Aug. 30, 2018, 12:02 p.m.
Thanks to brother Satoshi for sending the interview. Cheers!
Fatum are a metallic crust band from Moscow, Russia, and are currently touring Japan with Zay. This time I interviewed them on wide range of topics, not only about their “Rise of Crust” imagery and music, but the actual circumstances of the political situation in Russia such as “Ukrainian revolution” and Russian modern thoughts.
Interviewed conducted March-April 2018 by Satoshi Suzuki.
When and how did FATUM start? Any of you guys have/had been in any other band? And also introduce the current lineup of the band.
Tsyrik: Hi there! So we’ve started about 10 years ago, about early 2008, when a bunch of youngsters got fed up with the bands we had before and were looking for something much more rude and aggressive musically and lyrically. We were the first in our city who started to mix hc punk and metal both in equal proportions.
Through the years the lineup was changing from the very beginning, so now there are four of us who have been in the band since 2009. Pavel is singing, I am on guitar, Roman on bass, and Tsunar is thundering on drums.
Some of us had played in numerous local hardcore punk bands and still are.
Tsunar drummed in REPTILOIDS, PHENOLHOUSE, plus many other projects.
I also play in a few more bands, FURTHER CHARGES (80's UK punk rock), VENDEL (a tribute to oldschool epic metal).
How do you describe your music?
Tsyrik: Total Crust Mayhem! The only good words to describe the whole of it.
Paul: Venom+Exploited
Did you already have some initial concept what kind of music you wanted to play with FATUM when you started?
Tsyrik: We definitely did. The main idea was mixing punk and metal musically. We were absolutely out of playing skills, just had some basic experience of playing in previous punk rock bands, plus playing numerous hc punk and metal classics which influenced us mostly and made us total addicts of this music since the very early moment. We were hard charged with all this noise and cheap booze and were just fierce enough to incarnate it in that messy way we did when we started.
Paul: At the earliest times band played something like old school black metal mixed with punk with lyrics like "Blood've been shed for the whim of dead gods." But even those times band was influenced almost by the same musical and aesthetical things as now. And soon we turned to trying play "classic" crust, but still influenced by mythological and historical aesthetics to talk about dark side of modern life in a such epic language.
Some of my friends said the latest album “Life Dungeons” is much more “thrash-metallic” than your previous songs with shredding guitars and fast beats. Did you have any new ideas when making the album?
Tsyrik: We just had a bunch of new songs after releasing Time Passes To The Dark, so there was no special idea of "metalizing" the stuff - metallic presence was always a part of our sound, but I can describe it as hardcore punk music anyway - we just wanted to continue what we do with slight changes, people call it more metallic maybe because we developed musical abilities a bit more by that moment. Then the previous vocalist left the band and it influenced the sound also in some ways as well…
The time of recording Life Dungeons album was tough - Pavel lived in St. Petersburg, the rest of us - in Moscow. I had no place to live at the time and was wasted in different ways for the most part of our recording sessions, it was a strange period and we changed everything several times to find what we were looking for and I guess we finally found it. Most of the songs were fast and furious but this was the way we felt. We never wanted to go deep into metal or something, just to do the stuff of our own.
Your artworks is very “crust” with some Pagan patterns etc.. What the idea behind it and who draws those? Do you have influence of Slavic mythology or tradition?
Tsyrik: Being fond of ancient and medieval history, Germanic, Slavonic and Celtic early history, mythology, culture and last but not least their magnificent epic poetry since my early age, I was also adored by the illustrations on those themes and have been looking for it in different sources I could find throughout my life. A bit later I was astonished by the artworks of all the Crust Classics (Cheers Rob Middleton!!!) when they got into my hands and it’s still a big piece of inspiration, so it gave a big punch to me to use the influences in our own artwork – it’s an own allegory on today’s life said in the grim images of ancient times, mixed in my own way with some additions. The idea of the whole thing is searching between life and death or something like that. The thing is much close to the stuff we sing about, so I think it fits good in such a concept of everything.
Most punks in Japan don’t know anything about the Russian hardcore punk scene. So please introduce the basic things about there.
What kind of bands are there that you often hang out or play with? Any good bands in and outside of Moscow? At what kind of venues/clubs do you play shows? Is there any squat-kind of place in Moscow?