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INDEX
INTERVIEWS
GUESTBOOK
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BLACK
DEATH / DEATH BLACK
FRANCE
/ BELGIUM
HELL
/ HEAVEN
BEER / WATER
1. Hello! What's new with Black Bleeding? The beer barrels are full?
Balmuzette : The beer stocks are full but this isn't new. For us beer remains an essential element of "rock'n roll" in the wide meaning. The new thing is, our new super beautiful CD "A bright future" that took us 5 years to spawn. This is not an exceptional duration for us. We take the time it needs, we have no career objective. And even if we grow older, the fury doesn't diminish.
2. Your last album is entitled "A bright future", can you introduce this record in few words? Is there a link between the title and the current crisis that still refuses to leave us alone?
As well as for many things with Black bleeding, there is first degree, but also a lot of 2nd degree. "A Bright Future" isn't basically a concept album, but the passing time with its many facets is a recurring theme: Its worrying sides, including the crisis you talk about, our death that slowly but surely comes closer and leads us to realize the value of time (It becomes more and more precious as we grow older). The fact that in our 40's, we still feel like a band of teens, only with more experience ("older fatter balder" becomes "Older faster bolder").
This said, we only bring lines of thought, each one will draw his own conclusions and whatever he wants. We are not moralists. Beware: As I already said, there's a lot of 2nd degree in this answer!!
3. What could you say the readers to convince them throwing an hear (Or more) on this album? Do you send back, after use, the body parts that were attached with the payments, or do you keep a part of it? (Bottoms and tits... We never know, it might find some use Ah Ah)
In this album
you can find quite an amount of "traditional" ingredients,
but also big differences concerning the clichés, very varied influences.
So it is both classical and totally atypical. This is an album where
fans of brutality could find their happiness, but it surely doesn't
sound like 1000 others. Many bands lost of energy and efficiency
as they wanted to be so fast and/ or complicated... We didn't fall
in this trap!
Concerning your sub-question, it is completely
stupid! (Hey, no, come back... It was 2nd degree again!!)
4. Contrary
to many of the bands that embrace a genre close to black metal,
and play quite a lot with the sociopathic, claustrophobic or misanthropic
vibe, the music of Black Bleeding makes the listener happy (Or at
least your energy isn't so negative...).
Is this only a matter
of beer, mutual warmings during long nights of winter, or should
we search a bit further? In your humble opinion, do you rather play
some "black/ death", "black/ black" or simply
some "metal/ metal" (It's more metal than metal...)?
It should be
the reflection of your personality: When some incorrigible epicurean
jokers play extreme metal, this is the result. We didn't plan anything
in advance: We played what we loved, with the sound and the atmosphere
we like, and this is the result.
Peoples often tell us Black
Bleeding is a "sincere" band. I have problems to understand
how someone could play underground music without sincerity (For
what purpose?), but well...
We are quite some beerophiliacs,
so this should really be an influence (Well, Alex prefers wine).
If we had to stick a genre, I'd rather say "Diverse brutal",
or perhaps "Festive death black"? Festive black is funny,
hu?
5. When I listen to the style of your drummer, Balmuzette, I have the feeling I'm listening to some "Battles in the north", some "Reek of putrefaction", some "Suomi Finland perkele", with tom rolls à la Dave Lombardo... Can he quote the names of the drummers and albums that were the most influential on his playing?
The old ones
of Carcass and Slayer (At the time of Lombardo) are some of my favorite
ones: Alex has problems to understand the fact I prefer Lombardo
to Bostaph, but it's the same than for Animal in Motorhead, he's
the one who played on the forerunning tracks, the really innovative
ones, those that made the band a legend.
I like black metal
but it also bores me quickly, I don't listen to this genre for ours
in a row. "Ugra Karma" (Impaled Nazarene) was in heavy
rotation for a while.
I started with the drums in 1980 and I
always liked music with "balls". At this time, I listened
to punk (Exploited, Subhumans, Dead Kennedys…) and hard Rock (AC/DC,
Judas, Van Halen…).
I learnt the drums following their records.
AC/DC was then considered to be the most extreme possible. Then,
I followed the evolutions of upmanships in savagery and velocity
(Venom, Destruction, Dark Angel…). So my influences are very NWOBHM,
Punk HC and thrash, the speed came later. A great precursor of the
woodcutter style remains the immense Keith Moon (The Who, check
it on Youtube) .
In fact it seems to be obvious, but to play
extreme rhythms that shred very well you have to master the slow
tempos before all.
6. If Black bleeding was a meal based on potatoes, which would it be? (On the one hand, when it's dense enough mashed potatoes can be heavy or even crushing (For the stomach), on the other hand all that is French fries is baked in a very hot bath of oil (To plunge a human body in oil could procure a quite infernal feeling)). Would you rather choose the crushing, or the torture with boiling oil? (This question isn't totally innocent, a part of the band is located in Belgium...)
We would be
for the "Pommes dauphines" (Ed: Potato croquettes... In
French it translates word for word as "Dolphin apples")
because the dolphin is a gracious and intelligent animal, that evokes
the beauty of mermaids and the freshness of naïve TV series that
came before Goldorak. Concerning the apple, it is a round and juicy
fruit, with various bright lively colors. Apple juice, in addition
to its many vitamins, is an excellent antiseptic.
Without apple,
no Adam... And so, no mankind, no Snow White (And the Seven Dwarfs),
no Maurice Chevalier (Ed: Famous French TV presenter), no 9th symphony
of Beethoven, no Schtroumpfs, no Chirac (Ed: Past french president),
no bread...
The "Dolphin apple" will save the world
thanks to its incredible qualities, and Black bleeding wants to
be a part of this salutary dynamic.
7. If Black bleeding was a "tool", which would it be and why? (Maybe the hammer of Thor or the Shovel of Nicolas the gardener (French TV presenter)?)
The hammer of Thor, because I'm not familiar with Nicolas the gardener.
8. When you listen back to the albums of Black bleeding, what do you think about it? What are the recordings you are the most proud of?
I rarely listen
to my previous recordings. Because, if listening to the music I
love gives me some kind of rejoicing, listening to myself can procure
a strange feeling of masturbation. Each new recording seems to be
better than the previous one, and that is good!
When you rarely
listen to yourself, it's a bit the same than watching an old photo
album: You are surprised by yourself. Sometimes it's good, sometimes
it's bad.
9. Why in hell is the bleeding black, and not green or yellow?
It's funny,
last week my brother asked me the same question: Why do you keep
such kind of name? With your boundless imagination, you could find
much better!
In fact, when the Black bleeding name was chosen,
it was a band of teenagers who just wanted a name to be gore and
extreme. Later, we thought Black bleeding was a quite common (Even
a bit ridiculous) moniker in the style, and we decided to change
it... But after lots of talks and thoughts (Not necessarily in this
order), we concluded the name was so much "Cream pie"
that we decided to keep it for reasons of self-mockery, and to mock
all these band-names that finally sound so close to each others.
We finally are very "Black bleeding".
10. I have
the feeling we always traded each other's releases:
Since I
run a distro in (More or less) 2002, we always succeeded in exchanging
what you had released, so this counts at least 4 recordings. What
leads you to stay self-produced and do everything by yourselves?
We want to
avoid as many constraints as possible. It this is only to exchange
our freedom against more visibility, more cash and some kind of
rise in the "hierarchy", the answer is no.
We all
have our jobs, and Black bleeding is before all a creative space.
If
this is to write music under the orders of a dic...(ATCHA!) who
decides instead of us, it's better to keep your job at the factory
and remain free "After the day". Music will never be our
job, each gig is a feast. It's a quite punk way of seeing things.
I recently contacted a band I know, to play a nice gig in a
little bar from our area. The guy answered: "Now we are signed,
so the conditions are 500 euros, and we need the approval of the
manager so that we can play". Each can do as he wishes, but
this is not rock n roll the way we see it. This said, no one made
us label offers.
We sometimes have the opportunity to propagate
our recordings thanks to people like you. We thank you a lot :-)
11. Those
who still spend some time in the record shops, watching the CDs
and the "promo" stickers (What an amount of bullshit we
can read, Mr. Century media...) could have for example learnt Satan
has the most "evil" riffs because it was stolen to Vader...
Don't you feel it's a bit too much, and also erroneous... We
all know Satan lives in Belgium! (You only have to count the amount
of cigarette-shops per inhabitant in some towns, those are real
weapons of mass destruction Ah Ah)
Well, I might
be subject to the syndrom of "This was better before",
but the more Rock'n'roll loses his subversive side and enrolls in
the logic of capitalism, the more it loses its soul.
When I
hear young PUNK bands saying their goal is to make a whole load
of cash, this is far from the essence of punk. I have the feeling
the more we're lobotomized by the consumer society, the more we
applaud. I can't understand the self-filing à la Facebook, the success
of "La nuit des publivores" (Ed: French Tv program), and
other "things" of this kind.
NB: I'm not certain if
this was the question.
12. Years ago, some of you were playing in the grindcore band Disjonctor. Can you tell us a bit of its history? Is it totally dead and buried, or a temporary exhumation, the time of a few blasts in public, wouldn't be totally excluded?
Disjonctor
was a destroy grindo-theatrical concept whose basic principle was
the following: During gigs, we should always be drunk, so, to avoid
bad surprises we should also be drunk during rehearsals. The two
hours preceding rehearsals only resided in getting high, then, when
it was done, we could only begin. It gave birth to tons of improbable
and hilarious stories. Just an example: During each rehearsal our
bassist was fired, but he always came back to the next one because
he had forgotten about it.
A come back? One should never say
never, but I'm not anymore into this state of mind of "To be
as drunk as possible to play music". And we already had problems
to remember the songs then, so this would be quite complicated now,
hu?
NB : We had to record the rehearsals because we tended to
forget the songs from a week end to another.
13. I think you also had a more heavy metal parallel project, Iron Maiden covers of something like that... Is it still relevant?
I played in Moonchild, an Iron Maiden cover band that still exists, but I unfortunately had to leave because of becoming a father. At the time, I was multiplying the bands, the experiences, replacements... But then my children took quite a lot of time, so, instead of playing in five bands half-time, I only kept Black Bleeding. Well, ok, now my children are at school, I have begun a new project anyway (Varied rock, and a bit stoner, it's called Van Jex).
14. What will come for Black Bleeding in a close future? You can unpack the list of merchandising if necessary. Thanks for the answers.
As already
said before, but it's no evil to remind it, we have our new CD.
It's available during our gigs, on Bandcamp, or directly sending
me an email at balmuzette(at)wanadoo.Fr.
Advisable price: 1 CD
= 7 euros, 2 CDs = 10 euros , ½ CD for 4 euros. The previous album
« The Great Satan » is still available for the same price. We also
have very ugly Tshirts for 10 euros.
Concerning plans, a few
gigs are scheduled (13/12 at the DNA in Bruxelles), and we hope
many more will come. And we will start writing songs again, to release
a CD in 4 or 5 years. And we will especially drink beers WITHOUT
restraint (No bullshit).
Thank you for this interview, the distribution
of CDs, past and future. Later.
Web
page: https://blackbleeding.bandcamp.com
