Interview: Ghost Bath’s Dennis
Hey man, who are you, what’s your band, and what are you guys up to?
Dennis: Hey, I’m Dennis, I sing and play guitar in Ghost Bath. We play depressive, suicidal black metal, and we’re on Nuclear Blast! We’re currently on tour – we got here on the 5th of May, and we’re flying back to the states on the 26th of June, and I reckon we’ll have about a total of ten days off in that time. Busy times!
It’s a pretty accurate description that, ‘depressive suicidal, black metal’ – when you started up the band did you all want to play ‘depressive suicidal, black metal’, or did you come from a black metal background and just wanted to do something a little bit different?
Dennis: Until 2015, I was the only member of the band and writing all the music. Originally I heard bands such as Agalloch and was really into them, as well as bands such as SBM (Scream Blue Murder), and I wanted to make depressive suicidal, black metal that was recorded very well, as a lot of the recording quality on that sort of music is – I wont say it’s bad, but purposely made more rough, so I wanted to take that and have it more polished.
Makes sense, a lot of the black metal sounds like it’s been recorded in some cave in a Norwegian mountain at night time, in winter.
Anyway, you recently released your latest record ‘Starmourner’, how’s that been received?
Dennis: It’s been pretty polarizing like all of our stuff, people either love it or hate it, but a lot of people have said it’s more of a grower not a shower, basically. The first time you hear it you’re not quite sure what to think of it, then the more you listen to it the more you’ll get into it, and I get that myself with music as well; a lot of the records I listen to today was records I wasn’t quite sure of at first, and then they slowly grew on me.
Now, let’s get down to business; Orange Amps. What’s your history with the company?
Dennis: I grew up in a small town in the mid-west in the US, but we still had a decent music scene. One time this one band I was really into and looked up to brought out this Orange Amp on stage, and it just looked so cool and really stood out with the bright colour. I’m not too sure how old I was, but I reckon it was early teens. Since these were guys I looked up to, I just knew that I needed to get an amp like that eventually, and I finally did about eight years ago when I got a Rockerverb 100, which I could just plug in and play, I don’t even have to tweak anything, it just sounds better than all the other amps I’ve had, and that’s literally all I’ve used since.
From doing these interviews that’s probably what I’ve heard the most – ‘I just plug in and play’, which is exactly what you want. You don’t want to sit there for 40 minutes fiddling around, tweaking a bunch of knobs.
Dennis: Yeah, I had a Rectifier before the Orange, and that one I couldn’t even tweak. I’d be at it tweaking for weeks just all like ‘ugh oh why…’. So yeah, I’ve never looked back after I got an Orange!