Interview with Salvaticus

Charlottesville, Virginia is college town known for Dave Matthews band and its Jazz circles, but in the heart of Virginia resides Salvaticus, one of few black metal bands dedicated to capturing the natural sound of the forests and mountains of Piedmont and Appalachia. I’m meeting with founding members Brian Weaver (guitar) and Kevin Ardrey (drums) to discuss the music, the scene, and the band’s debut album Hidden Manna.

Let’s start with the history of Salvaticus. How you guys met, when you started playing together, etc.

Ardrey: Brian and I met at the Tea House on the Downtown Mall. My old band Sanguine was playing a show and I guess he had heard about it online.

Weaver: This was back in the day when you could use social media like Myspace and search for bands by location. I had just moved to Charlottesville and wanted to find some local music; black metal, death metal, the stuff I listened to. So I met Kevin when he was in Sanguine and we started hanging out. I was in a band called Thus Came from Harrisonburg and we needed a drummer to come up and play with us.

A: Eventually, we wanted to do our own thing so we decided to leave the band. That was around March 2010, and Salvaticus would have started in April. It was just the two of us at the time, jamming. Brian was writing riffs, and our songs kind of came out of that.

What about the full lineup with Alex Lee (vocals, bass) and Carter Felder (guitar)?

A: I’ve known Carter since middle school and he was actually the one who got me playing metal. He picked up the guitar and kind of inspired me to pick up the bass. He was really my window into this kind of music, showing me a lot of bands I had never heard of and burning me CDs and stuff. My first ever band was with him and we managed to keep in touch over the years.

The original idea for Salvaticus was to be a recording project only. Brian and I didn’t really consider finding other members and we just wanted to record albums and keep making music. After a while I started pushing for a live lineup, sort of against Brian’s wishes, and we got Carter to join. He was supposed to play bass as we wanted to keep a three piece thing going on, but the music we were writing really called for two guitar parts so we moved Carter to guitar and started to look for a bassist.

W: Alex and I both grew up in Harrisonburg and we’ve been friends since Kindergarten. We played in several bands together and jammed a lot over the years with him on the bass. As for the music on the album, Kevin and I had recorded that on our own a while back.

A: Brian did both of the guitars and I did the bass and drums. We didn’t add Alex’s vocals until much later, way after the instruments had been recorded.

W: Originally we were an instrumental band and we played our first couple of shows without vocals. After a show in Harrisonburg, Alan Fary from the band Earthling offered to do vocals for us. He was a good friend of ours and we were happy to bring him on. We worked together for a bit but his other band Valkyrie started taking off and he had some other things going on so he left and that’s when Alex started doing the vocals.

That’s when the album started to come together?

W: Yeah, we started playing more shows and recorded Alex’s vocals. Carter had gone to school down in Florida for audio production and took care of the mixing and mastering so we were happy he was available to do that.

I want to know more about the name Salvaticus. What does it mean for you guys, for your music?

A: “Silvaticus” is a Latin word meaning “of the woods” and a lot of woodland creatures have the species Silvaticus attached to their name. “Salvaticus” means “Man of the Woods” or “Savage Man.” It’s where the English word “Savage” comes from. I wanted the band to have a wild, natural theme and I felt like the name fit our band perfectly.

Does the geography of this location play a big role in defining your sound?

A: Definitely. We’d probably sound different if we grew up in a city like Richmond. We’re both mountain kids.

W: Growing up and living out near the woods really does inspires our sound.

A: Traditionally black metal has more of a grim and dirty sound while the bands that are influenced by nature sound prettier and more melodic so we lean a bit closer to that side. We still want to keep it grim with minor chords and blast beats but there’s more to it than that. We’ve got a lot of mellower, melodic parts because of our influence

How did the songwriting on Hidden Manna develop over time? It seems to have a pretty broad range of influence outside of black metal. Did you approach it with a certain goal in mind or did it just happen to turn out that way?

W: We both enjoy black metal and that’s a pretty big influence but we didn’t want to limit ourselves to anything specific going into it. Our goal was to just play metal and whatever came out, that’s what we wanted it to be.

Are there any specific bands you want to cite as major influences?

W: Keys influences come from Scandinavian black metal, bands like Immortal and Emperor.

A: Definitely Immortal and Emperor from the black metal side. As a kid, I was really heavily influenced by Opeth, the way they blend tremolo picked melodies and dual guitar harmonies with mellow, acoustic passages. The sort of Scandinavian folk influence impacted me heavily when I was forming my style. I’ve always been drawn towards metal with a mellower side so when I discovered Opeth’s first couple of albums I really latched onto it and that was the kind of music I wanted to play.

As far as the songwriting goes, it pretty much all came from Brian. He dished out the ideas and I made my drum parts to match that. A lot of the acoustic stuff came from him.

W: I like a lot of melodic death, doom, post metal. American black metal bands like Leviathan, Xasthur, Krallice, bands that take black metal in a different direction. We try to keep things open ended. Another factor is that a lot of our influences come from other genres of music. I probably listen to just as much classical music as I do metal. There’s also a lot of folk music, Irish folk, American folk.

Would you say your final output is a representation of you as a musician?

W: Yeah, our hope was to be totally open about it. It represents who we are, what we like to listen to.

I want to move on to the production side of the album. There’s a lot on the mix that’s atypical of what you’d normally hear on an extreme metal album. What can you tell about the mixing process?

A: The way it all fell together was kind of on accident. I don’t think it was very intentional. We worked with Carter on the mixing of the album and how loud each instrument was but it was pretty hands off on my end for the most part. Brian and I tracked all the instruments ourselves. We recorded the drums first, no click track. Brian would play his scratch guitar in our headphones and we captured the drums in my basement which is a hollow concrete cube that gave us a lot of natural reverb. The cymbals are loud and present because of that so it all really turned out the way it did on its own.

W: It’s fairly typically of black metal to have zero bass and that’s something we wanted to do differently on our album.

A: We had the drums and the two guitars already recorded and the bass was done last so I was able to sit down, listen to sections of the song and figure out what I wanted to do. I had a lot of creative freedom and really no time constraints so I was able to take my time and write a bass part I really liked, and bounce it off Brian to see if he liked it too. It turned out well and I’m really looking forward to doing it again on our next album, which is almost completely written at this point.

Is your main focus now is on the upcoming album?

W: We did a lot of touring recently and played shows all over Virginia and parts of Maryland. We had really great experiences but right now we want to focus on the most important aspect of our band, which is writing music.

On the subject of touring, how is the metal scene in Virginia doing? How do you see it trending?

A: I’ve been doing it for a good number of years and I’m kind of cynical about the whole process. To me it’s thankless and there’s no glory involved in it at all. You gotta do it for yourself. You do it because you really want to. You do kind of cause you have to, and not because there’s a demand for it because there really isn’t much of a demand at all. You gotta do it because it’s something inside of you and to not do it would be ignoring a part of who you are.

It’s a really small scene and you can’t expect to play a big show in the central Virginia area. It’s a small group of fans, same faces out at every show. Sometimes you’re playing for the other bands, which is fine. It’s cool to make connections and meet people doing the same thing you are.

W: You carry on thanks to the support of your fans. Places like Harrisonburg have a pretty strong scene for a small town. In Charlottesville, the venues are kind of coming down. Places like the [Main Street] Annex (where Kevin is set to play later that night as the drummer for Blooddrunk Trolls) have been really supportive. I actually booked the show for tonight and I feel like more people are likely to come out if they can recognize the bands that are playing. The more we tour in other places like Harrisonburg and Baltimore, we’ll make new friends and have more opportunities to go out and play with some awesome local bands.

A: We’re starting to reap some of the benefits of our labor over the past few years. As a local band you kind of have to do your thing for a couple of years in order to start building some momentum. We’ve been playing shows for about two solid years and just now I’m starting to feel like people have actually heard about us and have seen us a couple of times.

You seem to take a DIY approach to music. Salvaticus is currently still an independent band, right?

A: We aren’t signed to any record labels right now. We had a deal with Lost Apparitions, which is a record store/label based in Luray, to distribute the CD version of Hidden Manna. The guy who runs the company has been doing it for a long time now and he’s really passionate about it. While they do sign bands, we aren’t signed with them.

W: The cassette version was released through my own label, Nocturnal Reign, which kind of started out as a joke with one of my friends. As it turns out, tapes aren’t that much more expensive than CDs. It’s also the name I use to book shows, like the one tonight [at the Annex].

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The interview cuts at this point as the background noise made it impossible to get a decent audio recording. We continue talking about music, the upcoming album, and go into finer details with Hidden Manna. The goal with the album was to tell a story about the cycle of life and death, and each track represents a season in the year. Finally, we speak briefly about the upcoming album, which will be recorded in winter with an expected release in Early-Mid 2015. It is to feature a heavier sound along with a couple of shorter tracks, while still maintaining the natural feeling captured on the band’s debut.

Hidden Manna was released on May 16^th, 2014 and is available on CD through Lost Apparitions, on cassette through Nocturnal Reign, and digitally on Bandcamp.

– Interview conducted by Brian Leong