INTERVIEW: Loris Castiglia – Ultra-Violence

After a three year absence, Italian thrash metallers ULTRA-VIOLENCE have been back in the studio to record their upcoming third album Operation Misdirection. The band have been making steady progress since their formation in 2009, and we recently sat down with vocalist and founding member Loris Castiglia to discuss the upcoming record, a look at how the metal scene has changed over the years and more!

The new album Operation Misdirection comes out on July 27th. How do you feel ULTRA-VIOLENCE have progressed since your last record Deflect The Flow?

Loris: Well first of all we changed two members since the last album; we have a new bass player and a new drummer on this new album, and I think the new bass player was really important for the changes in our sound. A lot of the song writing was done by me and him, and it sounds more mature as we’ve grown up as musicians and as people – when we started we were kids, but now I’ll play a riff that sounds great and I’ll say “okay let’s write a song with this riff in it.” For this album I think we concentrated more on the single songs, so we’d do a song that starts like this and ends this way. We know we can write riffs but now we want to write a song about this and we want these elements in it, and we need these progressions and structure. For this album we have more songs than what are on the album, and we left them out because they either didn’t satisfy us or feel right for us.

What was the writing and recording processes like?

Loris: This is probably the most difficult album that we’ve ever done! It’s difficult when you have new members joining a band, especially when you had two members who had been with you for six years; we knew each other as people and musicians and knew how to write and record songs together. With the new members it took a long time for them to get settled in as a band, and then once we did that we started writing – it was a different process compared to the previous albums because on the previous albums we jammed together and then when we got home I usually recorded the songs on my computer and write some stuff over it. This time we did everything by recording it; we didn’t write the album in the rehearsal place because our drummer now is very far away from the rest of us so it’s difficult to meet everyone in the band every week like we did before. I think the way we did it was a good thing though because you can think more about the structure, you can think about all the possibilities. When you’re at a rehearsal place you just play and you can’t really listen carefully to what you are playing because you are concentrating on playing. I think the best scenario is when you write some stuff by recording it, you write some stuff because you’re feeling it in the rehearsal room, and then combining this is probably going to be the best process I think, and I hope we can do it for the next album. For this one we did almost everything by recording it and that’s it really!

Are there any specific themes or messages in the record?

Loris: There are yes – it’s not a concept album but every song tells a different story, and it’s different in a way to the previous records. My English became a bit better, not that it’s good now! But when I wrote the other albums my English was almost inexistent. I had to write parts in Italian and then translate, which meant sometimes you lost the meaning because you need to think in another language to write a song in another language! One important thing about the lyrics is that now I’m more aware about the language and I’m trying to improve everyday by watching TV shows in English. This time when I wrote the songs, I sometimes listen to the music that we created and I think about something that will fit perfectly with the song. We did this with almost every song on the album, and its better in this way because the songs and the lyrics are one thing, and you can really see that when you read the lyrics while listening to the song. With the messages, I think this one is a bit more personal to us as we’ve grown up and we don’t care to write about something stupid like the classic thrash metal things. When you’re younger you write about beers and shit like that, so we wanted to have a message or explain a sensation. The majority of the metal bands I think try to express anger, which, while it may have been at some point, isn’t really a good argument for a song because anger is not a good sentiment for me, it’s a really simple sentiment. I wanted to make it more complicated, so starting with the first song we released which is the first song on the record, when I came across the music it was like it was evolving, and I love that because you can write something like that and it doesn’t sound unconnected. I was really proud of the music so I wanted an argument that would make the song really great, I didn’t want to ruin it with the lyrics. This song started off very fast and aggressive and it continually changes, and then it ended up with a big melodic chorus, and then it goes off with acoustic guitars, so I was thinking and thinking about something that evolves like that. The first thing that came to my mind was like a butterfly, because of the way it changes over time but it wasn’t a good argument for me! I thought about it being more open minded and being about life and getting older, so it started off with the head, and I wanted the beginning to be like the upper body and the composition of the body, then in the middle I wanted the body to merge with nature, and then in the end I wanted the body to be reborn in the form of nature like in the water of a lake, so this is the meaning of the lyrics but its more complicated. I think the message I want to express with that is different and a difficult message to explain, and I think it’s difficult for a lot of people to understand what I mean. What I want to say is that for me life is just a family; I don’t know how to say it in another way, but I don’t think that’s different from human beings, animals, we’re just life and it continually changes and transforms every day. The thoughts that were in my mind is that there should be no difference from a mother feeding her child, or a fly that lays eggs – it’s two completely different things in our perception, but it’s just a mother taking care of life, so you see it’s a bit complicated and strange! But it was in my mind and I wanted to express it, and I wanted at the end when I say ‘mother cries and it rains upon your leaves’, I just wanted it to feel like what we are doing now with humanity, we’re not different from other beings, why do we have wars when we are one big family, and this family is called life. That’s just one song, and I can talk a lot about this because I’m excited about the arguments of the songs, and I think I’ll make some videos to explain the meanings of the songs – I just explained this one because it’s our first single, so maybe people who have already heard it can hear this!

What are your aspirations for the new record?

Loris: Well really we just want to grow as a band, and we want our fan base to grow with every record we release. Until this moment it was always great because the first album we got a lot of good responses, then the new label Candlelight contacted us and we recorded the second album which was good as well. It’s not like we sell a lot of copies or we suddenly became really popular, but there’s little steps that to us are important, because with these little steps we really grow – it’s not like we put out a single and we just became the new big thing and then we don’t know how to handle it. We are learning how to live in this business, it’s not easy but we’re learning more and more about it with these little steps, and I hope this album will take us to tour a lot, especially in the places we haven’t visited before like North America and South America. We know that in South America we have a lot of fans because we always read comments and things like that on our social media, they say “come to Mexico” or “come to Brazil”, so we know that there’s a lot of people that would like to see us in Latin America, and we just want to go where the people want to see us because there’s no reason to continuously play in our city where almost nobody but our friends care about us. We want to go where the people want us, and we hope that this album will bring us to those places.

You’ve been around since 2009 as a band and Operation Misdirection is ULTRA-VIOLENCE’s third full length record, are you surprised at how far the band have come since then?

Loris: Well to be honest, yes I am surprised but not too much because with all the effort and time and everything we’ve spent on this project I feel that it’s just right to be where we are. When we started in 2009, it was nine years ago so I was 15, and since the very first days I was very, very focused on this. This is my first band and only band, and I was serious. I was having fun, yes, but I was still super serious, and I’ve had nine years of this way of thinking with this band, it’s the first thing that comes to my mind when I wake up in the morning and I always say ‘okay let’s do something today that will help my band to grow’, and I go for it. I feel in the right place, and I just want to continue to grow.

You mentioned that in your home city it’s only really friends and family that listen to the band, so what is the metal scene currently like in Italy?

Loris: Well it’s not great, and I can only really talk about it from the thrash metal scene as that’s what I know more about. I think that when we started there were a lot of bands coming out, and we were inspired by those bands because we started to listen to thrash metal; we listened to one band and we read that they were Italian and we thought “we can do something like that”, which is how we started. When we started to come out with our first EP in 2012, all these bands especially from our city, they were not welcoming us into the scene. We felt betrayed so we started to make our own things by ourselves, and as the years have passed almost every one of those bands have disbanded, and we’re where we are right now. I almost didn’t care too much about the Italian thrash metal scene because I didn’t feel I was accepted by it, but I can say that right now there’s a few thrash metal bands that are coming out and they are very kind to us. They always send us messages and come to our shows, and always ask if they can open our concerts! I always try to make this happen but it’s not easy because we’re not the ones who chose the opening bands for our shows, we sometimes get a message asking if we want to do this show, or our manager finds a show, not in Italy but in Europe, so we can’t say ‘okay we’re going to bring this other band with us’, it doesn’t work like that.

ULTRA-VIOLENCE have been on tour with a lot of big bands including EXODUS, what was it like for you as a band to share a stage with them?

Loris: It was great! For us it was very good as it was one of the first shows since the new song came out and the reaction was great, the people bought all of the merch and we made some new fans which was good for us! We played with EXODUS very recently in Germany, and the people there were so nice with us; the club was not that big, I think there were 300 people in there and I knew they were coming for EXODUS and not us, but when we started they were already all there and every one of them listened to us and watched our show. We almost had the same audience that EXODUS had and they seemed really interested, a lot of people talked with us and took photos after the show. They told us that we should tour together with EXODUS because it’s a perfect match, and I feel really grateful for this, because I’ve seen it a lot in my time where unknown bands like us will open for bigger bands that people will stay outside the venue and just come in for the headliner so that means a lot for us! I also want to give another big shout out for them because it was fucking hot that day and we were playing inside a little venue, so the fact that so many of them were inside watching an unknown opening band when it was however many degrees inside, I just want to thank them! We played for 40 minutes, EXODUS played for an hour and 30 minutes and I could see they were having a bit of a hard time on stage but they nailed it, they’re a fucking killing machine on stage! I said this on stage that night, but I think EXODUS are not just a thrash metal band, they’re a thrash metal band because they invented it, and they’re carrying it on and still creating great albums. I’m sorry to see the end of SLAYER but I just can’t wait to see EXODUS writing another album and going on tour with them. It was a dream come true to share a stage with them, and that show in Germany was the second time for us. In 2015, it wasn’t a show and we weren’t the direct support for them, but we played in a festival in Italy and the headliners were TESTAMENT and EXODUS, and we were one of the first bands of the festival. It was great as we played with two of our favourite bands, and was one of the greatest days of our career!

Looking ahead what future plans have ULTRA-VIOLENCE got in store?

Loris: Well I hope that we can start to write new material soon, because now we have this line-up and we’ve been together for three years now so far so it feels right. We’re never angry with each other, we always get on in the easiest ways and we always have fun when we go on tour – it’s exactly like a family but it’s made of friends. I hope our drummer can input into the writing process a bit more because he’s a great drummer, and I think the new material is going to be different. I’m not sure if the people are going to like this statement, but we started off as young little kids wanting to play thrash metal, and we came up with the name ULTRA-VIOLENCE. We started with these Clockwork Orange images because it was cool with the name, and we go on with that because the people are liking it and always asking what the next scene will be on the cover art. We just want to be satisfied with our music, it doesn’t feel right for us to still play the same style of music with the same structures, we just want to take a step back and think about what we’ve done. We have three albums which are different but are connected in some ways, the last song of each of these three albums is connected. We just want to try and create something that we never did before, but for now it’s just an idea so I hope our fans will not have to wait three years for another album, and we’re going to do our best!

Operation Misdirection is set for release on July 27th via Candlelight Records.

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