Author: Rok Klemše
Location: Scratch Rock bar, Ljubljana
Interview date: 18.08.2011
Led by their founding dictators, the Cepanec brothers, Dickless Tracy are one of the longest continuously running metal bands in Slovenia. There’s probably no Slovenian stage the band hasn’t played in its 14-year history, during which a whole sea of members has come and gone, with Tomi and Ivan Cepanec the only constants. In 2009 the band put out its first proper studio album, Halls of Sickness. This marathon interview was recorded last summer… and has since been typed up at a similarly marathon, snail’s pace.
RockLine: Let’s start with the album, which you actually started recording quite a while back in Zagreb, if I’m not mistaken. What was the actual reason you didn’t finish the recording back then?
Cepo: Oh, I remember (laughs).
Tegla: In Zagreb in 2005 the plan was to record the album in a real studio, practically for free, or rather in exchange for a favor paid in beer and ćevapčići. The first time around, Cepo and I only had a short window, so we tracked drums overnight and the next day I had to go back to Ljubljana. The plan was to record bass and guitars later, and when everything was done except the vocals, the guy suddenly became way too busy. While nothing was happening with it, Cepo recorded the vocals by himself in Brežice. But the recording is a disaster, even the basic tracks were terrible, you could only use them as a demo. That was one reason, and the other was lineup changes, because new members obviously had to learn the material. Only once Sine and Hočevar were firmly in the band did we get another shot at recording, and then Hočevar left. To make a long story short, it all came down to the constant lineup changes and the fact that we never quite knew who we’d even be recording with or when we’d have time for it. The songs were written, but we prioritized playing live. Then came the chance to record the album in Prekmurje with Tilen Sapač. It started with us tracking drums in July, then Cepo did the guitars in the fall, and bass and vocals went down in February. We’d already agreed on a May release with Chop at On Parole, and the album was still being mixed right up to the last moment. And on April 25 the album finally came out.
RockLine: You mentioned the problem was the frequent lineup changes. Are you two such dictators that people run away from you (laughs)?
Tegla: No, but there’s definitely something to it, because you lose a lot of time teaching someone new the material. Another problem was that we didn’t have clear priorities about what we actually wanted, whether we’d even record a studio album… This is our hobby, so playing live is a joy, and we’d rather spend as few weekends as possible at home or in the rehearsal space. Tons of weekends went to playing gigs, and just when the lineup solidified, someone would leave. Personally, I was never the type to sit down and practice, so I had a kind of inner fear of recording. You build up these stressful scenarios before it even begins.
RockLine: Would you say the album recorded in Zagreb would have sounded different from how Halls of Sickness sounds now?
Cepo: Aesthetically, without a doubt, because it was recorded with different gear, with different people, in a professional studio. It’s a studio in downtown Zagreb that’s recorded everyone from Jinx to Tony Cetinski, and there’s even a photo of him in a Sepultura shirt hanging in the hallway.
Tegla: He even mixed Oliver Dragojević’s DVD, which won some prestigious award.
Cepo: In that sense it would have sounded different, no doubt.
RockLine: What about the songs themselves?
Cepo: We’d already recorded two albums before that, or at least you could call them albums going by running time, so Halls of Sickness is actually our third record, but the first studio one. Halls of Sickness has some very old songs on it, and so did that potential Zagreb album, which had the working title Dimensia Eternity. Some of those songs are even from the first two records, The New Domination (1999) and Of Light and Darkness (2001). Then we said it shouldn’t be an album, but more of a retrospective of the grind years, since lately we’ve been playing more death metal.
RockLine: This album also shows the band’s evolution from grind to death metal, in a way.
Tegla: Yeah, definitely. Of Light and Darkness was already a mix of grind and death metal songs. You can tell from the song lengths, which range from four minutes down to one. We never thought about which songs should go on which record. We just recorded as many as possible, and if there were twenty songs, there were twenty songs. Only later did we start thinking about track order. Of Light and Darkness was actually the first to point toward death metal, because those songs were written with a death metal guitarist who was with us at the time. The album was recorded in a single day, and so badly that you can’t even hear it’s death metal. The structures and song lengths are the only clue as to what it is. Halls of Sickness was already a more fully formed picture.
Cepo: In a way it’s partly a best-of too, since it has older songs on it.
RockLine: You also played quite a few of them live before the album came out.
Cepo: Yeah, that’s right.
Tegla: You could even call it our curse. Unlike most bands, we never locked ourselves in the rehearsal room for two months to write songs, then rented a studio, recorded them, and only then played them live. We actually introduced Halls of Sickness four years before the album came out, or at least 90% of the songs.
Cepo: That’s our methodology (laughs).
Tegla: Only after this album, once we’d stabilized the lineup, did things change, and we started thinking about stopping, writing the songs, and then presenting them.
RockLine: Maybe that was actually a good move, since people already knew the songs and wanted them in album form?
Tegla: Yeah, maybe, but on the other hand you then had nothing left to present except the fact that you had an album.
RockLine: Halls of Sickness is a pretty thematically cohesive record about the dark sides of life, and if I’m not mistaken, the individual songs are also illustrated in the booklet.
Tegla: If I remember right, we really did try to follow a common thread, although that wasn’t the original idea when the songs were written. It’s true the lyrics are about the horrors of humanity: disease, death, suffering, death, chaos, destruction, despair, morbidity. The themes themselves weren’t any different from what we’d always written about. But I think we picked the track order mostly based on the dynamics of the individual songs. Only the last two songs, Dark Waters and Conclusive Inscription, are there on purpose, first because they point to a newer direction, and second because Conclusive Inscription works as a closer.
RockLine: If Halls of Sickness is already a kind of compilation of older songs, did you ever think about re-recording other older songs in the studio, like They Killed Kenny or Nordland Fjordland?
Cepo: No, there’s not even a need. When I talked to people who’ve been with this band from the start, about how we can play these songs much better today, how we could record them on better gear and they’d sound better, most of them said it’s pointless, because you end up doing what the bigger bands do. I don’t know why bands like Exodus feel the need to record Bonded By Blood again. At the time it sounded good, and sure, it would sound better and more brutal today, but you can’t get the real sound, the magic of the original. The old Dickless Tracy sound the way they do on purpose, because that was just the standard sound for our kind of music back then. It was »a must«, just like today it’s a must for a band that wants to sign to Nuclear Blast and sound like Dimmu Borgir. Anyway, there’s no point. We have a few older songs recorded live, but the main idea was for The New Domination to stay exactly as it is. That sound is the album.
Tegla: That’s what Dickless Tracy were back then.
RockLine: That’s ultimately part of the album’s charm.
Tegla: Yeah. They Killed Kenny was actually recorded, while Nordland Fjordland only exists on some live recording. Like Cepo said, that was the sound of the time, and it’s gone. Same goes for when people want to hear those old songs live. We’ll surely still play a few, but it also feels like a waste of time to teach new members old songs we played in the past. If you weren’t there back then, tough luck. Most people want to hear the goofy songs we played in 1998. We still like to goof around onstage, but there’s no point. Sometimes you get the request, I’d also sometimes like to hear only the old songs from a band I love listening to, but I understand they’re over the goofing around too.
RockLine: Playing those songs probably isn’t much of a challenge for you anymore?
Tegla: Sometimes it’s cool for me to play They Killed Kenny, which we play much tighter and harder today. But back then that song had its exact moment, its exact chaos and aggression.
Cepo: That song is just part of situational comedy, musically it’s nothing special, it’s built on a hardcore foundation. As for the laughs and the jokes, you can’t learn that at home, it’s situational comedy. It’s like telling a joke at the table with your buddies that has everybody dying of laughter, and you almost cry yourself, but you can’t repeat the same joke to the same people for ten years. It’s not funny to you anymore either. First and foremost it was always about us liking something, and if we sing about Kenny, who just dies, that’s metal. That’s death metal, Kenny is death metal.
Tegla: He dies in as many ways as possible. He is dead.
Cepo: Of course, everything has its limit. You record your first demo, twenty minutes, you play as a support act and they ask you to play more… I remember our first gig on Halloween 1997 in Železniki, we had 7 minutes of material and played it twice so it at least looked like something. In a case like that, it’s not hard for someone who’s burned through the first set to play the whole program again, but when you have two hours of material, you can’t play two songs for fifteen years.
Tegla: The biggest kicker is that last year we played a few gigs with our first singer, and that was the best chance to hear the New Dominaton CD and the First Chapter demo. That was all of those 20, 25 songs plus They Killed Kenny and Nordland Fjordland. Those two songs can easily be played even without guitar, just drums, bass, and vocals. We tried that a couple of times in Serbia and Slovenia, but it would be a problem if we made it our go-to lifeline too often. We’ve already given people the impression of an identity crisis many times: what are you even playing now? Old songs, you’re writing new songs, who’s even in the band, it’s just you two left, the other guy’s gone… Cepo and I have had to deal with problems like that from 2005 to today. Even our current setlists include a few old songs, some of which are slightly changed.
RockLine: Did »true« metalheads look at you sideways in the beginning precisely because of this comedy? Since you weren’t evil and necro.
Cepo: I don’t know, I’m looking for the right words so I don’t offend anyone. A lot of metal genres are limited. We play old-school death metal because that was always my wish. But I wouldn’t say Dickless Tracy are a copy of some Death, Deicide, and the like. Not long ago I was walking home from work listening to AC/DC – Powerage, and that’s exactly what I think sets us apart from all those bands. I won’t call it originality, just that we goof around, and humor isn’t supposed to show up in death metal. A lot of people will tell you a flute has no place in metal, or they’ll go for masquerades in Norwegian forests and pouring blood over themselves, when really they’re vegans and mama’s boys. That’s exactly what I like, that we’re big fans of a wide musical spectrum and can bring those influences into our music. We’re not going to go to extremes now and stick an AC/DC riff in a song built on blast beats, though.
Tegla: That exact attitude he’s talking about was a thorn in a lot of people’s side from the start of our career. Plenty of people liked us back then because they got the jokes and because we played fast, short, and hard. We didn’t care whether we were part of the punk scene or the metal scene. One day we’d play with a ska punk band, the next with Scaffold, the third with some local black metalheads, but mostly with avant-garde or hardcore bands. We never looked at who we were playing with, only that we were playing. Slovenia didn’t have a band that sounded like us back then, and the humor live was spontaneous, a reflection of being relaxed and having fun. The scene in Slovenia back then was serious, there was tons of black metal. Until 2003 hardly any metalheads got the humor, while with punks, crusties, and alternative folks there was no problem. We didn’t let it bother us, if anything we found it funny, and we were always joking about how many black metalheads we’d offended on a given night. In 2005, when we started taking things more seriously, ironically the younger generation turned out to be way more relaxed than the older one. Back then we were humorists in a serious environment, and today our humor doesn’t really come through as much in a more relaxed atmosphere. The song Nordland Fjordland also came out of a reaction to the likes of Doblekarje, Noctiferio, who didn’t take us seriously. And how do you piss off people like that? You take the most serious genre of the time, black metal, and make a parody of it. Cepo performed in a grandma’s robe and plastic ears.
Cepo: Let’s be clear, Tegla and I are fans of good black metal. With that song we wanted to tell people something, to hold up a mirror to them. All those cliché lyrics are paraphrased in Slovenian, but we didn’t mean to offend anyone on purpose. We call it English humor.
Tegla: Tons of people got the joke right away, though it’s true the fewest were among metalheads. It also took quite a while before we started playing strictly metal shows. Before that we were happy to play with anyone, since we never felt we stood out in any particular way.
Cepo: And just like the audience gets hung up, some bands we know get hung up too, both here and abroad. They get hung up on limitations, on not stepping outside the mold. Everything has to be made to fit some mold, everything is instant. When I write songs, I don’t feel any need to force myself not to do something. Just because it’s slow doesn’t mean it’s doom, and just because it’s fast doesn’t mean it’s speed metal.
Tegla: If we sing about vodka, that doesn’t make it Russian Girl (laughs).
Cepo: Anyway, we don’t do self-censorship like, this band is great but it’s not death metal. This band reminds me of Cannibal Corpse, but what’s with the humor between songs, and why doesn’t the singer let his hair loose?
Tegla: And why the drummer never keeps his shirt on (laughs).
Cepo: And that’s something that really gets under people’s skin.
RockLine: If we go back a bit further into the past, what was it like when Gooyda left the band? Did you take over the vocals on purpose, or did you just not find a suitable replacement?
Cepo: I think we never even looked for a vocalist after that. Gooyda left the band in 2004, when Ivan and I were still playing in Tenacious Zghantsi, which also had a vocalist who also left. Right before some gig we went out for a deciliter of red wine so I could try out how my screaming goes, and apparently there’s a devil hiding inside me after all.
Tegla: That’s what he says now, but he was a backing vocalist in his hardcore band anyway, and yes, we have recordings (laughs).
Cepo: Anyway, we never deliberately looked for a singer.
Tegla: The funny thing is that in that lineup Gooyda growled great and Cepo screamed disgustingly badly. Today Cepo growls great, while Gooyda lost his growl somewhere along the way and screams more now. It wasn’t easy back then, because Gooyda had been with us from the start, but he just wasn’t happy with the direction we were heading in.
RockLine: Your discography also includes quite a few splits and appearances on numerous compilations. How does that even come about?
Cepo: The latest thing we’ve done is one song on the Grom Records compilation Message From the Other Side. A split tape with Bosnia’s Motherpig is in the works. The upside is that in the nineties, when we started, the tape trading scene was really strong, which is also why our material has actually been released all over the world. We worked with a really huge number of bands on various splits and compilations. It was about advertising, or rather promoting a band before the internet.
Tegla: On those releases we also shared space with bands that are bigger names in metal today.
Cepo: It was all based on tape trading and nobody cared whether it was produced by Peter Tägtgren, who mastered it… masturbated it, and so on.
Tegla: We really do have tons of those tapes and CDs, and now we even managed to put out a seven-inch vinyl, which is a true mark of the underground.
RockLine: Is there a band you’d like to do a split with, one that’s within reach so it’s actually doable?
Tegla: There are tons of them, but nobody who really stands out. If a band or an offer came along that was beneficial for everyone, we’d surely go for it.
RockLine: It probably also helped that you played quite a lot around the former Yugoslavia?
Tegla: Not really, we had two or three gigs in Serbia, one in Bosnia, and quite a few in Croatia. But Cepo already had connections to that scene through fanzines and tape trading. It’s interesting to play for people who don’t know you, because then you get a really genuine reaction, and the attitude of people in the scene there is completely different from here.
RockLine: Since you’re brothers, was it easier or harder to work together in a band? Death Angel, whose original lineup was all cousins, once told me it sometimes made things even harder.
Tegla: Yeah, definitely. With Dickless Tracy the actual song always gets worked out in the rehearsal space, and everyone wants to realize their own vision of the song and wants it to stick to the basic plan. If someone doesn’t accept that plan, I can argue with a guitarist more easily than with Cepo, who I have to see the next day in the same room or at the same workplace. In that respect it’s definitely harder, but on the other hand it’s easier to write songs, because information flows constantly between us, and 90% of the time I know how to approach his song, for example, or vice versa.
RockLine: Dickless Tracy were actually there at the very beginning of the Slovenian metal scene in the nineties.
Cepo: It was far from what it is today.
Tegla: We can say we saw the decline of most punk rock gigs. Back then the scene was much more open to all kinds of alternative, avant-garde stuff, and in 14 years of existence we’ve reached the point where we can see that every scene has gone off in its own direction.
Cepo: I was still going to a lot of shows then, and honestly we don’t remember a big number of metal gigs. Back then we followed the punk, hardcore, and crust scene more, metal didn’t interest us all that much.
Tegla: The metal bands of the time were so uptight you couldn’t tell if they were that tall or if they were afraid of you. It was much more relaxed working with punk bands, you connected with them right away. I didn’t feel any identification with metal until 2004, when I started working at Master of Metal, and 90 percent of the bands we knew were outside of metal, which I personally liked, because the scene was uptight as a nun’s vagina.
RockLine: You recently strengthened the lineup again with a new guitarist, and you’re probably already working on new songs he co-writes?
Cepo: He’s basically the author, really (laughs).
Tegla: Yeah, the new member is Andrej L’Püss, mastermind of Küzlavci, and his arrival has genuinely boosted the band’s creativity. When it comes to writing songs he’s incredibly hyperactive, and he brings a new song to practically every rehearsal, or at least an idea we build from. I hope he stays in the band for a long time, because he’s definitely taken the band in a slightly different direction and above all enriched it. Thanks to him it’s a real pleasure to create again, and after a long time you can feel a positive challenge again.
RockLine: So with him, a new era is starting for Dickless Tracy?
Cepo: It definitely won’t be about replaying what’s already been played, and it definitely doesn’t mean we’re going to start playing something completely different. Even the second guitar alone widens the creative spectrum, now it’s possible to work much more on the atmosphere of the songs and tailor it to the morbidity of the themes. And of course not in the sense of happy-sounding melodic death metal riffs a la Amon Amarth, singing about wars and the like. I think there’s a kind of Darkthrone atmosphere and a Fuck Off and Die attitude in the band right now. It’s our hobby, and as long as we enjoy it, we’ll keep doing it.
RockLine: To slowly wrap things up…
Cepo: What, do we deserve that after 14 years? We’ve only covered the period up to February ’98, 2011 is still way off (laughs).
RockLine: Hehe, okay, we’ll do a Dickless Tracy interview Part Deux. Will we wait for the new album as long as we did for Hall of Sickness?
Tegla: Seven years (laughs). No, seriously, I hope we won’t wait that long, and whatever we record, I hope it sounds the way it should.
Cepo: Rehearsals are very regular right now, there’s already quite a bit of new material, but there’s no rush. We don’t answer to any label, so we don’t need to have a new album out before April 2012. When we see there’s enough material and it’s good enough, it’ll be time to record, and if Chop is still interested, to release it too.
Tegla: Heavy metal shall live (laughs).
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