Today we are interviewing antifascist black metal band Ancst.
Thanks to Ancst Collective for answering to our call.
Enjoy!
Band's links:
Official Website
Facebook
Bandcamp
TDSAU: I think we can start talkin about your influences and the fact of you are german and antifascist black metal.
Ancst: Its different with everyone of us I guess but we are mostly HC kids with a love for metal or metal heads with a love for HC I guess. for my part, I grew up with death metal and later explored black metal and then went to hardcore stuff. I wasnt really happy with how things went with the metal scene at that point and for me the whole DIY hardcore stuff was way more my alley when it came to politics and ideals. the love for metal remained tough, so someday
Ancst was born when I went through another one of this metal listening phases. speaking influences, I really love 90s death metal stuff like napalm death or malevolent creation, second wave black metal like ulver, darkthrone and immortal, 90s metallic hardcore, euro scramz and of course the whole emo crust thing (ekkaia, madame germen). Im sure that stuff influenced us, some way or another. also the lyrical focus is more rooted within DIY hardcore, we were never really interested in all that cliche black metal stuff.
you know people always ask about that antifascist stuff and that somehow is strange as for my part I never really saw the point where facism or racism went hand in hand with metal. there had always been metal and also black metal from around the globe, coming from different cultures that cross influenced itself. going back, rock music comes from blues and blues was made by people of color. the instruments we use are created by people of other cultures as well. so metal for me always had an multi cultural aspect to it and I love that. If people come up with all that trve kvlt stuff and their orthodox nostalgic nonsense about how you have to honor those from the past, well its time these guys should do some delta blues worship. where I grew up metal heads and punks went hand in hand against white power bone heads, it was years later that I saw the first long haired metal guys wearing swastika shirts and doing the hitler salute which completely made me rethink the whole story. I always was aware of the shock effect that all third reich nonsense had but I never thought people being serious about that. metal is a lot about image and show (see kiss, priest, kind diamond, cooper etc.) and there had to be a point where people would play with that certain image but seeing a thing such as NSBM coming up it somehow saddened me to see that no one gave a shit and drew a line. I mean there is a difference in bands playing with third reich imagery for its shock value (which is still dumb in my book) and bands like der stürmer or absurd openly embracing and promoting nation socialist ideas and hatred against everything that does not fit into their world view. I mean we are speaking about active nazis here, not your average drunk 90s bone head bum. There is a lot of talking in the metal scene right now about politics and if they should appear in metal or not and Im saying "yes they do" as everything we do in our daily life is somehow political and by allowing some serious hatemongers to spread their bullshit we somehow forget what metal really is. also I like to add that there always had been political statements in metal, and those were not your average right wing, pro government, pro fascist, pro bullshit themes. there had always been a cross influence of (politcial charged) punk & metal, without that extreme metal would not exist. so its somehow silly to evade that topic with promoting nonsense like being non political. people don't give a shit and thats there excuse, which is fine but then why not being honest about it? Im not good at a lot of political stuff either, I do not know enough, I do not read enough but I know for sure where I stand in this discussion.
TSAU: Do you partecipate political life and how?
Acst: I used to do much more political stuff in the past but nova days I am honestly fed up with lots of discussions inside the European left. too much talk, too much weird directions. I used to go out for demonstrations and took part in political actions years ago but I simply don't feel that connected to a certain agenda anymore. I don't want to follow some stupid ass setting of rules just to please some pretentious smart ass activist. I always saw myself as a musician first, cause this is my first love and later on realized that there is much more room for ideas and for sharing these. so this is how I feel I can participate in all of this. beside this I'm still playing loads of benefit shows to support antifa groups, animal rights groups or people that somehow got between the wheels of this system and make sure I'm always open for some simple talking.
TDSAU: your future releases? Thank you for your time!
Ancst: Our new split LP with our friends in Ast in currently at the pressing plant and will again be released via Vendetta. I hope this will be out end of January. Next to this we are still working on our full length LP. not sure if we will have them for the tour in march, but it will be out some time in spring. after this several split releases are planned but I cant say much about this.
M.
