interview with TOXINA
How is it that you started playing music? Nicolas Saintesteben started playing with the Marmet brothers (Diego, Damian and Fabian) in early 2011. Then Diego and Damian left the band and Brian Newman joined in.
What are your names? / Who plays what? / How old are you?
TOXINA is Fabian Marmet - Drums, 21
Nicolás Saintesteben - Guitar Voice, 21
Brian Newman - Bass, 23
Have you had other previous members? Guitarristas/Guitar: Diego Marmet, Hugo Meza y German Castro Bajista/Bass: Damian Marmet
Where are you from? We are from Glew, GBA Sur, Argentina
What year did the band form? Toxina was formed in February, 13, 2011.
What's your style of genre? Since our last work people often define our style as "Old School Technical Thrash Metal"
How often and where do you rehearse? Once a week is the minimum to get things going, and always in Glew. Sometimes it gets difficult to find time between so many shows.
Do you have other interests of work outside the band? Nicolas is a car mechanic, he loves cars. Brian is a metal worker, and enjoys working with wood too Fabian studies in a Conservatory of Classical Music.
Are you looking for a booking agency, and what are your thoughts around that? Toxina has a fourth non-musician member, our Sound Engineer, Federico Marino,with whom we've been working for some time.Fede, besides the audio work, looks after a wide range of matters in the band. You could say he is the one who does the kind of job an agency would, alongside with us.
Are you looking for a label, and what are your thoughts around that? We’re not really interested in finding one, since our thing is the self-management. Therefore, Toxina must be self-produced.
What made you decide to make this music? We make the music we like and the music we can play. This genre is what comes best for us and what we enjoy the most.
What are your songs about? We like to think that anyone can give each song many different meanings. No doubt our lyrics are about human madness, but we don’t like to restrict ourselves at all, so we feel free to write about absolutely everything.
Who does the composing and writes the lyrics? Fabian and Nicolas are the main composers right now. Lyrics are written by Fabian, and Brian usually adds some things up.
Do you start with the music or the lyrics? Honestly, music goes first. That doesn’t mean lyrics are less important, but music definitely goes in first place.
Have you done any covers live? We’ve recently been doing the cover of Edible Autopsy (Cannibal Corpse), but in the past we’ve also played Skeleton On Your Shoulder (Coroner), Take No Prisoners, The Skull Beneath the Skin, Rattlehead (Megadeth), Beneath the Wheel (D.R.I.), Postmortem (Slayer), Behind the Mirror, Blind Faith, Love Us or Hate Us, and Extreme Aggression (Kreator).
What language do you sing in? We sing in English. At first, there were people moaning about it, because our native language is Spanish, but they slowly understood that this kind of music is meant to be sung in English. It’s mainly a matter of taste and influences.
What are the least and most people to attend one of your gigs? One time in Vadenuevo, GBA West, we were rushed to open the show and when the curtain opened we played for the barman, the sound guy and two more people. Probably the biggest show was during our first trip to the city of Rosario, with 150 people watching Toxina at Chopper’s II.
Do you always play the same songs live, or do you vary? Lately, we’ve been introducing our EP to people, along with other songs. We only play one song of our Demo, “Season of Lies”. We like to change the order in which we play the setlist from date to date.
What was your first gig like? Our first gig came out better than what we expected. We’d only had a few rehearsals but really wanted to play live. Many friends went to see us perform in this very small place in Burzaco, and we did mostly covers.
What was your latest gig? It was incredible. We travelled to Rosario, Santa Fe to play with our friends of “Shot.-Gun”, in their EP’s presentation show, and we’d never experienced such a thing before, visually and musically speaking.
Where have you played live this year? This was the year we played the biggest amount of gigs since we started! We had 23 shows in Buenos Aires, and 2 in Santa Fe.
When did you start to sell merchandise, and what do you have for sale? The only merchandise we made were 100 patches with our logo, and 100 copies of our Demo album. We gave them all away. We are planning to make t-shirts and some EP copies to sell.
What do you think about people downloading music instead of buying records now a days? The immediacy took over every aspect of our lives and the way we experience music is not left out of this. The ritual of getting home after buying a new record is increasingly rare, but now we have access to more music than ever before. However, you can’t hold a download in your hands nor open it to read the lyrics in the booklet. It might sound out-dated, but having the actual album, in such a concrete way, makes you feel a lot different, it gives you a totally different set of emotions. Or at least that’s how we feel about it!
How do you think the music industry have changed because of this? Physical formats like CDs or vinyls will keep going on sale because the artists want it that way. Music industry is in deep crisis as they are struggling to still make some profit in this whole new market. In the meantime, it’s the artist's labor to not only make music, but to learn the best way to engage directly with the public. The common factor between both situations is the internet: it is the threat, the problem, the opportunity and the solution.
What do you think of my work? We think it’s a great thing because thank to you bands can tell their stuff to people who want to know a bit more.
What have been your biggest obstacles? The biggest obstacle in every band is the relationship between its members. We could say that our biggest accomplishment was finding ourselves as a band of 3. That way things began to flow in the best way possible, because we are no longer musicians playing in a band but friends, and we love each other like brothers.
What advice would you give other bands or artists? Make friendship and companionship the first things on your list.
How do you get psyched for a gig? The warmup before a show is almost a ritual by now. If we can, we take our 30 minutes of relaxing, stretching and general warmup.
Do you have any new material? The last thing we recorded was our EP with 5 tracks called SELF-DESTRUCTION, which we let out on March 2015. .
What are your web sites? You can follow us and get in touch at http://www.facebook.com/ToxinaThrashMetal and listen our stuff via http://toxina.bandcamp.com
What are your plans for the future? Our plan for the near future is to burn some actual copies of our EPs, so people can have it physically and enjoy this old-school experience we really love, keep playing live and make some recordings for our upcoming material.
Do you have something to add? Thanks to you for this interview. To everyone that is reading this, thanks for your time. If you are interested in the band just listen to our stuff and follow our activity on Facebook.
