Published: May 24, 2013

Galaktik Cancer Squad starts as experimental black metal project that doesn't give a damn about rules, trends or other kinds of guidelines in music. I tried to push the musical freedom of black metal as far as possible to create extreme atmospheres and catchy soundscapes.

The musical sound of GCS is hard to describe. Each album has its own combination of influences and elements, but I guess it is always somewhere between progressive metal and black metal with specialized skills in songwriting and the use of instruments, based on anger and rawness with a huge amount of bittersweet melancholy.

GCS is about philosophy and imagination, psychology and dreaming, life and death, it's almost like a musical form of Yin and Yang. There are stories about cosmos, space and time on the one hand, on the other hand we have the abyss of the human mind, depressions and absuse of dubious substances. All these things affect each other and fuse to something that I would call "mindfuck".

The first releases where instrumental because the music itself told the story, that means the focus was on the technical side of riffing and way more experimental than the later stuff. The vocals came up as a new element just to give GCS some kind of real voice and tribute the paths of traditional metal. I think changes are pretty important to keep the music fresh and alive and prevent from repeating oneself.

It seems that especially the English native speaker are confused about the name, I never understand that...

Actually it's very simple to explain what the meaning is. The term "galaktik" stands for the mentioned cosmic influeneces, replaced the C's with K's to underline extraordinary attitude; "cancer" stands for the aspects of mankind, a destroying beast with a lot of failures which is heading towards the end; and the term "squad" points out the limitation of people I can reach with this kind of music. We are a small family of fucked up and music-loving people.

At first "Galaktik Cancer Squad" was meant to be a songtitle for an old project, but this unique

charactar grew fast and has become an independent band project.

The project stays solo. Maybe it will has some guest musicians in the future, but online for studio

recordings. There won't be any concerts and I can't imagine that it would work well as live project,

because the music is too large to transfer it on the stages of the world, it would just lose its details.

In March 2012 I sent tons of promition emails to find a label that want to release the "Strange Spheres of Hyperborea" album. One of them was Hypnotic Dirge Records and because of the

open-minded character of the label we start to work together. Unfortunately they told me to wait until November 2012 to release S.S.o.H., and when it delayed more and more we've reached the point where we decide to release a complete new album in summer 2013. Only 4 more weeks to go! To be honest, to wait 6 month is a hard thing, but in the end I waited one whole fucking year - and that sucks. Anyway I thank Hypnotic Dirge Records for giving me this chance and it almost compensate all the waiting!

Overall it was surprisingly good! It's really awesome to see the huge range of listeners from different genres. Most of them appreciate this weird combination of styles and give great support. I never expected something like that, but it seems everything works fine so both composer and listener have a great experience with GCS!

I have a bunch of other projects in progress, some of them will release physical copies soon and maybe playing some concerts in the future as well. But the main thing will always be the music and songwriting itself. The big difference between GCS and these other projects is the fact that only GCS is an one-man-bandproject, the others have complete line ups or frequent help of guest- and session-musicians. You should definitely keep an eye on Grauzeit and Morphinist.

Well, what I can say is that there will be instrumental and vocal albums. The upcoming album "Ghost Light" has a lot of post-rockish stuff for example, so the album after that could have some electronic/8bit elements again, or jazz. Everything is possible!

In the beginning I correspond with a black metal band called Deafest, because I really enjoyed their raw and atmospheric sound and I found out that we almost used the same kind of gear. Other bands from the black metal side are Deathspell Omega and Mgla or Darkspace. You may not hear but bands like ISIS, HORSE the Band and Pink Floyd were big influences too. A pretty weird mixture! It just a small extract of music I listen to, and it's impossible to get all these styles in one project and because of that there a so many sideprojects.

No, not really. The songwriting progress has some kind of spirituality to me though. For several hours it becomes almost a trance-like and trippy experience, just through music.

Besides music, recording and mixing/mastering I would say it's philosophy, literature, any form of escapism and alcohol. That's basically it.

I was surprised how long it took me to answer your questions. That's one of the reasons why I do so much instrumental stuff. Not using words often seems the easier way to explain, because the receiver feels it too or he does not.