Interview to DEAD SHAPE FIGURE (Finland)

1.Hello my friend, pleasure to have you on Rotten Pages ´zine. How are you doing today? Let us set the scene first. Where do we find you right now? Please describe your surroundings.

Hi there! It is Galzi here, singer from Dead Shape Figure. Just now we're in the middle of extreme weathers here in Helsinki, the darkness and coldness where i guess the Scandinavian melancholy breeds from..though DSF has managed to keep away from melancholy,  it's more about facing that energy, heaviness and having fun.

We've also started live gigs a few months back, having had a one year break from gigs. 

Year 2026 looks awesome, we got shows lining up quite nicely and new material will be recorded this year as soon as we find the time.

2. Let us start out by learning a little bit more about the members of Dead Shape Figure, perhaps you can tell us a little about insight of you?

Galzi: Me and our gitarist Juhani are the soul survivors and the originators, also our bassist Neissu has been around since the dawn of time , missing a few periods but never missed the coolest happenings in DSF. We adopted our drummer-god Ville aka Sahis i guess already 7-8 years back. He's a busy individual with a few other engagements as well, being as cool human machine as a drummer but we have a tight bond! He lives 500km from the rest of us, so there's no weekly rehearsals but such a great sessions before we go live. 

The 2nd guitarist we tend to invite on year/session basis..since Seppo -our guitarist and brother in music- passed away 1,5year back, we've not found a need to get a solid member on that 2nd guitar field for now.

Sometimes it feels we sign up for gigs just to have a reason to spend some rehearsing sessions together, heh! So the fun is what counts. 

3. OK, you have been around almost 23 years already, being into the history of Finnish metal…What is needed to be strong performer and delivering music for such a long time?

Galzi : Yeah we've been around quite some time already..for DSF the formula of existence has been this: love what you do, don't overdo what you love, keep the fun in what you do and enough space between the guys (together in a tourbus for a month is ok, together in a tourbus for a year might bee too much).

Also it is great to interact, to see other bands live, share knowledge, experiences, ideas and get influences that way. 

The least inspiring way for us is to scrape new songs together at home and studio and be done with it. The way of getting together, planning new stuff, gigs, hell a merchandise prints..that way doesn't get old!

4. So as a band that plays melodic death/thrash metal, which are the major bands that had an influence on your music? And do you only listen to European death metal bands or….?

Galzi: We have exceptionally broad taste of music in this band...the most influential band on our music is Dead Shape Figure, heh! Comparing to what we listen at our homes, you would not believe we all have quite the same mind when it comes to DSF. 

We've been fortunate to be able to share the stages with some of our common favs though such as Cradle Of Filth, Samael, Moonspell, Septic Flesh, Cynic.. on Feb. we're having a short tour with The Haunted which has been one of the greatest for us since forever.

5. How do you see the metal scene nowadays? So many subgenres, so many bands… What is different now vs. back then when you started – for the scene and for you as a band?

Galzi: Things done change that's for sure...The too much too often-phenomena can be conquered easily though by keeping on doing what you do and by taking new ways in little by little.

 The scene is obivously very alive because of the easy ways of recording and distribution, so that can't be bad. 

For us, we've anchored our location a long time ago: since our debute The Grand Karoshi we learned how keep DSF alive and not to get anxious on one way or another. 

Still i wish the physical formats would come back more then they have, would love to get The Grand Karoshi-era amounts of cd/lp sales back! 

6. “The Sworn Book” is your latest studio offering. All the music sounds complex, so I guess it took quite some time to build everything! Tell us more about it!

Galzi : The Sworn Book is no doubt the most experimental, still the heaviest sounding album to date. There was surprisingly little challenges of putting it together, even so little that the completion of the album took less time than we had scheduled. It's never been that way. There were a lot of fruitful ideas to deal with and the guys just went ahead while i scraped the lyrics and vocals based on demos and went as i felt. No producers involved anywhere this time.

The Sworn Book might have been the most team efforted album this far, a bit away from thrash, heavy as hell, still returning to basics every now and then. 

7. How much time does it take to put a record together? Do you have extra material that’s left out after choosing what fits you most?

Galzi: As mentioned, the schedyle felt even a bit loose on this one but the ideas and structures were there already, so we didn't actually start making it at any strict time, it started to happen when we gave our heads in it. 

Extras we don't have but some arsenal of riffs and parts that has to be used for the next album. So we didn't make any extra songs to be abandoned from The Sworn Book,  the idea was to fit the existing material in it to make a whole.

8. As a musician, how mandatory is the process of coming up with new ideas or incorporating new influences as opposed to staying within the style you are known for or that you are most familiar with?

Galzi: Now that we've been doing this for 20+ years and  we all are a music freaks more or less. For us it's more about keeping DSF frames even remotely where they should  to recognize us as DSF from album to another. With no commercial pressure at all, we're very free to do what we feel and our label is ok with it. Still DSF is a heavy  band, other projects then offer what we won't execute here.

9. Can you briefly inform us about the overall lyrical theme of the album?

Galzi: Lyrics are always a very important for me obivously as a songer spitting them. 

The Sworn Book is about having your mind fixed so that you are the sole person to control it, broadening it, taking advantage of it and doing what's right because of it. It includes, as all of our lyrics does, a lots and lots of references from literature history but also i always love to include some quotes from wherever..rap lyrics, r'nb lyrics, historical speeches or whatever..DSF lyrics always need to be more of a secret codes than anything too obivous.

10. The cover art look awesome. How important is the visual aspect of the band for you?

Galzi: The art was done by our friend Joni Borodavkin, and with this case i just handed him a bunch of texts and gave him no limits or any options for us as a band to hope for  a remakes! It was a nice fresh approach and it really payed off.

Visuals overall we like to play a bit more than as if we were a strict desth.metal band. Meaning, our text logo varies, our backdrop logo varies, our stage clothes are whatever any of us wants. We like to go free on these restrictions on this field.

11. Dead Shape Figure is claimed to be one of the most energetic, tightest live group. What are the basic criteria by which you choose the places where you would like to play live? Is it about lineup in the case of festivals, the nature of the action, or even approach of the organizers?

Galzi: We like to be pretty open regarding live shows. There's no festival we've been dissapointed with and specially on festivals we very much enjoy diversity of music. Last mini tour we did in Baltics we invited e few old frieds with us, there were death metal bands and prog-rock band and again the diversity seemed to satisfy the crowd. 

Stages we prefer big...no smaller than Guns n' Roses...a bit kidding though..But we are very cozy on big stages 'cause we've done so many supports on quite a big names on our time. Smaller venues we always love to have a punk band attitude, so on a contrary, the smaller the sweatier.

Your remark on the style of the approach of the organizers is very important..we've come across of every kind. The way we see it, it is a very, very easy to handle the event properly though we know there's a lot of stuff to deal with, even if it was just one show let alone a tour, having organized them ourselves also. The attitude towards bands, the respect of the whole deal is what makes the working package. We sre very co-operative guys but still there have been amazing mess-ups as promoters back in the days. That area has gone better with time a lot though.

12. If we divided the history of metal into decades--70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s... Which do you prefer and why?

Galzi:

I give a short highlights from each decade:

-70's - Led Zep, Dio, Alice Cooper..mainly ok era but still i prefer r'nb and black music to lead the decade..

-80's -Bad Brains, Black Flag, Misfits, Danzig..ug stuff, punk, hc saved the decade. Not much of a aor guy myself.

-90's - all our teenage favourites i must say..US gave the grunge, punk and death metal, Brits created grindcore, crust, death. Swedes had their own amazing death bands. Norwegian black scene..Even us Finns started to have some milestones our own.

-00's i enjoyed quite much, still proud to see how much extreme and hybrid shit was coming out ..and with such a professional touch. 

-'10 that's when we started not to have that much interest on metal scene, the newcomers so to speak..don't know why that is..i guess it's the fragmentation of things that does it. But the game has levelled up, no doubt. It's the balance of keeping it cool to yourself and gsining something new while we go from now on.

13. What you would say is the biggest downfall in the underground metal scene today? What if any changes would you make to better the scene?

-We always like to shout out the variety of things..that's how the evolution of genres keep alive. So even there's more scenes and genres that ever, it's important to be able to get the variations and not to stsy on just one. I'm not a fan of negative thinking, so let's get together and show what each of us is made of..

14. What kind of plans do you have for the next couple months with the band?

Galzi: February there'll be a small leg in Finland with swdish thrash gods The Haunted, then we're off to Baltic states on our own mini tour with a long term Baltic friends. Can't wait!

15. We have reached the end of our conversation, is there something that you want to say still?

Galzi: For all you local metalheads, check us out and DEMAND DSF on tour in your country! We'll most defenatly be there then!!

https://www.facebook.com/deadshapefigure