Kekal

Jeff: To be honest, I wasn't aware of the whole dubstep hype thing until about year 2010, after I finished working the material for "8" album.. I personally dig dub music, you know what I mean, the music built after reggae as the main roots.. As far as dubstep is concerned, it has progressed, or strayed far beyond dub and 2-step music as it was originally came from.. It's the same to me as what nu-metal or metalcore does to heavy metal.. It doesn't feel rooted enough, thus it doesn't feel strong enough.. I wrote the song "Tabula Rasa" with the classic dub/reggae kind of groove in the beginning, and it can be easily converted into dubstep with adding the typical dubstep beat, wobbled bass and some breaks and chops, as I actually did that on the alternate remix version.. but then again, what's the point if it's just to show you the same beat and the same kind of wobbled bass, just to make it a legit dubstep..? At the end of the day, all the things you do is just music.. And most importantly if you know what's your main roots, and then explore or develop your own style, you'll do good, no need to follow the hype..

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Jeff: Good question! Thanks for asking that.. Well, I don't see Kekal as underrated.. I think 'under-appreciated' is a more suitable term, and the other related term is probably 'over-looked'.. There are multiple factors that made Kekal to become less known than your average band.. I can give you three right now.. First, it's because the kind of music we do, that most would see it as 'weird' or 'too-much'.. I mean take this for example, a Canadian band Voivod - they could have been as big as Slayer, they were already in the scene since around the same time Metallica and Slayer started, but they never got popular enough to reach the mainstream status and selling millions of records, even though Jason Newsted from Metallica's fame stepped in later on, they couldn't get a commercial success from that.. They are many bands like that in this world..

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The 2nd factor is because Kekal has always been a DIY (do-it-yourself) band since the beginning.. Even though we have albums released by record labels, they don't give us the band contract - we don't want to, and they don't own our recording masters.. What we do is just through licensing, and the license is usually valid for only about 4 or 5 years per album.. Labels won't spend too much to promote Kekal like when they promote a band signed to them for 2 or 3 albums, for sure.. That's the main difference..

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Third factor, we don't tour.. We did a little in the past, but now we don't play any concert at all.. Lots of people who would probably like the music of Kekal may get Kekal outside of their radar because many people would discover a band through live concerts.. I still get messages like "how come only recently I discovered Kekal right now, after they released 8 or 9 albums?"

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Back in the day, before the digital download thing came about, we needed physical media to store the music, so we released CDs and cassette tapes, and that requires money to manufacture and print.. also we need distributors and mail-order merchants.. CDs and tapes are sold basically to cover expenses.. Right now things have moved to digital downloads, so for digital downloads we actually prefer to give away some of our important albums for free (well, not all albums, because we still need to pay for the bandwidth/data-traffic).. This is good for a do-it-yourself independent band like Kekal, because we get almost no promotional support for the albums, so giving away some of the albums for free can be considered as a way to promote music, but direct to potential listeners.. I mean you don't need to read reviews from media to consider if you want to buy the album or not, just download it for free and listen to it, and if you like it, maybe you'll be interested to buy the CD version too.. if not, you won't lose any money from the free download, just delete the files or send them to your friend.. pretty convenient..

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