(Last week we forced Andy Synn to listen to and review The Monolith Deathcult‘s new album, and this week we forced Comrade Aleks to interview TMDC‘s Robin Kok, and although we can’t affirm that Aleks got away unscathed, he did provide us the interview… below….)
The Dutch band The Monolith Deathcult began its underground career more than twenty years ago with quite brutal and moderately unbridled death metal, which over time was symphonized, electrified, industrialized, and decorated with various, often unexpected, samples. It sounds scary, but, for example, one of The Monolith’s past hits “Fist of Stalin” gained an exorbitant number of plays on streaming services, and on YouTube the views of this video amount to almost a hundred thousand, which is not bad.
As the years go by, The Monolith has changed within the framework of the formula discovered by its members, but the composition of the group has remained unchanged for many years: Michiel Dekker (guitar, vocals), Carsten Altena (keyboards, orchestrations, guitar, vocals) and Robin Kok (growls, bass). If we take into account the band’s tendencies towards electronic sound, then we can assume that their drums are programmed, but for several years now the invariably professional guest drummer Frank Schilperoort has been working in this position. He also worked with The Monolith Deathcult on the new album, released in April by Human Detonator Records, The Demon Who Makes Trophies of Men, which we spoke with Robin Kok personally about.
Hail The Monolith Deathcult! How are you doing? How does preparation for The Demon Who Makes Trophies of Men release go?
Hail, kill and all that! We’re doing just fine, everything’s in place for the new album. CDs have been pressed, promotions are being promoted, and algorithms are being… Algorithmed? We’re looking forward to playing some new tracks live, which of course necessitated having to learn our own songs from scratch.
Robin, your eighth album V3 – Vernedering: Connect the Goddamn Dots was released in 2021, so it seems that you easily keep this good creative pace. How do you manage to keep it, as all of you are involved in other bands?
Well, it’s 2024 now so three years isn’t that impressive? In ye olden days you were ideally supposed to put out a new album every year. And looking back at our vast and mediocre back catalogue, I’d say three years is on par for a new album anyway. The only difference is that our approach changed slightly: rather that being silent for three years and then dropping a new album, we now release several singles ahead of the album as we write, record and mix them; and then release the full album. And it’s really only Frank and myself who are involved in other bands, but Carsten has an extensive freelance musical career as well.
Oh, I see… Carsten’s post-black piece Remember That You Will Die is a kind of international project, and the one and only album was released in 2016. But what about your D.R.E.P. and Witchcult 71? Are they active?
Right now they’re not active. We released D.R.E.P.’s long awaited album last year and might start working on new material, but nothing is happening at the moment. And we’re definitely not playing live shows. Witchcult 71 was a one-off guest project.
Frank Schilperoort is listed as your session drummer since 2017 when V1 – Versus: It Will Burn Us Without Leaving Ash was released, and he plays live with the band too. Why don’t you take him into the band after all these years on full terms? Because of his schedule?
To be frank – well, I can’t be Frank, Frank already has the role of being Frank in the band – but I’ll speak frankly: Frank doesn’t want to be and that’s fine by all of us. I don’t really think it matters whether he’s “officially” a band member or not, he’s a hard-working professional guy who records and does shows with us and he does stuff with other bands as well. And he’s a bloody great drummer as well.
Yep, I see your point, but doesn’t it work like… like inner chemistry of the band or so people say? Everyone is involved in the creative process; everyone is happy; and blah-blah-blah.
I don’t really see how you would need “official” band members to do that. It’s like saying that you can’t have fun with friends without a formal friendship declaration signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
The new album is something. But foremost, for those who didn’t listen to The Monolith Deathcult before, how did you manage to integrate the very idea of using such authentic samples with brutal death metal? How swift was the band’s transformation from the point where you were back in 2003 with The Apotheosis to the shape you bear nowadays? Was it fast (and brutal) or kind of a smooth change?
Well, I’m sure we got it from somewhere as an inspiration, but it’s a sound that evolved throughout the years. We kind of say that Trivmvirate (2008) is the blueprint for the “modern” sound of The Monolith Deathcult but The White Crematorium (2005) would be the proto-Trivmvirate then; it’s just that in 2005 we didn’t quite get the formula right. If you listen to the Bloodcvlts EP (2015) it’s all old tracks that have been “updated” to the more modern sound we intended but couldn’t quite make work at the time.
It was quite a smooth transition but we learned a lot about songwriting, especially after starting work with Guido Aalbers, who very patiently and professionally explained to us that 128 tracks of guitars, explosions, lutes, and Tibetan nose flutes couldn’t ALL be at maximum volume all the time. These days we’re better at the “less is more” approach where we can actually get something across in the music, rather than just stacking endless layers and sonic booms. But more than 15 years later this is still a recurring discussion during mixing sessions…
Does The Monolith Deathcult’s uniqueness benefit the band or rather make it harder to find followers?
I would like to think it benefits us but to be fair I have no idea what it would be like if we made middle-of-the-road average metal. I think it makes us harder to market for a live audience because judging by a lot of festival posters there is a preference for easily digested bland metal that’s “fun to see on a stage” but musically uninteresting. But that’s probably personal bias speaking – I don’t really care about 99.99% of stuff that comes out these days.
How did you know your measure of samples? It’s easy to spoil the song when you overload it with authentic ideas or even movies samples? Is there someone in the band who really watches over that?
It’s usually Michiel who comes up with the framework and Carsten and I then give our suggestions or additional ideas. Maybe after all those years we’ve learned where the tipping point is between “that’s a cool sample, it really adds to the vibe” and “let’s do a 5-minute loop of rhinos with tambourines fucking to the beat of David Hasselhoff saying OK KITT”.
For example, you use samples from Mortal Kombat in “Gogmagog – The Bryansk Forest Revisited” track. How do these Shao Khan catchwords benefit the concept?
That’s definitely a case of being kids of the ’80s and the idea of “That’s a cool sample, it really adds to the vibe”. There’s no very deep thematic link between the content of the song – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and an ’80s fighting game, but the samples give just that little bit of “OK OK here it comes let’s GOOO” kick when the song needs it. If it works, it works.
Why did you choose to approach this ugly and actual topic this way? It’s a serious thing, and I don’t know… Shao Khan is a rather funny and grotesque figure.
It wasn’t really a very deep and conscious existential struggle to marry the themes of the Ukrainian invasion with Mortal Kombat. Unless you want some easy after-the-fact rationalizations like “oh Mortal Kombat is from the ’80s when Russians were the bad guys too and referring to round 2 would be like rekindling the old animosity!”. Sometimes something that sounds cool just sounds cool and we want to cram it together in one song even if it makes absolutely no sense. Nothing wrong with a little nonsense and absurdity in your music!
How many references to pop-cultural things like this do you have in the new songs? I saw your live photos in Decepticon’s t-shirt, and that brings some sentimental feeling.
That’s us being kids of the ’80s (again) and shamelessly cashing in on the ’80s hype that sprang up after Stranger Things hit the big time. But many of those (now timeless) cultural icons are works of visual genius, so immediately recognizable and they definitely speak to sentimental feelings like you say. It really speaks to our core demographic; which is mildly overweight 40-somethings with an unacceptable sense of humour and a geeky background.
Can you reveal some other Easter eggs of this kind in the album? Do you have Earth-worm Jim’s or Contra’s quotes?
If I revealed them they wouldn’t be Easter eggs now would they? But I can say that there is at least one Wilhelm Scream on the album, as had been the tradition for several releases.
Is “The Nightmare Corpse-City of R’lyeh” your first approach to Lovecraftian myths? What drew your attention to this story? How did you think to emphasize its mood, its delivery?
Yes and no. We have songs inspired by “Alien”, “Predator”, “The Thing”, which are all Lovecraft-inspired stories, so it was only a matter of time. Lovecraft is however a cliché in the metal scene, mainly Cthulu as the focus. But the city itself, R’lyeh, rarely is. So naturally we wanted to do something different. The album cover is, by the way, a depiction of the haunted city of R’lyeh.
But the elephant in the room is that we’ve been avoiding Lovecraftian references for a long time. Not because it’s not a great theme – on the contrary, it’s like it’s MADE for metal music – and that’s also the problem. Much like Tolkien’s work, you can open any Lovecraft book on any random page, walk to your CD collection, and point at the CDs that use the concepts and names on that random page. So we tended to steer away because it’s been done so often before.
One original version of “The Nightmare Corpse-City of R’lyeh” originally had the spoken phrase “That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may die”, which immediately called up Metallica’s “The Thing That Should Not Be” in my head so we scrapped it. So long story short; whatever you use, someone’s probably done it before.
Do you mean that you wanted to use some Lovecraftian influences before but forced yourself not to do this?
We’ve thought about it before but could never find the right angle or the right way to do it so it didn’t become a cliché.
How do you usually organize your live shows? Do you have a specific requirement regarding your reinforced electronic department?
Good question. We used a LOT of different setups throughout the years but currently we have a laptop running Reaper with all the electronics, samples, click track for the drummer and live guitar VSTs. We stopped using cabinets and guitars amps on stage and moved to dedicated monitor wedges which really cleaned up the sound on stage. Those setups can get very complicated very quickly so we optimized it to the point where we can just point the FOH engineer to a strip of XLR outputs and that’s all the electronics and guitars sorted. We have an identical duplicate setup in case of emergencies and standardized all the cables and interconnects so that we can easily improvise on the spot if something fails. Other than that it’s no different from any other band.
How many gigs are in your tour-list for the nearby future?
We have 6 this year, including one in Belgium and at least one in Germany. But there’s always room for more if the show is worth it!
Thanks for the interview Robin. That’s all for today. Did we skip something? By the way, how tight is your gig schedule for the rest of 2024?
Thanks to you as well! Bookings are filling up but we can always squeeze in another show or two! Also, don’t forget to buy our merchandise and make us rich! Thanks for the interview!
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