VASTUM

When the history of the Second Great Wave of Death Metal is written, I hope it will acknowledge San Francisco’s VASTUM as being ahead of the curve.  They first made their mark with debut record “Carnal Law”, a compact but pummeling example of American brutality, in 2011...well before the current flood of death metal. I feel their willingness to plunge full-bore into the genre may have ignited the spark the grew into today’s roaring flame.

Their fifth record “Inward To Gethsemane” emerged in the latter half of 2023 after a significant gap. It holds true to what has gone before and is unapologetically VASTUM. That includes the band’s unusual lyrical slant, which focuses on human sexuality in a unique and somewhat disturbing way. I reckoned it was time I spoke to the band and I was fortunate enough to get ahold of Leila Abdul-Rauf, an extremely talented woman with her hand in a variety of musical styles. She really is one of the leading ladies not only of American metal, but American music, period.

On with the interview!

WORMWOOD CHRONICLES: Greetings, Leila, thanks for talking with us. The new VASTUM album is out after 5 years. Has the material on it been worked on during this layoff or is the music relatively recently written?

LEILA ABDUL-RAUF: It’s been 4 years since our fourth album “Orificial Purge” was released. Most of the songs were written in 2020 and 2021. I started writing “Corpus Fractum” in 2020 and wrangled with it up until the last minute, and we did change some of the song structures slightly just weeks before we went into the studio. 

WC: A lot of things have happened, both in the musical world and the greater world at large, since the previous album. Do these events have an effect on music or is it pretty much in its own bubble, isolated from such things?

LA-R: I don’t think it’s ever possible to write in a perfect bubble, as much as people think they can. We’re all products of our environments at least to some extent. There are always unconscious forces at play even if people aren’t conscious of what’s going on in the world. So yeah, devastating world events have made an impact on the music we make, whether directly or indirectly.

WC:. Are new lyrical themes at play on the new album? Based on the title and cover art, the Christian religion seems to be a strong focus. What’s the meaning behind the album title?

LA-R: Dan (Butler, vocalist) came up with the title and concept for it. Many have guessed that it’s a word play on INCANTATION’s “Onward to Golgotha”, which is correct. But the biblical reference of Gethsemane – the Agony Garden where Jesus was betrayed and tortured prior to his crucifixion – ties directly into the song lyrics which deal with abuse, despair, addiction, violence, salvation, suicide, homicide, etc., rampant in the urban areas in which we live; all modern-day “Gethsemanes” if you will.

WC: The band was known for a unique kind of psychosexual outlook on things before. Is that still a strong component or has it receded a bit from forefront?

LA-R: Since the beginning, our lyrical concepts have focused more on eroticism than sexuality which is more complex, deep and messy, as well as body horror and psychic violence. I think the way we’ve been portrayed in the media as being sex-obsessed is reductive and over sensationalized. Perhaps this latest album is a conscious move to stray further from that stereotype, while also being our most lyrically unsettling album to date. 

WC: The new album is quite compact. It doesn’t overstay its welcome or meander. Were you pretty ruthless in editing the album and paring away songs and ideas?

LA-R: Thank you. We’ve never been a band that edits our material that heavily, and we didn’t with this album either, with the exception or replacing a few riffs here and there and adding new transitions between them. and generally use everything we write. In fact, we made “Corpus Fractum” longer to make room for the samples in the intro. What doesn’t fit on an album will usually be used for a single, like “Gagging on a Gash” for the split with SPECTRAL VOICE and “Befouled in Self-Salvation” for the flexi single released by Decibel magazine.

WC: Are there any influences on VASTUM that aren’t immediately apparent? In other words, coming from outside the death metal sphere?

LA-R: Oh, so many. Lyrically for this album Dan drew from philosophers like George Bataille and Lev Shestov, anti-theologian Thomas Altizer and bands like DYSTOPIA. Musically I always draw from a wide array of artists from many genres, artists like DIAMANDA GALAS and Lori Bravo (especially lyrically), Igor Stravinsky and JUDAS PRIEST for riffs, to name a few mostly non-death metal influences.

WC:  You are really involved in a multitude of different projects, only some of which are metal. How do you approach working on such diverse stuff? Do you work on it all at the same time or is it more “compartmentalized”?

LA-R: I think I’m the only one in the band who has other projects that aren’t metal in any way. I focus on different projects at different times. Working on my solo project is the easiest and most flexible because I record all my albums at home. In addition to using different instruments (trumpet vs. guitar, for example), compositional processes for my solo work, VASTUM and my dark electronic trio IONOPHORE are so vastly different from each other that they are naturally compartmentalized. My sole purpose in having multiple projects is to make music across different genres; I don’t think I could ever do two death metal bands, for instance. That said, I’ve been hearing from reviewers lately that they hear more of my solo work infused into the latest VASTUM album which I agree is true. So even though  both projects are on the opposite ends of the loudness spectrum, there is a similar dark thread that’s woven through both.

WC: You and Daniel share vocals in the band. How do you determine who does what?

LA-R: Because Dan and I split the lyric writing evenly on each album, we’re both very involved in determining who sings which lines in every song. Sometimes this is figured out last minute while we’re tracking vocals in the studio, and or it’s an intuition we have when we’re fitting the lyrics to a particular song, like we imagine some words phonetically may sound better sung by one of us versus the other, or one of our voices fit a particular riff better. And other times it’s simply trial and error. It’s often the hardest part of finishing a song, but for me, it’s usually the most exciting and satisfying part of the writing process because it’s at this stage where the songs start to really come alive. 

WC: The song “Corpus Fractum” is some a bit more different and epic for VASTUM. How did this one come about and is this a direction you might go in the future?

LA-R: I’m glad you think so. This is the song that took me the longest to write out of any VASTUM song period and it’s the one I’m most proud of compositionally. I started writing it 3 years ago and for the longest time only had the intro and first two riffs together. It took me almost 3 years to figure out its full structure, and the song probably went through several different iterations until arriving at the final result.  I absolutely want to take our sound further in this direction in the future, and make it even more extreme with more space, more melody, more experimentation. 

WC: In the last two years, death metal has really exploded in popularity again. Has this resulted in more opportunities for the band?

LA-R: Things to me felt like they exploded in death metal even earlier, like 5-10 years ago, especially since our third album “Hole Below”. I do think it resulted in more opportunities for us since then. 

WC: Speaking of which, do you have any live plans for the upcoming year?

LA-R: We’re in the process of figuring this out. We’ve been invited to play a couple of festivals next year which will hopefully transpire with some additional shows. 

WC:  Outside of VASTUM, do you have any more projects of albums on the way? Any solo stuff, perhaps?

LA-R: I’ve been sporadically laying some ideas down for my fifth solo album, but mostly focused on touring and performing live solo this year. Other than that, I’ve been doing a lot of collabs lately, mostly guest vocals and trumpet solos for various experimental projects like S.C.R.A.M., XXU_UXX, FRSKE, IINFINEXHUMA. I plan to hunker down over the next few months to focus on recording the solo album.

WC: Is there one gig you’ve played that sticks out in your mind as most memorable?

LA-R: For me, it was Heavy Montreal Fest in 2016, when we replaced INQUISITION on the bill at the very last minute, because we fortunately happened to be in town while it was going on. It was the first time I’ve ever played in front of thousands of people. 

WC: If you could have dinner with any 3 people from history, who would they be?

LA-R: Grace Jones, Frank Herbert, Hildegard von Bingen.

WC: This could apply to any of your projects, not just VASTUM. Have you ever had a “Spinal Tap” moment where things went haywire that you could share with us?

LA-R: I can’t think of moments like these from VASTUM shows, other than the occasional amp blowing out, some tuning issues and one European show where I got laryngitis and Dan had to sing all my vocal parts, which was more amusing to me and the crowd probably didn’t know any differently. I guess we’ve been fortunate in that regard. But I do remember a HAMMERS OF MISFORTUNE show, I think it was in Chicago, over a decade ago. We would usually open with “Trot Out The Dead” and there is a middle section  where it’s just piano and me singing the vocal line alone. Sigrid’s electric piano cut out right before my vocals began and I ended up singing the whole section a cappella, which was nerve-wracking but funny, and good vocal practice I suppose!

WC: Any last words or messages?

LA-R: Thanks for the interview, and we’re looking forward to getting back on stage in 2024!

VASTUM