Genre(s): Progressive Death Metal
PSAB: Why did you choose the name "Slice The Cake" for your band name?
STC: Around when we were starting out, we were throwing a bunch of “serious” names around just to see what would stick, stuff like “Gaia Aflame” .. None of the stuff we came up with was particularly appealing so our name was left as this big unknown until Jonas started working on a logo. We still didn’t have a name, so he just put Slice The Cake in place of whatever the real name was to be and it just kind of stuck. I’m not even sure if the whole verb the noun subversion was intentional on his part originally but we realised pretty quickly that it works on a few different levels.
PSAB: Your first EP came in 2010 and you quickly became decently known among the metal community due to music sharing websites. The same websites also share illegal downloads of albums. So, that brings up the question. What are your opinions on whole illegal download/piracy of music?
STC: We’re generally totally cool with it, as it’s done nothing but good things for us. The entertainment industry as a whole is changing, not just the music industry, and piracy is generally seen as this big “issue” that needs tackling in some way, and there are various philosophies concerning this, and ours is that piracy isn’t going away so we may as well use it to our advantage, and it’s paid dividends for us. The other thing about piracy that rarely seems to be acknowledged is that some people that have pirated your shit may then actually go and buy it if they like it enough. It’s not just some black or white issue like “PIRACY IS TERRIBLE AND BAD” because for us, it totally hasn’t been.
Even outside of the world of music this seems to be pretty evident, I personally keep up with the games scene a lot and the piracy discussion is equally as big with games and there have been a couple of great examples of how to deal with piracy in a positive way. The creator of Hotline Miami (for those of you who haven’t played it, you totally should, it’s a hyper-violent, Lynchian clusterfuck of a fever dream with an amazing soundtrack!) put the game up on the pirate bay and urged people to download it, but to support it with some moneys if they were vibing with it. The way the guy dealt with it made waves in the gaming press, and suddenly fucking everyone was playing it and it made the dude a ton of money. Hell, perhaps it’s taboo to admit it, but I’m one of those that pirated it.. And guess what.. I bought it literally as soon as I had the money to out of respect for both the dude’s openness and the art itself. The more you try and stop people from freely sharing art around, the more people will share it just to spite you and I don’t blame them for it at all. Art is something that transcends money and financial value, and I think that’s an idea worth defending and upholding.
As well as that, I frankly think we’d be kind of hypocritical if we didn’t take this stance. We didn’t make this band with the intention of making money or becoming famous or anything like that, we never could’ve anticipated that STC would blow up the way it did.. All of our music has been made more for our own sake than anything else. It’s an exorcistic process more than anything else.. And I don’t think you can put a price on that. We encourage people to acquire our music however the hell they want to, but to treat our bandcamp as a donation box if they really feel what we’re doing. All the money we’ve made has been poured back into stuff we’re now using to make Odyssey to the West and that’s purely the result of people’s generosity. If we hadn’t made a penny doing any of this, we’d feel the same about all of it.
PSAB: Your upcoming album Odyssey to the West is set to release later on this year. When can we expect a taste of the album with a new single? Anytime in the near future?
STC: Yeah, sometime fairly soon. We were aiming to release the album on March 1st originally, but over the past couple of months it became apparent that it needs more time to be as good as we want it to be, so right now we’re just saying “when it’s done.” We don’t want to put too much of a time frame on it because we don’t really know ourselves. Perhaps some time during the summer? But don’t take that as gospel!
PSAB: While on topic of your new album, will there is a b-side release after the initial release? Like when you released Other Slices after The Man With No Face. Or do you plan on releasing all tracks with the initial release?
STC: Probably not. Other Slices was probably just a one-time kinda deal. It was a fun album to make but for all of us it feels a bit hollow, since it’s literally just a collection of songs without anything that fundamentally binds them all together on a conceptual level.
That idea of each album being a self-contained, singular, unified vision is something that has always been pretty strong for us but it’s been more important to us than ever. Other Slices doesn’t fit that mold at all, and like I said, it was fun, but we probably won’t be doing anything like it any time soon. Plus it was just a really, really good opportunity to make an awful bakery related pun in an album title… You only get one of those before people start thinking you’re a joke band.
But yeah, we do have a few leftover tracks from the last year or two, but if they were to be used for anything they’d need a fair bit of re-working and they’d need to be relevant to whatever project we were trying to shoe horn them into. We have a few vague ideas for future releases and we have a couple of albums coming from side-projects (a post-black metal behemoth by the name of Fissures and an album of soundscape/doom metal by my solo project Musica Masonica) in the coming months too, so we’re getting all of those out of the way before putting any serious thought into future releases.
PSAB: Just recently you were signed to Subliminal Groove Records. Why did you choose to sign with that label over other labels? Also, what are your favorite bands on the SGR roster?
STC: Well we’ve been keeping an eye SG since its early days and it’s really started flourishing as of late. We’re good friends with the guy’s from Ovid’s Withering and Lorelei but after the shit show that was Myriad Records we wanted to make absolutely sure that SG was the kind of label that wasn’t all just big talk. Perhaps it’s just conjecture but you hear all kinds of horror stories about label dudes promising you the earth and then never actually delivering on any of it. Myriad was totally one of those labels, but SG has had a totally different vibe from the offset.
There’s also a really strong communal, family type of vibe with SG and that’s what swung it for us I think. Aside from that, SG just totally has its shit together on every level and that’s become massively apparent after spending just a few days on the roster, they’re a well oiled promotional behemoth for this kind of music and the amount of eyes we’ve had on the signing announcement alone is just insane. I mean, this is just the beginning of our experience with SG and we’ve got nothing but good feelings about the partnership, so we’re stoked as fuck. As for favourites? Probably Ovdi, Lorelei and Nemertines.
PSAB: Do you have anything to say to the readers of the site, and the fans of Slice The Cake?
STC: Yeah, like I was saying earlier, it’s down to word of mouth and sites like this that our music gets heard as much as it does, and the fans that have supported us with such passion and fervour. When we started doing this we never would’ve dreamed that it’d catch on in any meaningful way, since we’re just some dudes that made some art out of going quietly insane in our bedrooms at 4am, but we just hit 25k likes on our Facebook page and we’re working on our 3rd full length album. Considering we’re “that cake band,” this never ceases to totally blow our minds and we have the utmost gratitude for it all!
