Pete Bejarano of KDST – interview by rinaldo
A offering back to Metal, for all the uncompromising music and the people who help keep it alive In the ranks of Extreme Metal, there some who go the extra mile. Some become obsessed with total allegiance, and others find better exploits for there energies. Out of a chance encounter with an unfamiliar face donning an Emperor shirt, I met Pete Bejarano, the kind of person who brings people deeper into metal’s unexplored nether regions. Besides his involvement with Thrones Of Scorn, a Death Metal turn Black Metal band, he also puts on an Extreme Metal show at UCSD’s student run radio station KSDT. As some of the explorations in the dark musical arts pour out over the Old Student Center, people tend to run for cover. Yet, for my self, as newly emerging metal head, Pete proves to be an endless source of scene history and band knowledge.
Rinaldo: What inspired you to come do a radio show like this?
Pete: It’s kind of a weird coincidence, I was wearing an Emperor shirt, it seems like I always meet people when I wear my Emperor shirt. I was standing in line for some free tickets and a random student came up to me who introduced her self as Leila. She told me that she was the host of a metal show. I ended up co-hosting. By the time she graduated, I had pretty much taken over the show. And because of the band I’m in, I know a lot of people from a lot of bands. Making me the most inside person around here.
R: What’s it like doing this show when most of your audience isn’t even on the same continent? You told me that most of the people you get emails from are in Australia or Europe.
P: Its definitely weird, and at times depressing. Like when I sit in the DJ booth and realize that there is just hoards and hoards of people going to McDonalds to buy Britney Spears CD’s. I know that they are definitely in a whole different culture, a whole different place then where we’re at. And I know that the metal scene is so extremely underground, that its practically non-existent. So I do this show and I get no feed back live, no one calls in to request. When I do get them, its at odd hours of the night through email, because they are in other countries. I do get some requests from friends in the scene, up in Riverside and LA., but as far as San Diego goes, I’m pretty much a stranger, so I guess that’s why its it kind of lonely at times. I keep meeting people though; and if I keep wearing my Emperor shirt something will happen.
R: Yet you keep doing this, what do you want to accomplish?
P: You know, honestly, I really don’t want to accomplish anything. I would seriously be doing the same thing I am here as I would be if I wasn’t here volunteering my time and being a DJ. In fact I used to make fake radio shows to play in my car, (laughs) I would host them with my friends. We’d be stupid in the middle of the night, drunk or not, and just doing shows. So I’d be doing this wether I was here or not, I just love listening to metal. I’ve been in the scene for a couple of years now, so I’m not true by any standard. I do listen to jazz, a lot of classical, even some pop here and there. So I’m not like some old-school metal head who bought the demo tape of Mayhem when Dead was still singing or anything like that. I do listen to quality metal and I’m interested in putting on a show because I used to be a big fan of KSPC in Clairmont. There was a show up there, this guy Ray Spenosa, or Spenosa Ray depending on who you asked, that did a metal show like mine. Extremely underground, quality black and death metal that other shows that wouldn’t play. There would be one guy who lived on a hill way far away from where the station would broadcast, that could sort of receive. He would tape those shows [Ray’s], and those taps would circulate for years, and that was how we found out about new bands. That was the only way to hear about new metal bands. You know, there is no forum for that. There are very few ëZines, and ëZines that are around, very few are in to the style that I’m in to. As far as web pages, there are a few with some good MP3’s, but unless you have a high speed connection, you get screwed that way. So tapes circulating of metal shows is the way to expose new metal bands. You know I’ve got my own band that I shamelessly plug.
R: And what band is that?
P: Thrones of Scorn, we’ve been around for the past three years. Started in ‘97, we were originally pretty Death-y. We were death metal with keyboards. Kind of like From the Depths, that was the closest thing to us. We were getting pretty big playing the LA scene, had a decent response and were tight with that whole group. Pretty much everyone in the band had wanted to go black metal for a while. We were kind of scared to do it because there wasn’t anyone who was doing that. We had keyboards, so we thought, might as well. We had a couple of member changes. I was actually playing bass at this point but switched to keyboards and we got a new bassist and guitarist. There was a transition period where we were still playing shows, and got a huge response as a black/death band. We decided to throw away all our old songs, and cut all our shows. We’re waiting till we have more songs to release a split EP with Stormbringer, a quality black metal local group.
R: It seems like after the early and mid nineties, because death metal started to stagnate over Cannibal Corpse, that when black metal came on to the scene, bands started to incorporate the sound rather quickly. Almost in a backlash, a lot of groups needed a new direction, and it created a need to deal with both parts.
P: Which is why I think you see a lot of really terrible black/death bands out there that try and bridge the gap that aren’t taking a stance. The music just suffers. Finding your place out here in America is definitely a different thing in black metal anyway, because a lot of people insist that black metal can only be written by Scandinavian people who have a strong toutonic, heathen Aryan tradition or whatever. I think there is something about black metal musically that appeals, is something fresh, something new. It’s the reason that Nile [check out “Black Seeds of Vengeance” and bow down] gets a lot more support then other average metal bands. Their tapping into a different musical approach: the perfect fourth scale, the Olin scales, the modal approach, the harmonies that they are using are musically advanced. In a way they sound a little more, subconsciously I guess, ‘ancient’, they resonate with something. I don’t know I’m talking out of my ass here, something deep within us, that we respond to. If you listen carefully to the music, those harmonies and that style of writing, is what Slayer was tapping into way back in the day, and what set Morbid Angel apart as being more melodic band from other more brutal death contemporaries. So anyone who was leaning towards that more melodic side, as soon as we heard black metal, it was like, “This is it. This is where we want to go.”
R: Does the racism of some black metal and over all metal scene present a problem for you as a fan?
P: You know what? As for the whole metal thing, I do consider myself to some degree an anti-Christian or a non-Christian, but I’m not in any way Satanic. And of course not being white I can’t be about ‘white power, white pride’. I always listened to music for music sake. If there is any message behind that, what ever the band wants to do with it, that’s fine. I’m listening to them because of the music, I could care less in all honesty. I love a lot of bands that are blatantly against my race, and I don’t care, I am just listening to the music.
R: You were talking about not getting tied down and it seems that the roots of metal were a very iconoclastic removal from labels and insetting in something you enjoy. The underground/hard-core movement seems to be that if you have to many fans, your not metal anymore. If too many people are listening to it, you’re not underground anymore. It seems like that could really threaten the metal scene.
P: I think its a paradox. It threatens to destroy it, and it also keeps it going. Every time a band gets established, and starts selling a lot of CD’s, then people are going say “those guys are sell-outs, lets pick up our own instruments and make it even more extreme.” It’s this constant exponential growth of extreme that is jut going to keep going. I remember listening to Cannibal and Deicide back in the day, of course the watershed year, 1992. What album didn’t come out then that wasn’t influential? And thinking that the beat blasts are the fastest ever, is no way you could get faster. And now you listen to Flo from Cryptosy, and bands like Gorgasm, Last Days Of Humanity, and some of the grind-blast, its ten million times faster. I think there are going to be little things that will make the scene more extreme. You know some bands going to come out with something, everybody’s going to copy it, it will get popular, and then some other little band will find something else. It’ll just be again, and again, and again you’ll see the effect of people extremifying the extreme scene, for lack of a better term.
R: What do you see as the future of metal? A lot of bands are flirting with black metal and gothic tinged sounds. Do you think these and the underground scenes like Doom metal and Goth metal have a future?
P: Pretty much definitely, I think Goth metal will always be a little more popular than the extreme screaming of really, really, really, sonic focused aural hatred that is extreme black and death metal. There are a few that I personally really like, specifically Opeth, they blow me away, they are amazing musicians, and bands like Catatonia, but there’s always going to be a decent market for those sorts of music as long as gothic industrial are around, and I don’t see them dying anytime soon. So there is always going to be that cross-over, because the scenes, as much as both sides don’t like to admit it, do share a lot in common. The aesthetic of both, is to be dark and to explore the evil dark sides of the psyche and the personality. One is little more romantic, and one is a little more on the hateful side, but I really think that those doom metal bands are definitely not going to die out. I see more doom these days then extreme metal. There is hope for metal, extreme metal anyway. Everybody’s always saying “a couple years ago, that was the time when the scene was extreme, and now its weakening, everybody’s selling out.” That’s an overstatement, if not completely wrong. There is a new hope for death metal, I’ve been talking to a lot of mates about this, and we think there is new hope for death metal, because death has been pretty repetitive lately, but there are a couple of new bands, specifically Nile, who are blowing open the doors for this new black metal ideology with a definite death metal core. All kinds of creativity everywhere, taping into a different kind of non-satanic-but-non-Christian-heathen image that’s really taking off. Especially those natural harmonic minor scales, really influencing the sounds. Also, Anasarcha(?), form Germany, and Form the Depths. Those bands are taking death metal in a new direction with out making it black metal. There are a lot of black/death cross overs that we’re seeing right now, but I think death metal will always be around like that. And black metal keeps amazing me with every new release for a lot of underground creative bands, like Abigor, Diabolical Masquerade, that are just taking it to even crazier weirder places. Where its just really synth and orchestral orientated, and I’m actually pretty excited about that. Then there are bands like mine, Thrones Of Scorn, who trying to be really brutal black metal, that brings in a slight tinge a death, but is mostly taking straight ahead black metal in a new. Trying to push the boundaries, do something that no one else has done. As long as people are doing that, I don’t think metal has any fear of going away.
R: It seems like every couple of years metal gets stamped as dead.
P: People keep saying the same thing about rock!
R: Which makes it bad to say metal is completely different from the rest of rock music in a fundamental way.
P: You accent on the 2 and the 4, and the beat. Its the same style of music, I don’t care, using the same instruments, two guitars, a bass, a singer and drums. And although we’ve got the whole synth thing going, the same thing happened with new wave rock in the 80’s. People were saying, ìthis is something different, this isn’t rock.
R: How does some one go about getting more in to the metal scene? To find out about new bands. If you look to the Internet there are just so many that it’s overwhelming.
P: That’s a really good question, and I don’t think I have an answer for that. Personally, I got lucky because I was in another project with my current drummer which was a kind of Rage Against The Machine type thing. We did metal accompaniment for a Rap project, when I got offered a position as a bassits for Thrones. So I checked it out, it was something I had never heard before. Completely different. I liked it but I was confused by it. So I just started hangin’ out with the band and getting recommendations from them. So I would get in to it that way, but it seems like there are always certain bench mark bands that will lead you to other ones. It seems like everyone gets in to black metal through Dissection and Emperor, the two big bands. Everyone gets in to death metal through Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Morbid Angel. Those are the three bands that lead you down that path. Once you get more underground, more extreme then those introductory bands, you get inundated with flow from everywhere. You just have to pick through it, it takes some dedication, and lots of time. But if your excited by it, and like the sounds, then I’m pretty sure you’re not going to give up. You’re eventually going to find something that clicks with you. Its out there. It may be extremely underground. I’m only just now finding bands that can say I 100% want to hear. It was always real close. Emperor had great synth and an awesome brutality, but there is something missing. So eventually you find bands that are more what you like. Marduk, Dark Funeral, Sytherial, In Battle, bands that are way out there and brutal. Some combination of that has to be out there, and if not, heck, I’ll make it.
Pete’s Metal Show is on KSDT Thursday’s 4pm-6pm, you can listen in on your radio if you are on UCSD’s campus, and practically no where else. Though Time Warner Cable music choice does carry. You can see and hear the broadcast on channel 18 if you live on campus.
The most practical of methods for listening in is via webradio.com and realaudio, check out http://scw.ucsd.edu/ksdt/livebroad.html for links. Pete would love a request: 619-534-KSDT tel: 619-534-3673 or fax: 619-534-0480.
