Martin van Drunen
Martin van Drunen (* 1966 ) is a Dutch singer and bassist who became known primarily for his engagement with the Dutch death doom and death metal bands Asphyx , Pestilence and Hail of Bullets .
Life
Van Drunen joined his first band Pestilence in 1987 as a singer and bassist, as he knew their guitarist and previous singer Patrick Mameli from the neighborhood and liked their first demo recording Dysentery . Since he had never played bass up to this point, Mameli took over bass while recording the second demo, The Penance, a few months later. Van Drunen, for whom it was the first recordings in a recording studio, recorded the vocal tracks within a weekend. Van Drunen never played the bass on his later recordings with Pestilence either; Patrick Mameli took over this as on the demo. After a tour of the USA together with Death and Carcass , he left the band and immediately joined Asphyx instead. For the first album with Asphyx, The Rack , van Drunen wrote the lyrics, although the previous bassist and singer Theo Loomans, who was fired shortly after his entry, had already written all the lyrics and recorded some of them. Under the opposite direction, Asphyx came into a similar situation again with the next album Last One on Earth : This time it was already decided to replace van Drunen by Ron van Pol, but the record company Century Media prevailed and van Drunen recorded his lyrics himself, before he left the band. The drummer of the band Bob Bagchus then expressed himself negatively in interviews about Van Drunen's lyrics, as in his opinion they did not match the band's music.
"At that time, I somehow started to feel 'mature' enough to come up with something different. As a vocalist, you have to stand behind the stuff that you sing. [...] I started to get the feeling that I didn't sing about things which I was totally into. We all get older, I had a sort of responsibility and I had the feeling that I could do much more with it. "
“At that time, I was kind of starting to feel 'grown up' enough to try something different. As a singer you have to be able to stand behind the lyrics that you sing. […] Over time I got the feeling that I was not singing about things that I fully supported. We all got older, I had a kind of obligation and I felt that I could achieve so much more. "
The following year van Drunen recorded the vocals of the album Converging Conspiracies for the band Comecon within two days with the music producer Tomas Skogsberg . He later referred to this as a friendship service for Century Media and the band. He then joined the British band Bolt Thrower , with whom he completed two European tours. Van Drunen left the band shortly before the recordings for the album Mercenary , partly due to different views on where and how much the band should tour. He then withdrew from the music scene for a longer period of time before he was almost simultaneously a member of the reformed Asphyx at the end of the 2000s and founded the band Hail of Bullets together with Ed Warby and other Dutch musicians. Since 2011 he has also been a member of the death / doom metal band Grand Supreme Blood Court together with current and former musicians from Asphyx and Hail of Bullets.
Influences
Especially for the lyrics of the band Hail of Bullets, the events of the German-Soviet war , especially the battle of Stalingrad , are of great influence for van Drunen. The song MS Bismarck (inspired by the German battleship Bismarck ) was a text with a war theme on the Asphyx album Last One on Earth from 1992 . The 2009 comeback album by Death… the Brutal Way featured a song called the Railway Mortar . On the other hand, on the second album by Hail of Bullets On Divine Winds , van Drunen describes events during the battles of the Pacific War .
reception
Van Drunen's distinctive voice is often described as "original and charismatic" as well as "the most brutal Death Metal voice". He is considered the figurehead of Asphyx.
Discography
Note: Albums and EPs only
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Grand Supreme Blood Court
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Web links
- Martin van Drunen at Allmusic (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Steven Willems: MARTIN VAN DRUNEN , voicesfromthedarkside.de. Retrieved September 8, 2011.
- ↑ GRAND SUPREME BLOOD COURT signed with Century Media Records ( memento from September 23, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), whiskey-soda.de . Retrieved March 13, 2012.
- ↑ a b sj: Hail Of Bullets - Martin van Drunen has no love for Nazis! , bloodchamber.de. Retrieved September 8, 2011.
- ↑ a b Asphyx , laut.de. Retrieved September 8, 2011.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Drunen, Martin van |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch singer and bass player |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1966 |