interview by John Wisniewski for MK ULTRA Magazine
Researching VEiiLA, the first thing you notice are the words they choose to represent themselves on their socials. There is states, “Falling into the bottomless abyss of broken dreams with a fool’s hope of catching a glimpse of beauty.” This is actually an interesting overview of the atmosphere of VEiiLA, who recently released a fascinating album entitled “Sentimental Craving For Beauty” via the legendary label Projekt Records. VEiiLA is the duo of Vif Nüte and Bes Eired, who have created a fusion of sensual melancholic music driven by moody vocals espousing existential poetry.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, VEiiLA chose not to support the ugly war and the horrible autocratic regime, Vif and Bes packed their lives in a couple of suitcases, left their homes and embarked on a journey without destination. Ultimately the duo ended up in Armenia where they now live and work. There, we caught up with the band to find out more about this intriguing duo.
John:
Could you tell us about recording “Sentimental Craving for Beauty”? What is the creative process that leads to your unique sound?
Vif:
I don’t even know if we have a process. It’s quite different every time. I can say for sure that “Sentimental Craving for Beauty” came out of absolute darkness. It was the time when I needed inspiration just to get out of the bed in the morning. And when I did get out of the bed, I needed to occupy myself with something not to go completely mad. It seems that it was the only link that kept me moving, kept me from disappearing, falling to the bottom of the pitch black abyss.
Bes:
I think because of this darkness we somehow naturally drifted towards this old school approach of “less is more”. We wanted to play, to feel the music in real time, so it would take us elsewhere. It’s tricky with electronic music, because pretty often you can end up making it without even touching an instrument and then when it comes to performing it live you find it nearly impossible to play the songs without relying on playback and automation. In the past we tried to perform our earlier songs with live looping, gradually building those complex layered arrangements by looping synth parts and switching between many sets of timbres… It wasn’t fun at all. It was more like you’re a robot that has to complete a program and a very cryptic program too, so people in the audience will never know what you’re doing. Unless of course you screw up majorly, then everyone will notice… Anyway, we got bored with all that and we wanted to write new songs in a simpler way, so we can actually play stuff with our hands. Some kind of enforced minimalism. That, and of course the fact that our main studio computer is a 12-year old piece of junk, that wasn’t powerful even by that standards, it all created boundaries for us and where there are boundaries there is also a desire to break them, but in a creative way. I guess it’s some sort of resistance, the more technology gives the less we want to take from it. The apple is poisoned, if you know what I mean.
JW:
What is the main inspiration for you to write your lyrics?
Vif:
Life is an endless provider of inspiration. And also it comes naturally to me. I often have a desire to write, I just pick up the pen and write, without any set goal. It just comes to the point when things can’t be contained inside. Too much pain, too much stress, too much disappointment, you name it. It just spills out.
JW:
Are you satisfied with your listeners reaction to the new album?
Vif:
It’s hard to say. Nowadays all reactions we get are from the Internet and for me personally it’s never enough or satisfactory. It just doesn’t feel real enough. On the other hand when we play shows it’s a completely different matter.
Bes:
But what we’ve seen so far is very touching. People seem to respond to our music in a personal way. Feel it, often in pretty much the same way we feel it. At least this is how it seems to me. But it is precious. It wouldn’t change much for us if we saw somewhat different perceptions, because we anyway know what this album is about, what it means to us. But I’m glad that in the press reviews and letters that our listeners wrote to us it’s been more about the feelings, rather than some technical or genre aspects.
JW:
Who are your favorite or most influential music artists?
Vif:
The list of artists is very long. Some artists stay with me for a long time, some come and go. Life changes, tastes change, we change too. But if I think of all-timers that would probably be Nirvana, Radiohead, Queen, The XX, Portishead, Lykke Li , Ry X, Rye… and many others.
Bes:
Oh, how much time have you got?.. It’s gonna be hard to pick a few. But I’d like to mention Depeche Mode, as they inspire us as a band. They’ve been together for such a long time and they still manage to write great songs, push the boundaries of sound and just be freaking rock stars. I don’t even know if there is another band that managed to sustain the freshness for such a long period of time, without turning into cheesy pop or becoming stale.
JW:
Where did the band’s name come from?
Vif:
It came from a Scandinavian legend about a siren. A seductive beauty who lures men and destructs them . We’ve changed the spelling with a double “ii” to make it more personal to us.
Bes:
We also like the visual aspect, the symmetry of this word. We initially made the double “i” specifically for the sake of visual symmetry, but later on we saw the symbolism in it, because the “ii” looks like two human figures.
JW:
Can you tell our audience what is was like living in Russia?
Vif:
For me personally it never was easy. But I guess the life of any underground artist anywhere in the world isn’t easy. Anyway all I ever wanted was to make music and we were making it. But the moment came when staying there became completely intolerable. All the values what I have – peace, freedom, decency – were traded for something that I couldn’t stand. We had to leave not to lose ourselves and succumb to the total despair from which there wouldn’t be any way out.
Bes:
Living there on the casual level was pretty much like living anywhere else, I think, at least up to some certain point. I mean it was going south for a while, but when you have to deal with your own life going south, it’s not like you have much juice left in you for worrying about politics. Of course you hear stories about another newspaper being shut down, or another political activist rotting in jail for expressing his views, or another moronic oppressive law, but life went on and it didn’t really affect everyone on a daily basis. It all changed momentarily when the war started. Probably not for everyone, but for us and many others too. It’s like all the unspoken things, all the hatred, jealousy, misery that people kept inside just came out flooding everything. Suddenly you can’t ignore it anymore. Suddenly all the “nice simple people” spit fire and hatred. Within a week the government produced the whole selection of new beautiful laws, and there you go, you live in an autocratic militaristic dystopian story, which just a week ago you could imagine only in a work of fiction. We felt that things had gone too far. We aren’t capable of doublethink, so it was quite natural for us to get the hell out of there. In two weeks or something we were on a plane going somewhere where we knew no one and nothing, with no hopes, no clues and money only for one week of ascetic living… and yet we felt like we were being born again. There was beauty gleaming through the darkness.
JW:
Do you consider VEiiLA to be a Goth band? Is there a genre of music that you feel best describes what you do?
Vif:
We never care about genres that much. We play around and we get something, it’s as simple as that. But from some of the opinions that we’ve met on our way I can tell that we probably don’t belong to any genre specifically.
Bes:
Yeah, we don’t really consider ourselves a “genre band”. We make music the way we like it and it’s usually unfit for most niches. But we’ve been called something-something-goth every now and then. I think that for a regular uninitiated person we are as Goth as it gets. With our moodiness, black clothes and morbid pessimism. But I bet if we came to an exclusive Goth party we would be intruders. There was one avant garde musician who said that “popsters think I’m a rocker, rockers think I’m a jazzman and jazzists think I’m a jerk”. I think that’s our case.
JW:
Any future plans of touring, making videos and or various projects or upcoming releases you would like to discuss?
Bes:
We always work on something, and we are always ready to play live, and we plan to keep doing it. But we try not to look into the future too often. With the state of today’s world it seems like an utterly foolish thing to do – making plans.
BANDCAMP
https://projektrecords.bandcamp.com/album/sentimental-craving-for-beauty