Interview With Gorefest

One such band is Gorefest. I chose to do a band spotlight on this Dutch death metal act because A) I’m the co editor of this site and B) In dealing personally with the band a few times over the years, I knew they would make for an interesting feature. Assisting me throughout this retrospective of the sadly inactive band is founding member and guitarist Frank Harthoorn who was gracious enough to give us a some in depth insight into a band that became a death metal powerhouse, a the flag bearer for Holland’s extreme metal scene and a band that went through numerous ups and down both in their personal and recoding career. “Basically, it was back in 1989, we started out as any other band”, states Frank. “I met Jan-Chris in a pub in my hometown. We started talking about our mutual obsession at that time, which was Death Metal. JC was in a hardcore band at the time called Sjolmord, but what he really wanted to play was Death Metal. He told me about this, and we decided to form a band, right then and there. I had just begun to pick up a guitar, and JC asked me if I could work out how to play Sodom’s “Obsessed By Cruelty”, which I did. I then taught him, and thus this became the first song we both could play. And so the legend started. However finding a fitting name for this new band proved to be more of a problem that actually writing and playing death metal as Frank details- “We had a couple of handles before that, from the generic (Abhorrence), to the highly original (Leprosy), to the downright weird (Condemned Heretics – we got rid of THAT one real quick..). I first thought of GoreZone – well I stole it from the horror magazine. But when reading the mag, I came across the word ‘Gorefest’, which we all liked much better. It is, of course a bit of a silly name, but it’s also quite catchy, slightly Germanic, and it made pretty clear we weren’t playing reggae. So then came two demos – 1989s Tangled in Gore and 1990s Horrors of Retarded Mind- both released smack bang in the middle of a European and American Death metal explosion that saw numerous bands tackle the appropriate themes of death, destruction, gore, carnage, zombies and such. However, when it came time for Gorefest to record their demo tracks for their 1991 debut, Mindloss, the band were already starting to delve into more personal and less clichéd pastures.