Great thanks to Dylan of Metal Maggot Magazine for doing this interview with Raspatul!
1. How have things in Raspatul been going since your lead singer( Ayim) died?
- Hi Dylan, first of all many thanks to you for doing this interview with Raspatul! It's a great pleasure! It feels like the old days of underground xerox zines again! Well Ayim's death was a huge shock for the us as a band as well as on a personal basis. It has been almost a year since his passing on and the feeling of his depature is still within us. A week after his death, we resumed our rehearsals, but to be honest with you it was a really weird thing to be practising without Ayim. Things went really slow for Raspatul, but I was still doing promotion nevertheless. Many people wrote in to give their condolences and all the reviews that came after Ayim's death mentioned about his passing on, so I would like to thank all of the magazines and reviewers here for writing something about Ayim.
2. Do you plan on going on?
- This is a hard question to answer. I wish Raspatul could carry on as long as possible, but with things like this happening and for the fact that Ayim has been singing in the band since day one doesn't make things any easier. There were a few offers here to sing for Raspatul but thought of having someone new in the band just didn't feel right. I am currently in discussion with Canadian label Obskure Sombre (www.obskure-sombre.tk) and the label will sign Raspatul for releasing all our older materials. Obskure Sombre has sign bands like Agathocles from ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Belgium and Hyponic from Hong Kong. The album is basically collection of all our songs and there will be a new title and artwork for this album. So stay tuned for more updates on this. Raspatul is also feaured in a latest issue of Brutallica Magazine from Bulgaria on the CD sampler. Brutallica is a very well known magazine in the underground scene internationally, so I hope it will be some good promotion for the band.
3. Who has influenced you?
- I was quite a late bloomer if you ask me! I started playing guitar at age 15 and got into the underground scene during the same year. It was very weird because nobody influenced me to listen to Metal at all. I was doing all the things by myself and you can say I am somewhat an anti-social and introvert during my school days. No one was listening to Metal in my school, so it was natural that I did things my own way, and not saying that the things I did was always right! Hahaha! And 13 years later, I am still the same fucking Metalhead as before.
4. How is the death metal scene around you guys?
- Frankly speaking, I don't even know much about what is going on in the Death Metal scene in Singapore anymore. There has also been a huge abundance of new Metal bands coming out here, and all of them are as young as 16 years old. This could be a good thing but sometimes it could also be disastrous, if the bands do not practise enough and still record an album anyway. You can say I am pretty disappointed in the Metal scene here, as majority of the bands just wants to be known locally and not push out their boundaries of the comfort zone. There is a very close knitted community going on here and it's scary. Of course it's a great thing to be united as one, but when all of them aren't going anywhere and there's no improvement, this is when something is wrong.