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(THAT FUCKING SOLO THOUGH)
Waves of light shooting through night
The void destroyed
Eons of terror emerge from the realms to deploy
Big bang, life and death collide at infinite reaches
Spawned from eternity, we are the creatures of void
The cosmos, a flicker of the past
The cosmos, infinity at last
Arise into the night
Invasion of the twilight
Doomingly slow, destruction will follow
The balance is tipping, evil is falling low
A rippling in time as a new dawn unwinds
A galactic species takes off and leaves from its confines
The cosmos, a flicker of the past
The cosmos, infinity at last
Arise into the night
Invasion of the twilight
The time has come, the end is near
For anything that is not us
VEKTOR Issues Statement On Abuse Allegations And Being Dropped From A Label
VEKTOR Issues Statement On Abuse Allegations And Being Dropped From A Label
Earlier this month, VEKTOR was signed by Century Media Records and quickly dropped from the label in the same week due to past allegations of assault by frontman David DiSanto.
“Effective immediately, Century Media has decided to part ways with VEKTOR,” wrote Century Media on their Facebook page on September 16.
Now, DiSanto has issued a lengthy statement sharing his side of the story.
He said…
Violent Video Of VEKTOR Frontman Assaulting His Wife Has Surfaced
Violent Video Of VEKTOR Frontman Assaulting His Wife Has Surfaced
**Warning: this post contains violent depictions of domestic abuse.**
Katy DiSanto, the wife of VEKTOR vocalist/guitarist David DiSanto, has posted a minute-long video in her Instagram she filmed with her cell phone that shows David picking her up and throwing her, loudly verbally berating her and throwing a pillow at her face while she quietly cries.
is the third album by band Vektor, released on May 6. The album's lyrics are a sci-fi story about an astronaut finding the key to immortality and using it to gain vast political and financial power, eventually purposefully making himself mortal again following an existential crisis.
Maybe the best thing about Vektor are the vocals, Here we have a thrash metal band with all the right influence, all the right lyrics, For any who doubt the genre's viability in the 21st century, this is another album that begs you to GUESS AGAIN. If you enjoy riffs and technicality with your thrash or death, you owe it to yourself to give this is a listen.
David DiSanto Erik Nelson Frank Chin Blake Anderson
After nearly 5 long years, Philadelphia-based progressive sci-fi metallers Vektor are back with their third studio album entitled, ‘Terminal Redux’. Both embracing and expanding upon the intricate layers of the preceding albums, ‘Black Future’ and ‘Outer Isolation’, the band deliver the album that we all knew they were capable of. ‘Terminal Redux’ is Vektor’s first concept album, telling the story of a test subject and his rise to power within the all-controlling Cygnus Regime. In the wake of the release, Vektor has received widespread acclaim and praise for releasing one this year’s finest records.… We talk to David DiSanto about forming a concept album, having a deep connection with nature and Star Wars…
TSH: With each passing record you’ve mentioned the sound will always be typically Vektor but at the same time marking an important progression. How would you sum up the progression with ‘Terminal Redux’?
David: Well, we’ve taken everything we’ve done up to this point, the thrash elements, the prog elements, the black metal elements, the clean interludes, the epic space journeys, and we’ve turned everything up to 11, Ha! ‘Terminal Redux’ is Vektor on hyperdrive. I think the biggest progression was that it was a concept-driven record. We’ve always been a philosophical band as far as our lyrics are concerned, but this album has deeper meanings and more involved, cohesive, and meaningful song structures than our previous albums. We’ve progressed on a few levels, but the concept and storyline behind the music definitely pushed me to write a more powerful album and perhaps a more emotional album.
TSH: With this record you were able to properly demo the songs…
David: I put so much thought into this album, that it wasn’t very beneficial as far as changing any of the songs or anything after we demoed them. In fact, we actually used a lot of the “demo” takes for the final album. The real benefit of demoing everything prior was that it was much more relaxed and there wasn’t any pressure. We could enjoy a few beers while we were tracking because they were just “demo” takes, haha! We were able to track the guitars and bass as direct signals into Erik’s laptop for the demoing process, so we didn’t spend any money or time in the studio doing that. The really cool part was that Byron, from Villain Recording, was able to take our raw digital signals from Erik’s laptop and re-amp them through actual amplifiers. We just wouldn’t have had enough money to make this album in an old-fashioned studio. We had half the budget from our previous albums for this, and this album was twice as big. In that sense, it was extremely beneficial to do things the way we did.
TSH: The record is also your first full concept album. Can you elaborate further on the main protagonist’s ultimate goal to restore balance within the galaxy by controlling the ebb and flow of life and death…
David: The protagonist sees life and death as a hindrance to his ultimate goal. He wants to create a utopian existence within the galaxy, but his plans are so grand in scope that he wouldn’t be able to achieve what he wants in a lifetime. So, he uses the hindrance to his advantage. By extending the lives of those he wants in his society and by ending the lives of those who don’t fit within his plan, he’s able to mold the galactic population to his will. I think humans have it in their heads that they need to control the world around them. It’s based on our survival skills gained from the countless generations before us. The ones that could control their environment to benefit themselves were able to survive and pass on their genes. So there is this skewed perception, a relic, in our heads that humans can achieve peace and balance through control. It’s just not true. There is nothing more unnatural than forcing nature to work for us. Control creates a huge void that tips the scales of balance. In the end of ‘Terminal Redux’, true cosmic balance could only be achieved by destroying the Cygnus Terminal and everything it stood for.
TSH: You started doing a lot of research about the myths and legends behind Cygnus. What does the Cygnus regime entail to you as a physical, real space regime?
David: Cygnus, the constellation, was thought of as a swan on top of a stellar tree. Some people thought the tree was made up of souls and Cygnus was the ruler of those souls. Now we know that tree is actually billions of stars in a spiral arm of our galaxy. But, the Cygnus Regime can be viewed as a ruler of souls. They dictate whether people live or die. They decide who is fit to live in their society. This whole scenario gets amplified once the protagonist takes over the Regime.
TSH: What sort of consistency were you looking to factor in with your guitar playing?
David: I wanted it to be extremely tight and concise while not sounding robotic or overproduced. I’ve always been a fan of music that breathes. It’s a balancing act, but music has more soul when it sounds like a human played it. I think a lot of newer bands are going overboard with quantizing their music. We don’t do that. We just try to get good takes.
TSH: As you’ve taken elements of what you’ve done before and expanded upon them, do you feel this allowed the new album to be more fluid and cohesive?
David: Yeah. I think the biggest thing that helped open up my writing was forgetting about all my preconceptions of what thrash could be or what our own sound could be. One of the biggest breakthroughs for me as a writer was being more open minded about using major chords in the songs. That’s something I used to stay away from for the most part. By opening that door, I was able to convey the full spectrum of the story in ‘Terminal Redux’. I’ve heard some people say that because this album was a concept, it limited our creativity. I don’t think that could be further from the truth. The concept and story made it possible to take our sound into much more diverse directions than I might be comfortable doing otherwise. I really doubt I would’ve written anything similar to ‘Collapse’ or ‘Charging/ Recharging the Void’ without the concept to guide me there.
TSH: Is ‘Ultimate Artificer’ you guys coming out of the gates full force…
David: We chose ‘Ultimate Artificer’ as a “safe bet” kind of song. It’s one of the punchier songs on the album. We wanted to put out a song that rocked and didn’t want fans to think we were getting too avant-garde and turn people away. We hadn’t put out any music for five years, so it was our way of saying “hey, we’re back”! It’s always kind of hard for us during promo periods because we’re more of an album-centric band and not a song-centric band. It’s about the bigger picture with our music.
TSH: Tell us more about the ideas behind ‘Forest of Legend’ being about people backing off from the world and letting nature reclaim the lands that we’ve damaged...
David: I grew up on a lake with a forest on the other side. I’d catch turtles, snakes, salamanders, and whatever just for fun. So, I’ve always felt a deep connection with nature. The music for this track was inspired from the English Dogs album, “Where Legend Began”. No pun intended, haha! That album is so inventive and creative. It was a sound I had been searching for but didn’t know about until later in my life. The second piece of inspiration came from thinking about the pyramids in Central America: these once enormous and vast civilizations nearly invisible under a blanket of forest. There’s a lyric where I say “ancient kingdoms, creeping lines, split apart by roots of time”. This line is taking that concept and applying it to a futuristic society. The actual song is about a futuristic society that wipes itself out, and the decimated world slowly grows back and nature reclaims the lands. It’s amazing how quickly nature is able to bounce back after disasters or exploitation. Just look at old buildings that have only been abandoned for a few years. The third part of the inspiration for that song actually came from a Neil Young song called ‘Natural Beauty’. There are a lot of great lyrics in that song, but the one that stuck out the most for me was “what a lucky man, to see the earth before it touched his hand”.
TSH: What was it about ‘Recharging the Void’ that required at least 100 different versions before you were all happy?
David: I ended up molding and reshaping that song so many times. The early versions don’t really sound anything like the final version. It took on so many forms that I could’ve made multiple songs. At one point it was almost 18 minutes long. I had to get rid of a lot of cool riffs, but it was all to make the song more impactful. It just took a lot of refining to craft it into what it is. Creating the flow not only in structure, but emotion, was the biggest challenge for me. It’s a big song for the end of a big album.
TSH: Also, talk us through having the gifted soul singer girls from Philadelphia - how the collaboration came about and how it was so heartfelt to you…
David: Yeah, they’re one of the main highlights on ‘Terminal Redux’, for me. I met Naeemah at a neighborhood block party in West Philly. She was singing backups during a lineup of funk and soul bands. I couldn’t get over how good she sounded and it was exactly the sound I had in my head for ‘Charging the Void’ at that time. I hadn’t thought of the ‘Recharging’ parts yet. Most of that was made up on the spot by them in the studio. Anyway, I went up to her after the set and told her some of my ideas and let her know about my band. She was way into it, so I got her contact info. It wasn’t until about a year later that I called her, and luckily she remembered me and checked out Vektor. At that time, she told me about her friend Rosemary who I hadn’t heard yet. The first day of tracking their vocals were in a little bar in Philly called the Barbary. We went there during the day and got the vocal mics set up. Nobody knew what to expect at this point. I went over what they’d be doing as far as the “Oh, ay, oh, ay’s” and the ‘Relic Alshain’ part. It was like magic hearing the first vocal takes and hearing in real life what had only been in my head up to that point. Our studio engineer, Dan, told me it was the first time he’d seen me smile the whole time we were recording, haha! Up until then we’d only been doing my vocals. We went to Dan’s studio to finish up the vocals for ‘Recharging’ a few days later. The only part I had mapped out for them was the last bit of the song starting at 11:20. They mostly riffed on their own through the middle section and it was incredible seeing how well it came together.
TSH: In the wake of the release of ‘Terminal Redux’, what changes would you say have come into play with your live offerings?
David: For the immediate time being, we’re just sticking to playing the album in its entirety since it’s a concept. Most of the time, the crowd is still amped up and wanting more, so we’ll do an encore with a few older songs. Our sets are definitely a lot longer now than they used to be, haha!
TSH: Do you prefer not writing in a linear fashion and usually procrastinating pretty hard on putting pen to paper when it comes to lyrics?
David: I’d prefer everything to just flow out of my head as a stream of consciousness, but I have too many dams in that stream. I always have the idea in my head. I have the title, the premise, everything. Putting down more than one sentence at a time on paper is always the hardest part for me. I tend to overthink and it makes it hard for my ideas to come out in words. The content of our lyrics also forces me to think a little harder and kind of philosophize about different things, which can take some time.
TSH: What does being broad-minded when it comes to music and genres mean to you?
David: I’m referring to the fact that I don’t consider myself open-minded as far as music is concerned. I don’t listen to everything. That doesn’t mean I won’t be open-minded when someone shows me a new band, but I probably won’t like it after giving it a fair chance. Far from an elitist, but I’m pretty picky about music. It means that I like what I like and I know I am biased toward certain things. I am broad-minded though because I do like a lot of different types of music. It’s not all metal for me. Even within each genre though, I only like a handful of things. So, I have a broad mind when it comes to music, but I don’t like everything within each genre that I’m into. I think most people are probably the same.
TSH: Living in a universe that we don’t fully understand, why do you feel power is an illusion?
David: Power is an illusion on a cosmic scale. Power can put you on the top in our day-to-day lives, but nature supersedes us on a grand scale. If and when humanity could reach grand scales like a galactic empire, we would still be second tier to the cosmos. In fact, the only way to achieve those heights would be to emulate the natural order. No matter how much control we exert over our universe, we are still working within its laws.
TSH: What was your verdict on the new Star Wars?
David: Excellent! Totally a nod to Episode IV and I loved every second. J.J. Abrams did a great job a capturing the classic Star Wars vibe.
TSH: What brings about most happiness and harmony on a daily basis for you?
David: I still like to skateboard when I can find the time. It’s like meditation for me. Other than that, stars, nature, philosophy, and beer. The best is when they all come together.
TSH: Finally, having garnered such widespread acclaim for your brilliant work, what are the key aspects that you hope to maintain and stay true as Vektor head forward?
David: We definitely appreciate all the good words from our fans and reviewers. As always, we’re going to stay true to ourselves and our sound. That doesn’t mean stagnation. I’ve always said that each album was like an evolution while the core values and sound stayed the same. It’s all about moving forward while remembering what got you to that point.
Sci-fi influenced progressive thrashers Vektor are all the rage at the moment with their well-received album Terminal Redux. I spoke with vocalist and guitarist David DiSanto about what it’s like being in a band in today’s world and why it has taken them so long to do a UK tour! (more…)
