Rale

Who are you and what role do you have in the band? Where are you from?

Ian: I'm Ian Worz. I play bass, do some back up Vox, and so far, have recorded and mixed all of our output. I'm from St. Augustine, FL.

Keith: My name is Keith Kozelka. I grew up in Connecticut, spent some time in Florida (including death metal capital Tampa), before moving to North Carolina where Rale started. I am the rhythm guitarist, main writer, and lyricist.

Who started it and why? What made you start the band and play this particular kind of metal?

Keith: Since late 2016, I was motivated to express what I was feeling in response to the disturbing turn of world events in the form of death metal. There is something to its dark, heavy, complex sound that rose to the moment and made sense of it all. All the songs that would end up on the demo had their genesis from around that time. After a couple years of trying to get a project off the ground, I finally caught my break in 2019, responding to an ad Ian put out to start a death/black metal band. It started off as a two-man project before building to a full line up later that year.

Rale. What does your band name refer to? I find several intriguing medical explanations; [1

Ian: You're correct. It's a symptom of lung ailments. To my imagination, it evokes thoughts of a death rattle… and I like simple one-word band names.

Is there a connection between the logo and your band name? Is there a head behind your band name?

Ian: Yeah. I designed the logo, and have played with it for each release, but if you look at the first version on the 2020 Demo, you can see pretty clearly that the tops of the first three letters make up teeth and a tongue, and the concentric semicircles above them make for an implied exhalation or sound. That motif has stayed with each iteration, but I think it's become a little more obscured.

The cover artwork on your first EP Psychic Devastation reminds on the architectural style of Brutalism. Why did you pick this image — an image, which I tried to relate to a real building by the way. While writing the review back then I really took a dive into the absurd world of brutalist architecture. I needed to get this off my chest.

Ian: I was pretty fortunate to grow up with a strong education in art history and when I went to university it made sense to keep up with that. All of that has helped me out with a historical awareness of style. If I recall correctly, at the time that we started discussing aesthetics for the EP, I suggested something architectural, maybe even something as specific as brutalism… just some motif that hadn't been beaten to death in Death Metal. I think Keith found that image, and once I saw it, I thought it was appropriately staunch and haunting. I think it resonates with most of the material on that release. It's alienating whilst maintaining intrigue.

Keith: As far as that specific image, the fact that nobody can seem to answer the "who? what? where?" regarding this apparently real picture lends it an eeriness that appealed to me. Being an unknown band, I wanted our cover art to stand out from what other bands were doing.

Your lyrics are not particularly happy. What do your tracks deal with and why did you pick these topics?

Keith: The folly of humanity is a recurring theme throughout Rale's music, because it is what I understand best. For instance, Eyes of Pripyat is obviously about Chernobyl on a topical level, but it also speaks to how these powerful things of our creation catastrophically escape our control when it interacts with our stupidity, laziness and arrogance.

The Metal Archives lists only two active members in terms of your band. Why did the others leave and do you think about recruiting more musicians?

Keith: They are going to have to update that again, because we are back to a five piece with 4 of the 5 members the same. We have a new drummer now. I disbanded the line-up for a brief period to give myself time to make some decisions on personnel that needed to be addressed. I feel extremely fortunate to have the people we have now, because everybody is super talented and brings their own interpretation to the music. Rale wouldn't be what it is without everyone's contributions.

According to you, what would be the core essences of your music?

Ian: I think it's changed over time, and it's still changing, but some sense of melody is pretty big for us. I'll let Keith do the heavy lifting here.

Keith: Heaviness is the essence of our music, but I think there are many ways to achieve it. It's important to me that we don't fall into cliches. What helps me with that is writing along a throughline of melody and harmonic structures, with more brutal ideas punctuating that. I think it comes together in a band context as something that has a lot of dimensions to it, and it actively engages the listener. It's not just a salad of disconnected riffs.

Do you prefer more modern death metal or rather old-school stuff?

Ian: I tend to dig modern stuff more. I really enjoy bands that compose melodically complex pieces with odd voicing. The stuff that keeps me coming back is usually a little less riff-based and more structurally minded, although I'm not opposed to a real knuckle dragger of an Obituary riff now and then.

Keith: I enjoy the whole spectrum of death metal, and metal in general, but I think the old school has an understanding into what makes death metal great that modern bands may sometimes forget. Vitriol is a great example of a band that embodies the best of both worlds for me.

What bands would you refer to as influences?

Ian: Gorguts, Thantifaxath, Artificial Brain, Suffering Hour, Aosoth, stuff that now that I think about it, we don't sound like at all hahaha.

Keith: In the beginning I brought a lot of the usual OSDM stuff into our sound: Morbid Angel, Bolt Thrower, Incantation, Immolation, Dismember, etc. But honestly, I am like a sponge in that I will absorb anything that I am listening to at the time, and it will come out in our music. Ian's taste for weirdo metal has rubbed off on me, along with lots of non-metal stuff I have enjoyed over the years like Kemasi Washington, Swans and Dead Can Dance.

What are your experiences regarding streaming? What is your opinion on Spotify or Bandcamp?

Ian: Spotify sucks. Virtually all of the larger streaming platforms suck for a band of our size. For a small band like us, Bandcamp is 100% the way to go. We get over 300% more plays on Bandcamp than Spotify and Apple Music combined and if someone likes the material, they can actually pay us something for it. The revenue sharing on the big platforms is pitiful.

Keith: Bandcamp is the only platform that made me feel connected to an audience during a time when we couldn't play shows due to the pandemic. The fact that we can make a little money off it is cool, but I don't really care about that.

Are there venues where you can listen to live performances or do you have to travel abroad for it?

Keith: We played two shows at a local Raleigh venue called the Maywood before COVID shut down everything. We hope to soon start playing live shows again locally and regionally.

How can people contact you? Where can people listen to your music? Any concerts forthcoming?

Keith: Bandcamp is the preferred platform, but we also do Instagram. You can listen to us at https://ralenc.bandcamp.com/. We hope to be playing shows soon.

Closing comments, if you want ...

Ian: Thank you for taking the time to ask us some questions!

Keith: Thanks for doing this interview. Rale is just getting started. Stay tuned!