Backstage Pass - ThermiT - Interview

ATP

For the record, who's answering the interview?

THERMIT

Jendras: Jendras Jarmuszkiewicz – the guitarist and someone who’s filling the role of „manager” of ThermiT. Everybody has its own set of responsibilities and that’s why the “thermit machine” works so well, despite being active for a short period.

ATP

What is your band's name? How did you come up with that name?

THERMIT

We’re called ThermiT. The nam is simple and easy to remember which is a big advantage. When we’ve been brainstorming about the name we’ve came across the name of pyrotechnical substance used to welding railroad tracks. In the Polish Wikipedia it says, that after its combustion it creates pure metals – we’ve been convinced by then and we knew that we ARE ThermiT. Haha.

ATP

So who's in the band and what instruments do you each play?

THERMIT

There’s five of us. Jendras and Młody play guitars exchanging with each other rhythm and solo parts. Przydep is the drummer, Fabian plays bass, and Trzeszczol does vocals. We’re also great at playing beer bottles with our mouths, but it’s normal in the world of heavy and thrash metal. Haha.

ATP

How would you describe your sound. What makes you unique?

THERMIT

It’s not easy to talk about your own band this way. Fortunately, there are reviewers that do it for us. We have a very fresh take on mixing heavy and thrash metal, sometimes even rock’n’roll. There’s no trace of copying or imitating bands from Big4 family. It’s probably because we’re not influenced by the bands from the 80’s but rather by the same bands were shaped by. We’re more into hard rock from 60’s and 70’s and that’s where our sound comes from. It would be really tiring to listen to and play only metal. Believe me. Haha.

ATP

What bands have influenced each of you?

THERMIT

Our inspirations are really vast. I, personally, love hard rock from the 70’s. My favorite band is undoubtedly Deep Purple (almost together with Rainbow), that’s how it was and will be. From the “weirder” part of music I like to listen to Django Reinhadt and other guitarists from Gypsy Jazz genre – it’s my favorite non-metal type of music. We all love Vivaldi (generally the classical music), but we’re usually not talking about it because it sounds kind of pretentious, like every douchebag guitarist who thinks he knows music and can play. Haha. As for the rest of the band, it depends. We’re laughing at the vocalist that he is a “music fanboy” because he listens to literally everything, from the classical music, though pop, metal, blues, ending with metalcore and other strange things. Fabian (the bassist) you can say that he has his Holy Trinity, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. But he also listens to other bands, mostly Scandinavian forest pandas and Motley Crue. Młody (second guitarist) is into similar things to me, he’s favorites was always Black Sabbath (which can be heard in his solos) and blues – he loves Steve Ray Vaughn. Przydep doesn’t listen to metal at all. He’s a jazzman. One, at the rehersal we proposed to play a cover of Master of Puppets, he didn’t know the song and said he has to listen to it at home before playing. Haha. ThermiT is like a melting pot, combining all our different tastes.

ATP

How experienced are you on the stage, a virgin or whore?

THERMIT

We are the stage whores for sure! In Poland alone, we’ve played almost 150 shows already. We’re the most active band in Poland when it comes to gigs and we didn’t even record LP (we’re slowly working on it). We’re stage animals and only there we’re showing 100% of our capabilities. There’s no point in talking, you have to see it live!

ATP

How would you describe your shows?

THERMIT

As I mentioned before, we’re stage animals. We love to get crazy, jump around, run, our vocalist is suspected of having ADHD. Haha. It’s the next thing that’s hard to talk about and it’s better to see it live. Those, who didn’t have a chance to see our gig we ensure that everything sounds and looks better than on the record. And those aren’t only our words, but those who’ve seen us live. Sometimes it may look that we have too much self-esteem but really, in the short period of our career we’ve played 150 gigs and we know what we talk about!

ATP

Tell us about your favorite show and why?

THERMIT

Maybe this one on which we’ve been sober? The thing is I don’t remember when was it… Haha. But seriously, it’s hard to distinguish one concert. We haven’t had a chance to play before thousands of people at some festival yet. We managed to play for a few hundreds of people, where I’m going with this is that it’s hard to talk about one concert in particular because all of them are a big pleasure for us and we like the equally.

ATP

Tell us about your worst show and why?

THERMIT

It was in Kraków in 2012. It was one the European festivals which qualifiers were held in the said city. From our city it 400 km to Kraków. The day before out trip our car broke down. We went to a rental place where we rented a car for quite a lot. We managed reach the destination. During the trip we got a ticket for violating No Entry sing and then for not having a parking pass. What’s more, the eliminations results, we lost and organizers didn’t even give us back the money for the trip. Budget in the gas, car rental, food, etc., and you’ll see how much money we’ve spent. Haha.

ATP

Tell Us About Your Dream Show, who you'd like to play with and where?

THERMIT

It may sound perversely but our dream show is the one where we are the headliner and we play before a full stadium of people. Is it possible in the future? He who’s not shooting for the stars won’t ever reach them.

ATP

Do you have a street team and how can you join?

THERMIT

Do you mean fans? We have quite a lot of them (majority from Poland) and it’s really devoted group. As an example we’ve got a little anecdote. At some competition we were put in a reserve group (which meant that to play in the competition some other band from the main group had to drop out) and people started to flood the organizers’ FB page with comment that if ThermiT won’t get in they’re gonna come for the organizers with pitchforks. The next day, we were invited to play a competition concert and we won the audience prize. The easiest way to join us is to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, etc..

ATP

Do you have a record label and if not are you looking for one?

THERMIT

At the moment we don’t have any contract signed. We sent “Encephalopathy” to some publishers in May and we’re yet to hear back from them. Of course we had some propositions from small publishers but the terms were, lightly put, unsatisfactory. We know a bit about marketing and we can promote ourselves better than a small label. We aim higher, we count on that someone will cotton to us soon. Have you head our material, what do you think? Haha.

ATP

What are your plans for the future, in a year, 5 years?

THERMIT

We’re slowly working on recording our new LP. Also, we’re preparing a tour in Poland as well as abroad. These are our two main goals – if we manage to achieve one of them quickly the rest’s gonna be easy. We’ll see.

ATP

Finally, do have any words on what Arm The Pit means to you?

THERMIT

Arm The Pit is another great place to promote our music. I hope you like what we’re doing and everyone who’s gonna read this interview will want to listen to us as well. Check out our sites and GET PSYCHED!
http://www.facebook.com/ThermiT
http://www.twitter.com/ThermiTmetal
http://www.youtube.com/ThermiTofficial
http://www.thermitmetal.com