interview: Verminlord (part 2)

Verminlord is a one-person black metal entity in the United States. Starting in 2016 the recordings have kept on coming down the pipeline, including a demo, a few singles, an album, a few EPs, and split. This publication is going to get to the bottom of these developments and figure out for the readers what is going on with all this recording activity through the interrogation of a thousand and one questions. Let’s see what happens.

This was the first part: metalbulletin.blogspot.com/2019/02/interview-verminlord.html

Of course, you do the shriek vocals, right? But do you do the singing, too?

VL: Yup, all vocals come from the same weird mouth hole.

What are your feelings about your singing voice at this point? How much practice do you do for singing? The singing sounds like it comes from the tradition of The Sisters of Mercy, Tiamat, Type O Negative and on through various forms of goth music, including rock and metal. But actually, where do you feel that you are inspired from for the singing?

VL: I feel like my singing has improved greatly since the first release. I feel like on the most recent release Sojourn I’m the most comfortable with my voice.

All the bands you listed are definitely places I’ve gathered inspiration from but I’d say honestly the band I took the most from at least in vocals is the rockabilly/doom-country band Murder By Death. I’d love to even give 10% of what Adam Turla does. I’d also say Peter Murphy had a big impact on me. I saw Bauhaus perform with Nine Inch Nails in 2003 and it was a pretty life altering show.

Would you ever consider recruiting some friends to play live?

VL: I feel like if the stars aligned and I asked them really nicely I could assemble a band. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up but I’d like to perform a few shows in 2019. Live music was such a part of my life until the last 5 years. I’ve thought about doing a tour up the coast ending with my old home of Seattle.

Sometimes it’s just hard to find the time to organize everything.

Do you feel comfortable calling your music black metal? If people called it goth rock, would that bother you?

VL: I call Verminlord “atmospheric depressive black metal” but I know a lot of trve black metal fans don’t really like my music. I think one of the most incredible parts of black metal as a genre is that it lives in this weird experimental space where you can bring in all these foreign ideas and concepts and dump them into the cauldron.

I imagine there are some people who don’t agree with me but that’s how I see it. There are definitely a few tracks that would fit into the “Goth Rock” space, especially the EP “Visions Of A Cursed Warlock”

In 2016 the first recording was issued. How long did you cook up those songs before making them available to the public?

VL: I wrote that demo in a weekend of fury, frustration, and despair. I remember at the end of it how fucking shakey my hands were.

Then you kind of went crazy bananas on us and released another recording called Anguish in the same year of 2016. What was happening? The artwork on the cover is from 1878 and it is by August Friedrich Albrecht Shenck, correct? To use that art, do you have to pay money to anyone or is it public domain?

VL: Hahaha when i find something I like, I do it hard and often. Writing black metal became my artistic outlet. 2016 was a pretty hard year. So the music flowed through me pretty easily. I could finally exhale all my frustrations and sadness into something that wasn’t self-destructive. That is correct, it’s one of my favorite paintings. The painting is old enough to be used under creative commons laws. I think I saw it in art gallery when I was living in Europe in 2009.

You went even crazier in 2017 and did five various recordings as separate releases. Were you unemployed and had all this extra time to be making music?

VL: At the end of 2016, I was laid off from the job I hated and the apartment I wrote VL Demo & Anguish was going to be demolished to build new shitty condos. The woman I was seeing at the time got into a study abroad program and was moving to Bangkok. I asked her if I could join her and she said yes. I sold all my shit and packed what was left. My carry on luggage was my BC Rich Warlock. I still have the guitar, but she got a little damaged from all the travel we did.

I switched back into freelance role and was working as a comic artist and colorist. In between gigs I was exploring Southeast Asia and I would be inspired by temples, ancient sacred groves, and epic holy caverns. How could I not write that much music when I’m surrounded by that?

With all this music activity, do you have time for hobbies or is it an all-consuming thing that leaves you little time for friends, family, relations and hobbies? Putting out all this music by yourself, what you found out about yourself in the process, the work, the stress, the lack of sleep and everything else?

VL: I’m a workaholic. I’m a weird place now where all my old hobbies have become how I make a living. At this point I’d say Verminlord is my only hobby. I don’t mean to diminish its value but I also don’t think anyone goes into black metal and thinks “I’m going to be rich!” Every song is very personal to me. When I recorded the shrieking vocals on the track Sojourn I was literally crying because of what the song was bringing back up. I’m not ashamed of that either. It’s fucking depressive black metal.

Have people in your family and friends ever asked you why you put yourself through all this work making extreme music?

VL: My family has always been very supportive of my musical efforts including my exploration of metal. Most of my friends generally like the instrumental parts but the vocals tend to be the more difficult part to digest haha.

TO BE CONTINUED.

verminlord.bandcamp.com