From: London, UK
Sounds like: Mastodon, Torche, EyeHateGod
Website: www.MySpace.com/Astrohenge

Thrash Hits verdict: We’ve been itching to write more about Astrohenge since we first featured the vocalist-free four-piece in our review of Burnt By The Sun’s last ever UK show – Astrohenge’s hypnotic sludge riff-tsunami is something you need to experience in 2010. We put guitarists Matt Rozeik and Hugh Harvey through the Future Hits treatment.

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How did you meet?
Matt Rozeik: “My sister introduced me to Olly [Weeks, keyboards] years ago, and we’ve pretty much worked together since then.”

Hugh Harvey: “I met Matt through a mutual London friend and after that he put an ad out for a drummer and found Kieran Iles, drums]. The thing is we had been racking our brains for ages trying to think of drummers we knew. It was only after Matt had got Kieran to agree to joining that I remembered I knew Kieran from his previous band Eden Maine, so it wasn’t like having a total stranger join.”

What made you want to start a band?
Matt: “I used to compose film scores and wonky electronic music under my own name, I never actually considered being in a band. I was asked to play Truck festival in 2006, recruiting a mate to help me out for the show. I had to form an ensemble to do shows, which Olly ended up in, but eventually I got tired of playing quiet electronic music, so I started Astrohenge, which is pretty much the opposite.”

Hugh: “We have all played music in some form or another for years. Matt asked if I wanted to join Astrohenge, as we had a mutual love of sludge, doom and anything a bit sick.”

Where did the name come from?
Matt: “It was from a scrap of paper I had with a million band names scribbled on it. I thought it sounded like something from the future, as imagined in a 70’s Dr Who episode. Possibly involving mushrooms and space hippies.”

Astrohenge in the studio

Where did you grow up? How do you think it’s affected your music?
Matt: “I lived in Hertfordshire till I was about 19. I was really into drum ‘n bass and hip-hop, and used to go to raves in the early 90s with the only other people at school I knew who liked that stuff. There were quite a few pirate stations playing that music at the time and a mate lived on top of a hill, so he could pick up a few of them. We used to just make mixtapes and play on a pirate station at a mates house on this estate, using a transmitter he got from Tandy’s – I think it had about a 5 mile radius!”

Hugh: “I grew up in Essex and at the time there was a pretty good scene for local bands and promoters from other towns putting on shows or all-dayers and getting us to play. It was mainly metal and hardcore bands coming through which was great. I love all the old school hardcore stuff. This was before everyone had access to the internet and we couldn’t afford to buy loads of CDs so really the only way to learn to play heavy stuff was to go to shows and see other people do it. So personally I was very influenced by the scene I grew up in, though I’m into all sorts now.”

So far, what has been the best thing about being in a band?
Matt: “Running about like an idiot and having people clap at the end. Also, the free food.”

Hugh: “People being into the music you are playing. We’ve also made friends with a lot of really awesome bands over past year.”

What bands do you consider as part of your scene or as your peers?
Matt: “We know some excellent bands who have a strong DIY mentality, regardless of genre, like Nitkowski, Silent Front, Invasion, Ivy’s Itch, Roll Call For The Second Site….”

There’s a bit of a resurgence of quality metal coming out of London right now – why do you think London often fails to pull its weight when it comes to metal? Or do you think I’m talking out of my arse with that statement?
Matt: “Until relatively recently, the gig circuit was pretty disparate in London, and there were not many places to play if you were a metal band. Even now, there aren’t that many smaller metal-friendly venues compared to, say, Leeds, somewhere there seems to be a much bigger scene. Also, a lot of promoters won’t let London bands do a show a month either side of a gig, as they feel it’s damaging to attendance figures.”

Hugh: “A lot of the better known metal bands have a PR company making sure there is an article about them to promote a tour and so on, but there are shit loads of great bands over here who survive on a DIY ethic without any push in the press. It is not hard to go to a great show by an unsigned or lesser known band at least once a week in London. You just gotta keep your ear to the ground, keep checking venue websites, picking up flyers and so on.”

What marks you out as different to other bands around at the moment?
Matt: “We can probably play with a wider range of bands, probably because we don’t really fit in with any one style of metal. All of us have different influences, so there isn’t any one band we are trying to sound like. We also seem to appeal to some people who are not necessarily into metal, possibly because we don’t have a singer screaming their tits off, or maybe because we are a bit less serious than a lot of metal bands. I don’t think we could pull off Behemoth’s look.”

Hugh: “I guess our line up is a little different from the standard rock band line up – the piano is not really the most common metal instrument. I think quite a lot of instrumental bands are quite shoe-gazey, which we do have a little bit of in our music, but we also try to give the audience a riff boner as well.”

This is an Astohenge gig

When and why did you decide to start playing live in amongst the crowd?
Matt: “We started doing it after our first couple of show. I prefer the sound out front, and not bashing into Hugh when I play – most of the venues we play have tiny stages. It also it lets us connect with individual people in the audience rather than playing to the crowd en masse. We are not actually allowed to do it in a lot of the bigger venues we play now, only smaller DIY gigs and warehouse parties. Health and Safety bollocks apparently….”

Hugh: “It is a lot of fun too – being fed beer while playing is definitely the way forward.”

What’s the best show you’ve played?
Matt: “We played on Halloween at a warehouse party, and it was fucking carnage. Everyone was in costume, and people were holding me and Hugh up, pouring spirits and fake blood on me, and just generally being complete animals.”

Hugh: “We supported Monotonix at The Garage. Their show was absolute mayhem from start to finish, including a beer slide, and some very unhygienic uses for a microphone.”

What have you got planned for the future?
Matt: “We have just finished recording our album, so that should be available soon I hope. We’ll continue doing our free monthly night in Camden too, The Naked Claw.”

What other band should everyone find out about?
Matt: “Nitkowski – they are fucking incredible.”

Tell us a joke?
Matt: “What’s red and invisible? No tomatoes.”
Hugh: “What’s green and hard? Bruce Pea.”

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Astrohenge run The Naked Claw, a monthly night of musical carnage at The Unicorn in London – the next one takes place on January 22. For more information on that, or anything else to do with Astrohenge, go check out their official MySpace page.

All photos c/o Thomas Blessington. Like his stuff? Go check out his other work here.