(Today we present another interview by Comrade Aleks, and this time he spoke with both members of the California-based death metal band Negative Vortex, whose debut album was released earlier this year by Sentient Ruin.)
Negative Vortex is a Brazilian, US-based doomed death metal duo created by M.Feschner (guitars, vocals) and Libra (drums, bass, guitars, keyboards) a few years ago. Both men had years of experience in the extreme metal underground, and Negative Vortex’s full-length album Tomb Absolute is their most focused, matured work.
These nine songs aren’t just a nihilistic, intense, and depressing experience of analyzing modern human society performed in the vein of Autopsy and Celtic Frost, but a thoughtful and complex view of it through the prism of literature and socially important cases.
The songs’ lyrics include excerpts from William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe as well as lines from the last woman executed in Czechoslovakia, Olga Hepnarová’s original letter on “Cease to Exist”.
And last but not least, Tomb Absolute includes a good list of honourable guests, like Kam Lee, Nick Holmes, Vik Whipstriker, Moyses Kolesne, Leon del Muerte, and Caleb Bingham, who left their special mark on the album’s songs.
We have done a pretty good interview with both M.Feschner and Libra for the Spanish magazine This Is Metal, and I’m glad to share its full version here.
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Hi Negative Vortex! How are you? Who’s online today?
M.Feschner: Hello there! Today you will get both of us, M.Feschner and Libra for this interview. Thanks a lot for having us!
So I see both of you started in the Brazilian death metal band The Endoparasites back in the ’90s. What are your memories about this first period in the extreme metal underground?
M.Feschner: I have been involved with the Metal scene since early 1986, got to see Venom and Exciter when they played in Brazil, and I listened to a lot of Hellhammer/Celtic Frost, Destruction, Kreator, Discharge, all those underground bands that people in the tape-trading scene were exchanging between each other.
The Endoparasites started in 1989 with a different name and when I joined in 1990 we decided to change to The Endoparasites. Libra joined the band way later, 1996 if I’m not wrong, for a really short period of time, maybe a year or less.
I have great memories from those times. We used to play live a lot in Rio De Janeiro, sharing the stage with great bands like Expulser, Dorsal Atlantica, Sarcofago, Sextrash, Nocturnal Worshipper, to name a few. Despite all the hardship, especially economic hardship, it was a great crazy time. A lot of illegal things were done in order to keep the band active and running, you know, to pay for practice, recording the demos, etc…
We had an album out through Cogumelo Records in 1993 that will be re-released next October.
Was it the label’s proposal or was it you searching for this reissue?
M.Feschner: It was Cogumelo’s idea initially. They contacted me a while ago and we liked the idea as soon a few people asked about it from time to time. It will be out on CD format for the first time with two bonus tracks.
As I understand, you tried to start a new band after your relocation to the US, but both tries weren’t very successful. What made you return to death metal after years of uncertainty?
M.Feschner: Yes, I moved to San Francisco CA in 2004. Took me a while to find people to jam with. In 2007 I joined a band that had a more experimental but heavy kind of music called Skinhorse. It was a great experience to be honest, and I had the chance to record a few songs with the recording engineer Billy Anderson (Cathedral, Brutal Truth, Melvins, Sleep, etc.).
I left the band to form The Burial Tide in 2009 with my buddy Jay Bustamante, also ex-Skinhorse. I played a lot of shows with those two bands in the SF/Bay Area, and toured the west coast. Good times but, you know, I had this need to be back to old good Death Metal. In 2013 I started Negative Vortex.
You started Negative Vortex as a band with a full lineup and recorded the Tomb Absolute demo as a quartet. What happened next? Did the departure of other band members slow you down?
M.Feschner: Yes, in 2013 I started Negative Vortex with Phillip Hasha on drums. I had a few songs already and we started to jam, and a few months later Dave joined the band on the second guitar and Rob on the bass. Then with this lineup we recorded in 2015 the Tomb Absolute demo that ended up being released by Caligari Rec.
We played a lot of shows in the Bay Area and toured the west coast and Canada doing a few gigs opening for Heresiarch from New Zealand in 2017. Then in 2018 I decided to move to Los Angeles. The rest of the band had other plans and stayed in the Bay area.
I kept creating more songs and then in 2021 I asked Libra if he wanted to help me record the album as a producer. We started working on the songs and after a while it was clear that Negative Vortex had become a creative partnership and we decided to keep the band as a duo.
How did this experience of tours with Negative Vortex differ from those you did with The Endoparasites? Did you miss “the old times”?
M.Feschner: Completely different times! To begin with, in the USA you can work at a burger joint and buy a good guitar, good gear! It was almost impossible to have good gear back in Brasil. Also, a lot more places to play live, etc. It’s almost impossible to compare to be honest.
About the “old times”, the scene was a lot more passionate, it was a lot harder to find new material to listen to, and people used to get a lot more excited about new music. Nowadays music is almost disposable. For example, did you hear about this bullshit of metal labels posting on their social media “we don’t accept demo-tapes” or “don’t send your demo, we will not listen”? This is utter bullshit!!!! Bands make the labels and not the other way around! If there are no bands there are no labels!
Ok, I get it, nowadays there are ten thousand bands out there, but you can create an email just for new band submissions, even if you will not listen to all them, but give them a chance, maybe you will find some kids that are doing some great music.
Nowadays it’s all about politics, it’s about who knows who, the cool band of the moment. And you see this a lot in the Death Metal scene, people behaving like a bunch of glam rock posers posing as tough guys! Are we pirates or politicians? So yes, things changed a lot from how they used to be.
Negative Vortex’ debut album Tomb Absolute was released in January 2023 by Sentient Ruin Laboratories. How long did you actually work over this material? What took so much time – the process of composing or recording this material?
M.Feschner: Most of the songs were written between 2013 and 2017. After Libra joined the band, we changed a few riffs and added some new elements and created a few new songs, always keeping our old influences from the ’80s and early ’90s, mostly European death metal and doom bands and also Scandinavian (specially Finland) hardcore/punk.
I think we worked on the songs for a year. Libra did a lot of pre-production and then we started the recording sessions at his studio (13eighteen Studio in Hollywood CA).
The title song has impressive death-doom riffs and an overall doomy vibe in it. Were you influenced by doom bands as well when you were composing these songs?
M.Feschner: I came from a time and a scene where we didn’t bother to pay attention to labels on the music. I listen to everything that is heavy and if I like it, great! I think it is pretty stupid when people tell me “oh I only listen to doom metal” or “oh I only listen to death metal”. I listen to everything that is METAL and is HEAVY and I don’t care about labeling the music. My songs can have fast parts, slow parts, but one thing that it will always be is heavy and intense!
I listen to a lot of Finish, Japanese, and Swedish hardcore from the ’80s, also a lot of Discharge, Heresy, Poison Idea, and yes, old Paradise Lost and Cathedral, from where our “doom” influences actually came from, oh and obviously Celtic Frost. Nothing against new bands but I rarely listen to new stuff. I wish that I could listen to a new band and have that same feeling when I listened to my Morbid Tales back in the ’80s. I miss that feeling! Hopefully there’s not a lot of people who think like me out there HAHAHA.
Did you search to resurrect the same feeling playing your music the way you do?
M.Feschner: Not at all. I don’t think I will resurrect anything, because it never died!! I don’t like the term old school death metal, there’s only DEATH METAL. Just because a person has been playing Death Metal for a while doesn’t mean it’s “old school”, they just had good influences while creating their music, just that!
The new bands adding their new influences, because they’re younger, they weren’t there and now they want to tell people how it was without even having being there. They started listening to metal with Metallica’s Black album, with Pantera, etc…, of course they will not sound like Death Metal, then they start to call the bands from the past “old school”.
You both recorded the album on your own, but there are three honoured guests who recorded the guitar solos for some songs – Moyses Kolesne, Leon del Muerte, and Caleb Bingham. Was it a necessity to call for help from outside to complete the songs?
Libra: It was not so much a matter of necessity but more like an artistic direction. We definitely could have done a decent job ourselves (there are at least another 5 or 6 solos we chose to do by our own hands). The reason why we invited Moyses, Leon, and Caleb is because we thought those particular passages where they played needed a different personality, a specific flavor, or in some cases, a more advanced level of musicianship.
M.Feschner: Negative Vortex will be always open for collaborations as much as we think is necessary and fit in our music.
You quoted William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe in your songs. What motivated you to approach two such different writers?
Libra: We like to leave our lyrics open to interpretation as much as possible, but since one of the most recurrent subjects in the album is disappointment with ourselves, with others, and with the world we live in, we thought those two passages would help expressing those feelings. Both poems were the missing pieces to convey the idea we wanted to express in those two songs.
We decided to narrate both passages instead of singing to give more of a dramatic, almost theatrical, atmosphere to those two songs. We also used spoken word, done by Nick Holmes from Paradise Lost, as a conceptual tool on the song “Cease to Exist” for the narration of the letter written by Olga Hepnarova (who was the inspiration for that song)
Was it hard to get in touch with all these guests and persuade them to help you with the album?
M.Feschner: Not at all. I would not call it a “help” but more a collaboration. Most of them are our close friends and we talk with each other frequently. Some of them we just got in touch with and they kindly agreed to be part of our album after we showed them the songs and all the concept behind it.
As you said, you also quoted Olga Hepnarova in the song “Cease to Exist”. How did you find out her story, and why did you choose it for one of your tracks?
M.Feschner: I saw an article about her a few years back and I found it very interesting. She had a hard life and went through a lot of shit caused by society, which I really identified with. She was very misinterpreted by people driving into a state of mind of hatred for the human race. She drove a truck into a group of people killing 8 and injuring 12. She got arrested and sentenced to death. Olga Hepnarova was the last woman executed in Czechoslovakia, and one of the last by the use of short-drop hanging. ARSON ATTACK WILL RETURN!
Tomb Absolute was released digitally, on CDs, and on vinyl. Do you feel that the album got enough feedback? Do you feel all of this wasn’t in vain?
MFeschner: It was released also on cassette!
We’re getting a lot of great reviews and good feedback from the fans. We will be featured in some zines and also in some main Metal outlets in the next few months. Despite the fact that we never had any PR company representing us I think we’re doing ok.
Not at all!! Playing music is never in vain! We play music for ourselves. If people like it, great, if they don’t, oh well! We don’t really care. We came from the underground Brazilian Metal scene.
Do you have an opportunity and desire to support the album with gigs? When did you play live the last time?
M.Feschner: Sometimes we think about playing live, but not much. We both had the opportunity to get out of our system this urge to play live. For me, human interaction always causes a lot of weird feelings. Playing live is always a good opportunity to use my music as an instrument to release my inner demons. On stage I am one person, off stage I am another person. But you know, things can always change.
Last time we played live was June 2017.
Would you like to play a few gigs again with Negative Vortex?
M.Feschner: I have been talking with a few people about it, basically looking for a drummer as soon we have a second guitar already line up. Maybe next year (2024), let’s see what happens.
What are your further plans for the rest of 2023?
M.Feschner: At the moment I’m working on new lyrics and new songs. But no rush at all, we like to take our time and make the album the way we want!
Thanks for the interview gents! It was nice to talk about the band and your music. Won’t you tell a few more words to our readers?
M.Feschner: Thanks for the interview and support!! Our flag is black with skull and crossbones, with chains and spikes hanging from it! DEATH METAL FOREVER!!!
https://negativevortex.bandcamp.com/album/demo
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Negative-vortex/500326563445346
https://sentientruin.bandcamp.com/album/tomb-absolute