Hi! This is Iris from Mythologica. Today I’m with amazing people who probably made you dance and sing on a festival or two. Please welcome Stan, Tim and Laurens from Pyrolysis.
Pyrolysis: hello!
First of all, thank you for taking the time to answer this interview. You have a really amazing story. You began as a metal band and you’ve made some stops with folk punk. Can you tell us more about your story? What led you to travel through these different kinds of music?
Laurens: we started as a band when we were still in High School. We met a long, long time ago when we were small kids basically. You know, making metal was the cool thing to do so we started trying that but…
Stan: we already did that together so it was like a logical starting ground.
Laurens: yeah! The music that we were writing just came out of us so happy and jolly and all very danceable. So we were all dressed in black, long hair, angry faces, but we made this totally happy music… That doesn’t make any sense! Because actually we didn’t even know that folk existed. Well, we knew of course about some instruments like violin, accordion, whatever… but we didn’t know any folk bands. We were only focused on metal bands. It’s really strange that we started to create this music that turned out to be folk in the end.
Tim: obviously we knew bands like Ensiferum, Flogging Molly, basically folk metal, folk punk. We covered songs from those bands at that time as well. That was probably the starting point for the folk aspect. Basically, punk and metal bands who were also incorporating folk elements. That’s how we started to go down that rabbit hole (laugh).
Laurens: the reason why we actually went more into acoustic stuff is because we wanted to play at a festival in the Netherlands. It was sort of a folk festival and of course they said “okay, we don’t know you guys, we don’t have a place on the stage or whatever, so you cannot come and play here”. We said “okay, what if we just stick our instruments and just play acoustically on the field?”. We have never did that before so it was a really strange thing. We sort of bluffed that we could do that. We went out there with our instruments and we just played folk and everyone loved it! We had a crowd immediately! People gathered around. It was a really strange experience but it felt very natural.
Tim: yep! That felt like we were immediately embraced by the sort of Celtic folk music scene that we basically stumbled upon. We sort of bluffed our way into the festival, started playing and the rest is history essentially. This was super cool!
Laurens: yeah ’cause whenever we played metal we always felt like we were the ones out. People were listening to us and were having a good time, and people danced and we were always of course having fun, but it never felt like we were really making a connection with the people that go there. Now we know that’s just because we’re actually a folk band. In folk festivals we really have this wonderful connection. It really feels like home!
Tim: yeah!
Stan: agree!
See also: Interview with Le Garçon de l’Automne
How does this musical background influence your music now? What led you to compose and play folk music in the end?
Tim: like we said, we started off playing metal and punk and stuff. There’s a part of that that we have always kept in our music which is that we want: energy. We want to get people to move, get them to dance and really have the music sort of be a physical experience partially. That comes from us listening to punk and metal and trying to start off in that real house. That’s the big influence on the way we write and the way we perform. We want to get people energized and go. You can still see that we have acoustic instruments, we play acoustically but we get moshpits and we get walls of death and that’s so cool! That’s a big part of our background I think and that’s something you can still see in our music to a big degree.
Laurens: I think also the topics that we write about. I mean, we don’t write about death or whatever dark things but we do party songs, of course, about drinking, but also a lot of our songs having topics about finding your own way in life and sort of dealing with personal issues and feeling when you’re lost in the storm…
Stan: we actually have a song about accepting your own death, which is a pretty intense topic when you think about it…
Tim: but that’s basically also our love for Celtic folk music. If you listen to a lot of traditional folk songs, there’s some heavy, depressing lyrics sometimes. Once we found that out, we’re like “okay, we can also do that”. So, sometimes we get some emotional, some heavy lyrics.
Are there any artists who have played a significant influence on you as folk musicians?
Stan: a few ones that we already mentioned, like Eluveitie and Flogging Molly, which were obviously more on the heavy side. But after we kind of found out that folk existed as a genre, we started really admiring, for example, the band Silly Wizard, Scottish folk musicians. They were great, they were just… to me that’s pretty much the epitome of Celtic folk music!
Laurens: yeah they are very skilled! I think also now in the folk scene I’d look up to a lot of bands in the way they write their own songs. They really feel like they are already very old, although they’re not traditional, some bands write their own songs but they just feel so natural. That’s really inspiring for me. For example, in the band Plunder that we play a lot with, I really like their songwriting, but also bands like SeeD and of course Faun, the big bands that also write their own songs. That’s for me really inspiring.
Tim: it’s also crazy to see that usually, when you hear a band talk about their influences, you get a list of bands that they’re listening to since they were children, that they admire as rock stars or whatever. But, for us, mainly the bands that we look up to and the bands we get a lot of inspiration from, those are the bands that we share the stages with.
Stan: of course, what you’re saying is still partially true, as well. We also get some musical influences from the prog music that you listen to since you were a teenager and the punk music that I listened to since I was a teenager. We still have some of that stuff in our music. But yeah it’s cool that we also learn so much from all these bands around us and it’s so cool!
Pyrolysis
Your music is inspired now by gypsy, punk and pirate music. How do you manage the collision of these worlds?
Laurens: we don’t manage that at all (laugh).
Tim: part of it is that we play what we want to play and we play what we think sounds good and what we get enthusiastic about. That’s automatically what you’re gonna hear from us when we record stuff and when we play. It’s indeed a lot of different genres blending together. We don’t even understand what we’re doing half the time, we just go by ear.
Laurens: I remember this cool website that did a review for our album Daylight is fading. We didn’t post it on our Facebook ’cause they said something like “these songs are good, but what the hell is this band about?! Two songs you’ve been pirate then there’s some gypsy… what is this?”(laugh). We feel like “oh this album is all over the place again!”. There’s so many influences! What Tim said is that we try not to make songs like “now we want to make a pirate song” and we try to make that. It’s just really like “okay what do we feel right now, what do we want to play at this moment?”. What we are trying to do is not trying to fit in some predefined genre…
Stan: I think an interesting addition to that is that our relatively fresh bassist Joshua, which I’m glad to say has been with us for quite some time, he also brings in a wider array of musical genres. He’s also influenced by funk, for example, which is not something we would have done ourselves. It’s really cool to hear in some of our new songs that these funk elements are very strong and it’s like it gets an all new twist to the music we’re doing.
Tim: and I also want to add that we have a lot of different genres influences in our music. Sometimes it’s confusing for the audience when they find us on the internet or whatever. But the good thing about it is that we have been able to perform on many different festivals and for many different crowds with the same setlist. We’ve been on Pagan gatherings, we’ve been on a lot of pirate festivals, we’ve been on metal festivals, on all of these different fields and scenes. You know, part of our music always manages to find a home somewhere. We were able to discover a lot of places and meet a lot of people because we have such a wide pallet. I love that!
Laurens: that’s a good point!
See also: Interview with Scurra, French folk-medieval band
I found a little video on your YouTube channel with your adventures on World of Warcraft.
Tim: it’s a blast from the past! (laugh)
Stan: quite some time ago! (laugh)
Is composing for video games something you have ever thought about (I thought about Sea of Thieves for example)?
Tim: oh yeah!
Stan: yes! So many things I would like to say about this because of course we are all video game nerds! We regularly get together to just play video games. Laurens and I got really addicted to World of Warcraft at some point, both to an unhealthy extent. So the WoW thing was a personal thing. But also for video games in general I think we would be open to writing video games music. I think we all think it would be cool!
Laurens: yeah, but I find these opportunities difficult. We worked now together with two streamers for Sea of Thieves. One was called “The Pace” and our song was called The Pace and another one, we are writing a song for him, so some collaborations are starting up but we would love to write for video games. It would be great!
Stan: Sea of Thieves already has some great music so…
Tim: if you are watching, Sea of Thieves makers, and you want some really cool crispy folk music we would absolutely love to work with you!
But, as you said, you can also work with streamers or gamers. It would be cool too!
Pyrolysis: yeah!
What about your creative process: is it a mutual proposal or is there somebody specific who compose?
Laurens: it’s both at the same time, right guys?
Tim: kind of yeah.
Laurens: we really work together a lot. But there’s almost always one guy that has an initial idea and a sort of vision for the song. Because else we just get in the room and get frustrated because everyone is throwing ideas at each other and it doesn’t have that direction. Definitely we all write, we all contribute to the songs.
Stan: it’s all a dynamic process. At one point, some person can have an idea of where a song is supposed to go, but then, during the writing process, someone else might have an idea that connects better with the rest of the band and then we just go for that.
Laurens: yeah after a fight, of course! (laugh)
Tim: or not. Sometimes it’s harmonious!
Laurens: also all good lyrics are written by Tim!
Tim: I do my best. Indeed, usually one person starts with a clear idea like “I have an idea for the song and this is sort of what I have in mind” but then we all work together and we put ideas back and forth, and then we have an end result after hours in the rehearsal space.
Stan: not always hours. There are several cases of songs that we ended up re-writing after several years. Not entirely…
Tim: yeah that’s a thing about us as well. We are always under construction. Once you play a song for a month or years you learn more and more about it, even though it’s on an album somewhere and you released it. Sometimes you discover more and more about it and you can make changes. And we’re always open to that.
Laurens: I think what’s also very special about our writing process is that we have these melodies that sometimes lay around, just in the back of our minds for years. We have songs that the melody started three years ago. If we know it sticks in our minds for three years, then it must be something good. But you want to find the rest of the song as well (laugh). It takes years really for us because maybe we’re not really structured songwriters, but I also like this process a lot. We keep all these puzzle pieces from way back and then suddenly it’s a new song and I’m super hyped!
Stan: the inverse thing happens sometimes as well. We had some songs that wrote themselves like half an afternoon.
Tim: those are the magic afternoons!
Do you work one song at a time or several at the same time?
Tim: usually we work on a couple of songs simultaneously. Whatever ideas are freshest in our mind, whatever we’re most excited about, those are the ones that we end up working on and spending a lot of time with.
Laurens: there’s never a plan basically (laugh) we are a chaotic band! But it’s also really nice to be able to go with the flow. Sometimes we are almost finished with a song and then, in the rehearsal space, someone comes up with something totally new and we go with that song…
Stan: it’s pretty much a God feeling…
Laurens: well it’s… Stupidly chaotic (laugh). You can say “it’s a God feeling” and then it’s positive. We’re chaotic!
Tim: we’re just dogs chasing cars, and if there’s a new shiny car coming around the corner, we’ll be just like “oh, what’s that?” (laugh). The main constant thing about our songwriting is that we run fast. We chase ideas and we run fast and we just want that good song, we just want that thing that we get so excited about like “oh man, I can’t wait to record and play this live!”. That’s the feeling that keeps us going.
Laurens: that’s the car that we are chasing on.
And it works already! You have now three albums available and recently you released a new EP (in 2020). Why did you choose this format?
Tim: the new EP is full of songs that we wrote years and years and years ago in our metal days. We had those songs that we played at the time and we still play those but now we have different instruments in our hands and we have a different line-up. It’s a completely different sound. But we’ve always loved those songs and we always said “oh man, we should re-record those songs but in our current line-up”. It really gives it a representation of how we play now. That idea for an EP with those old songs that we still play from that era, we had that plan for years I think.
Laurens: it doesn’t really feel fair to put it on a full-length album because people already know these songs, ’cause we play them since forever. That’s why. And also of course because of the lockdown we had suddenly some time on our hands. Actually it was in the back of our minds again, we had this plan for years, so now suddenly we have a bit of time left and we said “okay, let’s go to the studio now to record these things”. And keep on working on a full-length album more secretly. That’s why it’s an EP.
Tim: we wouldn’t have made it without covid because we would just have been on tour all the time.
See also: Bando Celta | Interview with the Celtic folk artistic collective
How was the writing and recording?
Tim: the writing was easy (laugh).
Stan: most of the work was there. But we added new songs.
Tim: yes we added some extra songs. Those also came together pretty harmoniously. I didn’t for a moment feel like we were writing the EP. It was just sort of there. It was pretty easy!
Stan: both songs are both half afternoon songs.
Laurens: but of course when we made a switch from more metal electric instruments to folk, a lot of songs didn’t translate really well. I mean, they were metal songs. Whatever they did, they didn’t go with the folk. These songs… we rewrote them a bit to make them fit for the acoustic instruments and still be worthy songs. That was the most writing that we did for this EP. And the recording process, for us it was very important that we felt really acoustic, like something you would hear in a pub, because the songs are really sort of old party songs basically. So we went to a studio that we know, with more like an old school, analog and acoustic vibe. We wanted to translate these really live acoustic sounds. I think it went really nicely. It sounds really acoustic, it’s nice and also like… alive.
Tim: one of the things that we did to get that, to capture that feeling was recording a lot of parts at the same time. Stan was in the drum room, I was behind a piece of glass with my bouzouki jamming with him and Joshua was a couple of meters next to me and we were jamming as a rhythm section together, and get that all together in one take, a sort of live jammy feel to it. Also because it saves time in the studio because you don’t have to do everything separately, so it was really nice. But that’s what we went for: to get a very organic vibe.
Laurens: that’s the word!
Is there a difference between recording all together and one by one? Is the energy the same or not?
Stan: yeah massively!
Laurens: we didn’t really know actually what that means to really record an album until we recorded Daylight is fading. This was done with Fieke (van den Hurk). She is an amazing producer, she’s so good and she asks us all of these questions about things we never thought about like “how do you want your instrument to sound?”… How can we even know this? With her, we really sat down: “we’re going to create an album sound, we’re going to create layer by layer, we’re going to make these basically perfect sounds”. And it’s so well thought through, really well done. She did an amazing job! That was completely different from going for a very organic field. Both are really great, both are great experiences. But it was totally different, I guess.
Stan: I think a cool thing I like personally about the recording together is, like Tim said, with the rhythm section we could just groove together, we could do all the non-verbal communication that we would have on stage. It was also possible in the studio. And that’s so massively different!
Laurens: yes it is! And then again, if you really layered everything, you can hear everything so precisely. It’s just the higher quality. Of course, an album is different from a live gig. For an album, you need to be able to listen to it again and again and again and nothing has to annoy you. Everything has to be nice. Even after one hundred times there shouldn’t be any mistakes… It should be perfect! Fieke helped us really well with that. It was great!
Stan: so, if there’s gonna be one mistake in the album, and you know it’s there, and your family is just gonna run your CD for everyone that comes by…
Laurens: you die inside (laugh).
Pyrolysis | Photo: Marielle Groot Obbink
What’s your best memory on stage?
Stan: things gonna be different for each one of three of us.
Laurens: it was on the Castlefest the first time. The owner wanted us to be the closing act. The closing act plays on the campsite, so it’s only for like die-hard people that are still there on Sunday night. We thought “no one’s going to be here because they have to be at work on Monday morning, and it’s gonna be very awkward, because maybe five people show up and there won’t be any vibe…” But there was completely misjudgment because it was completely cool. Everyone was just giving what they had, because it was just the last party for an entire year, because Castlefest would only come next year again. So it was an insane party. The Castlefest has such an amazing crowd. It was really amazing! That’s my best memory on stage because also something very strange happened. At some point, the sound guy turned off the volume from the house, so there was no sound anymore. Don’t know… He didn’t get his beer and he wanted to drink some beers (laugh). We are of course an acoustic band, so we just said to all the people: “guys be quiet, we will continue acoustically”. And everyone started to sit down and it was really quiet and we played the songs. This was a very magical moment. We suddenly continued acoustically and everyone was loving it!
Stan: mine is gonna be maybe something you wouldn’t expect. It was when we played on the main stage of Keltfest. I remember that the sun was shining onto the stage. It was really hot that day. I was barefooted and I had a metal kick-drum pedal. And we played that gig for about 45 minutes, I think. My foot was on the pedal the whole time. I burnt my foot, but I didn’t notice it because the gig was so cool! I only noticed it when we got up to the bow. I felt like “oh s*** my foot is entirely burnt!” (laugh). And I walked around with my burnt foot for the rest of the day!
Tim: I remember that gig! That was a pretty good one. I think my favorite gig memory is when we went to the UK for the first time. I remember it was not because we played really well that gig. We played all right, but I just remember the feeling when we went to the UK for the first time, we sat in our car for hours. It was a long drive. And then we got there, we played our shows, I was like “oh my God! We’re a touring band! We are doing this for real!” And there were people overseas jamming to our music. We were just communicating through our music and it was such a surreal experience to do that for the first time! It really feels like “oh man, we are living this music!”. That to me was a really special moment.
All good vibes! Is your foot better now?
Stan: oh yeah! I’ve lost several toe nails in the meantime. My foot gets the worst.
Tim: well, you know we always play barefooted. We never have shoes or socks or anything. So a lot of nasty s*** has happened to all of our feet during gigs (laugh).
Hope Is The Thing With Feathers | The Castlefest Collective
You also participated in the Castlefest Collective album. What this experience brings to you?
Tim: it was such a good feeling to still be alive and active as a musician in these crazy times. I really value that aspect of it. We sort of came together through the internet and created something, and sort of stayed alive and kept our sanity. It was really special!
Laurens: I also just realized there are so many ways to write a song! I learned so much about songwriting from that. I also mentioned this before, but I really respect a lot of the musicians in the folk scene that were actually also on that record! Like, how they write their parts, how they structure songs, how they do all these things. I was very honored to be able to contribute to that! Steppy from PerKelt, he mixed and mastered. I think he did an amazing job also! He just made it from all these random beats and pieces from everyone. He made real songs that really feel like natural songs! It doesn’t feel like there are 600 people scrambled into a song! I was so surprised!
Tim: yeah, it actually feels like all of those musicians actually came together in the same studio. Even though you’re listening to home recordings that came from all around Europe… It’s brilliant!
See also: Tuatha de Danann releases ‘In Nomine Éireann’
To end, what’s your plan for the future?
Tim: we’re gonna write more songs, you know, keep doing our thing. And we are DYING to get gigging again! That’s just what we want to do ultimately: it’s just to play shows! So yeah, our plan, but it’s more a wish than a plan. It’s just to be on tour again!
Laurens: we are very busy writing songs now. I think plans for the future for me is just to write songs that really matter, that make you get up in the morning and dance! That’s really my wish for the future and then just see where it takes us. Just follow the songs basically. The songs lead and are alive and you follow, and hopefully play around wherever you can. That will be great!
Stan: I think it will also be nice if we can continue to keep learning from all these awesome people that we meet all over the place. And we’re gonna meet a lot more because we’re gonna be playing in more countries, even those we’ve already done. I like meeting these cool people and learning from them and playing on stages together and stuff! And I also hope that we can still stand each other’s presence after touring together (laugh). That will be a nice bonus.
Tim: we wanna make the music come alive! For us personally and playing in the physical world for people. That’s what we’re about! This lockdown can’t end soon enough ’cause that’s what we want to do (laugh).
Where can we find and support you?
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Pyrolysisband/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pyrolysisband/
Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC90U4uupL7Pi09IvWur_bXQ
Bandcamp: https://pyrolysis.bandcamp.com/
And website: https://www.pyrolysis.nl/en/pyrolysis-2/
Laurens: and we feel very supportive if people just spell our name correctly (laugh). That is the best way to support us. Get our names out. We have picked a difficult name and I’m still sorry about that, but the best way to support us is just to know our name!
Stan: in sign of great dedication! (laugh)
Tim: and just listen to our music. It’s on the internet. You know where to find it. Just listen to it…
Stan: as long as you have fun! It’s why we do.
Thank you for sharing this interview with us!
Pyrolysis: Thank you so much, have a good time! Cheers!
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Stay Wild!
Iris
