Images courtesy of Laura McCullagh and Slam Dank Productions

(We’re very pleased to present our contributor Vizzah Harri‘s interview of Lille Gruber from Defeated Sanity, with apologies to both of them for our delay in publishing it.)

Defeated Sanity are a jazz ensemble hiding in plain sight as a brutal tech-death band. At this writing they’re currently on their Final Impetus tour to bring to audiences far and wide one more experience of their 2020 opus, The Sanguinary Impetus. Their recent show in Cape Town, South Africa was reviewed here.

It’s certainly not easy to make time on a tour for pesky questions from a sometimes-contributor to a music blog, but Lille Gruber, drummer, songwriter, and founder of Defeated Sanity, took precious time out of his busy schedule to entertain my queries.

For those who don’t know or grew up under a rock like me, Lille Gruber started playing and growling from a really young age. Starting the band with his brother Jonas Gruber and their dad, the late Wolfgang Teske (R.I.P. 2010), it was like growing up with a literal Amadeus as a father.

With family names basically soothsaying where they’d end up seeing as the etymologies date back to people who lived in a hollow… or pit (Gruber), and to console/comfort (Teske); well, they’ve been comforting pit-dwellers since 1993 and aren’t we all the richer for it? Continue reading »