Robex Lundgren virkblogg.

What are your names? / Who plays what? / How old are you? Leo (27): I play the guitar and program some of the drums. I usually send first drafts of songs to Yannis (30) and let him add the missing guitars, drums, bass, and vocals.

Where are you from?

Leo: Strasbourg (France) originally.

Yannis: I was born in Québec city, but i've been living in Montreal for most of my life.

How is it that you started playing music?

Leo: Someday I went to the “music fest” in France with friend of mine and we just kind of drunk-talked ourselves into starting a band. I guess I never let go after that!

Yannis: I've exploring music on my own for about 12 years. Mostly on my own. Composing on my computer, buying gear to build my home studio. After a while, i had all this setup, but wasn't doing much with it. So i started to practice playing guitar more and more and, started to jam with friends (including Léo) and now i'm swamped in musical projects.

Did you make music even when you were young?

Leo: I played drums for a year or so when I was a kid but mainly started with guitars at around 18.

Yannis: I started around 18. Doing weird noises with my computer.

Have any of you played in other bands? We both had solo or bands in the past. We’ve had the chance to explore different styles and diversify our influences through punk, hardcore, folk, post-rock, grind, or death metal music projects.

What year did the band form? We kind of started to jam together a few years ago but the idea of Funeste is pretty recent. I think we started to throw the first riffs for the demo in January 2015.

What's your style of genre? Haha, we’ve had a hard time answering to that question. We started it off like a black metal band but I guess we mix in lots of our influences and bring doom, death metal and some melodic shit into that.

What made you decide to make this music? We used to jam together for a while and didn’t come up with any songs. Some day we had a drink together talking about music and just came up with the idea of a violent black metal studio duo. A few days later the first riffs of “le passage invisible” were there.

What are your songs about? Yannis: I mostly write about my personal experiences. Mostly the darker ones. I talk about what I see and feel while living in a big city. No satanic stuff which I feel is not really relevant in our part of the world. I try to talk about subjects that touches everyone and focus more on anger, anxiety and fear.

What language do you sing in? Promotion of local artists and culture is important to us so Yannis wrote everything in French and we are going to keep it that way.

Who does the composing and writes the lyrics? Do you start with the music or the lyrics? Leo: I usually start the songs, bring together the first guitars and drums and send that to Yannis. He then works on that, adds guitars, bass and vocals and after a few exchanges we can finish the songs.

Do you compose in a certain environment? Leo: We both compose alone at home. I know that Yannis composes everything in his laundry room and I find this fucking black metal haha.

What inspires you?

Leo: I guess I’m influenced by the music I listen which is mainly in any sort of rock/metal genre. However when making music for Funeste I just need to be by myself with a loud guitar.

Yannis: For myself, i my inspiration comes from music itself. I've been listening to great music all my life and it moved me in so many different ways that i felt it was important to give back to music as much as i could. As for bands that inspires me, I would say anything that generates strong emotions from me. It's not a question of style, more a question of what the person is trying to say with its music. I like bands that can strip down their music to the point that only pure raw emotions come's out of it. Listen to Jason Molina's work, and you'll get what I mean.

How often and where do you reherse? We don’t really reherse. As for now Funeste is a studio band so every now and then, one of us records some riffs on his computer, shares it with the other and song are built after a few exchanges. It’s rare when there’s a week without new riffs being recorded.

How have you developed since you started with the music?

Léo:Well, the demo sort of built itself as a single block. Since everything is pretty recent we haven’t had the time to really develop, but the songs we are working on right now are more brutal haha.

Yannis: For me, its the first time I build songs from A to Z. So I've learned a lot about song structure and transitions between riffs. I'm also learning sound engineering and it was great way to experiment with the creative side of engineering.

Do you have any role models or idols? Leo: I don’t think idols or role models is the word I would use. I think a lot of artists make incredible music. We have bands that inspired us for Funeste like Xasthur of Leviathan, and others that we just find have made masterpieces, like converge or king crimson.

Why do you think that they exist? Great music above all, originality as well as subtle, violent and emotional composition. I guess good timing and meeting the right people helps too.

Is it easier to find inspiration from older bands, or bands that are more active today?

Leo: Any band you personally like is going to be a good inspiration to you. If you like something it should be because it talks to you in terms of emotion. If you can trigger you emotion you can make music which will make you feel something. Given that you can play an instrument.

Yannis: I think each era has its own imprint. I think its important to keeps an open mind about art in general, regardless of the era. For sure when it comes to heavy music , the bar gets raised every day. So its interesting to hear the music getting heavier and heavier but it doesn't mean its gonna be more powerful that stuff that was composed years ago. Nobody has outdone Mozart's requiem or Van der graaf's Still Life yet. I think that humans are still talking about the same emotions than a hundred years ago. So any old piece of music is still relevant.

What have been your biggest obstacles? We haven’t really had any obstacle. Funeste is still pretty young and, as a duo, well together. The hardest thing is to find time between our jobs and other projects to compose

Do you have other interests of work outside the band? Leo: Funeste is a hobby for us, as we both have jobs and other projects on the side. Yannis is a tattoo artist and amazing drawer, and has become quite good in recording music. I work in a research lab which gives me the time to make music, and a little bit of photography.

Are you looking for a booking agency, and what are your thoughts around that? Are you looking for a label, and what are your thoughts around that? We are currently in discussion with a label, with whom we are going to work on the upcoming releases, promotion, etc.

When did you start to sell merchandise, and what do you have for sale? First physical releases should be available in the upcoming weeks. We are thinking about the packaging for the demo/EP MMXV, and a first t-shirt.

Where can people buy your merchandise? As for now the music is downloadable on our bandcamp (https://funeste.bandcamp.com/).

What do you think about people downloading music instead of buying records nowadays? Downloading music is a cheap and accessible way of sharing music. If it wasn’t for the internet, no one might have listened to Funeste so I guess it’s a good thing that it’s there. However, it’s important to support small band who don’t have a lot of money to promote music in which a lot of effort is put most of the time.

How do you think the music industry have changed because of this? It has changed in a bad way for the big labels who used to make a lot of cd sales. The good thing with downloading music is that every band is accessible to everyone. People get interested and go to see the shows. Also, now that we can download any music, band come up with awesome packaging ideas. When you buy something now you want it to be original and beautiful, which is a good thing for creativity.

What do you think of my work?

Léo: Cool and a lot of interviews! Keep up Finding new bands and sharing. That’s the most important thing for artists.

Yannis: I think you're questions could be a little bit more personalized for every band, but other than that, its awesome that you're helping to promote the underground like you do.

How do you think and know that this interview will help you in the music business? For us, each person that listens to our music and comes up with constructive review and opinion is great and important. Interviews are a great way to have some visibility in the metal world.

What advice would you give other bands or artists? Make music. Never stop. And don’t think about yourself too seriously.

Do you have any new material? We have a couple of songs that will be done soon. We will have time to work on some more during the summer. With a label helping us with the promotion and releases we have more time for composing and are really excited to start working seriously on the next EP/album.

What are your web sites? For now we only have a bandcamp (https://funeste.bandcamp.com/) and a facebook (https://www.facebook.com/funestemtl). We might have a dedicated website with everything (music, pictures, videos, merch) in a few months.

How can people reach you? E-mail: [email protected]