Dope Stars Inc.’s frontman Victor Love discusses album, TeraPunk, and their new single, ‘Dressed Inside Your Fear’
June 29, 2015
Dope Stars Inc., Italian most prominent cyber-punk/industrial metal band thta has been making music for more than two decades now, agreed to chat with AlteRock to talk about their recently released album, TeraPunk, and the newest single, ‘Dressed Inside Your Fear’, which was recently made into a stylish, gothic-looking music video. The band’s frontman, Victor Love, told us in great details how he writes new songs, as well as revealed DSI festival appearances for this year and shared his major business plans on the side.
Hi Victor and all DSI guys! First of all, congratulations on the new album and latest single/music video ‘Dressed Inside Your Fear’! The video is very artistic, energetic and “very Dope Stars Inc.” What was it like making the video?
Victor: It was really exciting also because we shoot our last official video like 6 years ago. We organized it in a very short time and involved mostly our friends and people we worked with. Daniele Campea who is the director of the video was already my band mate in Epochate. We do share a lot of common vision on music and concepts so it was really easy to create something that would fit perfectly with what we wanted. This was more or less his first bigger project for a music video, even though he has already made three short movies and other works in the recent past that already made him earn a place in the Festival of Cannes with his short movie ‘Baull’. I was pretty confident Daniele would be the perfect guy to make it and we all can say that it turned out even more exciting than what we expected. We had a very good time also while recording it, besides all people that participated in it are very close to us, so we really felt at home and could work in the best possible way.
What were the most fun moments of the shooting?
Victor: The whole day was all about fun. We spent a great day all together and apart from those moments when we had to concentrate on recordings, the whole thing was so much fun for everyone involved. As said we were all friends meeting up to make a cool project so that was a very great day for all of us.
Which do you think is the most powerful track from TeraPunk?
Victor: I think if we are talking about power the song with most energy is Many Thanks since it’s very direct and also the production is very powerful. However the whole album is much more energetic compared to the other ones. There are many songs that have a strong rock production even though we left some space for more soft passages in the tracklist.
Who are “thanks” addressed to in the track ‘Many Thanks’?
Victor: There’s actually not somebody in particular I can address this song to but rather quite a bunch of people that have been messing with me with their ego. ‘Many Thanks’ is a song about this kind of situations that pretty much everyone experiences during their life. There are so many people trying to take advantage of you and eventually blame you for just everything without realizing how much you gave to them out of yourself and your life. This has been happening to me so many times that I can’t even remember. When I write lyrics I mostly go for instinctive association of words and the texts come out as an uncontrolled flow of feelings coming out of my subconscious. I guess I was quite pissed off in my subconscious back in the day.
What about the most personal and the most meaningful song for you personally from the new record?
Victor: Most of the songs in the album are inspired by personal emotions and situations even if they are contextualized in a more general way. However I can definitely say the most personal song is “Along With You” since I wrote this song for Aylar, my love.
In a recent interview you said that DSI have a lot of almost finished songs and surprises for future releases. What sort of surprises do you have in mind?
Victor: Yes we will release new material as soon as I finish it but I am also working on other projects. Soon I am planning to launch a private network hosted on a next generation media platform. A network for bands, media and fans where they can share music privately before it’s released to the public. Outside the influence of other networks and open to anyone interested. I’ve already started a pre-campaign with our internal fan base but soon we will make it public and explain what it’s really about. It will be a test to see if we can create a hub of influence in the scene that can eventually be a starting point for bands in the underground. Apart from this I’m also working on a side-project that will be released soon, most probably with this platform too.
For this album you said you wrote 20 songs in just 2 weeks. That sounds pretty hard to manage. So you don’t need any inspiration or special events in your life to make you take a seat and write a song? Do ideas just pour out of your head, one new tune after another?
Victor: It is the opposite, actually. Usually I am very fast to write stuff but it must be the right moment with the right inspiration. I can stop writing for months or even years and then write two albums in a couple of weeks. It’s always been like this. It also depends on the time I have available, since apart from the band I also have my private life. The thing is, when I start writing I can produce a lot of material in a short time and that is helpful to have bonus material after the release of the full album.
How does being a perfectionist benefit your work?
Victor: I believe if you want to do something, then you do it good or you don’t do it at all. You just push at full throttle at your own risk and face the challenge. Otherwise, it’s pretty much possible you are going to fail. I’ve been always very perfectionist about our music, connecting it to our visual, providing a real concept behind it, in order to build a story and a subculture around it. I think it’s very important, no matter what the topic is, to build your own story, otherwise you will be yet another band in a ocean of 0 and 1. An ocean growing larger every day, where it’s getting harder and harder to reach the right audience.
Are there any problems you face due to your perfectionism?
Victor: Well yeah, eventually perfectionism becomes paranoia and you lose a lot of time because of it. But then it fades away and you just finally realize you are ok with it and ready to go.
Have you ever thought, what would be the most probable occupation for you, if you hadn’t been a musician? If you had got a degree, got a job from some Italian company?
Victor: I have a job actually and I’ve been always working since I was very young. I’ve never really put aside the ordinary part of my life. To have a real job makes you a better human being and in my case it also helped me to learn many skills I’ve been using in a positive way for my band activities. Also, to make a living with music has always been very hard for any band in this scene and sometimes it can be very expensive to have a band and keep pushing it.
I read that you consider social networks almost “evil”, and you even talked in interviews about how our posts in Facebook might be used against us in case of war. What is the worst-case scenario, in your opinion: how might social networks do us harm?
Victor: Apart from tragic and disastrous effects in the case of massive events like war, let’s focus on something simple. What was the mission and what we got out of social networks? The social networks basically didn’t keep the promise that was the main part of their early propaganda: to connect with people and your fans sharing the same interests. At the beginning, it was working quite good so pretty much everyone quit using the regular systems such as your own website, newsletter and forums to go social. The thing is, some years later, especially in the recent couple of years, these have become all paid services. So, the paradox is that the larger audience you have built the more you have to pay to reach it. What they basically did is to say: hey, invite all your fans to join you (us) on these networks so you can stay in touch with them for free! And so all of us did, not only the musicians but a lot of different realities did the same.
After a while instead, apart from starting profiling pretty much everyone, they said, “Ok, so now if you want to reach your pals, you have to pay.” And let me say something first: if it was cheap and if you also had the opportunity to reach more fans for real, then it would have been a great deal. In fact, it has become really expensive beyond any possible logic. I can’t imagine how a new band can actually sustain such costs in order to grow. So basically these networks have become another reality that is squeezing the underground instead of boosting it and also they grouped pretty much everyone in a big container where there’s no difference if you are listening to one sort of music or another, if you have an interest or another. It’s just a public melting pot for everyone that is no more a catalyst of subcultures but instead is merging and destroying them gradually. It is not a place anymore to share specific interest with other people because you just have people of any kind in your connections and what is trending is most of the time humor, cute cats or tragic news. All the rest is as a majority all sponsored ads of big companies.
So does it mean social networks are no good anymore, from your point of view?
Victor: This doesn’t mean it’s bad altogether, I am just saying it’s not really the best place for the underground subcultures to grow, no matter what they want you to believe with these few success stories that come out of social networks. What I am talking about is the majority of underground bands and artists, and I really know a lot of them, are in the same situation. They will never have that opportunity we had back in 2003 when none of these websites even existed. We had no record deal and despite coming out of absolutely nowhere we were still able to engage an enormous amount of people considering the times. This is not happening anymore for many bands, even the best ones and I believe it’s because these networks are not built to make it happen but have been evolving mostly into a tool for the big companies instead. That’s one of the reasons behind the creation of that new network I want to launch and I was mentioning to you before.
Have you ever been on the verge of dismissing the band? What was the reason behind it?
Victor: There are always these moments when for many different reasons you feel like you want to just move on, change your life, do something totally different but in my case it would not make much sense. Dope Stars Inc. is a project where there have been different people involved throughout the years but for real, apart from being the writer of all songs, I’ve also been the guy taking care of pretty much everything on other levels since the start. So as long as I am still alive I think it would be really hard for the project to be dismissed. There is no real reason to do that. Besides we live in a world where you have more reunions than new bands coming out. That means something. There is no more real “time factor” in the global networks. Most people live more in the past than in the present. There’s really a small part of people looking at what’s coming next.
What countries are DSI most appreciated in, at the moment?
Victor: It’s been always all about North America, Russia, Germany, UK and Italy as well as Scandinavia but in the super connected world we live in now fans are pretty much everywhere.
Is the band’s recognition in the U.S. scene growing? I heard you are planning a North American tour soon…
Victor: We had a great increase of interest with our last tour in the US back in 2013 but we are now planning a new tour only for 2016. Nowadays, a tour needs a really long planning but before going back on tour we want to release more material.
You used to be an active gamer on various game consoles and you say that you still play videogames. How did you gamer’s past influence your music making? Do you incorporate any game sounds into DSI tracks?
Victor: Well, not so much time lately but I am still a passionate of videogames and informatics in general. Also some of our sounds, especially in Ultrawired, were inspired by sounds of videogames even though I never incorporated some actual sounds from them.
What are the key festival appearances for DSI this year? Which of your upcoming performances are you most excited about?
Victor: We will be performing at M’era Luna Festival this summer and then in Schattenwel festival in October. We are also in process of booking more festivals for both 2015 and 2016. We are always excited about any festival appearance since it’s a great way to promote your music and of course M’era Luna, being the biggest festival in the genre, will be a very important spotlight for us.
It is summertime now. How are you planning to get the best of it, apart from work? Do you spend summer breaks together with DSI guys, or each with your own families?
Victor: We spend vacations with our families and most of us live in different cities. However I think this summer is going to be more work and no play for me since I’ve got a lot of projects to take care of and this is actually the right moment to do now that as I have more free time. I can tell summers have always been the best moment for me while working on something new.
Thank you for the interview and have the best summer of your life!
Thanks a lot to you! I would just like to invite you all to register to our newsletter on our home page at www.dopestarsinc.com if you are interested in the band and in the future projects I am working on. Thanks to everyone for your support.