Orkus April 2020

► In the past few weeks there has been wild speculation about the identities of the creature with the double head, since initially only the shadow outline of two musicians could be seen, who were said to be anything but unknown. "The confusion in the scene was perfect," Dero grins (OOMPH!), whom we catch at the Moscow airport before he goes on to the next DJ gig. About the fruitful collaboration with Chris Harms (Lord of the Lost) - the second head of The Creature - the vanity fair and dark chasms of modern society.

Orkus: "Let’s do something together" is said quickly. Have you and Chris had this wish for a long time already?

Dero Goi: We have known each other for quite some time and got to know each other at the Darkflower in Leipzig at a DJ gig, where we one after the other pressed the jack or rather the DJ desk. Then we lost sight of each other for a while, but eventually met again at a festival. Then we said: Let's try something out, maybe send a few songs back and forth. Then we talked about it all, everyone had a few songs in their pockets and then we were pretty surprised that there was already so much material there, that we both liked. Then we worked out the songs and it went on and on. We met on the weekends, always composed something ourselves and at some point we said: So, now we have twelve songs, maybe we should do an album. Since we are both with Napalm Records with our bands, it made sense to offer it to them. They were thrilled, but we still wanted to know what the response from the other labels was and finally received five offers, but then decided on Napalm.

Orkus: How long did you work on the album?

Dero Goi: almost 2 years from the first sending the compositions back and forth to the finished album.

Orkus: Was it difficult to keep it secret from the public?

Dero Goi: Well yes, that was pretty difficult. We really laid low. We didn’t even know really, what will become of us. We worked calmly and without pressure and did our own things in parallel, at some point it was finished. We are surprised because before even a note from the band became known, 2000 people had already bought tickets. I think that's cool, at first you only saw the silhouette and a few hundred people were already buying concert tickets. Although it could have been  everyone. I hope they won't give them back when the video is out (laughs) 

Orkus: You are both front men, if not to say alpha leaders. How did the collaboration work?

Dero Goi: Two alpha leaders potentiate, that's great. (grins). We never found ourselves fighting for competition or one wanting to be ahead of the other in the photos or something. We immediately found a good connection to each other. We were very creative and productive, and we achieved results very quickly without having to argue about it. Working in this way is relaxing and rare. We both have a similar idea of music in terms of darkness and the interplay between melodiousness and hard elements. Our voices complement each other well, they are both relatively sonorous, but you can still see who is who. A creature with two heads and almost one body.

Orkus: …and three legs, as the song says. In terms of outfit, you are very stylishly living in the "Jack the Ripper" period.

Dero Goi: You got that right. We wanted to differentiate ourselves from our respective other bands, both text-wise and in terms of content. We look at this era optically and in terms of content. 

Orkus: The first single: "Die Kreatur" has just been chosen. Full of hardness and strength, but thematically serious. How did the idea come about?

Dero Goi:  We worked out the whole thing together. We sat in the Chameleon studio and thought we needed a song that embodied the quintessence of the band. We immediately thought of the Hunchback of Notre Dame or the elephant man, who is more likely to live in that period. We also thought that people always need someone they can point their fingers at to exalt themselves. In other words, this deeply narcissistic thing that drives people is also what defines people in a negative sense. We also like to represent the downsides of society, in a world that is becoming more and more perfectionist, our hearts beat more for the creature than for humans.

Orkus: These freak shows and fairs at the turn of the century really stimulate the head cinema. Today you can hardly understand that "The Creature" was thrown things at and beaten. But basically nothing much has changed since then, has it? The setting is different, it still gets something thrown at, even if it is words now instead of tomatoes or rotten eggs.

Dero Goi: Yes, right, very nice metaphor! Of course, our vanity fair is no longer the panopticon, but the Internet. Of course, this is also the link at Die Kreatur to our time. The Internet is the new panopticon - a creepy cabinet with the creatures that are exhibited and presented. People get dirt virtually thrown at. I am thinking, for example, of the dragon lord. Everyone is even greater in anonymity than in real life. That connects ....... time in a very, very miraculous way with that time. 

Orkus: Ultimately, however, the creature takes revenge, in a way, frees itself from its bondage…

Dero Goi: If someone has been spat on, insulted, teased, humiliated - bullied, they say today - all his life, you can take revenge. You can see that happen today in rampages or suicides. That is of course not justifiable. The creature takes revenge in some form, of course not so that it stands on the same level as its tormentors, but it gets rid of it in its own way.

Orkus: That came up for a moment already: your heart beats more for those on the edges of society? 

Dero Goi: This is very important to us. We also see a certain fascination in the morbid and the abyss. For example Jack the Ripper was a serial killer. Of course we do not approve of this, but we cannot deny a certain fascination that we have for people on the abyss. I still very much like to watch a documentary about serial killers before going to sleep.

Is man inherently evil, as the song "Die Kreatur" says? In the next issue we will talk to Dero about our different chimpanzee genes and serial killer brains and hear what the other half of "Die Kreatur", Chris Harms, has to say about it. Of course, we also walk extensively in the dark "Panoptikum" that “Die Kreatur” creates with the album of the same name. We are excited about a world full of morbid kitchen songs, deeply emotional, darkly erotic, passionate, self-torturing abysses of the psyche and lots of questions. Questions that good art - so dero- has to raise. "If there are no questions left and you are disgusted, that doesn't appeal to me emotionally. Nor sexually." he laughs.