SUBTERRANEA MAGAZINE INTERVIEW

By: Dayal Patterson

*Original, uncut, & unpublished interview taken from the pages of Subterranean Magazine Issue #240 (Feb 2013)

VON - True Blood

VON’s early demos are some of the most bewildering, yet most sacred documents in black metal lore. So why has it taken them 25 years to release the debut album? There can be few bands in the metal scene-with the notable exception of Andy Sneap’s Hell-whose debut albums have been quite as delayed as VON’s. But then the history of this unique outfit is a long and complicated tale, one that can be traced right back to the late 80’s and two young friends, bassist Jason ‘VENIEN’ Ventura and guitarist/vocalist Shawn ‘Goat’ Calizo. Together this duo would summon a single-minded and ritualistic beast of unparalleled primitivism and in doing so create what was arguably America’s first black metal band. Enlisting a drummer known as Snake, the group relocated from Hawaii to San Francisco to chase their dreams, but their insanely stripped-down assault proved the antithesis of the technical thrash then favoured by the Bay Area, and the public response proved underwhelming to say the least.

Worse was to come, with Jason being forced to return to Hawaii to attend to his dying mother, a move that left him estranged from the rest of the band-who’d been persuaded to move to the city by VENIEN. The band recruited VENIEN’s best friend Joe ‘Kill’ Trevisano, and together the trio crafted a demo entitled Satanic Blood in 1992. Then they split, leaving behind only rumor, a few live photos and the three names listed on the sleeve. The band would slowly rise to notoriety in the black metal scene thanks to Varg Vikernes (who not only named dropped the band, but wore their shirt at his murder trial), bands such as Dark Funeral and Taake (who covered their material) and Watain, who named themselves after a song by the band. Shrouded in mystery for almost two decades, the return of the band in 2010 was perhaps the most unexpected extreme metal reunion to date, and many initially treated it as a hoax, particularly since the name VENIEN was completely unknown, having not been present on the Satanic Blood demo. A show with Watain in London that year proved that the band were real, but was badly received-due to both the casual attire of the group and a lack of tightness-and led to a split between Goat and VENIEN.

Dayal Patterson:
First of all let’s clear up the 2010 return show - what happened there and what has happened since that led to you and Goat parting ways?

VENIEN:
Goat and I parted ways permanently when we got back from London. He called me too quit the band and move on to do Von Goat with those bootleggers NWN. He canceled all VON bookings I was setting up including Hole In The Sky that year as well as a possible mini tour with some bands in Europe, if I remember it was Destroyer 666 and Watain, which was in the works but never became reality. The main reason for his departure was due to his fucked up performance and bad attitude during the London show, so I’m sure there was that embarrassment just tugging at him I’m sure and wanted to distance himself from me since he is a spineless jellyfish. I mean when I came on the stage first and plugged in to my amp and hit a note, shit! There was this great energy and the crowd was chanting VON for a few minutes, then that loser came on shortly after and then I heard him yelling at the club people to kick the house lights back on? He wanted to able to see the stage and demanded tons of towels so he could clean up the blood Watain left behind, fucking asshole!!! That was the beginning of the end and it fucked up the entire set and it went down hill from there. Goat was lit up on coke all day and went on stage with this fucking Von Goat style playing hitting his guitar like he was a Bruno Mars with the spirit of Pete Townsend and even worse was off riff the entire time and screaming out lyrics and grunts that had nothing to do with the songs, which in turn the drummer, and the other guitar player kept looking at me to figure out where the fuck were we in the song, all because Goat was in some “bubble-gum-pop-outer-space-fantasy-land” and it was pretty much a cluster fuck after that. Since my bass was loud and I was attempting to keep the tempo for the rest of the band, fucking guy came over to my rig and kept turning my shit down to zero, then I would tell him to fuck off don’t touch my shit and then turned it back to 5 or 7, ha! The only reason he did that shit was the fact that we were all on point and he was off, so he wanted us to all be off if he could not be on, fucking idiot! So man, that was the first and last show I will ever do with the adult version of goat…that bitch is a self proclaimed champion of non-violence/gay pop singing/pretender who calls himself a goat, fuck goat!

Needless to say, relations between the two are at an all-time low. Part of this has to do with VENIEN’s very public assertions that all CD releases of VON material not released via Von Records (VMG) are essentially bootlegs, since they were released without the permission from him, one half of the writing team. Goat, in contrast, is on reasonable terms and has even released his solo albums (under the Von Goat moniker) through the main record label in question. Even meeting the two at the aforementioned London show, it was quickly clear that they were radically different characters, and it seems this current schism is the result of two decades of underlying tensions.

Dayal Patterson:
What were you up to in the years from 1992 till now? How did you learn that VON was such a big deal and still had fans after all these years? How did you feel?

VENIEN:
Life was what I was up to, just like the rest of the world, getting on with it. I learned there was talk about it from friends in the bay area that called me asking for a copy of my album??? I told them I never finished the album just demos. Then I heard about the bootleg compilations of the demo material and some live club cuts from a camcorder put out like it was an official album. How do I feel about something I have been thinking about all my life…you don’t have enough word space in this article.

Dayal Patterson:
Now that some time has passed do you think confusion about VON is beginning to clear up and that you’re being accepted by people as the real deal?

VENIEN:
Not really, the bootleggers and that fucking dumb ass Joey Allen fucked that up a along time ago (ya fuck you too JOEY!!! I know someone will show that little bitch this too), and Shawn didn’t help by hiding his head in the sand about who created this shit and the real story behind it all, again, I never quit and that was the confusion, I created, ran, and was the core of the band, that’s the real deal, the other bullshit and people that believed in the false stories and make believe hype from others is just that, bullshit.

Dayal Patterson:
Tell us about Satanic Blood - where did these songs come from? Was it hard updating them?

VENIEN:
All the material on this album is from the old days from when we were young. These songs were made by Shawn, and myself period. There was no updating the songs it was fine the way they were and are today, so I recorded them as they are meant be, this time properly instead of shitty Tascam or a live mic hanging from a storage room pipe, but pro tools and good mics

Dayal Patterson:
The sound of Satanic Blood is very unusual - where some similarly primal bands (Blasphemy, Black Witchery etc.) tend to drive their sound into low frequencies, Satanic Blood is almost ‘scooped’ with extreme lows and highs thanks to the lead guitar, which is almost always present. How did you decide how you would update those early demo tracks, which featured very few (if any) overdubs?

VENIEN:
Again, demos are demos, not albums. These are the album versions of the material. I worked with Lord Giblete on all the guitar tracks for this album’s leads, rhythms, solos, you name it, we did what we did to get what we wanted. We used a Traynor head and a Jackson V and a Sennheiser mic, and it all felt right and sounded like it did back in the day, I was comfortable with it. My bass was the same with the addition of a Sans Amp bass driver and an old school fuzz/wah Morley, and that’s what I like and the bass to be out front. We used the same setup for all the new albums as well and even my solo album, and we use it all for live shows as well. In terms of VON and the material that was made in our early years, it generates a certain chemical reaction I would say, and for me the work is always met with a sense of panic, rage, a very special connection to those that feel the way we do, a freedom of expression in a very dark place. The demos Satanic, Satanic Blood, Blood Angel and some videos that captured the songs of the past, it resonates in people's minds as an old time of when a very dark metal was created, and since the beginnings of it was met with no fanfare or acknowledgement, that appeals to wide audience of people that are outcast like us, it’s the VON way even today. The levels, the distortion, the quality, old or new versions of the work, it is all the same to me, they are all the same songs, one is a demo and the other is the final form, an album version.

Dayal Patterson:
Tell us about Lord Giblete and Charlie Fell

VENIEN:
Let me start with Charlie, he is not in the band VON, he is in a band called Lord Mantis and another one called Nachtmystium. He was hired at a time I did not have a drummer and I needed someone that knew the VON material and could record it for me, he fit the bill and did it justice, the dude is a beast on the drums. I have to mention my main dude that I met the same day during the Satanic Blood drum sessions, who is my now “permanent” drummer Anthony “Dirty FvKn! Pistols” Mainiero, he came in later to finish up the last 2 VON albums and my double solo VENIEN album, he also is sticking around to do a few shows and a tour for next year even though he is in a touring band called The Atlas Moth and few other side projects as well. Lord Giblete is my right hand in this thing; he is the arm of the MONSTER. He quit goat’s bullshit band and moved out to AZ and never looked back. He has been with me since 2010 and we have recorded over 70+ songs and still adding, fucking dude is a GURU.

Whatever the situation, no one can question the almost unfathomable energy that VENIEN has put into the project over the last few years. The first evidence of this has just been unleashed upon the world in the shape of the Satanic Blood album, a record comprised of all the early VON material (including two unreleased demos, as well as tracks never recorded before) recreated in a studio environment. Working with guitarist Lord Giblete (J Giblete)-a member of VON since the reformation-and Nachtmystium/Lord Mantis man Charlie Fell, who provided session drums on the album, VENIEN has crafted an hour’s worth of utter barbarity, retaining the hypnotic repetition and crude riffing but giving them a more expansive (yet thoroughly unpolished) sound.

Incredibly, the first album is only the beginning of an absolute deluge of activity and, having recreated the band as a touring entity with new personnel, VENIEN is now preparing to release no fewer that three more VON opuses throughout 2013 as well as a solo project and several other releases related to the VON family.

Dayal Patterson:
Many of our readers will be surprised to learn that this is only one of 4 releases from VON - tell us about the other albums you will be releasing!

VENIEN:
Dark Gods was the follow up to Satanic Blood, and includes all brand new material I’ve been writing and demo tracking since the early 90’s and still am writing and I’m sure it won’t stop. But since I have so much material and it is a huge story to tell, I decided to sort out the songs and the chapters properly since 2006, and it went from 1 album to 3 albums. They are all DARK GODS albums but they all have their own title as well. Part I is called “Dark Gods: Seven Billion Slaves”, Part II is called “Dark Gods: Birth of the Architects”, and the final chapter Part III is called “Dark Gods: Ancient Blood”. We just performed a few cuts from all these albums in our own event we call the “Ritual of The Black Mass” in LA and soon to be in NY. This will become our traveling tour to showcase all my works from all the VON albums, and even the 30+ tracks from my solo “VENIEN” album called “Tribal Blood”. During the Dark Gods album releases you will also see VON versions of a few special tribute/bonus songs that I did from various bands like: Septic Death, Coffinworm, NIN, and The Shining. Coffinworm joined me on one of my VON tracks called “Ancient Flesh of The Dark Gods” off the first Dark Gods album Seven Billion Slaves, so look out for that song if you like those guys. I’ve also been talking and collaborating with Niklas Kvarforth for over a year now on a classic “The Shining” track. Niklas kindly re-wrote the first verse in English and I wrote a new verse for the second verse, so that song is coming in around 13 minutes, I’m still finishing that up but Niklas is putting that out at some point on something he wants to do in the future so keep your eyes open for that. He also renamed the title as “To Abandon My Heart” from its original title. We are collaborating on a VON song called “Blind God” off the Dark Gods: Ancient Blood album that he will be featured on as well. We are in preliminary stages of making that song right now and only time will tell. Alvaro Lillo from the band Watain is also joining Lord Giblete and myself with adding vocals and writings to one of the 5 bonus songs titled “La Legión del Santo de la Muerte”, that’s is off my solo album “Tribal Blood”. Plus I’m dropping Alvaro’s solo album called Kako Daimon, so it's going to be a busy year in 2013 for Von Records and few more surprise I can’t reveal yet. So all in all there are around 70+ songs coming your way, a couple extra surprises, but for now you should have Satanic Blood in your hands, and that is just the beginning.

Dayal Patterson:
Is it a relief to finally have this album out after all these years?

VENIEN:
I always knew it was going to happen, just when, but yes it is something that I always wanted to finish what I started and it was always there poking at me to be finished.

(Source: Subterranean Magazine Issue #240 Feb 2013) *inside the pages of Metal Hammer Magazine