#Vince Verkay | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

steelforbrains · 12 years ago

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Grim Eloquence - A Conversation With Evoken

You guys have been around since 92 to now. How have you evolved as musicians and artists, Vince?

I would say in every aspect we have. You basically gain a lot of experience from numerous places. When we started recording none of us had any studio experience, so essentially we didn't have a clue as to what we were doing. As time goes on, you start learning how things are done, how to click in the process, but to also take your time so you're not rushing things. Also as a band together, even though we've had lineup changes over the years, the core of the band, Nick was included, but, of course, he's not in the band anymore, but me and John, it allowed he and I to basically play without having to go over things every time. We can actually just look at each and figure things out without having to say a word. It allows us with any new band members that come in where we can convey what we're looking for. It's easier for us to do so.

As far as planning as a band together now, the new members, Dave, Chris, and Don have been in for several years, and we basically have gelled as a band where everybody can feel each other out as far as if there are any changes in tempo. When we're in the writing process it allows us to really focus on the writing rather than, is the other member going to play correctly, or not screw up on stage or whatever. Writing-wise, it basically improved as far as us realizing that not everything has to be just one, slow tempo. It allowed us to expand to different ways of writing, different ways of creating an atmosphere without having to just pigeonhole ourselves to one style of tempo. You basically learn from playing with other bands, learning things from them, learning the little tricks in the studio or being on the road. As the years have gone by, we've evolved to a point where if we were back in 1994 and we saw ourselves now in 2012, we wouldn't recognize ourselves as the same band. A little bit of everything has contributed to the entire way Evoken has evolved over the years, so I can't really say one thing is the absolute reason why we've evolved.

For you personally, Vince, what was it about the metal genre and specifically the darker aspects of it that worked as a catalyst for you to explore these things in the music you create?

It's really hard to put into words something that we essentially physically sell. I've always been drawn to music that physically affected me, where the hair stood up on my arms and I felt a surge of energy go through me. With this music - with the darker, slower, atmospheric metal, doom metal - it was really just something that appealed to us. It wasn't something that you put on the background when you're just cleaning the house or something or riding down the street in a car. It was something that you could actually see in your mind's eye - the atmospheres that it created, the different scenes and visions that you would draw from that music, it really spoke to us. It's an event. It's not just something that goes right by you and you let all that energy out. It actually takes you through a specific journey. It's really hard to put my finger on one particular thing about it that really drew us in. I think, honestly, it was the atmosphere it set. Some of the bands in the '70s and the '60s, they had a specific way of creating certain music that really affected you and you felt the power that it was creating. I think this music did the same. It allowed you to physically feel the music. It wasn't just all audio. It affected every sense of you, so that really just drew me and the other guys in.

Just in the last five to six years, it seems like there has been a huge resurgence of popularity with the genre, and I say resurgence because you saw it happen in the 70s. It just seems in the last five to six years, there's been a huge re-embracing of the metal genre. It's trendy now.

I agree, I agree.

I'm wondering what a band like Evoken, who has been around for so long and has been making this music and has been doing a very cerebral type of metal for so long, what's your perspective on that?

I think it's something that, if you look at anything in life, really, from the most accessible to the most extreme, as time progresses on it's something that stays around, and it just doesn't go away. People start to take notice of that. For us, just to take 1996 as an example, so long ago people didn't understand what doom metal was. In the US, more than anything, they knew doom as far as the traditional type of doom. As far as the more extreme aspects of doom, the extreme doom, doom death, funeral doom, or a million other subgenres that are out there - a lot of people really thought that everybody who listened to metal were just brutes, and that they just wanted to let out their anger and energy, and that there was no real artistic value to it. They just figured it was youth going absolutely crazy, and they didn't really think that there are forms of metal that are just like anything else, whether it be movies or books, there are certain things that have artistic value to them.

With this music it's really bizarre. It's something I didn't really see from years ago. If somebody told me that in 2012 people would be gravitating toward this type of music, I would've probably told them they were crazy. I would've never picked that out. I thought it would be too extreme for anybody. It's something that, I guess, you can say it befuddles me a little bit, but at the same time I could see that as time goes on and more and more bands are coming out, more and more fans are coming around. I can't sit back and say, well, there's only a handful that gets it, and everybody else should just stay away. Although I like the aspect of there being more cult audiences for this, and I really wouldn't want to see it on a wider scale, but there's no reason why somebody else can't find artistic value in it and experience the same things that we've been experiencing for a number of years before them. It's kind of selfish for me to think that way.

I just hope this genre doesn't go down the same path that black metal and death metal did in the early 90s where you just get such an influx of new bands that it actually kills the artistic value of it. Because all of a sudden every band is starting to sound the same, and then it just loses it's whole grip on you. I really fear for that, but it's bizarre. It's really bizarre, but it's something that I've gotten used to over the past couple of years, and it is what it is. I can't really sit back and say well, I think it's bullshit. They shouldn't be involved in this music at all, or find any art value in metal. It is what it is and if something happens and popularity increases more, I'm all for it. It's cool. I like more of an occult audience, but hey - who am I to say it's only for a select few?

If I'm going to a doom metal show ten years ago, it's a vastly different audience than what I'm seeing now.

Oh my God, yes. I agree with that. I remember shows in '97 and '98 where with a show like ours with a few other doom bands there would be maybe a handful of people, and now it's very different. Some people I've met, they're older now, but they started getting into metal maybe ten years ago and then they worked their way backwards, which is really bizarre for me because that's a late start.

On that note, Vince, just looking at the American culture and how discombobulated everything is right now, it seems like great art is born out of that. You saw that happen in the 70s in the film and music industry. Now I think you're seeing that again, because of the angst and the worry and the frustration that a lot of people are feeling. Do you feel that a lot of people are turning to the heavy metal genre, whether consciously or unconsciously for that reason?

Yes, I definitely think that's the case. I think your environment affects a lot of what your behavior is and the things that you tend to gravitate toward. Nothing is positive right now. Every time you turn on television there's something going on. There's an earthquake here, there's a flood here, there's a war going on here, there's a mass shooting over there. People have a lot of fear. You have mainstream media almost trying to brainwash us into a society that thinks and acts one way. You have a lot of people that are not for that, so they want to gravitate towards the things that are against the establishment, against the things that are trying to control you, and metal is a big aspect of that. When we were all teenagers, we all had people in school that we didn't like who basically outcast us. Our parents kept trying to put rules and regulations on us and make us a certain way. You gravitated toward metal because it was against all that.

Now, you have doom metal which is basically focusing on things that are dismal, that are hopeless, that it's usually death. It deals with all the things that are negative in life, and that's all people feel right now, is complete negative. There's no hope for anything. People don't have this outlook and this dream, especially in the US where people are having a life where they worked hard and they did this and they did that and they felt that they had a whole life ahead of them. Now they have nothing, and they don't know what they're going to do. In my case, and it's been like this for years, I don't listen to doom metal to make myself more miserable. I actually listen to it to feel better. People are starting to realize the bullshit in things like pop music where everything is just great and it's about love and life is grand. This is just the same thing the media and giant corporations do. They just want to keep you in this comatose state where everything's happening, and you're being complacent and accepting everything for what it is. Because of that, people are now going towards the more negative music to feel better.

With that in mind, Vince, concerning the process of creating Atra Mors and ]the sprawling sound that you guys created when you came into the studio, what was the initial thought process when you guys sat down to record the album both from a lyrical and compositional perspective?

Usually it starts out how every album starts out. We just write what we feel. We try not to force things. We try to let things come as a natural process. We really don't go in with with this preconceived idea of, “Okay, we wanted this album to sound like this.” It starts to evolve as the recording is moving along, and as the mixing is done, we start to really get an idea as to where the album is starting to go. Basically, we have a wide scope as to what we're looking to do. The one thing we wanted this album to have more of was an atmosphere as opposed to it being all dark. We wanted some things to have those darker aspects, but we also wanted it to have other elements and other atmospheres involved.�� When we went in, we said, “Okay, what can we do to make the atmosphere stick out a little more as opposed to our past albums?” We wanted something that was haunting, but was also bipolar, almost, where you had one moment to the extreme anger, and then the next moment extreme sadness.

From a lyrical aspect, I've always believed in using lyrics that gave an individual two things. It would give them some sort of setting to put their mind into by looking at the lyrics and perhaps going to the same places we were thinking of when we were playing or writing the music. Or we try to write the lyrics where they're not so direct in their descriptions, and you can interpret them to mean other things, because I want listeners to have their own personal experience from the music. I don't want to force my idea or our ideas as to what we're feeling, what we're thinking, what we're seeing onto them. I want them to have their own experience with the music. The lyrics are mixed a little bit where you have the setting that I'm trying to present to them, but I want the person listening to have their own experience for that music. Sometimes I find that people don't read the lyrics, and they end up having a better idea than I do when I wrote them, and I'm like, "Why didn't I think of that?" Every album has started out the same way and ended the same way where we just allow the process to naturally flow.

We try not to stay with the same ideas that we had on previous albums. We don't like to go back and say, "Hey, let's try it like we did it on this albums. Let's do it like we did it on that album." With Quietus, we just wanted to take the atmosphere and the tweaking of a reverb that we did on that album and try to expand upon it and improve it for the new album. It was also difficult writing this album because Nick was in the band since the beginning, and before we started writing Atra Mors, Nick decided he was going to leave Evoken. It was like, "Wow, the one founding member is leaving so what do we do now? How are we going to continue writing like we were?" We got lucky with Chris, who we were friends with for years. He brought in something that, I think, we were lacking for a number of years, and in some cases there was some melody in the music and he has a real knack for that. I think that had a big impact on the creative and writing process for Atra Mors.

When you're not honed in on Evoken and things surrounding the band what do you typically like to do in your leisure time, Vince? How do you relax and cleanse your palate?

There's a lot of things. One thing I do enjoy doing that I actually haven't done enough of lately is to take a ride to different places. We have a place in New Jersey called High Point. It's the highest point in New Jersey, and I love just taking a ride up there where it's really peaceful and quiet. If you go at the right time, nobody's around. I like to go during sunset and just basically reset myself where I'm away from all the chaos of daily life. I guess the majority of it, for me, is just going to different locations, seeing different places, experiencing different atmospheres of those locations, whether it be an old town that we have around the area that I live in or something else. I like looking at some of the old buildings and architecture, visiting different villages that are around there - just experiencing the quieter side of life.

I try to avoid all the media and the things you read about online and just the shit that goes on nowadays. You really need to take a step back from it, or you will wind up driving yourself crazy just worrying about everything and anything with the people around you. It's really cool just to go somewhere where you don't have anybody else around, because nowadays you really are hard pressed to find somewhere where it's not being developed, or somebody's building a house, or somebody's building a corporation there. There's a parking lot, a fast food place. I mean fuck, we were called the Garden State. You wouldn't know it anymore. Now it's strip malls and it's just ridiculous. Just to get away and, like I said, reset your brain and just stay there and quietly just listen to the wind, listen to the trees, listen to the things around you that we don't take time to listen to. That's basically what I like to do, just to try to quiet my mind.

Many thanks to Vince for his time.

#Evoken #Atra Mors #Doom metal #heavy metal #Vince Verkay #Profound Lore Records #interviews

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