Kekal

Jeff: That was long time ago, but I remember that I didn't listen to any of the 2nd-wave black metal bands (90's Norwegian bands) aside from Darkthrone when Kekal started to shape the music in 1995 - 1996.. Some of the very early Kekal songs had riffs written even before 1995.. I was in a high-school band called Obliteration in 1990, where the 'influences' were so-called "1st wave black metal", 80's bands like Hellhammer/Celtic Frost, early Sodom, early Bathory, early Sepultura, Bulldozer, etc. I didn't call them black metal at that time but we picked them as 'influences' because we couldn't play complex metal stuff, so the only songs we could play were stuffs like those bands, simple and easy to play by beginners - lots of tremolo picking and punk-ish riffs.. But the style of early Kekal was developed from my first band and I even borrowed my riffs from Obliteration on Kekal songs too.. When Kekal started in 1995, we mixed that early Bathory & Hellhammer/Celtic Frost influences with stuff from Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, so that's when the melody & classic metal riffs started to blend into the music.. and of course Leo was in a Metallica & Megadeth cover band before he joined Kekal in 1996, he brought the mainstream thrash metal influences to Kekal as well..

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It was funny, because people at that time, when Kekal released the 1st album "Beyond The Glimpse of Dreams", compared Kekal with Cradle of Filth, and many reviews accused us as being a CoF clone.. Actually none of us listened to anything from Cradle of Filth before the album was released.. But later on, I read the Cradle of Filth interview in a magazine, and they said that Bathory and Iron Maiden.. So Kekal actually shared the same influences with Cradle of Filth, in which coincidentally made people relate both bands..

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We started to listen to 90's black metal & melodic death metal bands only during songwriting & recording "Embrace The Dead" in late 1998, because people kept labeling Kekal being a "black metal" band, but I personally dislike the style of "Embrace The Dead" for that reason.. Too trendy and it doesn't have a strong character as Kekal..

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Levi: Unfortunately no. I don't even attend any international concerts anymore. I spend my time mostly in office and my coffee life. I still listen to metal and stuff tho..it's just the time and my priority that at this moment holds me back from doing actively in music or getting in touch with the scene.

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Jeff: I live in Canada now, so I will tell just before 2006.. Back then, I was somewhat involved, although more passively, in the local/regional music scene, and yes back in the mid 90's to early 2000's cassette tapes were THE most important tool for underground bands over there to release the demos and full-length albums, and tape trading was rampant.. But I guess from around 2005, when internet started to switch into hi-speed, it was gradually being replaced by digital file sharing, and bigger bands have released CDs too.. I lost in touch with the Indonesian metal scene when I moved to Canada in 2006, but I believe cassette tape is no longer popular right now.. If you're interested with Indonesian bands you can browse on The Metal Archives, there are plenty of bands there..

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Jeff: I list some that I like: Autechre, Amon Tobin, Squarepusher, Merzbow, Apparat, Recoil, Boards of Canada, Scorn, Pan Sonic, Venetian Snares, Ryoji Ikeda, etc..... Electronic music spawned considerably larger & more complex sub-genres than metal.. Although a bigger chunk of them fall within the dance music category, it may take years to look for and discover artists you like from the "non-dance" side of electronic music.. I personally started my search from two distinct 'doors', which was hip-hop/trip-hop/dub on one end, and the harsher industrial/noise/experimental on the other end, but to my surprise I ended up with pretty much the same musicians towards the end.. This makes a statement that genre really doesn't matter, as long as you keep searching you'll discover great music along the way..

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Jeff: First of all, thank you for discovering Kekal! Hope you will continue to listen & enjoy the music of Kekal for so many years in the future.. There are 4 albums currently free to download at www.kekal.org/download

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The roots of Kekal, from the early years of the band (1995 - 2000) was simply called "extreme metal", and people can hear it as both "black metal" and "death metal", but even then, Kekal couldn't be put right into few sub-genres, as the music spans beyond those categorizations..

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Since probably the 3rd album ("The Painful Experience", 2001), we no longer use genres or sub-genres to categorize the music of Kekal, we prefer to call it just "honest music".. Those categorizations came from our record labels, because they had to promote Kekal somewhere in the market segment - they needed to sell the albums to potential listeners, and that's when the word "progressive metal", "progressive black metal" and "avant-garde metal" came out.. And then since 2007 forward, there is very little to no direct reference to the extreme metal at all, so then the "black metal" term was gradually taken down and replaced by the word "electronic" because we utilize more electronic elements, up to these days..

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Now, by umbrella-term, I would say Kekal's music is somewhere between heavy metal and experimental electronic..

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Jeff: Well.. interesting you would ask that.. I don't quite recall exactly when I was starting to dig into hip-hop, but I think it started somewhere in the late 90's, when I was starting to explore other music as well, not just metal and rock.. I discovered a band called Massive Attack with the album "Mezzanine", I think that was because of songs with Cocteau Twins singer were played somewhere, maybe on radio or TV (both me and Levi already dig Cocteau Twins many years before), then I quickly got into their music and from there I started to explore more into trip-hop, hip-hop, and also reggae, especially Horace Andy, because he sang on the album as well.. For hip-hop I mostly love the beat, especially the newer, slower, deep-bass groovy stuff, but can't really get too much into the rap portion of that..

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Jeff: Well, I used to dig them quite a bit long time ago, in the mid 90's when I was still active in the underground tape trading and Kekal was in the middle of recording demos.. Their debut album was very interesting actually, no one did music quite like them, not in Asia, not in Europe.. The last album I heard from them was "Imaginary Sonicscape" in 2001 or 2002, which I think is an excellent album.. I haven't listened to them again for more than 7 years, since I moved here to Canada, so I haven't heard all their newer stuff.. But one thing I can remember, Sigh has always been a keyboard/piano/synth-driven band, so it's different with Kekal that is guitar-driven.. Even though both utilize guitars and synthesizers, but the songwriting that starts from guitar and from keyboard makes a huge difference.. Of course, people may put both bands into one box based on music style, it's understandable, but to me it's more like if you compare bands like, say, ELP and King Crimson - both can be put loosely into one box and call them progressive rock, but they are very different animals..

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Jeff: There are 2 Kekal albums that I would consider as 'the most difficult', or the most challenging to record: "Embrace The Dead" (1999) and "Audible Minority" (2008).. It's not because they are very technically demanding or because we wanted to create something above our own capabilities, but more because of the situations..

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"Embrace The Dead", to me, is just another classic example of a new band in the late 90's with no money trying to record a self-produced album, independently.. It was a year before we actually used our computer to record the music digitally, so we had to rent a studio to record the album using analog tape.. Here I've shared the recording experience on the liner note of the album re-issue, if you're interested: http://kekal.bandcamp.com/album/embrace-the-dead-2

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"Audible Minority" was the first Kekal album recorded and written entirely in Canada, all by myself.. The recording process started in September 2006, before "The Habit of Fire" album was released.. I took a 1-year audio-engineering college back in Toronto, so the good amount of songs on the album - I think half of the album - were written and recorded as school assignments.. I was learning Pro Tools and Logic Pro, and recorded most of the songs in the school's 4 studios; 3 were fully-functioning studios with 24-channel mixing decks, one of them also with 16-track analog tape machine, and one was just a small DAW-based room that students use for editing or for 'recording' MIDI.. What made recording and mixing process really difficult was because I had to share the 4 studios with other students.. So I had too book whichever studio available at that moment, first-come-first-serve, to finish the stuff.. Moving the same session between these 4 studios wasn't that easy because they had different studio monitors, and each pair of them behave differently, not to mention different outboard modules, also the studio acoustics - some were more echoey than the other, so I didn't have reference of the 'real' sound at all - the last studio that I ended up mixing was the only thing I had to believe.. Another challenge from that recording session was because I didn't own a Mac laptop - (in fact I've never owned any Apple brand in my life, but that's just my quirky attitude), I had my laptop PC running Cakewalk Sonar & Sony Acid as the main DAW programs, and the studios were running Mac OS X with Pro Tools and Logic Pro, of course.. So it was impossible to bring the recorded sessions right into my laptop.. The only stuff I was able to bring back and forth between the studios and my laptop was the pre-production files done with a program called Reason, but mostly MIDI stuff for electronic sounds.. Both the studios and I used that.. I only used my laptop's DAW when recording the last 3 songs for the album after finishing the school, and then for the mastering.. It was very technically challenging..

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