How do you interview a band named Cybernetic Witchcult? We wrestled with it before coming to the (possibly erroneous) conclusion that the obvious step would be to spend a wee bit too long at the bar at the mighty HRH Doom Vs Stoner festival, then trap the various members in a corridor before badgering them about the healing properties of tea. The interview begins as the band endeavour to unpick the pronunciation issues of Twinings tea and the various different flavours they offer; it doesn’t get much more sensible from there…
Alex: Twinings? Twinnings? Twinings? They do a good Chai Tea
Spiced Chai – that is a good tea…
Alex: Yes, I discovered that in Norway and quickly became addicted.
Why would you discover spiced chai, by Twinings, in Norway?
Alex: The hotels out there, they have it on the coffee machines. They’re pretty ahead of the curve.
Their hotel sounds better than our hotel. Our hotel has a see-through toilet.
Louis (horrified): What? A see-through toilet?
No, the toilet itself is fine.
Rich: It’s the walls – they’re see through
The whole band: Ooohh
Rich: and with two of us sharing a room…
Louis: So, it’s a case of “can you just not look left” when you’re taking a…
Yeah, that’s it!
Rich: That’s basically what we have to do.
There’s basically no lock and a big fucking gap right down the middle, so everything is going to be leaking out…
Rich: Seepage is how you put it earlier, isn’t it?
Alex: You guys really have to get this sorted.
So, if you’d like to do something, or take him with you…
Louis: I don’t feel like it’s his fault that you have a see-through toilet in your hotel room…
Rich: Particularly as he’s the one who booked it…
Louis: Is it a specialist hotel? We’re not kink shaming but…
I did pay a little extra…
Louis: Sounds like you might have had to.
It’s a twin room, but there’s no privacy… There are some questions in all this you know…
Louis: What’s your favourite see through room? Mine’s the one with all the toilets!
How many toilets do you need?
Louis: I can have as many as I want. You could replace all the beds in the room with more toilets.
The squatting and the thrusting… Oh no…
Louis: It’s not a room made for sleeping.
So, the first question…
Rich: You actually have questions?
[The recorder, unfortunately, does not capture the withering look directed at Rich] You guys have made a strange progression – you started in folk metal, then black metal and you finally landed on doom…
Alex: Yeah. So, I started off the band… well, the old band was me and the old bass player, we did some power metal and some folk metal and some black metal and we got bored of all that because they’re all pretentious in those genres and we wanted to have some fun, so we were like “we’ll just have a fun, doom band, and it won’t be serious…” Then it got serious and he left because it got too serious and now we’re having a different kind of fun, well I am.
Louis: It’s a nice progression – very creative…
Alex: I can’t really stand folk metal anymore. Louis still loves black metal, I don’t mind it anymore but we’re more into the doom-stoner bandwagon these days. Not a lot of people know that.
Louis: We met each other years ago when I was in a metal core band. I don’t tell many people that….
…but the see-through toilet story made you more trusting?
Yeah! It bought down the barriers. We’re talking about horrible, horrible things, let’s talk about metal core.
Louis: We’ve known each other for years and basically Alex got me into the band because he knew that I was drummer that played metal core and just needed someone to hit things.
Rich: I take it it was a progression from metal core band to doom band…
Louis: Yeah, I was really out of practice, so doom was the perfect genre of music for me to get into…
And how did you get suckered into this, or did it just offer you an escape?
Doug: Err, well there is that. Well they wanted some vintage gear, so they got me.
Alex: The original bassist, who was the folk and black metal bassist, he got a bit too… It got a bit too much for him because we were gigging too much. Doug was in a 1960s cover band and I was like: “he sounds great, he looks the part…” and then we found out that he also likes stoner rock and doom and we were like “what the hell is this?!”
Doug: The first Sleep album… my eyes were opened up!
Louis: Yeah, I don’t know what we would have done without Doug
Doug: Thanks Man
Alex: So, yeah, two days after we lost our bassist, Doug shows up at the practice space with this weird stick that he uses to make weird noises on his bass guitar and were like: “You! You’re great! Let’s keep him!” We’ll teach him how to play bass and it’ll be fantastic.
Doug: I’ve nearly got it now, I’ve nearly got it!
Then the band itself… you approach it in a way that it’s got that sixties vibe – for example cult of the druid…
Alex: That is directly inspired by having a budget of zero pounds and zero pence and Black Sabbath’s old music videos.
It doesn’t look like it has a zero budget…
Alex: We bought some green screens and some camera lights for £100… that was about it. We bought those things. We hired a practice room, did a green screen recording and then I learned how to video edit. We did three videos for that album, all filmed at the same green screen session, and there’s five different things in each one.
Louis: It was really fun…
Alex: We would have had a fourth, if the line-up hadn’t changed.
Louis: It would have looked a bit strange having two bassists in one music video.
I don’t know, you could go the Robert Palmer route…
Doug: They were wearing a skirt though. They looked better in a dress than I would… Anyway…
[Long pause] Good! Well, now you know where the boundaries lie. You’ve learnt a lot today – see through toilets, types of tea and boundaries.
Alex: It’s good
To be honest, when I saw the number of videos you’d done for one album, I figured you must have put a bit of money behind the release, but you did it all in house.
Alex: Yeah – the budget was all on the green screens.
Louis: And we’ve still got them!
Alex: Yeah, those were a good investment. Album three, we’re still going to be using the same green screen and it’s still going to be same lights… we just use a little tin foil for the space ship. Did you see that one?
I’m not sure I have…
Louis: He falls out of an airlock, it’s awesome…
Alex: Yeah, I get sucked into a black hole!
That sounds uncomfortable…
Doug: He’s OK now, it’s alright.
Alex: Yeah – tin foil, green screens and duct tape.
One of the key part of presenting doom and stoner is having really cool artwork – how involved are you in that side of things because you’ve got some really cool posters…
Louis: We keep it so close that it’s actually in Alex’s family…
Alex: My sister does the album art work and the posters I just kind of knock together out of old sci-fi posters. But my sister does all the artwork and she’s doing the next album as well. It’s cool. As our music progresses, her art… she was good at art to begin with – but her art for us progresses as well and it all kind of grows and fits.
Louis: We like to work with people that we know and trust and get on with and that kind of understand our strange outlook on how things should look and sound.
Doug: We’ve seen the proofs for the next album and it’s going to be incredible. The artwork is amazing.
Alex: She’s really, really outdone herself this time. Absolutely fantastic.
So, you’re in the process of recording album 3?
Alex: We’ve done it! It’s in the bag! It’s waiting for the final mixes now but it’s already sounding exactly how we want it and the final mix should sound even better. We can’t wait to… well, we’re not looking forward to the whole PR, release, the videos and the editing…
Louis: Hopefully we’ll get someone to do that for us next time…
Alex: Hopefully we’ll be able to afford that, you know… scrimp the budget on the videos… we don’t even have to buy the green screens again so maybe we can afford to get someone to advertise for us.
I suppose festivals like HRH Doom Vs Stoner really help to get the name out there, because you’re headlining the second stage here…
Alex: Send HRH enough emails and, eventually, when you don’t send them one, they’ll ask you to play!
Doug: There you go kids!
Alex: Yeah, shows like this, we’ve been looking forward to this all year and we thought that we’d record the album before HRH and then we could spend the time getting ready for the show.
Louis: We’re so excited to play later on today and, yeah, you’re right, it’s one of this big opportunities for us and we don’t take that type of thing lightly and it’s nice to know that someone’s been playing attention.
You’re Cornwall based I think – I grew up in Dorset but, back then (ten or fifteen years ago), it didn’t feel like there was a lot of opportunity in the south…
Louis: There still isn’t… you have to work your arse off really. Any show you book, you’re booking a show that’s two hours away so you’ve got no fan base when you start in each town, and then every tour you’re like an extra two hour drive and an extra two hours of petrol or four hours of petrol because you’ve got to get home after, but it’s good fun and I think it’s bought us closer together and we’ve had to be serious about it because…
Alex: Who would bother to travel that far otherwise?!
Louis: If we didn’t take it seriously, getting outside of Cornwall would just Haemorrhage us too much money. We’ve kind of had to really work at actually getting people out but, as a result, we aren’t really spending much time playing much time playing shows in Cornwall. They’re mostly out of County. The doom scene ends at Plymouth, right? There’s really not a whole lot else going on, it’s all sort of family-friendly…
Alex: I don’t know if you guys know Monolithian – they’re a great doom band from Cornwall and they are also very active in Cornwall.
Doug: Exeter and Plymouth – they’re local to us.
How are you planning to release the new album – is it going to be in-house and self-released again?
Alex: We’ve been doing pretty well with that, but this one, we’re going to try and properly look at labels this time. We’ve been looking for labels since we started, but this time we might properly get PR on it and try to push it. We’ve done well doing PR ourselves before, but it’d be nice just to see what we can achieve using professional companies to do it for us.
Louis: We feel we’re at the stage now, where we’d be able to utilise that properly and I think, before, when Troglodithic Trip was released, you know, I think the band had… not to take Facebook into too much account… but I think we had fewer than 1000 people following us. That’s now tripled and, like you say, we’re getting these slightly larger opportunities now and we’re playing nationally, so I think that now is the time to take the next step, or at least try to.
Alex: Yeah, we’re ready to release it ourselves, but if we can find an offer that suits us… we’re quite sceptical of paying people to do things because we’re like “well, we can just do that ourselves!” But, if we can find the right deal we’ll probably go for it this time, whereas last time, we were like “no, no, we’ll do it ourselves!”
It’s a huge amount of work, though, isn’t it – on the one hand you can reach so many people with social media, on the other, you’re competing with thousands of other bands and you have to keep pushing content…
Louis: There’s Merch as well – Alex is always having to send all this stuff and you just want to fob some of this work off onto somebody else so that you can free up some of your own time again. We have to sell all our things…
I’m telling you, Rich is great for this… if you’ve got no room in the van, you can tie a noose around his neck – it’s not that far from Sheffield to Cornwall…
Rich: I’ll run…
Louis: On a serious note, Alex has been a real workhorse doing all this and we’re going to try to take some of that off his hands by paying someone at some point maybe.
Alex: One day… because I’m not getting paid.
Any final words?
Louis: We’ve got a vinyl that’s just come out, which is the last album, and the new album will be out early next year, so stuff will be on line soon – artwork, videos, stuff… come find us on Facebook, all of our goings on can be found there.
