ITA VERSION HERE
After the release of their fourth album “Dirge”, Deadspace have joined Vanhelga for the first part of the Days of Madness Tour. Just after their concert in Milan, we had the opportunity to spend some words with Chris Gebauer, singer and leader of the band.
Welcome on Metalpit and thank you for your time, first of all could you introduce the band to our readers?
We’re a sextet from Australia, we play a weird brand of Depressive Black Metal that maybe is more energetic than the standard of the genre. We just played a cool show in Milan, with Afraid of Destiny and Vanhelga, and we had fun even if unfortunately Eyelessight couldn’t make it.
This was your first show in Europe and the following one will be your first European tour. Are you excited about that? How do you feel?
Yeah, it’s really good to be in Europe, it’s a big place and a slow market. We have some good fans here and we hope to connect with those people who supported us for so long from here.
In Australia you’ve got a lot of great bands but since you’re from there you’re cut off of the world, you’re far away from Europe and from USA and if you want to make a tour or some concerts here you have to travel a lot. How do you feel this distance?
It surely costs a lot of money, but actually we’re here, we made it and it’s not that hard. I just think that if you wanna play somewhere you gonna get there. It’s quite simple.
Have you got good relationships with other Australian bands?
Yeah, they say that in Australia Black Metal it’s not so big, especially in the west, where we come from. Over the east coast there’s lot of good bands you know, such as Advent Sorrow, with their Symphonic style, or Christ Dismembered, with whom we have played sometimes. There are a lot of great bands over there and a lot of good people as well, but you cannot always play shows that are gonna be good. I mean, it’s only one state, we haven’t got much possibilities.
Now let’s talk about your career: you have got four albums released in five years, along with some EP as well, it seems that you have got very clear ideas on what you’re doing.
Yes, we write things quickly because it comes naturally. We have a lot of ideas and now it’s just about focusing on them and making sure that they’re the best thing we can do. Personally, I think we reached this goal with the new records and hopefully we will continue on this way and keep pushing that forward.
You and Oliver are the only former members of the band that still play with Deadspace. Has the mind behind the writing of the pieces always been yours, or has the help of the various members you had by your side helped you?
Most of the ideas come from me, both for lyrics and instrumental parts of the songs, and then there’s something that may be changed by some other member. A lot of it comes from me even if in this new record Dan, the bass player, has written something.
In this five years you had lot of line-up changes, do you think that this one may be a stable one?
I don’t know, not because we aren’t friends or anything like that, there’s just the fact that we are usually busy with other things: Dan is a nurse and his girlfriend is moving to Melbourne so this might be a problem. Thomas, the guitarist, is going back to university and I’m at university too, so I really don’t know, I can’t say anything for sure. Oliver is actually leaving us here, so we already need a new guitar player. There are various reasons, nothing bad, we’re all busy and we’re doing things so I can’t say if this will remain a stable line-up, but I think that it’s a great one and we will keep playing with this members as long as we can get away with it.
Now you just released “Dirge”, your fourth album, and honestly I appreciated it because it shows your writing skills. Could you talk about its creation and what characterizes it from your point of view, compared to the first albums?
I think “Dirge” marks the point where we realized that I needed to take all of the writing back into my own hands. We all contribute on something but it doesn’t always feels right. Unfortunately, with this band, if the writing comes from me it feels like Deadspace, but if it comes from other people in the band sometimes the result feels like being in contrast . What we wanted to do was to get back on what we did on the first albums and make something a little more visceral. “Dirge” just happened, sitting there and writing things and then we had already contacted who mixed “The Promise of Oblivion” and he told us after about a month or two that he couldn’t do it, so I had to mix and master it from myself.
Listening to the album I’ve also noticed that your singing style is very raw, both for growls and screams, I felt a change from the past, didn’t I?
I think the voice is like a dynamic instrument so it changes over time, as you get older it gets lower and you can do a lot of things with it, it’s like any instrument.
What about the lyrics of the songs? Are they about something particular and has it always been this way?
Actually I’m at university doing a double major in philosophy and law and talking about “Dirge”, the lyrics are kinda influenced from that, they’re more extroverted, not the classic Dsbm introverted mass. It’s like judgement on how the world is and how it works, a bit of a fictitious kind of story that wants to be more reflective.
So it doesn’t talk about something happened to you but it’s related to a general opinion on the world and what we are living now, isn’t it?
Yeah, exactly.
Now you’re here in Europe as Deadspace, there will be a chance in the future to see you around here with Cancer, your side project?
Maybe, I’m not so sure.
