1. Hey man, this is Edu from Perú. I am starting all my interviews with the same question. Given the current COVID-19 outbreak, how are you confronting the home confinement these days?
Spermain : Hello Edu, nice to meet you. Well,... I believe we are confronting the coronavirus as most of the bands. We keep being disappointed by all those gigs cancelations (even if it's necessary) and to see that most of our 2020 planning have been postponed. During those empty times, we have dedicated ourself to write our 3rd album. It's a really hard and long process... We want this next release to be better than the our current one.
2. The band is existing since 2012. Thinking back at your career with Brutal Sphincter, do any memories or experiences stick out as particularly memorable, something you remember clearly to this day?
Spermain : Actually we don't excatly know where we have created the band. So we have decided to take the 1st april 2013 as the birth date... That day, we have created our facebook page. No, it's not a joke even if we are one, haha.
Does a stupid experiment count? During our last tour in UK (feb 2020), we had a day off with our friends from Razorrape, Anal Floss Is Boss and Basement Torture Killing and we have decided to go to the bowling. On one of the terminals it was possible to order drinks but also to take selfie and to put it on the point screen right above the bowling alley. To make the game funnier, we took a selfie of my balls and displayed it on that screen. It was incredibly funny for all of us, especially with strange people around who weren’t noticing anything.
Brutal Sphincter is made out of unforgettable moments of this kind. Besides, we have already played incredible gigs like Obscene Extreme Festival, DeathFeast and many more. Next big ones on our list is Hellfest Open Air and Netherlands Deathfest!
GG Stalin: There is a story popping up my head from a festival in France back in 2015. People there were some kind of mad, but in a good way. We were at an after party and minutes before at the venue some folks only pulled out only their balls and walked around like it was normal. Long story short: at the after party we managed to convince a ton of drunk Dudes to only get out their balls and walk around like this, which resulted in a ball torture act. People punched and even squeezed out cigarettes on each others balls.
3. Your sound is melting a modern approach of goregrind with a good blend of old school goregrind. What are some of the common influences between the band members that led you to your sound?
Spermain : Well, I'm the main writter until now but I'd say that bands like Jig-Aï, Ahumado Granujo, Rectal Smegma, SPASM and Last Days Of Humanity really helped us to define our own sound.
But Brutal Sphincter goes further and has it’s own identity (I believe). By exemple, our riffs and our structures are more complex than most of the gore/grind scene has to propose. Death metal has a huge influence on our sound.
4. “Analhu Akbar” is your most recent album and for the first time, you are bringing political, society / cultural / traditionnal facts into GoreGrind. Have you had any negative encounters with political extremists who disapproved of what you do?
Spermain : Of course, we had some people who have been extremely triggered by songs like Anders Breivik Utoya Party, AnalHu Akbar or Autistic Meltdown but nothing bad happened to us... Just insults or social medial censorship. What triggered most of the people are our jokes about Islam. But well, it's a religion like another one... Why not trolling it? Besides that we love the fact that plenty extremist groups tries to put us under a label, we’ve been called nazis and leftist snowflakes at the same time, which shows us that we hit the right topic.
The good thing about haters is that they are promoting your band without wanting to do it. For exemple, a good bunch of people are hating on us because we dare to bring (satyrical) political elements to porno goregrind Which shouldn't be part of the subgenre...(in their opinion) But it's good for us because the most butthurted will speak about it and around them... And some of their contacts will start to like our music.
Still, I have to say that most of the reacts we got have been overwhelming. I think the album/title explanations really helped us out to be correctly understood.
GG Stalin: Well, almost all the “negative” reactions we got are mostly in the Youtube comment section, everyone can see. What’s more interesting is that some people actually seem to discuss and think about the subjects we showed them on purpose in an offending way. There is no black and white, no strict left nor strict right, it’s all about the komplex structure in between. If you reach that point you are able to have a proper discussion.
5. It is in fact a notorious satirical approach. It sounds like you guys had a lot of fun making this album – what was the writing process like for this one?
Spermain : Well, as I'm not the lyric writter, I will let GG stalin intervene below. What I can say, is that before chosing a song title we were generally talking about it within the band. The title has to be provocative, funny but also clever at the same time. We are standing on the edge but if we went stupidly far we could fall and our band would be boycotted.
GG Stalin: The writing process was quite individal. Major Diarrhea and me wrote most of the songs by our own but we gave each other a lot of feedback to improve the sense of the lyrics. Sometimes it was frustrating to bring such complex topics in such few lines but in the end we think that we got the main message in the lyrics.
Off course as Germain already mentioned we laughed a lot about the song titles. We had really silly ideas like “Vladimir put-in” for example but we tried to pick out the best ones for the album. I also remember that Major Diarrhea came up with the idea of “Analhu Akbar” but more like a joke, so at the beginning he was quite nervous about the fact that we were using it for real.
6. Another of my fave areas is art work. What can you tell us about your illustrations and who was the artist responsable for this.
Spermain : We asked Dahmer Art to create the artwork for us. He made many great desgins in the death metal scene in the past. To be honest, he made our idea even better than it was in my mind.
We asked him to put 4 of the most wellknown terrorist face (Bin laden, Al Bagdadi, Boko Haram ex leader, etc) on Mount Rushmore. To us it was important to add an afraid muslim couple, hidding and trying to run away on the jacket. A hidden message is in those 2 characters... They are representing the fact that the first victims of islamism is the muslim community. They suffer much more than any others under the atrocities of the terrorists.
GG Stalin: The booklet has been designed and created by Luisma from Haemorrhage. I really like the result, we wanted to keep some of the roots of grind which is the art of collage. You know them from the early Napalm Death and Terrorizer albums. He nailed it because he put a lot of effort in it. Every song got their main elements integrated at their page in the booklet.
7. How important is live performance for Brutal Sphincter? Have you ever had any weird incidents while traveling for concerts that you would like to share?
Spermain : Live perfomances are the core of our existence. Without gigs, there would be no Brutal Sphincter. This is where we show who we are as a band, where we are in contact with our friends and fans, where we are making contacts and where we are sthrengthening our friendship in between us.
A weird accident... Does it count to stop at a gas station next to the highway, going out of the car and seeing a falcon crushed in between the roof and the roof racks of another car? Then talking to the people and advicing them to throw it to the station's bin?
GG Stalin: Live performances are fucking everything. Without them all the music would make no sense. There you can feel the real magic!
One thing I never forget is the first time we went to Romania. We travelled by plane. The whole weekend over there was an insane party, so we were really fucked when we headed back home. The flight back was at 5am so we decided to party the night and sleep in the plane later. When we went to the airport shit hit the fan. Within minutes there was a strong blizzard which delayed the flight, so we got more and more tired. Finally after hours we were able to enter the airplane and everyone of us was hungover as fuck. Because of the blizzard, they had to heat up the plane a lot, so it felt like a sauna inside and the plane had to wait at the airport for another eternity. Not to forget, we took cheap plane tickets so the seats were really small. Anyway we tried to sleep but then there was a baby going insane on the flight crying and making some strange curr noises. I will never forget the quote of Spermain “If that fucking baby doesn’t shut up, I’m going to throw it inside the turbine”
8. Being from the Liège area, can you talk about some local bands you think we should check out?
Spermain : Outch... I'd say Pestifer, Angakok and Putrified J.
10. Some people know that you are organizing Festival Brutality Over Belgium, how it was the past year and tell us something more about it´s idea and organization.
Spermain : I'm the only one involved in Brutality Over Belgium. It's a really, really small fest (around 120 people) which is happening in different regions in Belgium. We are hosting the fest itself with around 8 bands (grind/gore/slam/BDM) in Liège but we are also booking tour package aside... Mostly in Charleroi. Those gigs are kind of working... Not the biggest audience but our purpose is to built a scene in Belgium and to make those style more popular... We booked many bands for the first time who never played Belgium before!
GG Stalin: Just a quick sidenote - when I joined the band in 2015 the gigs in Belgium and especially in Liège had almost no visitors, like 15-20 max. But since Spermain and the rest of the BoB crew hosted shows around Belgium the Gore/Deathmetal scene grew at an insane speed. Now the BoB in Liège is a fest with 120 visitors and almost sold out every time. I still admire Spermain a lot for the hard an passionate work he did in the last few years!
11. It might be too early, seeing as you’re working on it right now, but what can we expect from the forthcoming album?
Spermain : Some new drum variations (our current drummer didn't write our current album), a wider vocal range, new riff ideas (our new guitarist is writing too), new kind of structures and - of course - GROOVE & BRUTALITY. The songs are a bit longer too. One thing is sure, we will work our asses of to make a worthy successor to Analhu Akbar. It doesn't matter if it takes time. Quality before quantity!
GG Stalin: We’re still figuring out what we exactly want as topic for the album. But one thing is for sure, we will head for the weak points of mankind. Things, we don’t wanna talk about, taboos and subjects that hurt thinking about will have a main element.
12. Hey guys, thanks for agreeing to do an interview with me! Our readers are waiting for your last comments.
Spermain : Thanks for reading and paying attention to us. Please, follow us on social medias, stream us on spotify and if you like what we are doing... Make your friends discover our music. One day, we hope that it will be possible to play south america.
GG Stalin: Thanks for the big support we get everyday from every single one of you! Covid 19 hit the whole underground scene really hard. If you want, try to support bands and promoters in need, cheer them up with stupid memes or buy some merch if you’re not broke as well.
I would even go further and say, we don’t stop until we played at every continent on this sordid planet.
Stay strong and let’s hope we all meet soon in front of a stage!
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