Speed metal meets 80’s synth.
Voice actor elements tie all of the tracks together on Death Trap.
Based out of Poland, “Ultrakiller are just two dude who decided to take a new artistic direction.” They are soundly and unashamed to be labeled in the darksynth genre. However, Ultrakiller does utilize an abundance of heavy guitars. The duo has been releasing albums a few albums over the years. Recently, they signed with JST Records.
The amount of blistering guitar work can not be underestimated on their newest album, Death Trap. If you like lazy cool guitar riffs or lame-o ‘shoe gazer’ fucktard guitar, Death Trap is not for you. Ultrakiller is more liberal with double picked, heavy guitar than Amy Shumer at Taco Tuesday buffet. They unconditionally pack all of the instrumental tracks on Death Trap with forceful, angry fret work.
Death Trap is a concept album of sorts. There are nineteen original tracks on the album. Eight of the tracks consist of vocal dialogue, written by Ultrakiller and performed by professional voice actors. The story follows a homicidal maniac and the gritty cops who pursue him. The album can be taken in small bites, but for the full effect it should be listened to from start to finish (at least the first time).
We let the guys from Ultrakiller talk about their music, artistic direction, and more in their own words.
Slickster – How do you divide the musical duties, ie, who plays more guitar and who does more programming?
Ultrakiller – One of us records almost all guitar parts, simply on account of being a far better player, and the other does programming, mixing and plays synths (not all synths on our albums are programmed).
Slickster – What tuning do you use on your guitars, or do you play seven strings?
Ultrakiller – On this album we used a 7 string baritone Ibanez in standard tuning and a 6 string Dean ML tuned down to B standard with real thick string gauges. That guitar is a real heavy monster.
Now we are also getting acquainted with a new friend – an 8 string Ibanez baritone so there will be even more mayhem on our future releases.
Slickster – The titular track has some nice symphonic elements, and use of ‘strings’. Have either of you had any formal musical training or did you learn by teaching yourself?
Ultrakiller – We are both self-taught, apart from some basic music lessons we had as kids. We just listen to a lot of classical music and film scores, which gives us some sensibility and understanding of orchestration. We picked up the theory along the way, out of necessity.
The state of sampling technology nowadays gives us possibilities we have never dreamt of before. Classical instruments – strings, brass, woodwinds and even choirs, are multi-sampled with all of their little intricacies and articulations, which inspires us to write symphonic elements in our tracks.
Slickster – Can you detail your practice routine(s) and the collaborative creative process that Ultrakiller uses.
Ultrakiller – Well, you know, it is difficult to describe a routine because it isn’t always the same. We both practice our instruments on a daily basis and sometimes one or the other comes up with a cool riff or melody worth working on and then it goes from there. We meet on a regular basis in our “studio”, which is actually just a cramped 2×3 room, improvise and build new tracks from the initial ideas.
We’ve been playing together for twenty years now, as part of different bands, so we have a great flow together. We also don’t get hung up on our ideas, which is a bonus when writing as a duo. There is always the other guy who can tell you if your “genius” idea is really utter shit (haha).
The initial amount of tracks written for “Death Trap” was almost 30. We then trimmed off all of these which were mediocre in our opinion and left the ones we thought were best.
Slickster – The album has 8 voice-actor dialogue tracks, which give Death Trap the feeling of a concept album. Was this your intention and how/when did you come up with this idea?
Ultrakiller – We always wanted to write a concept album. You can probably tell we are huge metalheads and we both also like the older metal albums, like for example Queensryche’s “Operation Mindcrime”. When we chose the tracks for “Death Trap” and listened to the demo versions, we noticed that the album lacked a bit in terms of cohesion, so we thought we could make the tracks stick together more by adding dialogues in between. We knew there had to be a serial killer, lots of rain and a bit of a futuristic cyberpunk vibe. We didn’t want to use any existing dialogue so we wrote it from scratch and got voice actors to read it. Very happy with how it turned out in the end.
Slickster – Death Trap is a notorious live action video game that was surrounded by controversy when released in the 1990’s. The game is about a group of girls who go to a cabin and get hunted by vampires. It’s laughable by today’s standards but at the time, it was a flash point for censorship. Did you ever play this game or is your album a nod to the game?
Ultrakiller – Now this is quite funny. You see, the game was the first thing that came to our mind when we came up with the album title. But it’s wrong, the game was actually called “Night Trap”. So you just made the same mistake we did (haha).
But to answer your question – there is no intentional nod to the game. We didn’t play it, though obviously we know it, being one of the first games to be blamed by politicians for promoting violence among kids. The story behind its creation is interesting in itself, so we encourage you to check it out. We missed it in 1992, as it was out on Sega, which wasn’t a popular platform in Poland back then.
Slickster – The plot of Death Trap (the album) follows a maniac as he stalks, drugs and murders a woman, aka Nancy. Although it would have been nice if she was named Karen, we’ll go with Nancy for now. However there is a clue on the album cover that Nancy might not be exactly who we are lead to believe she is. Any comment?
Ultrakiller – Haha, Karen, now that would be something. She was named Sarah in the first draft but Nancy sounded just more innocent. You know, Sarah would probably kick the killer’s ass (haha). The truth is the cover art came after the album was fully written so it has more of a loose connection. The whole story, apart from being something out of a class B 80’s slasher, is set in a cyberpunk reality, so it kind of made sense that everyone on the cover is cybernetically modified. Anyway, the plot was meant to leave some things to the listener’s imagination. We had a blast when we read one of our Russian fans wrote his own short story, based on the dialogues, where the cyborg cop from the cover is also the killer, though that was completely not our intention.
Slickster – How has working with Zak at JST Records been? Is this a one-off records deal, or will there be more releases in the future on JST?
Ultrakiller – Working with Zak has been absolutely great! Signing with JST Records got a huge load of work off our backs in terms of getting the album exposure. If there will be more of our releases on JST is also up to Zak so we can’t give a definitive answer here but we hope there will.
Slickster – Where do you predict the genre of synthwave, and all it’s subgenres (outrun, vaporwave, darksynth, etc), will be in five years?
Ultrakiller – Haven’t been following that much of outrun or vaporwave, but we think that darksynth artists in particular will start incorporating more and more elements from outside the genre, which has already been happening for a while now. This is a good thing because otherwise it would get old quick. There will always be those who are ready to break boundaries and they move the genre forward.
Slickster – Synthwave, as a catch-all term, draws heavily on the experiences, aesthetics, and pop culture of the 1980’s. Will the well of ideas from this era ever run dry?
Ultrakiller – We are curious ourselves if this well will eventually become empty. The 80’s were so rich in terms of pop-culture and music. Don’t want to sound like old geezers but “they just don’t make music like that anymore” (haha). There might be a shift forward in culture as usual and maybe next the 90’s will come back as an inspiration and so on.
Slickster – Thanks for sharing your music and giving some insight into Ultrakiller’s musical creation. Is there anything we didn’t talk about that you want to mention or share with the readers now?
Thanks for the interview! Actually, there is one thing that is bugging us tremendously from the moment we started this project. We would really like to finally see you guys live on tour! We are so stage-hungry we can barely take it anymore (haha). So let’s all hope this fucking pandemic finally ends and we can go blow the roofs of some clubs together.
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Social Media Links
UltraKiller:
Facebook: http://facebook.com/ultrakiller666
Bandcamp: https://ultrakiller.bandcamp.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ultra_killer666
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ultrakiller666
Spotify: http://spoti.fi/3sTUyAs
JST Records:
Website: www.jstrecords.com
Bandcamp: https://jstrecords.bandcamp.com
Spotify: https://play.spotify.com/user/jstrecords
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/jet-set-trash
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JetSetTrashRecords
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/JetSetTrashRecords
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JSTrecords
Stream/Purchase:
Bandcamp: https://ultrakiller.bandcamp.com/album/death-trap-lp
Spotify: http://spoti.fi/3eDgJHt
