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Rutger (Rudy) Verbist

Season Two: Episode Eight

Ryan talks with Rudy Verbist, from the band Gnome, about his song selection for the mixtape, “Tom Paine’s Bones” performed by The Trials of Cato as well as the importance of not taking yourself too seriously, the wealth of metal festivals in Belgium, bands that Ryan and Rudy have ruined for themselves by listening way too much, and much more!

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Season Two Playlist

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Transcript

Rudy: We already had this kind of stupid vibe going on. We didn’t take ourselves serious. There were these whimsical parts in our songs that you wouldn’t expect from a Stoner band. Then it was Egon, the drummer who who came up with the idea, “why don’t we call ourselves Gnome?” And I think it was spot on because a gnome is a mythical, mystical creature, but it’s also stupid. It’s funny and it’s badass at the same time and that’s exactly what we are and how we view ourselves. So we went with the Gnome thing. We put on some pointy hats. We started playing our first shows in local bars and that’s kind of where it all started and now we’re here.

Ryan: You’re tuned into Let’s Make A Mixtape, where each episode features a different guest selecting a song based on a prompt and this season we’re talking about Gnome. Sorry, home. But also Gnome. Because my guest today, Rudy, is the singer and guitarist in the Belgian trio Gnome.

I recorded this conversation with Rudy nearly a year ago, well before their album Vestiges of Verumex Visidrome was recorded. Vestiges was released just a few weeks back and builds off of everything that made their breakout sophomore album, King, a cult sensation. At times heavier than its predecessor, Vestiges sees the band with the same dedication to hooks, riffs, killer tones, and healthy sense of humor that swept the heavy rock scene off its feet two years ago.

I know this conversation is with and about Rudy, but I want to take a moment, to talk to their bass player directly. Geoffrey, if you’re listening, bassist to bassist, that bass tone you got dialed in for this record is fuckin’ nasty, dude. This is a podcast so you can’t see me making the stank face, but it’s very much there.

While many who have found their way to Gnome stay for the riffs and killer musicianship, a good portion of the audience found them through their music videos, including myself. The YouTube algorithm recommended the video Wenceslas. I watched it. And that was it. I was sold.

They haven’t held back on the videos with this new record either, which is why it’s super important to check the show transcript at letsmixtape.com because I’ll link to and embed a bunch of cool stuff.

Anyways, as I said, I’ve been sitting on this conversation for the better part of a year waiting eagerly to share it with y’all so I’ll quit yappin’ and get to the chat.

And yes I did sneak in the line “gnome is where the heart is” so you better listen carefully. Let’s make a mixtape.

[Intro music by Scotty Sandwich]

Ryan: Rudy, thank you so much for helping me make a mixtape here on season two. We’re talking about songs that remind you of home and you picked “Tom Paine’s Bones” by the Trials of Cato.

Why does this song remind you about home? Why why’d you pick this one?

Rudy: Well, the why is because I stumbled upon it while listening to a radio show about maybe three or four years ago. And it just stuck to me. I obviously love stoner metal, doom, rock and roll, but this is more of an old time classic folk song.

And, folk instruments, they always make my inspiration juices flow and this song has just such a fun vibe with kind of a sad lyrics. I just love it. And I introduced my girlfriend to it. She loves it as well. For me, it’s so high up on my personal favorites of all time list that I would be absolutely happy to have it played on my funeral if I ever die, which I will.

So anytime it comes up at our house where we’re, yeah- I love it. It gives me this cozy, homey feeling.

Ryan: When, when you recommended, or when you selected this one, I had never heard of the band or of the song. I’m not realizing that it is an older and older folk song.

But that the treatment that Trials of Cato did to this music is incredible. As soon as I listened to it, I knew there was something special about it. I typically enjoy folk, it’s not my usual go to, and I listened to this and it just grabbed me in a way that I don’t think I’ve been grabbed by similar music. There’s just something so full and, and beautiful about it.

Rudy: Well, it isn’t usual for me either. I do listen to some folk, but absolutely not that much. But the thing is, it’s completely normal if you haven’t heard of the Trials of Cato, I don’t think they’re very big, but the song is- I don’t know exactly where it comes from, but I think it’s a quite an old timey classic because if you look up “Tom Paine’s Bones” on Spotify or YouTube, you’ll find hundreds of results. I think it’s an old time classic folk song from- I think it’s English in nature. And it’s been played and covered by countless bands. But I think that their rendition is just, it’s just bittersweet. I love it.

Ryan: Yeah bittersweet, I think is a really good way to describe it.

I love a song that has that darkness to the content, but musically it’s a little bit more lively and happy.

Rudy: It’s got that kind of dark humor part in it. A little bit, even because the instrument wise, the way the instruments sound, the music is really happy.

It sounds like a fun danceable folk song, but the lyrics are about Tom Paine getting executed by the King for, I don’t know, because it was anti-religious or whatever. And, yeah, so it’s kind of dark, but it’s also happy. I don’t know. I love it.

Ryan: A band that keeps coming up a lot on this podcast, which is, which is kind of funny in season one, and actually in season two, the band Bombadil, has come up several times.

[Post Production Note]: Post production note from the future. In fact, those of you listening through the series in order will recognize Bombadil because Daniel was literally my guest in the last episode. When I put this podcast together, I record all o f the episodes and then sequence the mixtape based on the selections. As I mentioned at the top of this episode, this episode was recorded nearly a year ago. My chat with Daniel from Bombadil was recorded more recently. Time is a flat circle man. Anyways, back to it.

I don’t know if it’s familiar. They’re originally from North Carolina. I think one of them is based in France now, but they have a very similar folk approach where the lyrics are dark as hell, but the music is incredibly happy.

Rudy: It sounds familiar. I think I’ve heard the name of this band before, but I’m not sure if I, if I recognize any of the songs.

Ryan: It was the first thing I thought of when I, when I listened to this song. That kind of gave me a little bit of a memory of home too, since they’re from my hometown.

But, yeah so, the coziness is really what reminds you of home? What, what is home to you?

Rudy: Home to me right now I have a partner, my girlfriend. We bought a house together in Borgerhout, which is a suburb of Antwerp. In in Belgium. We’re very happy we were able to afford a house because these days the housing market is really, really tough in all of Europe.

We are past our thirties now, and we were happy that we can get a house right now. Some of our friends, they’re in their forties and they can’t even afford a house. So it’s- very happy to own one. But we picked a good neighborhood. We like it here. We’re happy.

I’ll show you, I have my cat right here on my lap.

Ryan: Taking a nap. Adorable.

Rudy: She also reminds me of home. I have a lot of friends here. I grew up in a different suburb of Antwerp, Scholten, but it isn’t very far away. I have a lot of friends here and I love it. My full time job isn’t very far away either. So my commute is nice. I have a garden. We do barbecues there. Love it.

Ryan: Love it. Gnome is where the heart is, right?

Rudy: Oh yeah.

Ryan: What is the scene like in Antwerp or the surrounding area?

Rudy: Specifically the stoner scene is, I think really healthy. We obviously have Desertfest Antwerp. There’s only four of those in the world. You have New York, Berlin, London, and Antwerp. So I feel quite privileged to live in a city that hosts a Desertfest because those are probably the biggest festivals in the genre.

The broader genre of metal is bigger, of course, stoner and doom, they would be considered sub genres of maybe metal. But metal as well, is very big here. We have Graspop Metal Meeting, which is one of the three biggest metal festivals in Europe. Germany has Wacken. France has Hellfest and Belgium has Graspop. And I think those are the three biggest. So that’s also something I’m spoiled with because Graspop, that’s one hour drive away from where I live. Every summer I go there. It’s amazing.

We’re quite close to Scandinavia, which births a lot of heavy metal sub-genres. And specifically Belgium in, Antwerp here, we do have quite a few cool venues and metal is very much alive. Stoner is a little more obscure, but it’s good as well.

Now we are signed to a local label called Polder Records. It’s a small label. It’s only one man who runs it, but he has 15 or 20 bands under his belt right now, and they’re all in the stoner genre. Some of them tend more towards punk or hard rock maybe, but most of them are actually stoner bands.

So I think it’s pretty good here.

Ryan: With Gnome, do you find yourself playing mostly with stoner and doom bands, or do you also find yourself on bills with more punk bands and the like.

Rudy: I usually put Gnome under under the term Stoner, which might not entirely be correct. I think we have a lot of flavors in our music. Some of our riffs are doom or heavy metal. Some of our songs are more of a happy hard rock. Calling ourselves truly a stoner band would not be entirely correct. If you define stoner as more of a Kyuss kind of music, Fu Manchu or early Queens of the Stone Age, we’re not actually a true stoner band.

But because we float somewhere between rock and metal, we’re a little too heavy to be called classic rock and we’re too soft to be a metal band. So I think Stoner kind of fits, but because we don’t take ourselves very seriously and our concept is a little whimsical and a lot of our songs aren’t very brutal or hard musically, we also fit quite nicely between rock bands, punk bands or even some pop music bands.

We play in weird places. Usually we’re coupled with metal bands or stoner bands, but we’ve been on festivals that had hip-hop acts that had pop music and it works as well.

Not as well as the metal scene, not all the time, but usually it works pretty well. And for instance, Friday, we opened for Slomosa and Elder at Het Depot in Leuven, and the three of us can all be put under the umbrella term of Stoner, but we are this kind of whimsical, yet brutal, Stoner type of band.

Slomosa is a lot more this straightforward, energetic Stoner and then Elder is this psychedelic floaty space rock. So even within the same “genre,” they’re three totally different flavors of metal or stoner, if you will, in one night and I think that’s awesome.

Ryan: Oh, yeah. I first saw you, well, the first and only time I saw you was Desertfest Berlin. You were actually the selling point for my partner to join me in Berlin. The lineup was too good to ignore. So the fact that you’re on it was like sealing the deal. Desertfest, it was amazing. It was a blast. I love, again, the diversity of billing at the Desertfest. What that entity is building, creating, the lineups at Desertfest is doing a great job of really capturing the breadth of what the genre and sub-genres have to offer.

And I do love that when we were there watching, there were definitely at least two people wearing Gnome hats in the audience. I love that you’ve created this this culture of people making their own Gnome hats.

Rudy: Oh yeah. And we went a lot further cause right now we’re selling them. So at our most recent shows there’s often up to 50 people in the audience with Gnome hats. It gets wild. Really funny. And Desertfest, their lineups are great. What I love, I don’t know if all of them do it but Desertfest Antwerp usually does this, they go for a completely new roster of bands every year. Let’s say if, for instance, Elder plays Desertfest Antwerp the next year, they’re not going to play there. And Desertfest Antwerp, it feels like they also tend to go to a certain subgenre.

I usually go every year and sometimes the entire weekend is mostly doom bands. And then the next year it’s mostly stoner bands. I prefer it if it’s more of a mix, which I think it was this year. This year it definitely was, but I love that they switch it up. Because I previously mentioned Graspop, which is an awesome, ginormous metal festival, but they tend to get the same headliners every year.

I’ve been there about 12 times already, but almost every year I see Iron Maiden, I see Judas Priest. You see these same names return. And I think the Desertfests are better ranges. Putting more American bands on and the next year they’ll put more Scandinavian bands on. You can see everything there. It’s great.

[Transition Song]

Ryan: We had talked a little bit on email and before the official recording, because you were talking about a second track that reflects more your childhood home. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and how you got started, how you got interested in music?

Rudy: Yeah. So my first response was the track that reminds me most of my childhood home, which would be where I grew up with my parents, that’s “Sultans of Swing” by the Dire Straits. And that’s because my mom, she’s absolutely in love with Mark Knopfler. She loves listening to the Dire Straits and she loves listening to his solo albums.

And back in the day, she had a few CDs of the Dire Straits and of Mark Knopfler, and they were on repeat all the time. So me as an 11 year old, 12 year old little boy, I didn’t like it. It all sounded the same to me. And because it was playing all the time, it got to a point where I didn’t enjoy listening to it.

Because of that, I think right now I still don’t really like listening to the Dire Straits, but I know they’re objectively a super cool band. They have written masterpieces, but there’s- I don’t know, his singing, his style of playing guitar. I know it’s amazing, but I don’t like listening to it.

My mom kind of killed it for me, but when I hear the “Sultans of Swing,” it does always remind me of my childhood home. And I think of my mom and thinking of my mom makes me happy, though. I absolutely don’t dislike hearing it from time to time, but I won’t be listening to it on my own, on my own time.

Ryan: Understandable. Yeah, it’s it’s hard when you get burned out by by the classics. I was really into CCR [Creedence Clearwater Revival] for a while and I completely burned myself out on them. I don’t know, I was probably like 14 or something. I just listened to the greatest hits nonstop. And then I just reached a point where I just completely ruined it.

I can’t listen to CCR now. I hate CCR because I listened to it too much.

Rudy: It’s very recognizable. I’ve had exactly the same with CCR as well. For the longest time my top three bands of all time were ABBA, The Beatles, and CCR. They all do different things, but these are three bands that I think have such a wide discography of just hits upon hits.

Almost every song they make turns into gold. And they’re all good. All of their songs are so good, but for CCR, for instance, I worked a job as a mailman in the Antwerp region a couple of years back. And I was alone in a car delivering, newspapers and mail and packages. So I was just listening to music on repeat. And that was for me a period where I was listening to every CCR song I could find. And exactly as you say, at a certain moment, it’s too much of a good thing turns into a bad thing.

Ryan: True. It’s true. It’s true.

Rudy: I also made the mistake a couple of years back, to use a song I like as my alarm clock in the morning. That’s a good way to ruin a good song very, very quickly.

Ryan: Yeah, because you’re associated with not wanting to get up.

Rudy: Yeah, and having to go to your job. Never do that.

Ryan: Noted. Yeah. I have the default setting on my phone and it’s annoying as hell. And I feel like that’s probably how it should be.

Rudy: Yeah. I recommend nobody to ever use a good song as his alarm. The Dire Straits thing, it’s a similar thing because there’s like two major, huge bands that I don’t like listening to. And those would be U2 and the Dire Straits. U2 just not kind of my vibe.

And the Dire Straits is just kind of ruined by my mother.

Ryan: Both valid reasons, I think. So what, growing up, it sounds there was a lot of music in your childhood. Was there a moment that you were like, “oh man, I really want to play music and I want to start a band.” Where did that come from?

Rudy: So there was a lot of music. As I mentioned, my mom, she had music on pretty much all the time when she was doing chores or she was cooking, there usually was music playing.

My father was into rock and roll, but I haven’t heard him put on music a lot. It was usually my mom who decided what was playing. We rarely listened to the radio. It was usually her just putting CD- She had this old school CD player kind of thing, but it could house five different CDs. And it had this kind of rudimentary shuffle function where it would select one of the five CDs randomly and then play one of those songs randomly.

Ryan: I’m pretty sure my mom had the exact same thing and she just throw on the same five or six CDs while she was doing chores.

Rudy: So my mom did the same.

So I grew up listening to a lot of what she listened to, which turned out to be mostly Mark Knopfler-based music. There was also some classic rock. There was Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin. Some more local Belgian tunes. I got into classic rock quite, quite soon in my life.

But I think that up until the age of 13, maybe 14, I just listened to whatever was on the radio. I didn’t have a particular taste. But I did gravitate towards weird sounding things or quirky things.

I visibly remember, Spaceman, very annoying electronic music. I don’t even remember who made it, but it has had this chipmunk kind of vocal [sings] “Spaceman” it was annoying, but I would listen to it on repeat on repeat because it was quirky sounding.

And my mother, she played classical guitar when she was a teenager. So we always had this old nylon string guitar laying around in the house and I got curious and sometimes picked it up. Started plunking away a little bit. And at the age of 12 for my birthday or Christmas or whatever, I received this very simple, cheap, Casio keyboard.

I think ever since I got that keyboard, I was just unstoppable. I was messing around with it all the time, playing simple folk or music pieces and mimicking things I had heard on the radio which is where, in hindsight, I have quite a good ear for music. I’ve never been classically schooled, so I don’t read music, but when I hear notes, it takes me only a couple of seconds to recreate them on a piano or on a guitar.

So yeah, I gravitated toward messing around with the keys and with my mother’s guitar. But the main breakthrough for me was when I was 14 years old, we had some kind of show and tell thing going on in school. And one of my classmates, he brought an electric guitar and he played some AC/DC or Metallica on his electric guitar in the front of the class. And it just blew me away. It was pretty good, but I was just in aw of the raw nature of an amplifier in the flesh.

I had never been to a live concert at that point. It just blew me away. And I was like, “Oh, I need to do this.” And one of my best friends at the time, Geoffrey, who is the bass player of Gnome, he started playing guitar with one of his good friends.

They took some private lessons and about half a year or a year later, I went to my mom, I said, “Mom, I want to play guitar.” So she was like, “all right, I’ll send you to music school,” but I didn’t want to go to music school. It’s like this. School after school when on your Wednesday evening you go back to school to learn the classical theory. It’s so dusty and boring. I just wanted to play AC/DC, you know?

At one point my mom, she just gave in. She bought me this $50 electric piece of junk guitar and this tiny volcano amplifier, which has maybe 10 watts of power. Sounds like absolute shit, but I was in heaven.

I started to play the thing that everybody does “Seven Nation Army,” “Smoke on the Water.” None of it played correctly, but you can get close to something resembling it, so you feel like a rock star almost immediately. And then from there on out, I never quit.

I started listening a lot more to rock and to metal specifically. So around the age of 15, I got into metal with Metallica, System of a Down, Rage Against the Machine. Those were, I think, my three biggest bands at the time.

I started with some of my friends, cause some of them also started playing guitar, we formed these garage bands playing some Nirvana cover songs. You might know how it goes.

Ryan: Oh yeah.

Rudy: But usually none of those types of projects live long enough to become anything resembling successful. I’ve had about 20 of those types of bands with some random friends throughout my teenage years.

I also started making electronic music on the software called Reason, Propellerhead Reason. And that’s because around the age of 16, drum and bass and dubstep became very, very popular in all of Europe. It was already popular in England, but it kind of washed over the rest of Europe and all the parties were playing drum and bass-

Someone’s at the door. I think it’s my girlfriend. She also reminds me of home. So, where were we?

Ryan: You’re talking about electronic music and dubstep was getting big.

Rudy: Oh yeah. So between the ages of 16 and say 20, I was very deeply into drum and bass and dubstep. So deep I wanted to mingle with producing it myself.

But I wasn’t very good in making actual dubstep or drum and bass, but I got quite good at making these experimental electronic tracks with a lot of samples and just weirdness, which kind of reaches back to the creativity I found with the keyboard and the stupid quirky songs. But this really ended up laying a big foundation in the way that I write music right now, because also I remember for our first Gnome album, the Father of Time album, many of the riffs are actually electronic pieces I had written in some of my weird music back then, which I just transposed to guitar. I recycled some of those electronic ideas, turned them into rock ‘n’ roll and went from there, actually.

Ryan: That’s really cool. I’m gonna have to go give that a listen with that context in mind too. That’s, that’s really cool.

Rudy: That’s another thing I did. I got into the habit of finishing my projects. As I mentioned before, a lot of my contemporaries, a lot of my friends around the time also started playing guitar. Some of them also started messing with producing music, but most of them, they never released anything.

It was like, “Oh, what are you doing?”

“I’m making this song.”

“Oh, can I listen to it?”

“No, it isn’t finished.”

And then three years later, it still isn’t finished and it’ll never see the day of light. But I got into this habit of just making something. Maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s bad. It was usually quite bad. But when I started losing interest or had more interest in something new, I’ll just give it an ending. Upload it to SoundCloud or YouTube or whatever and move on to the next thing, no matter how bad it was. So most of it is still floating around on SoundCloud, on Newgrounds, on YouTube.

Ryan: Newgrounds. That’s a throwback.

Rudy: Yeah, I was very deeply into Newgrounds. It has this audio portal, which has all of my electronic- Oh, and I also made some flash videos. Because believe it or not, my full-time day job is motion graphics design. And my animation skills, they have their kickstart in flash videos on Newgrounds. I was never any good though, but I had fun.

Ryan: I remember back when in like, yeah, Newgrounds messing around at- my high school had some weird program that you could do. I think it was like some sort of geometry program, but you could add animation to it or just like creating these stupid little stick figure animations.

It was ridiculous. And I never went any further than that, but yeah, I remember those good old days of those flash videos.

Rudy: Stick dudes fighting, that’s a big, big lump of my childhood right there.

Ryan: The good old days of the internet when it was far more innocent.

Rudy: Oh yeah, it was, it definitely was.

[Transition Music]

Ryan: When starting Gnome, you said you had about 20 some-odd projects that you had started and never went anywhere. When you started Gnome, were you like, “all right, we’re going do it this time?” Or was it, you just started the band for fun and then. “Boom.”

Rudy: Yeah. Let’s, reduce the 20, the 20 odd bands to about four that were actually something.

There were four bands. One of them was called Imansion. Which was like this, how do I say more kind of bluesy folk-ish type of music. But there were five of us and we all wanted to go in a different direction and it created some friction, which eventually ended the band, but we did have some recordings that still to this day are not bad to listen to.

Then I also played bass for about a year in a very brutal metal band called Sadistic Embrace. This wasn’t a band where I had ever written any music, but it was fun for us as long as it lasted.

And then there was my most successful project at the time was called Ivory for Elephants where I played drums. Geoffrey, the bass player of Gnome, he played guitar. And then there were two other friends of ours. Vinny, who played rhythm guitar and did lead vocals and, Schenck, who played bass. And this was already stoner with like a wink of doom. It was quite unhinged.

It was fun. It was raw, a lot of energy. We actually recorded two albums with that band. But we like never got to- we hit a ceiling and we never really got to break through it. There was something, my rhythm on drums wasn’t exactly there. Schenck on bass, he wasn’t too good either.

The vocals never really reached their potential and somehow the band and ended up dying as well. But to this day, I have a lot of fun memories of Ivory for Elephants. But at the time I was playing drums in Ivory for Elephants. And I started out playing guitar when I was 14 years old, but because of having one active band where I was playing drums, I wasn’t actually touching my guitar anymore and I missed it.

I think I was about, let’s say 20 years old at the time, and I was also starting to lose interest in the electronic music. I didn’t like dubstep and drum and bass anymore. I was listening exclusively to rock and some funk and blues maybe, but I completely lost interest in electronic music.

And I wanted to play more guitar. At the time I started this YouTube channel where I wrote songs on my own. I recorded them very amateur in my bedroom. I played drums myself. I played guitar and bass myself. I recorded vocals myself. And then I just shoot ridiculous videos of myself dressed up as an idiot, walking through the garden, dancing, playing instruments. Just generally being an idiot.

But that’s where I actually wrote some rock songs that had potential to my own ear. So at a certain moment I realized I want to play more guitar and playing drums in this band that it’s fun, but I miss playing guitar and I have a lot of ideas for songs.

So why don’t I just start my own band with myself on lead guitar, I’ll write most of the music. I’ll just need a drummer that is at least as good as myself on drums because it would be frustrating to have a drummer that cannot drum the parts that I have going on in my head when I’m writing the music.

So my initial idea was I’ll start a duo, kind of like White Stripes or Royal Blood, because I told you about the five piece band Imansion, it was very difficult to get rehearsals together. To get everybody on the same page. So I was thinking if it’s a duo, I do everything melodic, right? The music and the drummer just fills in the rhythm. It’s easy to get rehearsals, to get in a van and play shows. It’s easy if it’s just the two of you.

So what I did, one of the songs I recorded by myself, I put it on a Facebook group called Antwerp Musicians, I think it was called, and I literally said there “I’m Rudy, I’m 20 years old. I live in Antwerp. I want to start a band, a rock band. This is the type of music I’m making. And I linked the video there. I’ll write the music. I’m just looking for a drummer, somebody who doesn’t live too far away.” ‘Cause I’d like to do maybe weekly rehearsals, because I did have the ambition to make at least something out of it. And we could start playing local bars tiny places. And actually after one day I had like eight people responding to it saying that they were interested which already kind of blew me away.

I didn’t think it would be that easy. So I started chatting with all eight of them to see if I could connect with one of them and then maybe meet them live, have a jam in my music shack, which is in the yard of my mom’s house. Actually the first guy that turned up was Egon, who is now the drummer of Gnome.

We started jamming in my shack in the backyard and we just completely vibed from the first minute. Not only musically, but also he’s a funny dude and an idiot. I’m a funny dude and an idiot. We’ve got the same kind of fart humor. So we jelled quite fast and musically, cause I was sitting with this thing, I don’t want a drummer that isn’t as good as me, but I’m not very good as a drummer, but he completely blew me away because he’s an actual trained musician. I’m a hobby musician. I work a full-time job. I started playing guitar, but I’ve never been trained. So it’s a side-hustle that I have. It’s my hobby, but for him, he’s schooled. He earns his living playing drums. He plays in a lot of bands. He plays in jazz trios. He earns his living playing drums. So he completely blew me away. Not only musically. His chops were insane, but I was also blown away by the fact that he even had interest in my stupid side project.

He plays in bands where it’s actually making music. My band, even if he likes it, I couldn’t offer him any payment, at least not even for the first five years, you know. I had no idea where it would take us because all of my previous bands had failed. I was actually assuming this one would fail eventually as well.

But you know, it just vibed. There was potential right away. We had so much fun and it took about just two or three rehearsals with just the two of us before I realized, okay, this has potential, but a duo isn’t gonna cut it. So I called in Geoffrey and I asked him to join the band. Not, not exactly as a bass player ’cause in the beginning he played guitar. We had two guitars and one drummer. But he started because we were missing a low end to our sounds. So he’s played everything that I played on guitar, but he’d play it with an octave or pedal, everything one octave lower.

So the next realization we made was play it through a bass amp because it sounds heavier. And the next step was just start playing bass. And it was a lot better because our first album, Father of Time is completely played with two guitars. No bass on the entire album.

Ryan: And then King is full bass?

Rudy: Yeah. Oh, and then the other thing that’s quite fun to mention about our our origin: my first name for the band was Sleepless Titan. But we quickly figured out, especially after having written the first three songs, Sleepless Titan was too evil sounding. It doesn’t sound evil, but it’s more standard Stoner sounding, but our music wasn’t standard Stoner.

We already had this kind of stupid vibe going on. We didn’t take ourselves serious. There were these whimsical parts in our songs that you wouldn’t expect from a Stoner band. Then it was Egon, the drummer who who came up with the idea, “why don’t we call ourselves Gnome?” And I think it was spot on because a gnome is a mythical, mystical creature, but it’s also stupid. It’s funny and it’s badass at the same time and that’s exactly what we are and how we view ourselves. So we went with the Gnome thing. We put on some pointy hats. We started playing our first shows in local bars and that’s kind of where it all started and now we’re here.

Ryan: Amazing. And so I first found out about y’all from- it was a YouTube recommended video. It was Wenceslas. I was like, “this looks like it’s going to be hilarious.” And it was goofy, but well put together, the cinematography on that video is amazing and it looks super pro.

And while you say you don’t take yourself seriously, it seems like you don’t, but also you take the craft seriously and you got the – I hate to use the word “gimmick” – but you have the gnome shtick, but you back it up with just some amazing fucking music. It’s perfect. I love it. It’s great.

Rudy: That’s where the magic lies. I think, because we don’t take ourselves seriously, but we do take music seriously. I wouldn’t be playing in bands for almost 20 years of my life just for laughs, you know. I think it’s in every musician’s mind to at least aspire to some kind of success.

So from the very get go, I’ve always wanted to be able to create music that can be listened to around the world, that people can enjoy and that could maybe put me on a big stage somewhere. Ever since I was 14 years old and heard the kid playing in school, playing on his guitar, I was dreaming of a big stage on, on Pukkelpop, or Graspop in Belgium.

Playing there would be amazing. So I always do take my music seriously. On the level of wanting to create something that actually sounds good. But what I don’t take seriously is the ego approach. Many musicians, they need to dress-, they need the long hair they need to appear as a rock and roll God.

But it’s the music that matters. Not your appearance, not your name or your ego. It’s the craft that’s awesome. And on top of that, I love metal and doom and stoner, but most, most of it is- the music is heavy, brutal, and dark, but the themes are also very dark. Usually it’s often about decapitation and bloody things and misery and what have you. But I think I’m a happy person, generally, but I love heavy sounding music and I’d like to combine music that sounds heavy and brutal and bad ass with a theme that is happy. And whimsical.

Ryan: That almost ties it perfectly back to the song in almost the inverse, because we were talking about how the music is kind of happy and whimsical, but the theme is much darker.

So it’s almost, it’s almost like a flip there.

Rudy: Yeah. We go full circle there. Yeah, we do. To say more about the video in particular. ‘Cause we hear it a lot of people saying it’s stupid, but it’s also cinematographically sound. But it has to do with a few factors:

First of all, so I already mentioned that my day job is being a motion graphics artist, but that’s not my only function in the company I work at. I also do camera work and video editing in general. It’s also I who edited all of our videos. So I do have a background. I kind of know what I’m doing.

I wouldn’t say I’m great at it, but the funny thing about the Wenceslas video is it’s very- there isn’t much orchestrated about it at all. Our goal was to make a video for Ambrosius, which is the one we did in the greenhouse.

I was at the marriage of one of my friends and the party for the marriage was in this tree orchard that belonged to his father. And when I was there at the party, I saw this overgrown shack and I thought, “oh man.” I went up to him and I asked him, “can we please make a music video in this greenhouse, it looks absolutely phenomenal.” And he was like, “sure, just ask my dad.” And his dad was fine with it.

So we looked for a date. We rented some GoPro cameras. We made sure we had all the equipment we needed. We went over there, put the GoPros in every corner of the shack, played through the song two or three times. And that was a wrap. We were done, but we had like the entire rest of the afternoon, we had a cool location. We had cameras, we had time. We were all there.

So we were like, “why don’t we just record another video? Which song are we going to pick?” “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe – Let’s do Wenceslas.” I was kind of inspired by the, Lonely Boy video of the Black Keys, which is just this dude dancing in front of a static camera on a tripod. That’s the entire video. So I thought, let’s do something similar. I’ll put a camera on a tripod, we do a stupid dance, it took about 20 minutes to come up with the choreography. And teach it to them.’

Ryan: The dance is great. It’s so stupid. It’s so perfectly dumb, I love it. It’s great. It’s amazing.

Rudy: So the entire video was actually an afterthought.

But then, you know, life happens, the planets align, I don’t know, the Wenceslas video does twice as good as the actual video for Ambrosius. Which is what we thought would have been the- to us personally, Ambrosius is probably our best song to date. And I personally thought that maybe “Your Empire” would be the biggest hit on the album. We had Oskar Logi singing it. I thought it had quite a catchy hook and it had a cool riff, but somehow it was Wenceslas that completely took over.

It’s exactly the popularity of those two videos on YouTube that opened all of the doors for us. Up until then, we were just playing local bars and very tiny festivals and venues. But the videos exploded and suddenly we got these requests of people all over the world. “Oh, you guys are amazing. When are you, when are you playing New Zealand? When are you coming to Brazil?” We were completely blown away answering all of them with, “we would love to go to fucking Brazil, but we cannot financially make that happen.”

We didn’t a booker, we didn’t have an agent, we didn’t have a manager, nothing, But the videos drew enough attention that we got to play Desertfest Antwerp for the first time, which would now be two years ago. And then Plague on Antwerp, Desertfest Antwerp really blew open the doors.

That was our way into the actual scene because every artist is looking for that breakthrough. For us, the videos leading to the first Desertfest show were the actual breakthrough. And from there on out, it magically just aligned.

We got into contact with Sound of Liberation, the Germans who are booking our European tours. We’ve got contacted by Brett Raffenhoff from Medicine House asking us if we had already have a Canadian or U.S. Booker, which we obviously didn’t. And he’s the one who made our U.S. tour happen. And from there on out, we signed to the Polder Records label.

We had already done that maybe a year previous. And he had very good connections with the organization of Alcatraz, another metal festival in Belgium. So he got us a spot there. Then the Desertfest Antwerp show opened the doors to Desertfest London. Desertfest Berlin. And that’s where it all took off and now we’re on this magical journey.

This past year has been amazing. We’ve toured the UK, which was absolutely amazing. Toured the U.S., which was an insane adventure. We’re opening for Elder, for God’s sake. We’re playing together with Greenleaf, with Slomosa. It’s been insane. I’m living on a cloud right now.

Ryan: Amazing. And you’re still having fun with it and loving every minute. That’s amazing. And well deserved, what you’re doing, it definitely stands out and it’s so fun to listen to. It’s fun to watch. I’m so stoked for y’all, that y’all are blowing up the way you are.

Rudy: Thank you for the kind words. I always keep telling everybody that my goal is to have fun.

Ryan: Yeah, because why else, as musicians, why else would- One of the first things with my band, like we all kind of decided on just like key parts about what we want from the band. And it’s like, all right, where do we want to go? What are the key things as musicians in a relationship, effectively a family. It’s like, as soon as it stops being fun, we need to reevaluate. ‘Cause if we’re not having fun, why the fuck are we doing that?

Rudy: Yeah. Yeah. Cause I mentioned the five piece band I mentioned. Which was all about productivity and the fun was completely gone. And that’s what killed it for me. But the flip side, I’ve also played in bands that were just fun and nothing else. Smoke some weed, play some bass, play some guitar. Play some video games, but then you never get anywhere.

So 100 percent of fun isn’t good either. You need to find this magical relationship between. ‘Cause that’s what keeps you going and keeps you going back ambition because we want to at least grow to something and then being at least productive enough that you can play, you have more songs that you played a year previously, you might be able to look forward to recording something at least two or three years after you’ve started a band. There has to be some kind of progression because otherwise it will stagnate and the fun will start to dissipate anyway.

Ryan: That’s great advice and a great outlook.

Thank you so much for your time for talking with me. Is there anything before we wrap up that we didn’t get to that you want to talk about?

Rudy: Well, to be honest, I could go on for a couple more hours, but what do you need to know?

I don’t know, man. I love making music. I love listening to music. I absolutely love the fact that people are now loving my music. Cause that’s always been the dream. I’m on this insane magical journey because in the last two years I’ve realized most of the dreams that I’ve always had since I was about 13, 14 years old.

I always wanted to do a big tour. I always wanted to play big festival shows. And then it took 15 years to actually get there. And now I’ve checked almost all of those boxes in the past two years. Which is insane. I think we’re still on a healthy rise. I do not know where we will hit a ceiling or where the journey might end, but ideally it won’t end and it will keep going and growing.

We are looking forward to recording our third studio album probably in April next year. And over the summer we will be recording new videos and by September, October, we’re hoping to be able to do a European tour through Germany, Scandinavia, maybe some France. Maybe back to the UK to promote the new album and then we’ll go from there.

But our journey hasn’t ended. It’s going solid. It’s taking off. We’re having fun. I think the future is bright. And I’m loving it.

Ryan: Amazing. Well, I wish you the absolute best and I’m so excited to see what is in store for you all in the future.

Rudy: Well, thanks a lot. Thanks for the interest and the support and it was nice talking to you. And I’m looking forward to meeting you in the flesh.

Ryan: We’ll make it happen. Cheers. Thank you so much, Rudy.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. You can listen to all three Gnome records wherever you get your streaming or order physical copies from Polder Records. To hear “Tom Paine’s Bones” and all of the season two selections so far, go to the show notes in this episode and add the season two playlist to your Spotify or YouTube favorites. I’m going to leave you with the 8 minute epic off of their new record called The Ogre.

Thanks to Rudy for chatting with me and thank you for tuning in. Be sure to feed those algorithm gods by subscribing and rating this show wherever you get your podcasts to help other fellow music nerds find this here show. Tune in next week when I chat with Nick Wheeldon, a prolific musician currently based out of Paris, who releases music under his name as well as with the band Os Noctambulos. All recording and editing was done by yours truly; intro and transition music was composed and recorded by the one and only Scotty Sandwich.


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