Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Interview date: 11/22/2006
November 23rd. Thursday evening was creeping closer. The climax was known – the show by Rijeka’s Father. The bigger unknown for me was the opening act. Ragespect. I honestly couldn’t build any kind of detailed picture of what to even expect from Slovenian hardcore guys. I’d formed my impression from listening to the internet versions of two songs that you can hear on their website. I expected raw, bloodthirsty beasts, hostile to the very mention of the media. Mainstream sucks! Kill all non-believers! Movies like that were rolling around in my head as I looked for the band that would step into my barrage of questions, curiosity and urge for a thorough dissection. They were sitting at a table. Totally ordinary, friendly guys. The band is made up of the Dolšina – Lavrini brothers. Andrej Dolšina is pretty much the only long-hair in Ragespect. The younger of the Dolšina brothers, I’d guess. One of the main links in the young band’s rhythmic skeleton, he came across at first as pretty quiet and analytical. The other half of the rhythm section is bassist Sergej Lavrini. Going by first impressions, I’d call him an eccentric. Damn it! A totally decent dude, with whom I’d already had a nice chat on the pilgrimage to the Tool show. It was precisely because of him that I wanted to meet the rest of the punk-metal crew from Zasavje. Sitting next to him was Peter Dolšina, the main (and only) throat of Ragespect. An enthusiast and a sincere believer in what he does. I’d describe him as a guy with a clear vision of what he wants to do with his music. A visionary even when anyone else would have lost hope ages ago… A former regular member of Ragespect had left them. Just two weeks before the gig. The hole was filled by the other Lavrini brother – Aleks. Quite a tough job for someone who’s otherwise fully booked with other music projects, so I wondered how nervous he was… So we jumped straight from contemplation to words. The tape started rolling and the group brainstorm could begin.
Sandi: First off, a warm hello. Tonight is a pretty big night for you, I’d say – if only because you’re finally back on stage after a long break. For a lot of people you’re still a complete unknown. So if I ask you: how would you describe the whole concept, the idea behind your band – what would your answer be?
Peter: Yeah… The whole idea of the band… It’s like, well… We’ve been playing since we were little kids, and over that time our playing wove in a kind of rebellion, an uprising against the system and the state of society in general, and against social norms… We all grew up on punk first, hardcore, and later metal. Even though we all played in different kinds of bands… So… I think that’s our main thread.
Sandi: So how did the whole crew come together? When did the idea to form Ragespect come up, and to play what you play together?
Peter: Basically it went like this, let’s say: around 2003 the first idea for a band popped up, right. Back then there were four of us friends, and only two of us are left from that original lineup, even though we were still called Fightback back then, then we renamed ourselves Mind Fist, but it turned out there were a million bands with names like that… So we said it was time to come up with something more original. We came up with a mash-up. What it looked like was, we wrote a bunch of words on a piece of paper and then looked at how they fit together. Say, Respect and Rage… We merged those into Ragespect, and the name says a lot all by itself. That’s when it became a band. That was in 2005. The lineup we have now only came together in February this year, still with the former guitarist, and only now have we started taking things a bit more seriously… Before that it was just messing around. We hung out a bit, jammed a bit… Everything was kind of done as a joke, you know. Now we’ve grabbed it a bit more seriously, you know…
Sandi: Looking at the current lineup right now, I could say you’re a family band…(laughs) Two brothers on one side and two brothers on the other. But let’s leave that… What concepts did you set for yourselves when making music? I assume you’re planning to do your own music, right?
Andrej: Yeah, of course!
Sergej: I think the main thing for us is that we work, right now, on chemistry – between Peter and Andrej and me and Aleks, so…
Andrej: We know each other so well that it doesn’t take much to figure something out. You just look at each other and it’s already all clear, you know? That’s a huge plus, you don’t have to explain stuff or get to know each other. We grew up together the whole time and we’re such kindred spirits that, well, that’s it…
Peter: It’s a real coincidence that it’s two brothers and two brothers… Now we’re a duo of two brothers and two brothers… So it’s cool, because we crack each other up. The chemistry is seriously good… We have a great time at rehearsals, we go to gigs together – we’ve really become like one family. Almost a bit kitschy.
Sandi: Maybe that’s the recipe for keeping your chemistry, too. Rivalry between brothers…
Peter: Though, OK… True, we’re only playing together now, but we’ve known each other since… Sergej and I already played together a bit, so… It’s not all from today to tomorrow, right? It wasn’t just a thing from yesterday either. It’s actually been going on for quite a while.
Sandi: In that time you also set up your own website. There’s not exactly much of a discography to speak of yet. But do you have plenty of your own songs?
Peter: Yeah.
Sandi: When are you heading into the studio, and when will you finally put out something a bit more compact with what you’ve done so far?
Peter: Look, we’ve just decided – Aleks is helping us out, since Aleks isn’t our permanent member from the start – that we’ll probably carry on as a trio. We’ll keep looking for a guitarist, but if we don’t find one we won’t force something.
Sergej: Unless Aleks is up for staying for good…
Peter: Only if we bribe Aleks into staying with us… (laughs) So if all goes well, we’ll go record something in the spring.
Sandi: Do you already have the groundwork laid out?
Peter: Yeah.
Sandi: Can you say a bit more about the idea or concept you’ll present with the release you’re planning to put together?
Peter: Our music will be, well… You say honestly what you think and that’s it! We’ll express ourselves in our own way – no hiding, no forcibly pleasing the taste of some particular crowd, no striving to make the music more widely accepted, popular, approved by the majority, I dunno… We just play what’s cool to us.
Andrej: If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t!
Peter: Of course it’s great for us if other people dig it too. Don’t get me wrong! If we didn’t dig it we wouldn’t be out there playing. We’d be playing in the garage for ourselves and that’d be it!
Sandi: That could be the death of a band and of music!
Peter: Yeah! But we won’t bend over to serve a certain goal, a target audience…
Sandi: Because of the genre you play – HC…
Peter: It’s actually funny, if I can say so! All the punks say we’re metalheads, i.e. that we play metal, and on the other side all the metalheads say we play punk. Fuck it, damn… I don’t even know what we’re playing now? Ragespect or what? Hardcore or what?
Sandi: It’s the projects you forge yourself that count, after all…
Peter: Yeah, I guess… It’s actually interesting. Music has no borders, right?
Sandi: Exactly, that’s why… If I put you in front of the fact that you had to stick a label on your music – what would you stick on it?
Sergej: Hardcore, punk…
Peter: Probably, yeah… Hardcore!
Andrej:…With some extras.
Peter: Look! That’s how it is: best if people check it out and judge for themselves…
Andrej: Like with Tool – what would you say they are?
Sandi: I get it…
Peter: That’s it! You can’t say that… You can’t chop a band up neatly into little boxes and say this is thrash, this is punk, this is HC… It’s just a style and I guess that’s the style it is!
Sandi: Certain genres get more media coverage than others, and because of that more gigs too. How’s it going with gigging for Ragespect?
Sergej: With this kind of music it’s really hard to get anywhere. We try as hard as we can – maybe we’re even not aggressive enough in marketing what the band has to offer, but… Well, unfortunately it’s going kind of slowly. So thanks to everyone who’s helped us with all the gigs. With a genre like this… The current generation is such that this genre can’t be the most popular.
Andrej: We definitely want to play even more than we do. That’s…
Sergej: The people who listen to us are anyway our age or older. Rather a bit more… But those guys come to gigs less often, or rather, at every gig we keep seeing the same old faces.
Andrej: It really is like one big family… Sometimes a gig is downright funny, because you see the same three people over and over… Everyone likes to see some serious young blood, but mostly it’s the same old crowd…
Sandi: Speaking of the state of the scene – not the New York HC scene, which has become a compact whole, where they cover each other’s backs and actually push each other forward – what’s the state of the music scene where you’re from?
Andrej: I think it’s very similar. We all know each other really well and support each other…
Peter: Look. We’ve got lots of good bands. Like, I really dig Ambasadors Of Sifilis. Those guys are doing really great. We just played at Ort. A bomb! It’s a real shame you couldn’t make it. Next time you’ve got to catch them, because they’re total maniacs. There are lots of young bands in Zasavje too, developing their own direction.
Andrej: We’re all trying to help each other and push each other forward. Nice and slow… If you need someone for a gig you call them, and vice versa. That’s how it moves forward. It couldn’t go any other way!
Peter: As far as name recognition goes: we haven’t managed to do all that much yet. We had Trnfest, now this gig, and a few local Zasavje shows before that. But we’re basically starting from zero. Even though we recorded another promo – two songs – with somewhat better production, everything set up a bit more professionally, more professional covers, then our guitarist left in the middle of it, so now, we’ve seen the project through to the end. It’d really be better, though, if we had more material, a lot better for promotion – so when you ask someone: “Listen! Could you sort something out for us?”, you can press something tangible into their hands. That’s completely different from just saying, with no arguments: “We’re really good. Hook us up with a gig!”… You know how it is… And now… We only have two recordings, and even those are, quality-wise, kind of shit. We’re not happy… When you throw something together in a hurry… And now, basically, people get to know us through the website only through those two recordings, and we’re already working on replacing them with two new ones as soon as possible. If it comes out of the mix next week, we’ll swap them in right away. It’ll cast a completely different light on the band, because right now we feel those two songs on the website put the band in a different light than what it really is. It’s really better if you come see us at a gig, when we play our stuff live, because there’s more groove.
Andrej: You’ll see it today!
Sandi: Guys… I wish you all the luck on your road, and definitely: “Respect! Ragespect!”
Andrej: Thanks.
Peter: We’d like to thank you for the promo and for the work you do on this side and that. Thank you!
Sandi: No big deal. Thank you.
