CHAPEL OF DISEASE

Who are you and what do you do in your band?

Hello, Laurent here, guitar and vocals for Chapel Of Disease are my part.

When was your band formed? 

We formed in early 2008, should’ve been around february or so. First it was just me, Ced and David as a three piece. About half a year later, Christian joined as our bass player so Ced could take over the second guitar.

Why did you choose to play Death Metal?

Hard to tell. We listened to all sorts of ancient sounding metal back then. Since we were already involved in a black/thrash project, we then had the idea to go into the death metal direction. But there is nothing much more to it to be honest. Sometimes I feel like people think death metal is our main music, but it’s just one of many and back then, when we formed, it wasn’t that important what sort of style it is, it just had to sound raw, like our heroes back then. Now, it’s about a bunch of other ambitions again…

How do you compose your music? Does only one guy do everything or does everyone contribute?

Usually it will start with a riff that me or Ced come up with and then takes off from there. Sometimes me and Ced sit together to work a structure out and we then take the song to the rehearsal room so we can all work on it together. From there everything can completely change, sometimes we drop the whole song in general again and start to work on something else. Me and David like to meet as a two piece as well, as soon as the general structure of a song is set, to work on details you could say.  

Tell us about your lyrics, writing, inspiration etc.

Ced writes most of the lyrics by now. We mainly focus on old horror or phantastic literature. So each song has a literary source it is based upon. While the first album still had a few lovecraftian lyrics on it, Ced chose to leave those alone for the second album and took his inspiration from authors like Meyrink, Lord Dunsany or Poe, just to name a few. It is always important for us to try to capture the atmosphere of the lyrics through the music. I do think that we have gotten better at this aspect with the second album. Lyrics and music do have to harmonize together and make sense as a whole.

Is there an ideology behind your band?

Just to make good sounding music, which I think should be every bands number one ideology.

How do you see the state of Death Metal music these days in your country and in general?

It surely is oversaturated by now, which is normal I guess. That may lead to a lot of bands that I personally find to always sound the same, or even boring, which of course is a quite subjective thing to say. Yet there are bands that really peak out and have managed to create an own sound for themselves, which I think is always the most important thing. In Germany we have a lot of those swedish clone bands, which I can’t relate to in any sort of sense. To be honest, I can’t relate to the thought at all anymore, to just sound exactly like a certain era. This may have been interesting for us as well, while being younger. But I do think that at some point you should have to start making up your own mind and trying to define your own sound as a band. Of course it is nearly impossible to really create something new, yet it still is manageable to create something own.

What are your long term plans as a band? What do you want to achieve?

We barely talk about stuff like that to be honest. We like to take it step by step and see where things take us. Our main goal has always been to keep getting better at what we do. So it is pretty much about proofing something to ourselves this whole time. We want to keep evolving on a musical level, in whatever sense that may be, it just has to stay interesting for ourselves. If we then end up on live billings that we as fans would very much enjoy, then we’re pretty much satisfied.

Name an other Death Metal band from your country that everyone should hear.

There are a few, but I’m gonna pick the one that recorded one of the best death metal albums after the turn of the millenium but before this giant wave of „old school“ death metal came up again: Excoriate  

Free word.

Up the irons!