As Jason explains, it was the band’s vocalist who came up with the name VON for the group and the almost identical pseudonym “Von” as an alternative for the similar-sounding Shawn, suggesting related stage names for his bandmates also based upon their birth names, thus turning Brent into “Vennt” and Ventura into “Venien.” While Shawn naturally came to the fore and became the frontman, it was Jason who determined that the trio should return to his birthplace of San Francisco in order to become part of the famous Bay Area scene, a far cry from the beautiful but isolated existence that the island of Hawaii offered.
“Jason was a big influence in me coming to San Francisco,” explains Shawn, “I don’t think I would have come if it wasn’t for him. We all had these pipe dreams, ‘Let’s rock out and do this band shit.’ We were working together in a job, going to fucking school, it was kind of a far-fetched dream. Slowly we came to some decisions and went for it.”
Upping stakes in 1988, the trio soon discovered the hard way that they would have to balance the development of their band with simply struggling to make ends meet. Brent, always the more practical and professional of the three, was a Californian-born surf enthusiast who adapted back to life in the city with reasonable ease, but Shawn and Jason often struggled to keep afloat, with drugs and young families proving awkward bedfellows.
“There was a very big struggle personally to keep fucking food on our tables and do the right thing,” explains Shawn. “We were slumming, man, working shit jobs, trying to pay the rent.”
“[It was] terrible, to be honest,” Jason admits. “I am not proud of my earlier dealings with drugs and the people that I ran with during that time and the hyper-violent attitude that I inflicted on friends and family, but the times and the city brought that out of me during that stage of my life. We argued constantly and bills and being broke was also a constant. Shawn had a small new family starting out at the time, so it was tough on him now that I think of it, and I tried to help, but I always felt guilty bringing him to the city and see[ing] them suffer in poverty. Brent was alone so he was good, he kept snakes as children and he was good to go I guess. My first son was born during that time and it was getting harder with that and the band, so extra money from drugs was my path and it was not all good. Drugs had taken its part within the fabric of each of us in different ways, but for myself it was more drawn toward violence—the others were really laid back, so there was tension for sure.”
Live in 1991 with Kill, Snake and Goat, the only lineup known to the world until almost twenty years later.
These desperate conditions provided the backdrop for the band, who practiced every other day in the cold, dark, damp confines of a basement storage space beneath a tailor shop. Painted black and lit with red bulbs, it was here the band recorded a demo/rehearsal tape for themselves in 1990 entitled simply Satanic, which contained many of the songs that would find their way onto Satanic Blood.
“Satanic I personally recorded because we were so lazy before that, and I wanted some of the songs on tape,” sighs Jason. “We didn’t even record all the songs we made, but I made each of us a copy.”
Recorded with a single microphone hanging down between the band members from a pipe, it is a somewhat less cold and caustic listen than its better-known follow up, with guitars more audible and less distortion overall, most noticeably on the vocals. It is no less primitive or intense, however, its drug-fueled, hardcore punk-influenced black fuzz a far cry from the increasingly technical death and thrash metal of the time.
“I was violent and darkness was in my blood at all times, I wanted to be harder, faster, darker than all those on the scene, but with that punk mentality … raw!” Venien explains. “Metallica and technical metal was popular, still is, but we wanted to be raw and simple … and not like anyone else if at all possible. Metal music was a crucial and important form of expression, as was the urban/punk and even tribal sounds that played in my head. The influence for me was the pit, the mosh pit, [but] the raw human condition, the brutal and psychotic mentality within us was what really drove me. I can only speak on what I feel I brought to VON, which was the raw, brutal, and overpoweringly loud aspect of bands like Septic Death, DRI, Black Flag, Christ on Parade, Cro-Mags, Venom, Sodom, Kreator, Slayer, Samhain, Misfits, and my personal favorite, Diamanda Galás, and more specifically her album Litanies of Satan … Tribal expressions have also been extremely dominant in terms of my life and music … due to [their] core, basic, and raw structure. Anything outside of that is over-indulgency; that might be why it was so stripped down in terms of VON.”
Indeed, if VON was characterized by one thing, it was utter minimalism and—as Jason suggests—an almost tribal primitivism that lay at its heart. Combining unrelentingly simplistic, hypnotic percussion and stripped-down riffing with an unearthly vocal style, VON’s music seemed to be driven by a ritualistic and almost religious fervor.
“You just know something just ain’t right, but the feeling behind metal is perfect,” explains Shawn of the forces that drove him to create such possessed sounds. “Isolation. Finding things in common with the undercurrent of mysticism. Everything around tells you otherwise but inside, you believe the truth is shrouded. Slowly, through the ‘trust’ of mysticism you see the hypocrisy of all you are surrounded by. This will germinate in you over time and, in my result, created under extreme circumstances ‘this person.’ It’s just something you’re born into. The music was a product of those conditions.”
“I was into many things in my development years, and Satan was a pure constant indeed,” ponders Jason. “The band was into making dark things and keeping it simple and bloody pure. But organized religions, cults, and things of that flock, no. I am not a follower of any, I am a freethinker and always have been, just having the realization of being able to dictate your own existence is comforting. But Satan and all things good and bad are interjected into the music, even more so in the new writings.”
The trio played live at a few bars and gatherings but the reception was far from overwhelming; entirely at odds with the technical thrash and death metal prevalent at the time, VON, as with so many early black metal bands, found their efforts largely unappreciated.
“We played a handful of performances through the years as the original lineup, but nothing to go into detail about,” admits Jason. “The response? Negative! Plain old shock. I think even metalheads had issues wrapping their senses around what they heard. It just goes back to the simple fact that there are millions of closed-minded sheep out there in the world.”
“The music got poor conditions like us,” confirms Shawn grimly, “and was left to fend for itself like us. VON didn’t deserve special treatment that I [also] wasn’t getting in my own personal life. Nothing here was privilege.”
As unhappy as the band’s situation was, worse was to come in late 1990/early 1991 when Jason’s mother was told by doctors that she had only a few months to live, forcing the bassist to return home to Hawaii. His bandmates were far from happy; having been persuaded to head out to California, they were already struggling to get shows and would now have to deal with losing a band member. The solution came from Joe Allen—whom Jason describes as his then-best friend who would later be the best man at his wedding—whom the bassist introduced as his temporary replacement while he sorted out the family situation back in Oahu. Some resentment over the situation clearly arose and VON sought to distance themselves from their departed bassist, with Shawn/Von becoming “Goat,” Brent/Vennt becoming “Snake” (after his taste in pets) and Joe adopting the “Kill” moniker. Furthermore the song that had been named after the bassist (something of a tradition, since Vennt and Von would also have songs named after them) was renamed from “Venien” (as listed on Satanic) to “Veinen” (as it appears on Satanic Blood). Venien himself was later described unflatteringly in interviews as “an unnamed bass player.”
1992’s primitive, uncompromisingly barbaric and highly influential Satanic Blood demo.
While
this was all somewhat messy, it was undoubtedly this new incarnation that put VON on the map, recording the second demo and capturing the imagination of fans with iconic live shows that featured two seven-foot inverted crosses, red candles, and both guitarists stripped to their waist and covered in blood. Even these efforts weren’t enough to keep the band going, however, and the group collapsed before Jason had a chance to return. Before their demise the group would record one more demo, Blood Angel, but this would go unreleased until many years later.
In the intervening years the band was left largely untouched by its founding members, who kept little contact between themselves, to the extent that the whereabouts of Snake have been a mystery almost since the band dissolved. Jason would go on to work as an illustrator and designer in Arizona, while also working in the urban music scene, and Shawn would lead something of a colorful life, continuing with a variety of musical projects (including death rock project Sixx and moderately successful funk-tinged pop act 10¢) while also appearing as an extra and actor in music videos and films, including Dead Man on Campus in which he, rather aptly, plays a guitarist in a death rock band.
Meanwhile, a new generation of black and extreme metal fans and musicians stumbled upon the band’s demo recordings, these unique, even avant-garde, efforts providing one of the links between the eighties pioneers and the rebirth of black metal in the early nineties.
“I feel like we kind of contributed to a particular guitar style that [in turn] kind of helped to contribute to the black metal sound,” reflects Shawn, “and that came purely from a musical standpoint, a guitar standpoint. I sort of gravitated toward the single strumming notes as opposed to the bigger chord progressions, the heavier, crunchier chord stuff. Something more like a ‘beckoning’ or ‘calling,’ that kind of style, which was influenced by the early Slayer and Sodom guitar styles. I think what made it interesting was that we brought in the more Satanic imagery as opposed to the death thing, we brought more of a darker, evil Satanic element to it. I think that came from the frustration, the anger, the fucking abandonment of family and displacement of being an outsider.”
Released almost two decades after the demo tape, The Satanic Blood album was finally recorded in the studio and released in 2012.
Despite the many bands inspired by VON’s efforts, it was only in the late 2000s that Jason and Shawn really became aware of the amount of interest that their old band had amassed. 2003 had seen a compilation featuring the second and third demos and live material, but this had apparently only been approved by Kill, and its official status is therefore still disputed today, at least by Jason. Nonetheless, the release indirectly triggered the band’s return.
“The return was based on old friends reaching out to me telling me they [had] seen my album,” explains Jason. “I thought that was odd when we never released an album. I looked into it and to our surprise there had been releases of the old demo material. There were also many bands and other CDs out there with the material. Since all the copyrights are under myself and Shawn, it felt awkward to see something released outside of us. I had already started a company to release new material and rerecorded demo stuff, but once I started it up things got weird.”
Indeed, Jason’s next move would prove confusing to many black metal fans. Forming a company to release new material, he issued a slew of publicity announcing the launch of “VON Music Group/VON Properties LLC” and its possible distribution by Warners, the rather corporate presentation perhaps reflective of his two-decade absence from the scene and underground sensibilities. He also stated that earlier releases of VON material, including the most recent by the respected Nuclear War Now! were “bootlegs.” Given that most black metal fans had not yet learned of Jason’s role in the VON story, or even heard his name before, skepticism was rife, with many believing the entire thing to be a hoax.
“VON Properties was only to start the business side of things, to release music to the world and deal with others that need it to be a business,” Jason explains. “If people think a guy doing everything DIY, his own cash, his own hands, recording, mixing, planning, and even illustrating every image for every album is corporate, they are misled and need to learn the basics of starting a record label.”
While confusion reigned during this time, Jason had also managed to re-establish contact with Shawn and persuaded him to reform the band to record an EP and play a one-off reunion show at the Armageddon festival, a two-day London event where Watain were launching their new album, Lawless Darkness. With VON Music Group making the Satanic demo available as a free download, and the scheduled appearance of “Venien” (Jason) alongside “Goat” (Shawn), the once-doubted story now proved increasingly legitimate.
“Erik of Watain reached out to me a year before the London show through MySpace and we started talking about VON,” Jason explains. “With Erik asking if we would like to perform a set with him in Sweden, it got the ball rolling for us to pick up a few other guys to start the band again. Shawn initially had just been getting ready to get married again, and he was really not into it, he actually said he was done with metal and VON. So I just phoned him up every other day to talk about things and at some point he changed his mind. He wanted to do the show and record a little vinyl for the show for the fans as well. We could not find Brent, so I sought out a local drummer who went by the name of Blood, he was a VON fan and wanted to get involved as well. We rehearsed the old songs a couple times, and also recorded, mixed, and mastered the vinyl in one weekend. We did London a month or so later.”
Unfortunately, though the London show would at least prove that the whole affair had not been a hoax, it was not well received. While the playing was certainly not as tight as it could have been, much of the resentment from fans seemed to focus on the slower renditions of the songs and the lack of stage gear, the band simply playing in their street clothes without the blood or crosses. When I asked about this Shawn replied, “I think we grew as people, it’s been twenty years and you have to sort of fucking grow up … people grow up in different ways, different things take on more meaning and it boiled down more to the music I think.”
Trouble brewing: Goat and Venien, pictured in London in 2010, prior to their live performance together and consequent estrangement. Photo: Dayal Patterson.
A scheduled performance at Norway’s Hole in the Sky festival was quickly cancelled and Shawn soon decided to leave the band, making the 2010 Satanic Blood EP the only non-demo release to feature both Shawn and Jason (alongside J. Giblete Cuervo and Diego “Blood” Arredondo). The two men would later follow their own musical projects, Shawn issuing new full-length albums with the aid of drummer Blood, guitarist J. Giblete Cuervo, Bone Awl bassist He Who Gnashes Teeth, and even session drummer Wrest of contemporary USBM heroes Leviathan/Lurker of Chalice. These slabs of intriguing psychedelic black metal would be issued via Nuclear War Now!, the label making peace with Shawn if not Jason.
For his part, the latter would take on a huge amount of work. Initially going under the name “Von Venien,” his solo project would revert to the more straightforward “Venien” and craft an ambitious double album entitled Tribal Blood, featuring himself on vocals and bass, Giblete on guitars, and Anthony “Dirty FvKn! Pistols” Mainiero, drummer of sludge metaller The Atlas Moth.
VON itself would continue, meanwhile, under Jason’s leadership, initially recruiting Giblete and drummer Charlie Fell (Nachtmystium) to create the album Satanic Blood (that title again), a searing and impressively authentic opus featuring studio rerecordings of the demo material alongside unheard songs from the era.
Seven Billion Slaves, the first part of the Dark Gods trilogy, released in 2013.
Charlie would then be replaced by Dirty FvKn! Pistols and several new guitarists, with whom VON would record another ambitious project, a trilogy of albums entitled Dark Gods, works that would wander quite far stylistically from the early compositions.
Quite how the legacy of VON will be perceived following the band’s comebac
k remains to be seen. For his part, Jason is untroubled by whatever reactions may arise and continues upon a very determined and unusual creative path.
“Respectfully, I never officially got into the scene per se, VON or myself never made it that far. As all things evolve there is a certain amount of backlash and dissent, but it’s supposed to be that way in all forms and things, so I take reactions, opinions, and those nasty and positive things and listen, but I do not dwell on them. My current state of mind harbors no ill will toward ‘kvlt’ VON fans and Goat-worshippers and those that might react to Satanic Blood and Dark Gods as blasphemy. Those new to it who listen to the screams of those holding on for dear life to a demo, well it’s up to them to think for themselves. I respectfully feel the albums will be received, in both camps, good and bad, it is the VON way. I have been in an uphill battle to get this out since the gatekeepers of the metal scene in the eighties told me it’s not really what’s going on right now, well, let’s see if its time is now.”
14
BEHERIT
“Beherit were one of the bands who had a real mystique. Their sound was never really popularized so they’ve remained ‘cult,’ but their atmosphere of claustrophobic and pernicious ritual had a big impact on a generation of black metal. They represent a whole era when black metal felt vital, and even dangerous, in a way that was swiftly lost.”
Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult Page 15