Vinyl XXX Edge

Let’s start with the good old thing - you presenting your band, its history and other members?
I’m Roel, I play guitar in Eye of judgement. We are a full vegan straight egde band. We started out in 2004 and released our demo in January 2005, that was re-released in New Eden Records. We released The New Crusade in 2006, also on NER and did a US west coast tour in the fall of 2006 The New Crusade consists of 7 new songs and the demo. In 2007 we started recording Belligerent, but it wasn’t finished until August 2008. Belligerent will be released on Catalyst in early 2009. We have toured in Europe a couple of times and we are planning a full US tour in 2009.

What is the reason for you to be a part of the hardcore scene?
Well, hardcore is the music that was most appealing to all of us when we were growing up, and hardcore is also the music that channels emotions best it’s not like we chose it from a range of musical styles, rather sxe and veganism are more or less embedded.

Were you influenced by some specific bands?
When we started we wanted to do some agressive hardcore style like Slapshot or Integrity, but later the focus came on the metal part of Integrity and 90’s metalcore like All Out War. Basically it’s all about the atmosphere we want to create. If hc suits us we play hc, but if doom metal is more appropriate we play that. This is how come you see a shift from hardcore to metal through our releases.

You are a vegan straight edge band from a country with legal marijuana use, tell us more about the sxe culture and scene in your country?
Well… there is not really a sxe scene anymore, the thing is… Foreigners always seem to believe that everyone in Holland is on pot but in fact the amount of softdrugs users in the Netherlands is way lower than in other countries In fact we are all in favor of legalisation of drugs. Even of hard drugs, if drugs are legal, the black market would be destroyed.

And what about the hardcore scene in general, in Bulgaria it is quite stronger despite there’s not a single straight edge band.
Hardcore is very big here there are tons of bands that tour around Europe and a lot of kids are into hardcore. It’s also due to the fact that Holland is really small. You can go to a show within a 2h drive every day of the week. There’s even an overkill in shows, it often happens that kids just dont show up at shows, because they dont know the bands.

This is probably a problem everywhere. Once it was a problem there weren’t enough shows, all were complaining about this, now when there are enough shows everyone’s complaining why there are so much hahaha
I guess its a bigger city problem

Another thing we’d like to ask you is if you or your band mates are involved in any side projects?
Actually we always have a lot of projects going on. The main one is probably Civil Terror where me and our singer are in. It’s political hardcore punk. Our bassplayer is in a deathgrind band called Grindpad. Our drummer and singer do a project called Karel Anker en de Joden and then there’s some untitled projects that some of us are working on. None of these are fully sxe though

Quite a lot of playing going, that’s nice! Is actually music the only thing you are doing or you have … ordinary jobs as people would say?
Yeah we have normal jobs. In fact I’m starting a new one next month, and then it will be a lot harder to keep all this stuff rolling. We’ll see how it goes.

In this sense, do you think it is right for hardcore musicians to live from music. Because many bands are against this form of commercialisation, in our view is absolutely ridiculous musicians to live rough, hardly breaking even just to say they are keeping the DIY spirit alive?
Well, if you can live off of what you love doing there’s nothing wrong with that. I think hardcore should be music from the heart. but i dont really care how other people feel about that. If bands want to make a living off of music, sure go ahead. If you music sucks I just won’t listen to it.

Okay so let’s put aside hardcore for a while… What are the things that concern you, are you involved in some other form of activism besides Eye Of Judgement and your other projects?
As you know I can’t talk about that in detail, but right now none of us are really active. We all have personal matters to attend to at this moment. Some of us occasionally go to demos and stuff, but we are not really involved in their organisation. The only thing we have going is that our other guitarist is trying to set up a webshop for vegan food in the southern part of Holland.

I suppose there’s no need to go into details anyway, I mean everything you want and have to say is in the lyrics, right?
Absolutely.

Okay few things are left to ask you. Tell us what do you like besides hardcore?
Me personally, I like metal, doom, hardrock, industrial, 70’s progrock and 80’s stuff. The rest of us are also pretty openminded in different musiacal styles.

And are some of you vinyl collectors?
Yeah definitely. Our singer has a big collection and the other guitarist even bigger. I personally collect on vinyl only stuff I really like. The rest i have on mp3. I have a lot of metal on vinyl. I am not realliy into collecting first presses and stuff, the othger guys are though. I love the vinyls artwork too.

I was just going to ask you about the artworks of your releases and merch. Who creates those amazing works?
The 7″ was done by Dwid Hellion, the singer of Integrity and so was the eye logo of our new shirts. The artwork of our album was done by an artist calles Samual Araya from Venezuela. He is amazing and always cuts us a good deal.

Okay, so I guess, we said everything. To summarize, an US tour coming next year, a new album on Catalyst Records, maybe even a vinyl edition.
That kind of covers it.

So maybe some last words from you?
Check out the new album. I think it’s already on some file sharing applications.

So mate, thanks for the interview, we really hope to review another Eye Of Judgement vinyl release soon, and what is more we hope we’ll see you in Europe, especially in Bulgaria again soon!

*Photos from Myspace
Myspace Page: Eye Of Judgement

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.