The Veil – Undertow Of Enchanting Sounds

For those of us who got tired of all those Symphonic Metal Bands, let us introduce you to France's The Veil. They may be new to the world's metal scene, and not yet signed, but here in Israel we know just how many excellent unsigned bands there are out there. What makes The Veil unique is their analog approach to their music – which combines gothic metal, black & horror movies atmosphere and some varied electronic sounds. Add to that the voice of beautiful vocalist Jensara Swann and you got yourself a real treat. In honor of their new EP, hopefully the one to get them signed, I spoke with that Red Headed vocalist, who surprised me with her unusual kind of humor. Be warned.

Greetings to you. Your new EP "Vestige" has just been released, how are the responses so far for your new effort?

Hey there! Well first I have to precise that it has not been “released” in the purest meaning, as we don’t have a distributor yet. This CD was made in the fist place to find a label and get our fans a way to listen to our music at home. We only produced 500 copies of it and we sell it via our MySpace page and gigs merchandise stand. So far we had an amazing response from the people who bought it from us, needless to say we are very glad and relieved about it [Laughs]…

This is actually your second release, after a successful EP from 2006. How did the band mature since then, up until your current release?

Well we grew older, wiser, stronger, and incredibly more beautiful at once. This is the effect that cereal, beer and time can have over you [Laughs]… Nah, I am joking, apart for the beer stuff, but of course, a first release is always a bit wild and rough, and although we’re really happy about it on any levels, it taught us a lot where we wanted to go, what we had to improve, etc'. This first release was a way to give birth to this infernal child of ours, and now our job is to raise it the right way.

You started out as a duo, but now you hold a full group of freaks. Can you tell us in short about your history and how did the band came to be in the current lineup?

Only Julian [drums] is a freak, we are very nice people trying to contain him [Laughs]… When Notox and I created this band it was always implied we wanted to gather a full group around us but it's not so easy to find the right musicians, even more when you live in a remote little French place as we do! We didn’t want to wait for that day to happen to start creating music, so we composed and produced "Sleeping Among Serpents" as we could.

We then played a few gigs along with session musicians as Stefan Bayle from Anorexia Nervosa and then felt that we needed a stable line up. We met Julian (the freak), and immediately hooked up. Finding the right guitarist was more difficult as we have a very specific idea of what we would like as guitar parts and style in our future creations, and we enrolled Gregory Staley from the black metal act Reverence to record "Vestige" with us and complete our European tour.

Greg is not staying in the band as he is not the exact kind of guitarist we’re looking for despite him being very talented of course, plus he got his own agenda running. So the hunt is kinda open! We're soon going to start auditioning potential freaks and keep you posted. This doesn’t keep us from composing on as we are already at work with several guitar player friends who thought they could add their freak seed to our freak cake.

Let's get to your music. As the cover artwork and lyrics hint, there seems to be a theme or even a concept behind the EP. Can you shed more light about the EP and its name?

I wouldn’t go so far and say there is a concept, but a theme, definitely. The main theme of the EP is obviously Love (how daring of us). But more than being about romantic love, it was more about love’s aftermath – the ruins, the inner decay of a heart struck by the acid arrow of love. Romantic love, narcissist love, universal love. The complexity brought by such a simple feeling, the pain we inflict ourselves and each other in its holy name.

Poetically speaking, I wished to use the lexical field of the sea that I found very accurate to the domain of passion, deep feelings, and mystery. I blended it with a bit of magic, like voodoo, as love can definitely blind you like a glamour and even make you raise many things that should have remained dead at times and “Voilà!”.

The different drawings that can be found in the booklet all have an explanation if you take the time to read the lyrics. They are like these things you cannot see on the surface of the ocean but exist and dwell deep below. The writings are to be seen as a kind of travel book notes one would have written crossing the oceans of Eros and Thanatos. They were probably brought to the shore in a bottle of some kind, which lead us to the name, “Vestige”.

A vestige is a ruin, what remains of something, witnessing about its past grandeur. It has something noble and old, and dead – definitely dead – belonging to another time, long forgotten, swallowed by the currents, but still there, somewhere. Besides, I found interesting that this word is the same in French and in English, so people from my native culture and any other could relate to. Just like Love. Just like Death.

My favorite song from the EP is "Voodoom", which is also an excellent word combination. What can you tell us about it? (Do you dabble with word games often?)

Unfortunately for my poor friends and relatives am afraid so [Laughs]… Well that’s a funny story actually. Most of my lines “come” to me while sleeping or when I'm in my bath. But these last ones are usually more about bubbles and ducks, so I keep them for a future disco glam project [Laughs]… This word, Voodoom, just came to me in that way. Oh I didn’t invent anything, I am pretty sure some hundreds of people at least came with the same pun, but I liked the sound of it. It made me think about a deafening pounding heart *Voo… Doom*. And from this very feeling came the idea for Notox and me to create a song based on a pounding heartbeat.

The term Voodoom could be seen as a kind of love bewitchery inevitably leading to your demise. How many people do we know have once been so mesmerized by someone that it nearly made them surrender their soul for them? I did. I'm pretty sure you did. Although I wrote this song thinking about two specific persons, and being in no way talking about myself when using the "I" (I precise that for all the people who reading my lyrics would then think, what a bitch, ha ha) I guess this is a story we could all relate on. Love can be a drug, as enlightening than destructive. This notion is embodied in the word Belladonna that can be found in my text. It's an Italian word meaning beautiful woman as well as it’s the name of a poisonous weed and it’s a usual component of love spells…

It seems that you're a part of both the metal scene and also the dark-electronic one. Was this something you wanted to do on first place?

Nah, we didn’t really structure our thoughts about that, its more that we as persons, as music fans, belong to all these scenes at once. It seemed logic our music would be the mirror to what we are. And we are really lucky that people from all these various scenes seem to appreciate us. All proportions kept of course as we’re only The Veil yet and not Metallica, so they may hate us only later [Laughs]…

What do you think that appeals in your music for each crowd?

Hmm… this is a thing we can only guess I think. It would seem easy to say that guitar parts and blasts got to the Metalheads, synths beats reached the electro fans, and gloomy ambiances to the Goths. But I think it would be categorizing a bit to easily all these people. I have been surprised many times by Goths actually liking the blasts and Metalheads the dark melodies. I like to think that our music is more than meets the eye, as are the people that listen to us and like us, and that’s this bound they may find in our music.

Your influences are quite varied, from atmospheric black metal tunes, to gothic metal and then to the electronic side. In my opinion, I hear many similarities to Lacuna Coil, especially with your vocals. Do you take it as compliment or as misdirection on my behalf?

Wait I go dying for a minute and I’ll be right back [Laughs]… I'm joking of course, although we are not so much into metal with female voices actually, and I also think that musically Lacuna Coil and The Veil are coming from two different galaxies, them being more into a modern / new metal, pop direction, and us more into a Gothic, Darkwave, Doom, Black, Rock & weird UFO [Laughs]… But they still are the band I respect the most in that scene. Mostly because unlike many other singers, Cristina has this rough rock side that she manages to entangle very well with emotional melodies and a classy feminine touch. So in that way, I sure take it as a compliment! I think our medium range is also quite similar.

What other bands and artists you take inspiration from, on both metal and electronic sides?

Although we would, as any band, say something as “we're only inspired by ourselves, blah blah…” there are of course many artists who in one way or another got to be our muses, be it for their way of composing, the emotions we felt while listening to their music or their artistic evolution. Such bands as Skinny Puppy, Rob Zombie/White Zombie, Nine Inch Nails, Emperor, Siouxsie And The Banshees, Type O Negative, Das Ich, Guns N' Roses, Bathory or Anton Dvorak were our forefathers. And the list could be endless. If you ask me again in one month I’ll probably give you some other names [Laughs], although I’d say my one and only vocal god will always remain Sebastian Bach but I was threatened lately of abysmal torture if I wouldn't stop saying that in interviews which probably makes me a masochist then [Laughs]…

Speaking of your electronic side, I understand that you don't use much conventional methods for your mechanical parts. Can you tell us about those special instruments and tools that you use?

Well we're not the Leonardo Da Vincis of electronic metal, far from it, when we created the band, we wanted everything but our electronic parts to be cold and flat. We wanted them to be alive (just like Frankenstein's Creature). So we decided to use older synths rather than newest workstations, like "Oberheim Matrix 6R", which is our little sweetheart, or a general filter like "Sherman", which definitely got a life of its own.

On "Vestige", we didn’t want to record my voice with the usual kind of microphones that are used by singers – that kind of microphones that make your voice all clean and smooth and perfect but a bit soulless and out of the music ensemble – so we recorded my parts with a drums microphone! I loved the result, my voice was indeed not all velvety and stupidly perfect but rougher and merged into the rest of the music and that’s exactly how we wanted it, just like another instrument.

The cherry on the cake is that "Fostex" tape recorder that you can see us using during live performances. We transfer everything we record through it, and it gives this little old, warm touch we adore. To put it in a nutshell, we are definitely analog beings wandering into a digital world.

Besides your musical influences I can defiantly feel a special atmosphere on the EP, something which might come out of a horror movie. Is it true? Do you sleep / mingle with zombies?

Only Julian, but it's because living girls think he's crazy. Zombie girls are fortunately not so complicated [Laughs]… That’s a very important point you raise up actually. I think we’re much more inspired by films or literature than music. Among them I could quote "Blade Runner", "Mad Max", "Brazil" (for the “serious” ones), along with "Amityville", "Nightmare on Elm street", "Night of the Living Dead", or even old goodies as "Forbidden Planet", "Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" and "Bad Taste". Mix that with the eeriness of Burton's ambiance, a zest of "Fifth Element", the violence of "Doberman", the philosophy of "V for Vendetta", the beauty of "Dracula" and you‘ll get a big… big and very weird musical cake. That's what we are – a kind of music pudding [Laughs]…

What can you tell us about the song writing process? First it comes as music or as lyrics (or as an enchanted mushroom)?

[Laughs]… We all go for the mushroom!!!

On the new EP you used the producing talents of Neb Xort from acclaimed symphonic metal band Anorexia Nervosa. How did the relationship with him start and how's working with him?

Well he did use to be our sex poodle in the first place, but we noticed in the long run he was a much better sound engineer than a poodle [Laughs]… Me and Notox met Xort a very long time ago and together with Anorexia Nervosa they're very close friends of ours, so it kinda seemed obvious to ask him to produce our first EP 2 years ago. Xort also performed live with us on a few gigs as I didn’t want to handle any key part on stage and focus on the singing. This guy knows us by heart, is unimaginably thorough, dedicated and talented when it comes to engineering and we’re likeminded people.

That’s the reason why we asked him again for our second recording, because working together and creating together is a bit like sex, the more you know and sleep with a person, the better it gets [Laughs]. There is a very important value for us, which is the one of musical family. The Veil you see on the pictures is only the top of the iceberg – we wouldn’t be where we are now if not for all the people beneath the surface helping us manufacturing this dream of ours. Xort is one of them, and we definitely wish to keep him involved in this project in the future.

You're coming from France, which has not such established metal scene, what can you tell me about it and the current upfront bands?

Ah that’s a very long story… But to make it short, it's hard surviving here as a metal / Goth / electro band. If you want to have success here either you should be from the US, or you should learn to play the kind of music that doesn’t need any kind of neurons to be appreciated. Brains need no apply [Laughs]… But you know, without wanting to be all patriotic, there are so many original bands that would deserve a bit more light!

Anorexia Nervosa was the best example of that kind of bands. If you have a moment you could throw an ear on very good bands like Rosa Crux, Punish Yourself, Zuul FX, or The CNK. Nihil was also an amazing band, and Treponem Pal a legend for industrial metal!! But if I can spread a personal word here, there's an awesome band here I 100% stand for, and although their official nationality is Swiss, two of their members are French, and living in France, so I consider them as part of our scene. They are called Sybreed and their second album "Antares" has been released under Listenable Records. Listen to them, it's an order!

How is your concert experience so far? Did you had chance to perform with well known acts?

We just recently started to tour, and for a band without a label and a name yet, we are very thankful we could share our first European tour with the German Samsas Traum. I don’t know how much they are known in Israel, but in Germany? Big deal! And their music is really killer. We also played along Tiamat, Battlelore, Autumn, or Zuul FX. That’s it for now! But we do have great expectations for the future, David Bowie and Madonna want us bad I heard… [Laughs]…

What the future holds for The Veil members? I understand you're in search of a label, but do you plan to keep working on new songs while on the lookout?

Of course, we didn’t wait for a label to start creating and we won't wait for them to keep on creating. Its like a drug, we can't help it. We are at the moment gathering press reviews to try to get some labels interested in us. So far we personally produced everything we did – tours, CD's, merchandising etc', and as we‘re neither heirs nor bankers, it's becoming impossible to keep this pace up without external support. So yeah, label, distributor, editor, booker, the whole package – come, we’re waiting for you… and we have biscuits.

Last but not least, please tell our Israeli readers why they should listen to you and try to get hold of your new EP. It's your moment to shine!

You should listen to us because your mom won't like it!