Among the many different Scandinavian bands we seemed to find the second English band on Incineration’s bill, Bast.
Combining various different influences from all over Bast have crafted some incredibly intriguing blend of Doom laden black metal, exemplified in their concept album Spectres. We caught up with Craig Bryant speaking about the band’s influences, why it was like to play the prestigious Roadburn festival among other…
What influences do you draw from when you’re writing music, it’s kind of doomy but then you have some double pedal etc…
To sound a bit pretentious, I think one of our main influences really is sort of Prog stuff, you know like Jethro Tull,
Seriously? Like Genesis, that sort of stuff?
King Crimson and all that sort of stuff, what the process was is that when you try and tell a story, you end of drawing from different genres to try and show an idea. Obviously the song structures aren’t verse chorus oriented. So we draw a lot from those kind of Prog influences. I used to listen it as a kid, my stepdad gave me a whole load of Pink Floyd vinyls when I was a kid, I would say that that was quite a heavy influence. In terms of everything else, it’s just a fuckin’ huge bag. Everything from you know In Flames, At The Gates , melodeath stuff, you know a lot of hardcore punk… A lot of doom and black metal obviously, those are the two most prominent influences that I think you can hear.
That’s cool! I wouldn’t have spotted the King Crimson’s and stuff like that, what albums were they? In the Court Of The Crimson King?
Obviously the more sort of upbeat, you know stuff like Aqualung by Jethro Tull, Minstrel In The Gallery, I think, that’s sort of thing. I think that we kind of brought it back doing a concept album, which I think is very trendy at the moment…
This is only an excerpt of our chat, for the full thing listen to our Soundcloud below!
Bast have just rerelease do their album Spectres via Indie Recordings and you can bet
that it deserves your attention!
