Author: Rok Klemše
Location: Metelkova, Ljubljana
Interview date: 21.04.2011
The Karst-region black/death metal outfit Kreation Kodex recently dropped their debut Puzzles of Flesh, and they didn’t stop at those two genres. They’ve dipped into industrial, gothic metal and Swedish melodic death metal too. The result is a richly layered, dynamic record with a clearly defined “concept” and some excellent dark lyrics. We sat down with guitarist and vocalist Alen to talk about how this puzzle of flesh took its final shape.
RockLine: Alen, you recently put out your debut record. Tell us a bit more about it. You recorded it at DYz’s place, but actually in three studios.
Alen: Yeah, recording kicked off at Negligence studios, then moved to Dejzi’s, and finally to our own studio. Then we handed everything over to Dejzi, who mixed it.
RockLine: The only thing you recorded yourselves was the keyboards?
Alen: Yeah, our keyboardist Jana recorded the keyboards at home.
RockLine: Do you plan to keep recording that way, or will you expand your studio and do more on your own?
Alen: We’re thinking about recording guitars, bass, keyboards and maybe vocals at home, drums in some other studio, then running everything through a preamp somewhere else and probably giving it to somebody else for mixing. We’ll probably do it like that with the next record, because the music is going to expand too. With the first record we were pretty restrained, since we were limited by time. You can expect a lot of new stuff, including things that maybe aren’t the most death or black metal.
RockLine: You can clearly hear the evolution on this record compared to the demo, which was very chaotic. On the album you can hear the arrangements and structures have moved up a level.
Alen: We started recording the demo mainly out of necessity, we just needed something recorded. We did the instruments and vocals live, all in the same room. Then Miha and I added vocals afterwards. Maybe that’s partly why it came out chaotic. After that we recorded a single for Rock Otočec, which was done “old school”, half analog and half digital. Now we’ve gone fully digital.
RockLine: Kreation Kodex is a really interesting name. Is there a deeper story behind it?
Alen: Originally we wanted to call ourselves Grim, but that seemed pretty funny to us. You can’t play thrash metal and be called Grim. So each of us suggested a name, and I suggested Kreation Kodex, which is a pretty general name. It can mean all sorts of things, depending on the feeling and what you want to say. Kreation Kodex is a code of creation, and creation can be anything, music or whatever else. On top of that, a lot of the lyrics come from literature, everyday life or even sci-fi. Everyone put their suggestion on the table, I put mine down, explained it, and everyone agreed. The thing is, we don’t limit ourselves, we don’t want to be just thrash, death, black or industrial, we want to be all-encompassing. I feel like we’d be boxing ourselves in if we said we’re going death metal only. When you make music, in my opinion, it depends on the feeling you have while writing it. Even if you play, say, death or gore, you can’t write about deeper things, only about how we slaughter everything…
RockLine: … and then fuck the corpses
Alen: Yeah, of course! Porn grind. Lividity! (laughs)
RockLine: Your music actually has death, black, melodic death and also gothic metal influences, mostly thanks to the female vocals.
Alen: Yeah, it’s like I said before. With us it’s not just metal, we can go from R.E.M. to Faith No More, Massive Attack, Prodigy. It’s just about what you can draw out of that music. We’re metalheads and we stay metalheads, and then we create from there. Just like I love Carcass, I also love Cathedral and Type O Negative, and you combine that stuff depending on the feeling. We don’t want to limit ourselves to just the eighties, for example.
RockLine: As a band you really started from zero, and some of you even started learning your instruments at rehearsals. Do you think that helped you develop your own sound, even more than it otherwise would have?
Alen: I wouldn’t say it helped us. At least I wasn’t striving for that. The thing is, I started this project together with Jana. It was meant as our side project while I was still playing in Magus Noctum. When they stopped working, Jana and I started getting more serious, and Gregor joined us. It’s true that neither Jana nor Gregor could play their instruments back then. By chance I got a guitarist who was already much better, and the bassist was playing the kind of music where it was hard to expect him to suddenly play heavier, faster rhythms. So yeah, we really did start from scratch, but the whole point from the beginning was to make our own music. We didn’t start out to geek out on technique, but purely to really create our own music. Whether that helped in the way you say, I don’t know… maybe it did, but I never thought about it. We burned through a lot of nerves just to get started, though.
RockLine: I believe it, especially since it’s technically still pretty complex music, not something thrown together off the cuff.
Alen: Yeah, the thing is, we weren’t thinking along the lines of “now we’re going to make something technical.” We listen to everything from Nile to Black Sabbath, there’s a whole spectrum…
RockLine: If you want to make good music, I think you need a wide taste in music too.
Alen: Yeah, definitely. Our music wasn’t made by just one person, we mostly build things on what we felt. We didn’t focus terribly hard on being evil (laughs).
RockLine: You got a bit of a gothic metal flavor mainly thanks to the female vocals of Nita. Originally you hadn’t planned to add female vocals, right?
Alen: No, at first we only thought she’d sing one song. I should also stress that the band has had the same members from the start, nobody left, nobody was replaced. It’s only music and good friendship that bind us, so we’re pretty protective when it comes to this band. We said we’d invite a singer to sing just Mourning Angel, since we’d tried it ourselves and it came out really bad. She came to sing, we talked, and we heard how good her voice is. When a friend first suggested Nita, I thought it would be another Epica, Within Temptation clone, but when I heard the tone of her voice and got to know what kind of person she is, we saw she was right for our band. And now we’re working in that direction, expanding that aspect. We want at least somebody in the band to be able to sing.
RockLine: So it’s not all just growling. (laughs)
Alen: Yeah! (laughs)
RockLine: So can we expect even more of those vocals on the new songs, on the new record?
Alen: Yeah… various options are open. There’ll be songs where the singer only has a couple of lines, and songs where we only have a couple of lines and she gets more room. But we’ll stay brutal. If we wanted to play Foo Fighters… we’d play Foo Fighters (laughs).
RockLine: The vocal dynamic is great too, your vocals are higher, more black metal, and Miha’s are more of a classic growl. Did you work like that from the start? If I’m not mistaken, there’s only one vocalist on the demo?
Alen: Actually there are three, even a fourth who threw in some agony every now and then (laughs). To tell you the truth, the guitarist and I never imagined we’d be the ones singing. We wrote the lyrics and the music, and figured we’d find a singer somewhere. After countless singers and rehearsals, we’d had enough of putting up with everything: egos, lectures about what’s “true” and what isn’t. At some point you’re just sick of messing around with kids, and Miha and I said, out of pure desperation, that we’d just sing it ourselves, who cares what people say, we’ll give it our best. And actually, Miha has that kind of voice, I have this kind, and they kind of overlap, so we create a sort of harmony. Nita helps a lot with that, since she’s a trained singer and shows us how you can scream for a long time and then still talk normally.
RockLine: Let’s get more specific about the album Puzzles of Flesh. It seems to me the album title sums up the record’s theme pretty well, because at times, at least when it comes to the lyrics, it feels pretty misanthropic.
Alen: Yeah, that’s just our view of the world. The older you get, the more you see people’s true nature and how the world works. You realize that “flower power” they promote so much doesn’t work in the real world. Lyrics like that come naturally, at least from my point of view. Sometimes They Return, for example, was written with a specific purpose, I already had the theme in front of me. When I look at it today I wonder what I was thinking, but it’s about just sitting down and writing whatever comes to mind. A lot of the themes are about human malice in one form or another.
RockLine: As you said, on one hand it’s about human malice, and on the other it’s a different kind of evil, and in Kult of Starspawn you can really feel a big Lovecraft influence.
Alen: Yeah, yeah, that’s my Lovecraft obsession. That lyric really captures the whole Cthulhu Mythos, and there’ll probably be another one like it on the next record.
RockLine: Lovecraft really does fit your music.
Alen: Yeah (laughs). “We are fucked.” Take Deathonation, for example, where I played around with words: Deathonation, Death of Nation. It’s about the history of the human age, from the Stone Age to the Reich, even Christ.
RockLine: The self-destructive nature of humanity.
Alen: Yeah, just look at the story of Christ. He showed really well what happens when you’re a good person (laughs). Yeah, fuck it, that’s how it is (laughs).
RockLine: Yeah, it happens (laughs). The record also has a few hidden surprises, if I can call them that, like the intro to MoonReich, which sounds like something from the thirties, something off a gramophone.
Alen: Yeah, exactly! We found a song, Drei Rote Rosen, meaning Three Red Roses, and the drummer had the idea. We played around with the idea of having an intro like that before the track, and somewhere we dug up this song that Eva Braun used to listen to. It seemed even more interesting to us since there’s black humor in what we do too. The one singing is actually Nita. We took the beginning of the original song, before the vocals come in, and Nita sang part of the MoonReich lyrics in German. Then we wrapped it all in that gramophone effect so it really sounds like something from the thirties. We play around with stuff like that, Synthetic Humanoid, female screams and so on. We’ve got plenty more sick ideas, but let’s leave something for the next record.
RockLine: Do you write the lyrics, or does everybody?
Alen: For this record I wrote most of them, but there were various collaborations too. When you focus on the lyrics, it’s hard to say this one is by so-and-so, since we all agree on the themes. How someone sings it matters too, I could have sung Sometimes They Return myself. In fact, our previous singer tried to sing it, and all I could think was why I’d even written the lyrics. Then Nita came and sang it straight from the heart, and her delivery really adds everything to the lyrics. We’re all about everything being a shared thing, a matter of collaboration.
RockLine: Mourning Angel (Sometimes They Return) is personally one of the more interesting tracks on the record for me. You said the song went through quite a bit of evolution. You added female vocals, which adds a lot to the idea of the song, which is, after all, dedicated to two of your friends who passed away.
Alen: Originally the track was meant to be an instrumental, but then these two accidents happened in which our friends died, who were big supporters of the band. And not just supporters, not just friends you only go for a beer with. At a time like that you sit down and think about life. I also thought about my cousin, who died of leukemia at 16 in a hospital in Turin, far from home. You see how lucky we are to taste the good things in this life, even if it’s hard sometimes. This lyric is mainly positive, even if it may not come across that way.
RockLine: Earlier you mentioned that you’re also planning extensive tours abroad.
Alen: Yeah, we’re talking with a couple of bands, one of which is recording a record right now. We want to tour as a band, and maybe we have an advantage because we live close to the Italian border. We’ll give it a shot, but of course none of us is thinking about making it big with this music, or being able to live off it. We’ll try to balance time and jobs with time for the band. But we’ll do our best to get as many people as possible to hear our music.
RockLine: Fingers crossed for you, you definitely have the potential, and a recognizable, unique sound too. Alen: Thanks a lot. We’re extremely critical of what’s on the record ourselves, though. We could improve it now, but the new songs are being written in the direction we want, and we’re also trying to shoot a video by the end of the year. Then we’ll slowly start preparing a new record, because this time it was really Kreation Kodex/Chaos. When we were recording at Dyz’s, he kept grabbing his head, since we recorded a huge number of tracks and he said more than once that a single song had enough tracks for three songs. Still, there’s that urge in me that we have to complicate things. I think I’m missing a few screws (laughs).
RockLine: Have you already thought about which songs you’ll make a video for?
Alen: Originally we had Sometimes They Return in mind. But I don’t know yet, we still have to talk with the label On Parole, with Chop. If we have to shoot a video, let it at least be artistic, not just us on some stage. I’m fascinated by surreal stuff, like Hieronymus Bosch, not a few people getting together in a pile, getting drunk and then the police show up.
RockLine: What are your plans for the near future?
Alen: New songs, a new record and as many gigs as possible. Above all a new record while we’re still fired up, and then we’ll see what time brings. Our goal is also to stay in this lineup, we don’t want to replace anybody. Even if we aren’t the best musicians, we’re first and foremost friends and metalheads. We just want to make music together, we don’t want to compete on technicality, evilness, … That’s probably why we’ll be around for a long time.
Photos: Nina Grad
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