Taipei Metal

Interview: Blood Stain Child

Metal music scribes are all, at heart, taxonomists. We study, we categorize, we compare and contrast the varied characteristics of our musical beasts and then finally we place them somewhere amongst the branches of the phylogenetic tree. Knowing precisely where a band fits into this grand evolutionary scheme helps us sleep soundly at night. It saves us from the burden and challenge of actually having to dredge the depths of our creativity to define a band’s style and sound. We listen for the telltale genre indicators—a breakdown denotes hardcore, a breakdown coupled with a blast beat indicates metalcore, guttural vocals and a fixation on bodily fluids would suggest death metal, or perhaps the subspecies gore metal—and we classify a band thusly. But then, a genetic anomaly like Japan’s Blood Stain Child comes along; a musical platypus with bits and pieces that seem to have no business coming together in one animal; a band that spits on every single page of metal’s version of The Origin of the Species. Suddenly we are left bereft of our pre-packaged terms and descriptions. It looks like the aforementioned tree is growing yet another branch.

Don’t let the techno sample and keyboard laden intro of “Freedom,” a track from Blood Stain Child’s latest album, 2007’s Mozaiq, fool you. Though a cursory listen might suggest a benign herbivore, BSC, a sextet comprised of Sadew on lead vocals, Ryo on bass and backing vocals, G.S.R. on rhythm guitar, Aki on keyboards and samples, drummer Violator and lead guitarist and band leader Ryu Kuriyama, is a carnivorous beast with razor sharp claws and teeth in the guise of crushing, Euro-inspired riffs that are fit to shred and drum beats that are bashing when they need to be.

Since their inception back in 1999, when they were known as Visionquest, BSC has, to a certain extent, followed in the snow-trodden footsteps of Scandinavian shredders Children of Bodom, albeit a few steps to the side. Led by Ryu, the band’s main songwriter and lyricist, the band has utilized European producers such as Finland’s Anssi Kippo, who has actually worked with the Bodomites themselves, as well as Norther and Impaled Nazarene, among others, and the famed Dane Tue Madsen, who has worked with everyone from Aborted to the Haunted to Hatesphere, to forge a decidedly European sound.

“I really love Europe. When I was in university I learned about European culture, especially northern European countries like Sweden, Denmark and Norway. I love music and I love culture, so our influences reflect in our music,” says Ryu, who at the time of our interview, was sporting a Warhol-esque, slightly androgynous purple coif.

Sadew, the band’s dreadlocked vocalist, joined the band in 2007 after most recently handling the vocal duties in another Soilwork-inspired band, Plastic Earth. This left previous vocalist Ryo, who is Ryu’s younger brother, free to focus on his bass duties while providing backing black metal screams. Sadew also weighed in on the band’s sources of inspiration. “Basically, we love metal. In Flames, Children of Bodom and Soilwork are our main influences. Also, we like other kinds of music, so that makes our music very fun and exciting. That’s our favorite part of our music.”

Where the band really sets itself apart is with its use of electronic samples, provided by keyboardist and sampler Aki. Though they are of course not the first band to utilize samples, it is their choice of samples that will cause their share of raised eyebrows among metal purists. Trance and techno beats underlie the band’s songs, along with jumpy keyboard patterns that might leave a first-time visitor to a BSC show thinking that they went to a metal show and a rave broke out.

“For our first album, we used orchestral samples, and then by our second album we started to use synthesizers and a lot of digital effects from Aki, which was a big breakthrough for us. We thought it was really cool and we should do something like this. By our third album we had established our band’s direction, and we wanted to do something that no one had ever done before. We wanted to create one-of-a-kind music, and use different styles, from dance to hip hop to healing music,” says Ryu.

Make no mistake, BSC is a metal band. But they are a band that isn’t afraid to take chances, and thus have created a sound that is all their own, and have created their own breed of fan in their native Japan in the process.

“Basically, our fans are metal fans, but after our latest album, Mozaiq, these fans became our own. They like Blood Stain Child’s music. They do not describe themselves as metal fans anymore, but fans of our music. This is our biggest success so far,” Ryu offers.

Sadew follows up on this idea. “We have many different kinds of fans. We are not a major band yet, and our basic audience is made up of metal fans, but other kinds of fans are showing up in the audience. They are not listening to our music because they are metal fans. They are listening because they like our style. Japanese metal fans tend to listen only to metal, but we hope our fans, when they listen to our music, they will progress beyond metal.”

Still, despite this urge to bring metal fans, a notoriously cliquey breed, out of the safety of their genre-defined divisions, the band’s seemingly quirky musical influences are firmly rooted in metal, with members claiming such varied bands as Dying Fetus, Dark Funeral and Dark Tranquility among their sources inspiration. But the fact that this is essentially Ryu’s project, keeps the level of conflict down when the band goes into songwriting mode.

“We don’t really have conflict,” says Ryu, “I create the basis for the songs, and sometimes I will ask the opinion of our vocalist and then move on to create the rest of the song.”

Constantly creating music, Ryu is among those musicians who believe it is better to be over-prepared when it comes time to enter the studio. As a case in point, in 2000, the year that BSC recorded its first demo in a lead-up to the band’s first album, 2002’s Silence of Northern Hell, the band wrote over thirty songs.

Unimpressed with his own statistics, Ryu states in a matter-of-fact manner, “Whenever we create an album we write at least 20 songs, so 30 is not a big number to me.”

Has this ever led to a case of creative burnout?

“I don’t get burnt out, but I do sometimes get depressed because when we write so many songs it is difficult to determine which of the songs is good enough to go on the album,” he says.

And therein lies the problem with being prolific. When one has so many songs completed, how do you choose which songs will go on an album? This is a responsibility that, once again, largely falls on Ryu’s slender shoulders.

“After we finish creating an album we leave it for one or two weeks and then we listen to it as if we were the audience. If we feel nothing from a song, or if it makes us feel uncomfortable, we don’t put it on the album.”

When it comes to lyrical themes, Ryu prefers to write about broad social problems such as war and oppression, “…but we will take that and put that in the context of a personal conflict and I will draw on my own personal experience.”

Sadew, who at times collaborates with Ryu on the lyrics, also sticks to the broad theme of the problems facing the human race. “Good and evil, weakness and strength, and the mental effect of all of the things that happen in the world,” he elaborates.

But this is not a band that uses the stage as a pulpit from which to preach. “Rock music is based on giving the masses new ideas, but we will not give them any ideas directly. We imply a certain meaning in our music,” says Sadew.

“I like to share my thoughts with the audience through my music, and it would be really great if I could inspire a similar feeling in the audience,” says Ryu, who looks every bit the introvert, sitting with his knees together, conscientiously brushing his hair out of the way of the lenses of his thick-framed glasses. But, much like his music, appearances can be deceiving. Behind his bookish, almost artsy, and at times quiet and guarded exterior, is a man who expresses himself eloquently, thoughtfully and confidently when on the subject of music.

And he does have every reason to be confident. Now well into their career, having released four albums over the past nine years, BSC have an established sound that they are ready to take beyond Japan’s shores, though according to Ryu this was never something that they aspired to do. Nevertheless, European and American tours are in the works, though the dates have yet to be set.

One would hope that music fans in both locales will greet BSC with open minds. Your average metal fan would be loathe to even mention the word trance, and would probably rather gouge out their eyes than glimpse the word “emo” in a band description that also includes the word “metal,” as is the case on BSC’s Myspace page. But to do so would be to write off a truly original band that is forging a new musical direction, and creating a new branch of metal taxonomy all its own. It is because of bands like BSC that metal, and music in general, is dynamic and exciting, rather than stale and stagnant. If you’ve had your fill of the formulaic and are looking for something that is, dare I utter these words so often maligned in extreme metal circles, uplifting and even beautiful, open your ears and your minds to the sounds of the bred-in-Japan-but-steeped-in-Scandinavia hybrid beast Blood Stain Child.

by Joe Henley