This is the biggest revelation in STONER METAL style!!! An
american band with marvelous sound, mixing prog/grunge/heavy and psycodelic power with
bluesy feelings. Krepuskulum interviewed Daniel Bukszpan, guitar/vocals and band leader.
SLOW HORSE
This is the biggest revelation in STONER METAL style!!! An
american band with marvelous sound, mixing prog/grunge/heavy and psycodelic power with
bluesy feelings. Krepuskulum interviewed Daniel Bukszpan, guitar/vocals and band leader.
KREPUSKULUM: What do you think of the label "stoner metal"? Does it define your sound?
Dan Bukszpan: I guess so. "Stoner Metal" is as good a label as anything else. It doesn't really make any difference to me what people want to call it. In the last interview I did, they asked me if I thought we were a "doom metal" band, and that's fine too. I usually like to call it "Oppressively Negative Dinosaur Sludge Rock", but that's probably too long for anyone to remember. The only problem though is that I don't want anyone misled by that label into thinking we sound like Fu Manchu, because we don't. At all. Anyone looking for that will not find it in Slow Horse. They will be disappointed. They will feel ripped off.
What does the name Slow Horse mean for you?
It doesn't really have any meaning. It was the product of one of those endless band disagreements about what the name is going to be. Me and the first drummer were trying to figure out a name for the band and it took us literally two weeks of arguing about it before we both agreed we wanted the word "Horse" to be involved in it somehow. We would have just stopped with "Horse" but we found out there was already a band called that, so we needed some kind of descriptive adjective, and that led to another week of fighting about it. Eventually we got down to either Slow Horse, which I liked, or Plow Horse, which he liked. I wouldn't budge, I wouldn't compromise my one fucking letter! And he eventually lost interest, so I got my way by default I guess. In any case, about a year ago a friend of mine suggested "Blow Whores", which is a hundred times better in my opinion, but by then it was too late. Oh well…
Your voice is full of feeling and you manage to move from sweetness to fury very well. Did you have some special voice training?
Thank you. I never had any training or anything like that, no. I just try to sing naturally, and be expressive in the way I think the music and lyrics call for. I actually smoke cigarettes, which is certainly terrible for my voice. But I just read the other day that my idol, the heavy metal vocal god Ronnie James Dio, used to smoke three or four packs of cigarettes a day, which is totally unbelievable to me. Actually now that I think about it, there have been a lot of singers who you would think would take better care of their voices but who smoke cigarettes. Freddie Mercury, Ian Gillan. That's amazing to me. I don't even see how that's possible.
" When Are You Coming Home?" is the best music of your debut CD;it overflows with feeling and has a "Bluesy" structure. Can you tell us what it's about? Is it true that the song is about a girlfriend that left you??
Yes, that's what I wrote it about. I had been living with my girlfriend for over four years. I was totally head over heels in love with her, I thought I wanted to marry her. She kind of grew apart from me I guess, and when she moved out I was absolutely devastated. I felt like someone had died. I really experienced her leaving in that way too, the same way you would deal with the loss of someone who had died in a car accident or something. I mean, it was definitely coming for a while but it was still a huge shock to me when it happened. I ended up staying in the apartment we had lived in together for six more months after she left. Basically on some level I didn't believe she was gone, and I was waiting for her to come back. It was kind of like living in a haunted house, to use a very tired cliché.
On the back cover of the CD is a picture from Kubrick's "The Shining". Are you a fan of the film director? What do you think about his last movie??
Stanley Kubrick is absolutely, hands down, my favorite director. I didn't see all of his movies though, including his last one, "Eyes Wide Shut". From what I understand, he never finished it, despite what the studio said, and everyone I know who saw it said it seemed sort of unresolved, like he hadn't yet trimmed all the fat off of it. Besides, he died before it was finished, and that, combined with the movie studio digitally inserting stuff to block the naked bodies… it's all just too depressing.
What are the ten best albums in history, in your opinion? Why?
Oh God! I could never ever say what the best ones are. I can list my favorites, though, or the ones that were the most significant for me. I also can't just list ten either. At a minimum, I have to list 25. So in no particular order, these are the albums that either were a big influence on me, or I just listen to relentlessly:
Did SLOW HORSE sign with a label? When you will release the next album?
Freebird Records in the Netherlands distributes the CD throughout Europe. In North and South America, it's the responsibility of Smoking in Bed Records. Actually, I'll let you in on a little secret: I am the Chief Executive Officer of Smoking in Bed Records, and the World Headquarters of Smoking in Bed Records is located in the corner of my apartment where the computer, stamps, envelopes, and boxes of CD's are. Right now I couldn't really say when we're going to release the next album; we only released this one three months ago. And right now I'm auditioning new members, thank God. But I hope it will be soon. I mean, if it was up to me I'd release a new record every two weeks. But hopefully there will be something soon. And the bright side of not having a label to bankroll it is that we can release whatever we make whenever we want to. Anybody can. If you have $2000 and a computer you can release your own album, and you don't even need those assholes in the music industry.
CONTACTS: dbukszpan@mindspring.com