Viter Surprises

Viter is one of the bands which surprised me a lot this year. It’s not folk-metal like we used to, I have to say, I find it difficult to describe what they do. But it sure sounds nice and it’s very refreshing. So, I was glad I could manage to have a nice interview with Sviatoslav Adept, guitarist, backing vocalist and player of folk instruments with Viter.

Folk’n’dustrial
Sviatoslav tells me their music style has indeed absorbed a lot of distinctive features of different genres. In many respects they differ fundamentally, for instance like melodic wave of folk unites with some gloomy industrial music. ‘We’ve shaped the ethnic sound, particularly the sound of our national instruments into the form of industrial trend. So all in all they’re happy to greet all of us and introduce their own style – folk’n’dustrial.’

Yulian Mytsyk is the inspirer of all the compositions, but the band members constantly broaden and change the material. This way they evolve into our own peculiar sounding. All members of Viter are very different personalities with different outlook, so the music you hear is in some way a result of the final agreement between them. And that’s a nice one. Listening to their last album Springtime, you clearly notice all kind of different stuff which is nicely blended into one very unique sound.

The members of Viter are active participators in all kind of other projects, but Sviatoslav feels this other projects don’t influence Viter in a negative way because the band likes the fact that they’re all able to develop their skills outside the band. A lot of the experiences all members have in other bands are often a positive gain or the band en this positively affects their sound as well.

“Our style is a direct result of our creative experiments. We are still amazed how strongly we altered the initial version of our creations and even we have difficulties tracing the whole process of incipience of our style.”

Surprise
It sounds as a very distinctive style, but it differs from the previous album Dzherelo, and this makes one wonder if they’re still on the move. And if we can expect a move towards folk or if they’re planning to go in the opposite direction. So, what Viter’s opinion about this?

“In the future we would like to emphasize on the proper mood and tunefulness of our melodies. To achieve that we will use instruments that we feel would sound just right. These could be folk instruments or something else – we might choose whatever we want. I think that you will be surprised by our work because we really want to develop our sounding even more.”

Ukrain
Nowadays it seems the Ukraine is one of the hotspots in the folk-metalscene in this part of the world and Sviatoslav tells me the band is fully aware of the situation. But no matter how “well – developed” the music industry in the Ukraine is, they are still going to make the music they enjoy and hope that the listeners will get what he expects in any country.

At Folk-metal.nl we have a lot of contact with labels and band from all over the world, and we sometimes get the impression the scene in the Ukraine is self-supporting and it seems a bit separated form the scene in Western Europe. When we ask Sviatoslav about this he tells us the scene in their country has some nice perspectives and they sincerely hope that it will approve itself in the nearest future. Then Viter will be on every radio station of Ukraine. “And if to talk about the communications – we are at close quarters with members of other bands and from time to time we come together to hate one Ukrainian band that signed a pretty successful contract with one of the American labels (haha). But no, seriously, we are trying to communicate with others, just not everybody is responsive.” And this seems to be the same everywhere, a lot of the bands have nice contacts with each other but others like to do things on their own. So, since the scene in the Ukraine seems to be not so different from what we know, we can only hope we get to see more of Viter in the rest of the world. Until now they have only had gigs in Ukraine so far.

‘Playing outside’
At the moment the band is working at some projects which don’t include any tours. But as soon they are through with that they will definitely think about touring in in Western Europe or in other parts of the world.

Invitation
And of course we ask Viter this question we have for almost all band we get to interview: Do you have something else to say to the readers of Folk-metal.nl? We get all kind of answers to this question from: ‘Drink beer’ to ‘Stay metal’ to even ‘No’. The first one is nice, the second I will surely do and the third gives me the itches as a fan of a band, but Sviatoslav answer is a very nice one:
“I personally invite all readers to come visit our lands, especially our mountains called Carpathians which actually inspire me to create the music. If you see this beauty by yourselves and breathe our Winds*, only then will you be one step closer to our work.”

* “wind” means “Viter” (“Вітер”) in Ukrainian

By: Michel