Interview by Vpower
The Band: These Hands Conspire
Country: Germany
The Man: Tom, guitarist
https://thesehandsconspire.bandcamp.com/releases
Hello friends, today I have the pleasure to talk to a young German band, These Hands Conspire (THC , from now) that has just released his first album, a great work of Heavy Doom Metal that I strongly recommend for its high performance and great feeling. I have here Tom, guitarist of the band, to tell us some more details about THC and their first work. Before getting started with the questions, let me tell you guys that these people has been the pure courtesy since the very beginning, nothing of praying on your knees for some words or a bit of your time, and that is always something to be grateful for. Apart of that we are in front of one the surprises of the year and one of the best albums released in 2015, no doubt.
So, Hello Tom, first of all, what is the idea behind the band? How has this monster been created? And how did you choose the curious, but difficult to say, name of the band?
Hallo Alberto and thanks for the interest. This is our first interview with THC, so I am kinda excited. I guess the idea behind the band is to play the music we like. To be honest I never really thought about the reasons why. Playing guitar’s been a big part of my life since I am a kid and I guess I suck even more with other things real adults usually tend to do when they are of my age. I already used to play in an old school death metal band together with Stefan for some years. After our split up we joined different bands for some years until we met again. Stefan told me that he found a good singer and that they wrote some more druggy psychedelic tunes and now looking for a second guitar player. I listened to the demo recordings and thought to myself lets fuck their plans up with my heavy metal 🙂 After one bassist and some drummers later we came together with Sascha and Paul as the band that we are. It is rumoured that we took our name “These Hands Conspire” merely because of its abbreviation. This is not true but we can’t tell you the true meaning. It’s a secret.
Aha…Well I hope in the second interview you will unveil that secret, I’m a patient man. By the way, when you sell thousands of copies, have several recordings in the handbag and guys going crazy to get an interview with THC, please, remember whom you made the first interview for haha. OK, enough with blablabla, this is a very intense and ellaborated disc, what is the proccess you follow to create the songs and eventually record the disc? Who is the mastermind of this project and so on?
Cool that you liked it. All our songs are more or less a collaboration of a lot of ideas from everybody in the band. For sure the guitars deliver the basic structure but everybody contributes some of his ideas to it. This sounds great in theory but also comes with the price of a lot of creative arguing and slow song writing. But I think in the end we have something that everybody in the band likes and nobody ever mourns after all the riffs and unfinished songs that couldn’t pass our personal quality assurance. I am more worried about the maybe cool stuff we can’t remember anymore ‘cause we were too stoned and/or drunk to record it when we were jamming.
Nevertheless there is no real mastermind behind the band and if I’ll ever decide to “reunite” THC in 20 years with another singer and a different guitar player don’t expect it to be great anymore. “Sword of Korhan” has been recorded live in our rehearsal room together with the help of a friend. Since we recorded everything at the same time and we have rather long songs I can tell you it can be a pain in the ass when somebody makes a mistake at minute 5 and we had to start all over again. In the end you never get a perfect result but I think we could manage to catch the vibe of playing live. After we recorded the basic structures of the songs we added the vocals and some overdubs like guitar solos and some syths. That was the fun part because we did it at Felix’s place without any time pressure so we could experiment with sounds and effects and try different things until we liked it.
Cool! The old school method of live recording, wow, you guys are fresh in every sense. Well, you are young a band, but surely you have diven into Metal for a long time, what are your influences and inspiration?
I started to listen to music with bands like Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Black Sabbath and Metallica, pretty standard for a kid from the 80s who didn’t like pop music besides Michael Jackson. Basically you just had to put a monster on the record cover and I would have liked it. Nowadays I am open to a lot of stuff and I prefer good music over a certain genre. We all played in several metal, punk and hardcore bands before.
Hahaha the monsters on the covers, so true… I think THC touches several styles, Heavy, Doom, Epic, sounds of the eighties and seveties even , you have searched for it or you just got it naturally? How would you label your style, your mark?
I don’t think that we fit in a certain genre 100%. We prefer to quote the things we like rather than to just copy another band. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand people prefer things they already know and can relate to but on the other hand it is just boring to hear the same copy of a copy over and over again. For me walking the thin line in between should do the trick. Obviously we like 70s and 80s rock and metal but we never tried to exactly sound like a band from back then. Trends come and go and I personally don’t pretend to be from a time I was not even born.
I like Antarox IV, it is the longest song of the album but I think it has so many faces, even some epic flavour, a complete work. What song you think is better for a live show?
Thank you. I think all the songs we recorded are good enough for us to play them live. We already kicked a couple of songs out of our set and replaced them with the ones we liked better. I prefer a tight set with no fillers and we can play for almost on hour what should be more than enough for any support show. But if we would collect sufficient quality material to play for two hours and people wanna hear it I wouldn’t mind to deliver. But that’s future talk.
Tom, don’t forget to pass me the dismissed songs after the interview and I will start up my own band at once hahaha. What kind of band you are when it comes about evolution? I mean, you are the anchor band type, always releasing the same cd or we can expect an evolution, maybe a revolution, for your next cd (I assume, please, that there will be a next effort hehe)?
I definitely think that there will be a next album. We already wrote some new songs and they still sound like THC. I think we found our own sound and we will see in what direction the space ship will travel in the future. We all want to evolve as musicians but I wouldn’t expect something completely new.
Where can the fan buy your cd?
Right now you can’t buy our record in a physical form yet, but if you want to get the music you can download it on Bandcamp. In some weeks (I can’t tell exactly when) the CD and the vinyl will be published by Ván Records. So if you are interested in buying Sword of Korhan you should check out our facebook page from time to time to stay updated.
I will do, for sure, cause this is one of the albums of the year. What do you think about the situation of the Metal scene right now?
Berlin has a great and vivid metal scene. There are a lot of awesome underground promoters like Wolf City, Lucifers Rising, Headzup, Swamp Conspiracy, Dustown and the Morbid Catacombs crew just to name a few. It’s a lot of people who work their asses off to make it possible for bands like us to play. I really think that right now a lot of people are around because they are dedicated to the music and I think it hasn’t been like that all the time. It’s awesome to see other metal fans sharing this passion and every time you go to a show you meet a lot of likable people you know. If I had to say something about the metal scene in general I must admit that I live in my own spoiled microcosm and I don’t pay too much attention to the outside world.
What are your plans for the future? Some show in Spain?
Our plan for the future is to play as much as possible. We worked hard on our songs and now we are burning to perform them live and spread the word throughout the galaxy. We would love to play in Spain and if you know some promoters let them know that we are ready to rock. Our next upcoming show is the Berlin Swamp Fest in September. It will take place for the second time this year and the line-up is great again featuring bands like Death Alley, Vidunder, Night Slug, Reactory, Speedtrap, Belzebong just to name some of them. I think it is definitely worth a travel and for me it is the prototype of how a diy festival should be.
Spanish promoters I suppose you have ears… Thank you, Tom. Anything you need feel at home, if you wish to add something now it is the moment… Cheers!
Once again, thanks for the interview. It is awesome that people from the other end of Europe are interested in our music although we never had the chance to play there live. We really hope to catch up on this. See you around.
Yes, it’s the magic of Internet, no distance. Hope to see THC in Spain some day and very good luck with your project! Thanks for your attention, Tom.
