Desillusion

I AM IN THE STUDIO WITH DESILLUSION.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: YOU GUYS ARE FROM SEATTLE, WASHINGTON RIGHT?
Desillusion: Yes

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: YOU HAD TO MAKE A DECISION EARLY ON ABOUT THE CLUB SCENE THERE. YOU OPTED FOR THE "GOTH INDUSTRIAL" SCENE. TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT WHAT THE UNDERGROUND SCENE IS LIKE IN SEATTLE AND WHAT THE DIFFERENCE IS BETWEEN THE CLUBS/VENUES AS OPPOSED TO HERE IN L.A.
Desillusion: There is a significant difference, they have themed nights every now and again at clubs. There really is no underground scene as far as I'm concerned. The only underground scene that we've had in the last 8-10 years has just been raves. After the whole grunge thing and playing in warehouses, the electronic raves took over.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: WELL, BECAUSE YOU HEAR THAT SEATTLE IS THE GRUNGE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.
Desillusion: Yeah, that's the first thing that we hear every time we say we're from Seattle. People will say "Oh, so you're like Nirvana?" and we say "Oh, we are going to punch you in your fucking mouth."

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: ARE THERE A LOT OF BANDS LIKE YOU THERE?
Desillusion: There's really not, there are a couple. Most of them are pretty good. It depends on what band you're talking about. KMFDM was in Seattle for a while. They are a more well known electro, industrial, rock band, but there is not a whole lot there really. A lot of bands are either all electro or all rock. You have the bands that don't branch over into the Ministry style of industrial and we are more the Ministry style. What seems to be taking the cake in Seattle is more of the poppy bands.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: DOSEN'T THAT MAKE IT HARD TO BOOK SHOWS WITH OTHER BANDS THAT ARE COMPARABLE?
Desillusion: Actually no, we have made a lot of friends in the music industry and everything. The shows that we are not headlining ourselves, we will play with one of our friends that we have played with in the past or a big touring band that is doing a U.S. tour. We will choose to open for them and play at our two venues El Corazon and The Showbox. Those aren't anything like here in L.A., you look at their schedule and you see what's playing there that night. It's all over the place and it's not really good because it is hard to pinpoint your demographic.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: IT SEEMS LIKE THE WORD GENRE DOES NOT ALWAYS APPLY IN MOST CASES. SO MANY ARTISTS THESE DAYS BLEND SO MANY DIFFERENT STYLES IN THEIR MUSIC IT BECOMES HARD TO PUT INTO CATEGORY. WOULD YOU AGREE?
Desillusion: Oh yeah, you can think of a million different genres now. There are so many bands. The generation previous to this generation of musicians had half as many influences as we have nowadays.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: A LOT OF ARTISTS DO NOT LIKE TO BE LABELED.
Desillusion: Well, it's not that they don't like to be labeled. I will quote from a review that we had "we don't want to be the sum of our influences." It's stupid getting pigeon-holed. People will say "You sound like this band or that band." I've never even heard of these fucking bands and yet we sound exactly like them so we automatically have a label. Like they know what to expect and we are already capped as far as what we can do. That's the kind of impression people get.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: WHEN YOU HAVE A SHOW, DO YOU USUALLY PACK THE HOUSE?
Desillusion: Normally we do, every band has it offs days. I mean sure we can bring our crowd. If we can bring 200-300 people to a 1,500 plus venue and we are playing with five other bands, the place should be packed even if they brought half of what we brought. It takes a lot of hard work to get that many people there. We don't sit on our asses and say "Yeah, we're playing a show, just show up." We are cool like that. We are still out there pushing our name pretty hard.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: AT WHAT POINT DID YOU FEEL YOU WERE BECOMING WELL KNOWN IN THE SCENE?
Desillusion: I don't know if we are particularly well known in the L.A. scene. I think Seattle would be a lot harder to build a scene because the music is so diversified there. Like I said, here you have themed events, where one night you have industrial and the next night metal. If you are in any of those genres you would say "Okay, it should be my goal to play any one of those events so that I am specifically playing to a crowd that listens to my kind of music." In Seattle, it's different; you have 150 different venues in the city. Some are just generic rock and some are pro venues. It is hard to bring a consolidated amount of a specific group of listeners to come see you. The only industrial radio that we have in Seattle is on Sundays from 9 to midnight. It's a great show and a lot of people listen to it, but obviously like I was saying you want to direct yourself towards that. You would tell Paul, the guy who has the show, play our stuff. That way he can announce that we are playing at this venue at this time. It's your job to keep in contact with those people to let them know when you are playing again.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: YOU CAN GET ON THE RADIO WITH THEM AND MAYBE DO A LITTLE INTERVIEW TO LET PEOPLE KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
Desillusion: Galen and I just did one before we left to promote the anniversary of our favorite club in Seattle, El Corazon.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: DO YOU FEEL THAT YOUR MUSIC NOT ONLY APPEALS TO THE GOTH AND INDUSTRIAL FANS BUT ALSO TO METAL FANS?
Desillusion: I would like to think so, I mean, we do. I like to use the word diversity in our music a lot because we have the more metal songs. We do have some electro stuff too. There will be just a shitload of people moshing over here and a whole bunch of people dancing over there. There's no "this song is too pussy for me to listen to because I have long hair and I wear leathers that haven't been washed in three years. I've got to go mosh and prove to everybody that I'm hardcore." Every song I think of ours, except for a couple, you can either mosh or dance to.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: LAST YEAR YOU RELEASED YOUR DEBUT EP THROUGH FAULTLINE ENTERTAINMENT CALLED BLASPHAESTETIC. THE NAME OF THE EP MEANS "BEAUTIFUL BLASPHEMY."
Desillusion: Desillusion has its own vocabulary dictionary. You can pick them up on EBay for $19.95. Not really, just kidding, maybe someday. Now, here, you know the meaning. We have the "rights" to use it.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: TRADEMARK!
Desillusion: Trademark!

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: EXPLAIN WHY YOU DECIDED TO CALL IT THAT.
Desillusion: I am a very blasphemous person. I don't know, the correlation between blasphemy and people accused of it is nothing more than going against the majority. It's not just narrowed down to a religious sense; it's going against the common belief. I don't think any of us here have really followed the common belief of people, so I find it to be a very beautiful thing to be blasphemous.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: YOU GUYS CAME DOWN HERE ON A TWO WEEK TOUR AND ENDED UP MEETING WITH YOUR PRODUCER POGO (MARILYN MANSON). I THINK THAT'S A REALLY GOOD FIT FOR YOU GUYS.
Desillusion: We think so; he is a very honorable man. We come in here into the studio with him and what he is listening to in a round about way is his music. He is an inspiration to me and everyone in the band. He is a person who we have strong ties to as far as what are influences were getting into music. He is very dedicated; when we record he will stay in here the entire time and give us feedback. He won't leave, go outside the studio to smoke and then come back to deal with it when it's all done. He will stay in here and make sure he has his input on it through the whole thing. Someone has to tell us to turn the suck volume down! (Laughing)

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: YOU ARE HERE IN THE STUDIO RECORDING RIGHT NOW. IS IT GOING TO BE A FULL LENGTH ALBUM OR AN EP?
Desillusion: It's a surprise.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: I LIKE SURPRISES.
Desillusion: Don't we all?

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: WHEN IS THE SURPRISE GOING TO COME OUT?
Desillusion: In about eight weeks minimum. We want to make sure it's done right, there's no reason to rush these things.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: YOU ARE ALSO WORKING WITH RAE DILEO.
Desillusion: Yeah, he did a lot of the mixing, specifically for the drum tracks on the last EP that we did and of course it came out sounding fantastic. He is a very awesome guy as well.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: IN YOUR BIO IT SAYS THAT YOUR SONGS REFLECT A MEASURED RAGE RATHER THAN UNCONTROLLED, ANGRY OUTBURSTS. EXPLAIN THE MEANING BEHIND THE TITLE TRACK.
Desillusion: There is no easy way to specifically tell people the meaning. What it might mean to me is different from what it might mean to Galen here. I think that is why so many people connect to our music because it has that certain level of being abstract. People can relate to it in all sorts of different ways. Reverting back to when I was describing the name of Blasphaestetic, it's a song that I sing about how I define the word. As far as uncontrollable rage, I'm glad he said that. He took the meaning into his own because I kept it abstract. Anybody who knows me at all knows that there is no level of measured rage in that song. Its balls to the wall, I'm going to tell you what I think.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON DOING TRADITIONAL STYLE VIDEOS FOR YOUR MUSIC?
Desillusion: Those are fantastic, I mean, when that all comes together as a group effort as a band to kind of tell the story of the song, it portrays what our thoughts and feelings of the song is to the fans. They can take their own meaning from that as well. The thing that sucks about that is none of our ideas would be allowed on network television. I would rather have it on YouTube and have it full in the message that I want to portray out there, rather than on MTV where they have basically changed everything up so much that the people that like the music video aren't even people we'd want as our fans anyway. I don't really feel one way or another, especially at a level where we are at right now we would be doing back flips if our music video was aired on MTV. Nevertheless, we don't want to start out our career selling out by doing things that make us unhappy and feeling like we didn't get our message across. We just did what we had to do to get more listeners.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: WHAT CAN SOMEONE EXPECT TO SEE WHEN THEY COME TO A SHOW? I KNOW YOU USE A LOT OF LIGHT DISPLAY.
Desillusion: We put on a great live show. Violence, we've had more than a couple people crack a couple skulls at our show. We've seen blood, but we are all very active and visual stage performers. When they come to our show, they are not just going to see us play our songs. That is one of the most boring things that you can see, is someone get up there and play a song. They are going to get a badass light show and they are going to get a killer performance from every single member of the band. They can mosh, some people come out to the show just so they can mosh. I think a lot of the reason that people do music is just to vent or to get some sort of some "measured rage" out of their system. The fans are there to see us for almost the exact same reason we are there to play for them. Of course, you have the entertainment aspects and we would never deny that. It is the "entertainment industry", but we are there for personal reasons. People that might connect to a song, they have a personal connection to that song and how they see fit to express that can be expressed better at a live show. It's a venting tool, so naturally we get a lot of violence at our shows. It's not violence like I'm going to beat you to the hospital, its violence like "Oh, I'm going to hit you, he's going to hit me back and we're friends." I'm only using you as a vessel to get out my frustration and afterwards we will be friends.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE SOMEONE HEAR YOUR CD FIRST, OR SEE A LIVE SHOW FIRST?
Desillusion: A live show, we've never lost or rubbed anybody the wrong way at a live show that didn't have a religious bias to begin with.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: AFTER A SHOW, YOU GO OUT AND HANG WITH THE FANS RIGHT?
Desillusion: No, we're dicks, we hang out backstage all the time. (Laughing) No, we are not proclaiming ourselves to be rock stars or anything of that nature. We go out, we are there to have a good time and we like to hear what people have to say about the show as long as they are not dicks about it.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR TOURING EXPERIENCE
Desillusion: Westin and Galen have been in the band together almost four years now. We are the original members and we have done some really cool shit. We used to tour every four to six months. We did a week long tour with Combichrist and Black Light Burns last February. It was one of the best experiences of my life. All of those guys are down to earth, really nice guys. We got feedback from every single one of those people, they actually checked out our show, which is almost unheard of from an opening act. The cool thing about that tour is they had to pre-screen the bands that went on. They actually cared whether the bands they played with were good or not. A lot of bands are like "Yeah, whatever" and the fucking crowd shows up, pays their money and they are covering their ears the whole time.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: PEOPLE CAN ALSO LOCATE YOU GUYS ON VAMPIREFREAKS.COM.
Desillusion: Yes and Myspace. Google! Just Google our band name.

SHAUNA O'DONNELL: THANKS SO MUCH FOR THE INTERVIEW.
Desillusion: Thank you very much!