Interview with death metal band from Florida - HIBERNUS MORTIS.
Answered Cesar Placeres (drums, vocals), thank you!
Translated Duzl, thank you!
Questions prepared Jakub Asphyx.
https://www.deadlystormzine.com/2022/12/recenzereview-hibernus-mortis-monoliths.html
Ave HIBERNUS MORTIS! Greetings to Florida. I hope everything is fine with you. I have to say straight away that I wasn't looking forward to any album as much as I was looking forward to your new album "The Monoliths of Cursed Slumber". I had the record a long time in advance for review and I was very annoyed that I couldn't share my joy with my friends. It is excellent. Death and thrash metal exactly the form I like best. How did the album was created and how did you feel about going to the studio?
First of all thanks for the interview! We are always shocked to know people have heard our music outside of Florida, not to mention outside of the U.S. especially considering how limited the quantities that were pressed of our previous albums. I am glad you enjoyed the new album, we worked really hard on the album and wanted to make sure we were 100% happy with the final result after such a long absence. As far as the creation of the album it's a combination of ideas we've had going as far back as ten years ago but also newer ones as well which were written more recently specifically for this release. We were totally comfortable going back into the studio because this time I was the one recording it from start to finish and we knew we could take our time and not rush things. On previous releases we were in studios where we had to pay by the hour so a lot of times we had to rush things. But this time we were able to take our time and for the first time ever we were able to say we truly made the album we've always wanted to make.
What was it like to start creating new material again? You haven't released a full-length album for 21 years. This is a very long time. Everything has changed. Technology, we have the internet, everything is faster, more brutal. In extreme metal especially. Then you come and chop me up with a total old school! Has the approach you take changed in any way? How did HIBERNUS MORTIS create new material?
Well yes, over 21 years lots of things have definitely changed not only with technology & recording but with death metal as well. The thing with us is while some bands have always tried to emphasize on being "the fastest" we always wanted to be "the heaviest". I mean we do have blasts once in a while but it's to add dynamics or "seasoning" to the music. Our main focus has always been on heaviness. Our approach has been the same since day one and will never change. We play dark death metal, some people may call it "old school death metal" but back when we started it was just "death metal". As far as writing the newer material for this album, as I stated earlier we had some riffs/songs we never got to record during our hiatus and those have always been in my head. I never forgot those. So when we started making music again, we had those ideas as well as a bunch of new ones but all with the same spirit of classic Hibernus. The majority of the music was written by Ralf Varela as well as myself. Our other two members Yasser & Randy also made great contributions on this album as well.
You've always had that moldy, dusty sound that won't leave anyone calm. How and where did you record the album? The record looks old, moldy, it's probably not analog or is it? Who is signed under mix and mastering?
This is a topic I actually really enjoy discussing. I love talking about recording. The album was recorded, mixed and mastered completely by me. I've been a recording engineer for a little over 20 years and while I've recorded a ton of bands during that time frame, this is actually the first time I record a Hibernus Mortis album. We knew we had to find the perfect balance of clean/dirty production. It's a fine line, you don't want to lean too far to either side. I tried to keep it as vintage sounding as possible. In a perfect world I would have loved to record the album 100% analog but some aspects of digital does have its advantages. To combat the sterile "digital" sound of working on a DAW I used several weapons like using some vintage mics, tracking through tube mic preamps whenever possible, drowning things in reverb to create space, running the final stereo master out of Pro-Tools and into an analog line mixer and then in turn I run that into my 58 year old 2-Track Reel To Reel. I actually recorded the final mastered mix onto 1/4" tape on that ancient Reel To Reel and then ran the playback back into Pro-Tools. If you listen to the new album with headphones on you can faintly hear the hiss of that sweet sweet tape saturation from the reel to reel along with some occasional cracks & pops. We use those qualities of tape saturation hiss, crackles and pops almost like their own instrument, the same way we use feedback, delay and reverb as its own instrument as well. It’s all part of the bigger picture and the sum of its parts is the final result. So yeah that's some of the techniques I used to get that "moldy/dusty" sound you're talking about. I’m all about experimentation in the studio. Since I've been into death metal since around 1989 I've obviously been influenced by the production style of dudes like Scott Burns and Tomas Skogsberg, but I've also been influenced by producers outside the genre like Joe Meek and Phil Spector who had that incredible "Wall Of Sound" production style with lots of layers and tons of reverb. That was a huge influence on me as an engineer and you can hear a bit of that influence on this album.
Without the cover, the board would not be complete. The one for the new release "The Monoliths of Cursed Slumber" is like a cut out from an old horror movie. I like it a lot. I immediately ordered a T-shirt. Who designed it and how did you choose the theme?
The album cover was actually done by my brother Chris Placeres. He's a super talented artist in every form of media. Photography, painting, drawing, digital media, film etc. He painted the album cover on 24" x 24" canvas with acrylic paint. We wanted the cover to be a perfect representation of the music. We play dark cavernous death metal so we wanted the cover to be both dark and cavernous. As far as the concept goes I gave him a rough idea of what we wanted. Something like a forgotten mausoleum or ossuary lost in time in some underground cavern. The significance of "The Monoliths Of Cursed Slumber" is to be determined by the listener as the visual representation can have several meanings.
I have to ask - why didn't you actually record anything between 2001 and 2022? It occurs to me that no one has ever heard of you. I'm the kind of fan who follows the band, looks for information, is interested, but it's like you disappeared. Why actually?
It's kind of a boring story but we got to a point in the mid 2000's where we weren't really writing new music, we were just kind of playing shows all the time and that was the only time we got together to rehearse, just practicing for shows. Eventually we just stopped playing all together sometime around 2006. In 2012 we got back together again and played a couple of shows and then we all agreed we had to make a new album, so we started to write music for the new album and the rest is history. We are all in our mid 40's so we don't have as much time to practice as we did when we were in our 20's. We all have things like careers and families and stuff that take up a lot of time, so things tend to take a lot longer to see the light of the day more than they used to.
When I noted the death of Doug Humlack, I thought you would never continue. He was a great guitarist and a great man. How did you find a replacement in Randy Piro? His work in GIGAN, HATE ETERNAL, KULT OV AZAZEL speaks for itself. Did you know each other from before? Why him?
Well, Doug had left the band sometime in 2004 which was actually one of several reasons we ended the band a year or two later since he was a big part of the songwriting process for Hibernus. His exact reasons for leaving I am still not 100% sure on and sadly I will never get to find out exactly as to why. From what I gathered I think he was just done with playing live shows or just being in a band in general. Doug was kind of like a mysterious lone wolf type of dude. He's the type of person who would just be perfectly content playing his guitar at home and maybe recording things by himself. Even though he left the band we still remained friends and would talk once in a while. I hadn't spoken to him in years since he moved to a different state and he wasn't on social media either. By chance I did get to speak to him once a few months before he passed. I miss that dude like crazy. After the band got back together again in 2012 we knew we had to get a 2nd guitarist. We've known Randy for years, he lives down here in South Florida. We used to work close to each other, he was also a fan of Hibernus for years and I was also a fan of his other band Orbweaver. We felt it was natural to approach him about joining. He's already been in the band for ten years and it's been nothing but awesome.
Let's go back to the good old days, please. The "Into the Thresholds of Dead Winter" cassette once came to me in the 1990s. I have to admit that I immediately included you in bands like DEICIDE, MORBID ANGEL, SOLSTICE, in short, among my favorites. How do you remember that time? Is there anything you would like to return, change? How did HIBERNUS MORTIS actually reunite? Please remember for us.
Well, surprisingly when Ralf and I decided to start the band together in December of 1995 the metal scene especially in South Florida was pretty dead. At that point in time in 1995 I had known Ralf for a couple of years and we had very similar tastes in Death Metal. At first we started writing the bulk of the early material just him and me, after we had a couple of songs ready we recorded them on cassette with an old boom box and played them for Doug who I had played with recently in another local band. Doug loved the songs so he was on board as well as Adam who was the vocalist of that previous band I just mentioned. The final member was Yasser (bass) who Ralf had gone to high school with. After a couple of months we started playing shows. The local scene as I said was pretty much dead at the time. The only other local death metal band in the area (Sickness) broke up not long after our 4th show so that pretty much left us as the only Death Metal band still active in the South FL area with the exception of Malevolent Creation. The first few years were rough but around 1998 bands like Hellwitch got back together and other bands in the scene started to pop up. As far as the Into The Thresholds Of Dead Winter demo, that thing was a nightmare. We were young and had no clue what studios were good for this type of music in South FL. We ended up going to this place in Miami named "The Dungeon" thinking it sounded like a place that knew how to produce heavy music, we couldn't have been more wrong. The guy that owned the place played in an alternative pop band and had no clue what he was doing or how we were supposed to sound. The guy was already weirded out that I had 2 separate bass drums. We had a very limited budget. Something like $500. We did it in like 2 or 3 days. It sounded decent at the studio because the engineer had expensive monitors, but once we took it home it sounded awful. Eventually about a month later we took the ADAT tapes to another studio and had the album remixed. The 2nd mix was definitely better but still not as great as we wanted. So to answer your question would we change anything? Yes, we would have recorded at a different studio. As far as wanting anything to return from those days? Definitely a lot of the venues/clubs we played at in those years. Pretty much all of them have closed down.
In the underground, your old demo is literally iconic. Or so I perceive them that way. As I mentioned, times have changed a lot. We have the internet, everyone downloads music, everything is different. Did you have to change your approach as a band? As musicians, you have a lot of new possibilities.
Thank you so much, I mean I wouldn't say our music is iconic or anywhere close to that level, but I certainly really appreciate that compliment since that is determined by the listener. As you mentioned, the landscape as far as technology, venues, and music has changed drastically since when we first started. Everything is different now. The good thing for us is that our mindset has never changed. When we first started we wanted to make music for “us”. We wanted to play real death metal. No frills, just absolutely heavy and crushing death metal. We always had the mindset of making the music "WE" wanted to make and if other people liked it too then that was a bonus. We live in a random suburb of Miami. We were shocked anybody had even heard of us outside of Miami. Then we started hearing things from other states. That was already mind blowing considering we had never pressed more than 100 copies of any release we ever had back then. In the late '90's when the internet really took off that's when things really started getting wild. Our releases were being shared all over the net on several of those old file sharing sites back in the day. We'd get emails from all over the world asking to buy merch or physical copies. So all these years later we finally have a proper release through our label Blood Harvest. Our mindset is still the same. To make the best possible death metal we can make, the music that we enjoy. If people end up liking it then that's more than we could have ever asked for.
For me, Florida as a place is one of my unfulfilled dreams. I wonder how the death metal scene works for you? Lots of great bands come from you. When I did an interview with DIABOLIC, they praised Florida a lot. Do you have an active scene, clubs, fans? Is it still alive as in your beginnings? Has the fans' attitude changed somehow, for example?
Florida has gone through several phases since the late 80's/early 90's. As far as death metal and extreme music in general, Florida had 3 separate scenes. The most famous being the Tampa scene, followed by the Orlando scene and finally the South Florida scene which combines Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. As everyone knows back in the day Florida was the main breeding ground for death metal. Especially in Tampa not only because of the amount of bands from the surrounding area but it was also where Morrisound Studios was located at and literally every extreme band in the world was trying to record there. The Orlando scene was smaller but was obviously spearheaded by Death. As far as “my scene”, the South Florida scene, it was great back in the day. There were big names like Malevolent Creation, Monstrosity when they were still based out of Fort Lauderdale, Cynic in Miami who were more thrash/death metal on their demos before signing to Roadrunner, Hellwitch, and a slew of other smaller local acts. There were tons of classic venues to play at back then that welcomed death metal shows like The Button South, The Plus Five, The Cameo, Summers On The Beach, Washington Square, The Thrash Can etc... Through the years all those venues closed down, a lot of bands either broke up or relocated. During the mid to late 90's the scene down here was pretty much dead. But around 2000 it came back to life and a lot of it had to do with the opening of The Culture Room. It's a fairly nice sized venue that can hold about 700 people. They originally started doing only local shows but then started getting national acts in. Then next thing you know there was literally 3 or 4 metal tours every month going through there. We've played that venue more times than I can count with everybody from Morbid Angel, Dismember, Mayhem, Incantation, Cannibal Corpse, Immolation, Vader, Suffocation, Exhumed, Angelcorpse, Monstrosity, etc.... The scene in recent years has resurfaced in South FL with several bands playing death metal, black metal, traditional metal, grind etc.... but clubs and venues to play at are almost non-existent. While it's cool that things started picking up again, nothing will compare to the glory days of the late 80's/early 90's Florida scene.
I still firmly believe that I will see you live. Aren't you planning a tour for a new album? I can quite imagine you, along with DEICIDE, INCANTATION on a tour around Europe. Please don't forget Prague! We have a good beer and nice girls, be sure to come!
It has always been a dream of ours to play in Europe. We have so many fans that have written to us from over there in several countries all over Europe. We would all jump at the chance to play over there if the opportunity ever presented itself. It basically all boils down to a booking agent wanting us to play there bad enough to bring us over for a few weeks. I'm sure if we ever did go it would most likely be as support for a bigger band like Incantation or Immolation or something of the sort. I would love to play in places like Spain, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, Germany, the U.K. as well as Prague to try some top tier Czech beers. Hopefully someday we can make it across the Atlantic. As far as in the states I don't really see us doing a lot of touring here. Everybody in the band works regular jobs so it would be hard to get extended time off to be touring for weeks at a time. It would literally have to be an opportunity that sweeps us off our feet for us to commit to a tour. For the time being we are just going to concentrate on doing shows in Florida, maybe like 3 or 4 day runs here and there at most. We are definitely open to playing festivals outside of Florida as well.
What are HIBERNUS MORTIS planning in the near future? What can we look forward to? I hope that the next album will not be again in 21 years!
Well now that The Monoliths Of Cursed Slumber is finally out, we're gonna play a couple shows to promote it. We are also in the process of making some new merch (shirts, patches, etc...). I would also definitely like to film a music video as well for one of the songs off the new album. Time will tell. As far as other things in the not so distant future we are also planning for a proper re-release of The Existing Realms Of Perpetual Sorrow which will also have bonus tracks including some old recordings never released before. Besides that, who knows? I'm sure we may have another new album or two in us before we call it quits. But I will guarantee the next one will not be 21 years from now.
Thank you so much for the interview. It means a lot to me. I'm an old fan of the band and I wish not only success to the new album, but also sold-out concerts and all the best in private lives! are HIBERNUS MORTIS rules!
No, thank you Jakub for the interview! It means a lot to us that all these years later people still remember us and still enjoy the music, especially all the way in Prague! The general consensus on the new album has been pretty great so far. Big thanks go out to Rodrigo over at Blood Harvest for making this happen. Thank you Jakub for the well wishes and hope all your readers get to check out our new album. Lots of time and effort went into making it. Hopefully we can all have some beers together one day in Prague. Hail feedback!
Recenze/review - HIBERNUS MORTIS - The Monoliths of Cursed Slumber (2022):
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