Behind Black Cloud Syndicate Band History, New Music, and Community at Wacken

0:04 Hi, you love done too? Sure? Fore Wow for you you. This is the pipe Man here on the Adventures pipe Man W four c Y Radio, and I'm here. With Glenn Novak. I'm in multiple bands in Toronto. Nice. So you're from the nice place in the world. Wow. It has its moments. I have a lot of friends in Canada and they're all so nice. And the funny thing is, I was telling this story earlier because I was interviewing somebody else from Canada and this girl I'm really friendly with I was in walking around Costa Rica and I was on the phone where and she heard somebody next to me say sorry, and she goes, they must be from Canada.

0:57 Yeah. That is the reputation we have for sure. Everybody's very apologetic. It could be a worse reputation, I can tell you. There are some other choices. Yeah, yeah, I like the reputation. I don't really like the reputation of how people act in Florida, to be honest. Where I live, the old Florida man thing, Yeah, where I live. Yeah. No, I actually. Worked down there for a couple of months at my previous job many many years ago. I was down there training customer service reps. So I got a bit of an idea of yeah, it's a. Different world for sure. What part of Florida was I was in Melbourne. Oh okay, that's a cool place. That's about two hours north of me. But I go up that way to surf.

1:42 It's a cool, cool area to surf. And yeah, it's a cool area. As you go further south, they become more assholes. That's where everything starts to get crazier. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So tell us about the bands. Well, they're to you completely different bands. So one of them is kind of the I guess the culmination of where I started, which was, you know, playing in a kind of a thrash band with teenagers and just trying to sort of figure it out. You know, Okay, you know, how do I get fast enough to play like Lombardo? You know all that kind of thing, right, And that band was called Morbid Streak, and then we said, yeah, yeah, that doesn't I'm not bad. But we changed the name and that went to absolute zero. At one point. I guess some of the guys in the band just didn't feel Morbid Streak fit us anymore, and we started incorporating a little more a little bit of death metal, a little more hardcore, because these are all things we listened to.

2:40 It just wasn't what we were initially playing, right, and and even some hip hop later on with that band. Yeah. So when that one kind of went on hiatus, you know, one guy moved to b C. Another guy got married and his wife didn't want to be in a band anymore, whatever that sort of thing, I switched it up and started doing us strictly rap me up project called gut Shot, and I switched from playing drums to doing vocals in that one. So on the one, I'm the singer and the other one I hide behind the drums. So and yeah, So I did that for a long time, and we did, you know, several tours, did a couple with Absolute Zero as well. We videos on you know, the much music and music pluse in Canada.

3:23 I used to love much music. It was great when they played music videos. That's why I said I used to lay back in the day. Yeah, before it was all reality TV. Yeah it was, yeah, it was. It used to be amazing. It was appointment television for us. You know, whenever they were going to do the Power thirty or the Power Hour, or whatever. It's like, oh metal videos are We're going right? So and it was fun because getting to see ourselves on there was amazing. And this is we're talking back in the like ninety four yeah kind of thing. So this is still when everything's pretty manual. You know, it's not quite you don't quite have the ease with the digital, with the editing and this and that. So thinking a music video was very expensive back then. Yeah, totally, But anyway, it was I mean.

4:09 It was cool. We did a lot of stuff and then I switched over to gutshot and we did We did that for quite a while and it was fun until it kind of stopped and things just sort of petered out for a while. On that band, our old singer from the first band, I realized, I'm getting at a little verbal, a little wordy here, but no, no go for it. So our singer from her first band, he calls everybody up. He says, listen, June sixth of two thousand and six is coming up. We have to play a show on the sixty sixty sixth day, right, and none of us have played together for hour. So we start rehearsing, we start playing, We play the show, and we decide, hey, why not continue, So we switched the name up to something called the Black Cloud Syndicate at. That point, and that's a name we went from there.

4:52 That goes back to our old guitar player used to talk about how we lived under a black cloud. We have a reputation that if we're playing a live show, it's it'll orain in Toronto that night. Nice and uh yeah, so we were. So we went back to doing that and we've been working on an album. It's unfortunately an album that was like a COVID album and that has thrown us off the rhythm for getting it done to some degree. There's quite a bit. Of it that is finished and tracked. We got about four of them mixed. Originally it's going to be a double album. I don't think it's gonna be anymore because I just don't think we're gonna be able to pull all that out. But we're still working through it, getting it mixed and then we'll master and we'll get it to we'll get it out to everybody. We really one or two tracks, you know, just kind of tease people.

5:39 I love it and how can they check out those two tracks? So the Black Cloud Syndicate is on Spotify. Okay, so we have a single there that we put out I want to say maybe but two years ago called the Dead Is Due, and that's gonna be on the album. And as far as and then we have, I gave you one of those cards. That's the thing we do where it's like he here's a link and if you don't have one of these cards, you can't get to that link. And it's a different song from the album that we've mixed a finish that we're ready to share with people. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, so I'm gonna show you something. Okay, let's see it shows you that we come from the same school. That's my eighties battle vest all right.

6:20 I think we come from the same school. Let's see Slayer, Yes, Mercial Feet, Yes, Metallica obviously. Suicidal is my favorite band of all time GBH, Midnight Madison. Beyond, Dark Angel Angel. I just saw Dark Angel in Toronto, like either late last year or early this year. One of my favorites in Hoagland is like the greatest drummer next to Lomarto. Yeah, well that's yeah, I mean for. Sure, the original Exodus logo. Oh very nice. Yeah, I'm a huge Exodus fan too. Yeah, there's Canada represented on here. He's right down the are see. I don't know these guys exciter, Oh excited, I know, I'm sory. I thought you were talking about English dogs.

7:01 I don't know excited. I know I've seen excited live very recently too, which I. Love it for them. It was the front all right? Who else we got going here? All right? Venom absolutely dri is an all time favorite of mine. Dealing with It is probably a top five hardcore record for me in my life. Oh I love that album. I even love the first one where the songs were even faster that are on Dealing with It. Yeah, that one where there's twenty two songs in thirteen and a half minutes. Yeah, yeah, exactly sure. Oh wow, we got it too, misfits again, Yeah, absolutely exploited for sure. Yeah. I think I think we grew up on the same. That's a Venom patch and part of it's in the pocket here because it was already destroyed and then it fell off at one of these festivals. There's blood on here from a twenty foot stage dive off of Marshall Stack.

7:54 It's been through some worse. Yeah, sure sounds like but I think we got the same nutrition as kids, for sure. Exactly how was that Slayers first show ever? Metallica's first show ever? That's amazing. My older brother actually saw Metallica open for WASP. I used to hang out with. I used to hang out with Chris Holmes and Mick Mahr's at the mall. Nice right, And so you know what's funny too, is like in that whole scene back then, it was all new and fresh, and you know it's funny they tried to lump these bands in, but none of them really sounded the same. And like, back then, you couldn't be a long hair and go to a Dead Kennedy show or any punk show for that matter. Sure, and I was a long hair and you couldn't be a punk and go And I always thought that was stupid.

8:51 I talk about it all the time. It's like we liked similar types of music and we're both getting bullied by the jocks instead beating. The shit out of each other. One hundred percent. Get together. That's it, right, Underground needs to stick together. You know, There's that's that's the whole thing. It's all of those things are for the people who feel like the regular stuff isn't for me. Yeah, you know, being in isn't something that is a priority for me, exactly, yeah, one hundred percent. Right, it's it's it's it's music for outcasts. That's right. Yeah, but all of us outcasts here at Vadkin are all not outcasts here. There are no outcasts. Everybody's welcome, everybody's part of our team. Everybody is here at Vodkin or any other metal or hardcore festival across the world because we are one big family and a community now and we finally got smart about it.

9:49 Yeah, one hundred percent. And the amazing thing too about here is like I was talking to my buddy. He's been coming here. For for a long long time, at least fifty years, and that buddy uh No, another friend of mine that's here and now this is his first time. But he mentioned to me he goes all in a row. I went from Bland Guardian to corn to Wa Taine and all three of them blew me away. And I'm like, yeah, like, that's exactly it, right, you can love all of it or thanks man, we'll see you later. He's loading you up.

10:30 You can love all of it, or you don't have to love all of it. You don't have to watch Blind Guardian. If power metal is not your thing, you don't have to watch What Tane and black metal is not your thing, right, but it's all available here and everybody nobody gives a shit if you maybe don't like black metal, it doesn't make them mad if they do. I'm so happy the gatekeeping has been minimized drastically since our days. One hundred percent. I think these days, especially with the amount of music that's being created, there's there's just so much right to listen to these days, there's so many different styles, there's so much creativity out there. I think it's dumb to cut yourself off from stuff. Give things a try, and if it doesn't work for you, stop listening to it.

11:12 Act exactly, we don't all have to like the same stuff. We don't have to all like everything. We're here to get some therapy for sure, family that's. Fun, the internet, and try and convince somebody else that they're an idiot for liking something you don't like. Exactly. Yeah, it's a funk, how's it? Fact? My thing is, why do we always make these big deals about things that don't affect our life in any way, shape or form. Yeah. People are wired that way, though, aren't they. I'm telling you, I'm telling you. So what else do you want to tell the audience that we haven't covered already that they need to know about your newest music or anything you got coming up? Well, I think it's just a couple of things. One, keep an eye out for the Black Cloud Syndicate album.

11:54 We're grinding away, we're meeting, we're mixing, we're. Getting it done. And then Gutshot is kind of started again. We got an opportunity to participate in a tribute album. I had previously done a cover of a Beastie Boys song, like a heavy cover of So What You Want many years ago, and we reached out said are you interested in this? But we decided why not get together and re record a new version of it. So we did that. Everybody had a really good time, and now now I might be in two bands again. There it is, Well, that's fun. It is. And picking up a microphone again, for sure. You know, it's a kind of interesting and fun to kind of play two different roles instead of the same thing all the time.

12:38 One hundred percent, like I think my passion for drumming is not where I'm at right now. I really like writing. Lyrics, like I that's if there's one thing that I think I do well in music, it's right lyrics. And writing hip hop style lyrics is a very different thing from writing black cloud lyrics, So it's a it makes me. I have to turn my brain around a little bit to be able to do that, but it's cool because it's a challenge. And I'd like to say I love putting words together. Well. You do it well and you got some great music. And thank you for being here at Vawkin and thanks for being on the Adventures of pipe Man. Thanks for leving me to talk with you, Dian, I appreciate it.

13:19 You got it. Thank you for listening to the Adventures of pipe Man. I'm w for CUI Radio.