GOREFEST Guitarist Talks Reunion, Upcoming Album

GOREFEST guitarist and founding member Frank Harthoorn recently spoke to Vampire-Magazine.com about the group's decision to reunite and their future plans, among other topics. Several excerpts from the interview follow:

Vampire-Magazine.com: First of all a question that you answered about a thousand times by now I guess. But, I'm still wondering - and many readers will be interested in it as well — what made you reunite? I mean, every time I spoke to you I somewhat begged for a reunion but your answer was always the same, and negative…

Frank Harthoorn: "Ed got approached by Hans from Transmission Records about re-issuing some of the old stuff, and doing a DVD. He took it to the rest of us, and at one point we were quite close to signing all material over to Hans, and thus, for the last time, making some money off of those songs. We never even considered reforming until, for the sake of discussing some of the logistics of all of this, Boudewijn and JC met and patched things up between them. We kind of thought, hey, if we're all on good terms again, why not try and do something we all enjoyed doing together, ie. make some music? None of us were very sure if it made any sense until after the first couple of rehearsals. I mean, a month before all of this, 'reforming GOREFEST' was out of the question, something we all joked about once in a while, but never thought of actually doing.

Vampire-Magazine.com: The news reached my ears rather quick, but I wasn't allowed to tell anyone. Though the information leaked pretty fast on the Internet. What was your idea behind trying to keep this somewhat of a secret?

Frank Harthoorn: "Pretty much because of above mentioned things. We didn't want the whole 'reunion this, GOREFEST that, bollocks all over the place' thing before we were sure ourselves we wanted to do this. Initially we just went into rehearsals playing lots of old songs, trying to see if we could get something out of them. Turned out we all had a great time, but who knows, if one of us would've had a bad week, we might never have done this interview.

Vampire-Magazine.com: Now that the reunion is a fact, questions arise about the musical path to travel. GOREFEST's career has clearly been divided in two different genres. The brutal death metal (even gore-death in the very early demo days) in the beginning and the more bluesy way of the later records. What will the new material sound like?

Frank Harthoorn: "Only two? You can say a lot of things about us (and some people do),but you can't say we ever did the same album twice. I don't think we could even if we wanted to. It'll be what it'll be. There's always been heavy guitars and powerful drums though, so expect a lot of those. We've got some new songs, and they're pretty loud. No blues in there, I assure you."

Read Frank Harthoorn's entire interview with Vampire-Magazine.com at this location.