WEAPONS OF TOMORROW – JOHN KEVILL
Art: Andreas Marschall
I’m a rationalist type, so I thought and planned. Just getting the idea or the riffs into my head and chewing on it for a while, messing with a bunch of different versions, and seeing what sticks. I only write a little down- the idea is, if I can’t remember it, it probably needs work.
I’m a secular humanitarian; if you ever saw the old Carl Sagan stuff where he discusses his worldview, it’s akin to that. You can hear some of this on the songs ‘Divinity of Flesh’ and ‘Defiance of Fate’.
I don’t see it that way; it’s a unique genre that expresses some of the difficult aspects of living in modern civilisation and being mortal, doomed to die. It can be a great way of giving voice to certain feelings and fortifying one with a sense of strength and power- the proverbial ‘Fist to the sky’. For me, it started slowly and accumulated just by listening to music and finding the next thing. There wasn’t one particular event so much as there were records I heard and listened to way too many times, which are part of my life and consciousness now.
No fetishes in particular, just listening to and thinking about music. Every time I meet with my bandmates, it sparks ideas, and sometimes I cook up a song idea around a certain phrase over time. Nothing ‘obsessive’, just something I do in the background sometimes. When we are writing, I’ll end up pacing back and forth to think of something suitable that I like.
Well, those are different reasons. It fills many aspects of my life with colour that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Everything from relaxing sounds waking up in the morning to banging my head to sweet riffs. The shared experience of enjoying music, especially in a live concert setting, can bring people together, and yeah, I’d call it spiritual (if it was really good). The idea that it’s just mere entertainment is silly; music is even entertaining in the first place because of its spiritual power and ability to make people all feel something together.
I love what you might call ‘Wizard Metal’, stuff like Manilla Road, Pagan Altar, Ashbury, etc. Some of this isn’t especially heavy, but it evokes something that powerfully makes me think about time and legacy. My music taste could be more surprising, though I like the classic metal and thrash stuff that you’d expect, and rightly so.
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