CVLT Nation is stoked to present you with our interview with the infamous GEHENNA, who will be headlining this Friday’s CVLT Nation 2nd Anniversary show in Santa Ana! To read Mike Cheese’s story of Gehenna, click here! Check out the interview below as well as the info for this Friday…
To the unknowledgeable, explain who Gehenna is and what fuels its negative existence?
Gehenna was a desolate valley outside of Jerusalem that was used as a trash dump and eventually it became a place where the city exiled their diseased, their poor, their criminals and their blasphemers. The valley became a lawless parish and holy ground for ritual spells against society performed by the excommunicated. That in turn is what GEHENNA as an entity represent. We’re the ones who’ve been disregarded who’ve learned to embrace our painful existence by singing songs of the damned and accepting our place on the outside of society. GEHENNA is the love of hatred and the discipline of lawlessness that lets life carry us into the grave. True Trill Death!!!
The band is playing many shows throughout the summer, including prominent festivals like Maryland Deathfest and Chaos in Tejas. Which of these shows do you anticipate as the highlight of these shows?
The greatest reward of making music, art, skateboarding or whatever is exorcising the demons inside by letting it out on the world. There are a lot of things we’re looking forward to being out on the road but most of all it’s about us just hearing the sounds we love and getting new dirt under our heels. I love the lawlessness of desert and getting back in touch with some of our closest underworld connections in Phoenix and what’s not to like about places like Chicago or New York? But I really, really like the idea of being in New Orleans quite a bit to spend a little time in the swamp learning some voudon rituals. The Big Easy is a real interesting town.
There has been mention around the Web that you will play new material at these shows. What can we expect? What specifically influenced this new material and forced it into being?
We’re really excited to flood ears with some ugly sounds from the new records. “Deathkamp Of The Skull” LP, “First Blood Part II” 7 inch and “Drug Maniacs” 7 inch have been buzzing around in our heads for a few years now. Like all GEHENNA releases we make them for ourselves. So they’ll come out when we’re done listening to them and we’re satisfied with the sounds. The new songs are about love and hate, pain and joy, feast and famine. Life and Death. “Deathkamp Of The Skull” is a journey into the prison of the mind that is ruled by the heart and crushes the body. “First Blood Part II” is the relentless warfare to break the chains of society. “Drug Maniacs” is about the escape from pain fear of life by embracing the eternity of death. None of these records will be out for the tour. You’ll have to wait until we’re done listening to them for ourselves first.
Back in January Gehenna played with Integrity, Catharsis, Left for Dead and several other sensational bands at the A389 IX Anniversary show. How was this show and working Dom and A389?
Dom is a great friend and a real brother. He’s released a lot of great records and put together some great stuff for us in the past. I don’t know if he’ll release other GEHENNA stuff in the future as I think we’re headed in different directions. While I think A389 is a great label and Dom is a great guy we’re not interested in staying put in one area. I like idea of trying something new and relieving Dom of the stress of handling us. We’re not in a band in the typical sense. We’re not regular musicians so it’s hard to deal with us. We don’t meet any deadlines but our own. We don’t have managers or a street team or anything like that. We have 20 years of underground activity that has lead us no where. But to be perfectly blunt about it I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t care about the rules of the music industry. We’re criminals with guitars who chant ancient lines of praise to our dead friends and live our lives of excess in poverty, not musicians.
Gehenna has a penchant for violence and it is no secret that the band encourages fans to get bloodier at shows. In all the band’s years, what was the craziest, most disgusting result of this Gehenna trademark?
The danger of rock and roll is that it is uncontrollable. We only encourage people to dance, scream, thrash, stagedive, sing and live free. We want people enjoy themselves not stand around looking at each other for acceptance. Waiting for other people to start moving is the same as standing in line for the gas chamber. What is the point? The world will end and we will all die so we might as well be free to explode. If there are 1000 people in a room or 10 people in a room you should live your life like it will end… because it will end. We will all die. I don’t want to hurt anyone or anything. I want to save the world by giving them the guidance to walk towards their deaths enjoying every minute of their lives. Standing at a merch table trying to get limited records to flip on ebay, or checking online message boards to see if a band is cool or not is fucking poser shit. Just flip out and have fun.
Are there any releases, music, film, book or otherwise, that has come out in recent years you’d recommend to Gehenna’s listeners?
Listen to KOOL G RAP.
In the coming months what can we expect from Gehenna?
More shows, 3 or 4 records, a DVD, smoking blunts, shit talk, lots of mixtapes and eating approximately 300 pounds of potato tacos.
Any final words for our readers?
True Trill Death!!!
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