There’s no denying the Chicago death metal scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s was nothing short of groundbreaking, producing a slew of bands who have since achieved legend status. Master, Cianide, Macabre, Sindrome: The list goes on and on. How about our neighbors up north in Wisconsin? Well when it comes to Wisconsin death metal, there’s one name that stands tall above the rest: Morta Skuld. Having released some cult classic albums in the ’90s (specifically 1993’s Dying Remains), the band split in ’98, only to return in the early ’10s. They’ve been going strong ever since. With a brand new album entitled Creation Undone on the horizon, we sat down with founding guitarist/vocalist Dave Gregor to discuss the band’s unlikely resurrection, Death’s Leprosy, and the infamous Milwaukee Metal Fest.
Greetings Dave and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
Dave Gregor: I’m fantastic, Joe! How are you my friend?
I’m great, thank you! We’re now a few weeks away from the release of a brand new Morta Skuld album, Creation Undone. When did ideas start coming together for this one?
DG: About 3 years ago, we started preparing for the record. We like to release every 3 years to keep current with everything. We were playing with a different guitarist at the time (Tim Beyer). The way he liked to write songs and the way we liked to write songs was kind of different. He liked to write whole songs himself and then present them to the band. We had written about 5 songs. I had written a couple. He had written a couple. Then, he just didn’t want to be involved anymore. He came from up in Appleton, which is where my other two guys come from. I seem to have a connection with Appleton with band meets. He just didn’t like the drive anymore, so he decided to leave.
Scott (Willecke) who has been in the band a long time, he decided to come back. We scrapped everything. How it really started was is Scott came to a rehearsal. He came on the wrong date. I live really close to where we rehearse, but I was unavailable, so Scott and Eric (House) started writing what was to be “Painful Conflict”. They started writing the song and that’s where it really all started. It started with that song and we were like, “OK, we like where the material is going at this point. Let’s just keep going this way.”
What did the band set out to achieve with this effort to set it apart from the past two reunion era albums, Suffer for Nothing and Wounds Deeper Than Time?
DG: With this one, we just wanted to please ourselves. On Suffer for Nothing, in my mindset, I was like, “What do the fans wanna hear?” With this record, we’re like, “You know what? Who cares. Let’s just write what we write.” Matter of fact, a lot of the riffs on here were accidental. I would just start jamming on a riff and Scott would go, “I like that! Let’s use that!” I’m like, “What?! I don’t even know what I’m playing!” “No, no, no. Let’s look into it. Let’s do that.” I’d say 50% of the riffs were just off the cuff and just kind of happened.
We like to keep our writing very organic and natural. We don’t like to force anything. If we feel something’s being forced, or we’re like, “Yeah, this doesn’t sound good.”, we can it and move on. I think what we wanted to do too is we were all listening to different stuff. I was listening to Immolation and Kreator and what have you. I noticed little nuances in a lot of the songs that I loved and listened to. For example, I can’t remember what song it was off of Extreme Aggression, but I remember Mille (Petrozza) started with this really cool fast part and I was like, “Man, what if we write a song that just starts with guitar?” That’s what became “We Rise We Fall”.
It really was nothing conscious. We wanted to write what we love, what we feel. Like, “That’s a really catchy riff! I love it! Let’s do it.” We wrote it more to please ourselves and threw in little things. Immolation does a lot of harmonic pinch bends. I was like, “Dude, I wanna throw that in on a riff somewhere.” It was more like we wanted to pay homage to a lot of the bands and some of the intricacies that they had in their music.
It’s funny you mention that about “We Rise We Fall” because that is such a ripping cut to leadoff the record with. The opening riff caught my attention first and foremost. I totally hear Kreator and Dark Angel, that “death metal before it was death metal” vibe. How did that song come about and was it a given that it would be the opener?
DG: No, it really wasn’t. This song was probably one of the last couple of songs we wrote. I tell everybody this; lyrics are tedious. Even Max Cavalera will tell you he hates writing them. It’s a tedious process. I got a writers block. I reached out to my buddy Frank Rini (ex-Internal Bleeding). He was like, “Yeah, I got some lyrics!” He sent these lyrics over to me and he had the title. I was like, “God, I really don’t like the title.” But he had the words “We Rise We Fall” in it and I was like, “I’m gonna name it that!” After I molded his lyrics to fit this, they just fell into place. Like I said, I was listening to Kreator’s Extreme Aggression and I was like, “Man, I wanna write a song that just begins with this fast guitar part.”, and like you said, almost thrashy.
What events took place that led up to Morta Skuld’s return after a near 15 year dormancy in 2012?
DG: After Morta Skuld had broken up and I tried to revive it for a few years and just kind of gave up, I formed a different genre band. I did that for probably about 8 years. We did a couple records. It ran its course. I was talking with Eric Greif, former Death and Obituary manager, and he was dealing with Relapse on doing the reissues for Death. He said, “Hey man, I’d really like to have those first two demos that I produced for you on CD.” He paid us to go into the studio because there were some small glitches with the Prolong the Agony demo that we had to fix. We went into the studio. I sent him the CD.
Then, I don’t know if it was him or myself that was like, “Hey, why don’t we add a couple of other tracks and put this out as a compilation through Relapse?” I was like, “Yeah, that would be cool!” He did it and we got some pretty good response. Clawhammer did our PR for that one and we definitely were getting some pretty good reviews off of it. He just called us and said, “Hey man, why don’t you get the band back together?” I was like, “I don’t know man. I haven’t played death metal in so long. I don’t know if I can even do it anymore!” “Oh come on! Just do it.”
One day, I was like, I’m not doing anything. Why not? What is the worst that can happen? I called up a couple of guys in the area that were on the demos. It was a mix of the Gory Departure and Prolong the Agony lineups. Everybody was onboard. We decided to go ahead and play the demos. That was all we were playing, just demos. Then we did a bunch of shows. At that point, I know (bassist) Jason Hellman and myself were getting the itch to write. When you’re a musician, you can go a while without writing, but then once in a while it creeps back in. “Oh man, I got the itch to write!” So we wanted to write and Jef (Jaeger) who was drumming for us at the time, he just had no interest in writing. We were like, “OK, fine.” Him and (guitarist) Kevin (Zeitler) decided to dropout of the band.
We had been in touch with Eric House for a while. The stars just didn’t align. Then one day, he just called us and he goes, “You still looking for somebody?” We go, “Yeah.” “OK, let’s get together.” So we got together with Eric and we just started playing Dying Remains material and the demo material. At that point, we were like, “You know what? We want to start writing. Let’s start writing. Let’s do an EP. Let’s do an EP, throw it out there, and see what happens. Let’s see what the response is. Let’s see if we even get any response.” So we did an EP called Serving Two Masters and we threw it out there and it got a really, really good response. At that point, that’s when I got in touch with the label and said, “We should really remaster Dying Remains.” Then all the wheels just started turning and the next thing I know, we’re in the studio recording Wounds Deeper Than Time.
In hindsight, it was almost perfect timing. Morta Skuld reformed in 2012. By the latter half of the ’10s, the whole OSDM explosion, between the classic bands coming back and the new bands trying to sound like the old bands, was in full swing. Its been this way for nearly a decade now.
DG: Easily. I’m really glad it worked out the way it did because like I said, we had no idea what the response was gonna be to Serving Two Masters. We did a lot of it ourselves. It was a very low budget recording money-wise, but it really turned out well. I was like, “Wow, I can’t believe we recorded a lot of this stuff ourselves.” We had a professional studio mix it, but it just turned out real well, so I was happy with the response. That sparked us onto decide to go and write a full length, which was Wounds Deeper Than Time.
You are the sole original member of Morta Skuld. How does the current incarnation of the band compare or contrast to those early days in the ’90s?
DG: That’s a good question. The really good thing about it is that Eric, our drummer, followed us. He followed us when he was a kid. He’s a big fan, and he’s a big fan of our drummer off of the first four releases, Kent (Truckenbrod). He was a big fan of his and he knew a lot of his mannerisms. He knew a lot of his beats. He really had his style down, but Eric had his own style too. The thing that I guess I’m blessed with is that the guys, the know the band. They know the history of the band. They know the music. Everybody just falls into place.
The big difference too is I generally like everybody in my band, which back in the ’90s, there was a lot of dissension between me and the guitar player. There was a lot of animosity. We really didn’t like each other. It was a real hard thing to go to practice every week and play with somebody that you didn’t really care for. Like I said, we just try to be down to earth. I think the thing is we all want the same goal. We wanna play in a killer death metal band. We wanna write killer death metal. We’re all on the same page when it comes to that.
Mission accomplished!
DG: Thanks! Honestly dude, John (Hill) and Scott and Eric, they’re definitely great players and we definitely have a chemistry, that’s for sure.
Growing up, who were the bands that most influenced you and helped shape you as a musician? Furthermore, when did you first become aware of death metal?
DG: I’m older than the other guys in the band, so I’m 57. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s. A lot of the music back then was you had the disco era, the punk era. That was a cool thing that I liked when I grew up. I grew up through all of that. I saw the disco. I saw the rock. I saw punk. I saw all of that come into fruition and all of it come full circle. That was really cool being there at the time, picking up a Sex Pistols record or Styx or Foreigner or whatever have you.
My early influences were Styx, Foreigner, Journey, Alice Cooper. Obviously early Metallica and Slayer and all that good stuff. As I started growing older and finding all these niche bands like Talas and Hardchoir and all these rock bands back in the ’80s that if you wouldn’t have looked for them, you wouldn’t have found them. I was really, really into looking into bands that I didn’t know who they were and if the cover was awesome, “Hey, let’s get this.”
As far as death metal, I was a late bloomer. I was maybe 20 or 21, something like that. I was working at a record store, when we used to have record stores. I was working in the warehouse section of it and I would pull orders. This was right when CD had just come on the market. No metal. Nothing was on CD except for new age. All the new age music was all on CD. So I knew if I was picking an order and it said “CD”, I knew it was new age because that was the only music that was on CD at that time.
I don’t know how it came about. I don’t know if I picked it or I saw it, but it said “Death – Leprosy“. I was like, “Woah! What’s this?” He goes, “You’d probably like that.” “Really? I really want this.” He goes, “Take it!” “What?!” “Just take it!” At least that’s my recollection. Maybe I paid for it. I don’t know. I was like, “OK, fine!” So I get home, I crank it up and I’m like, “This is awesome. This is exactly what I’ve been wanting to do with my musical career, with my band. Right before Morta Skuld happened, I was jamming with a whole different bunch of guys. We were doing crossover music like M.O.D., S.O.D. type stuff, real jokey stuff.
The musicians that I had in the band, some of them, including myself, we were all green. I think I had been playing guitar maybe a year? We were real green. I was like, “No man, I wanna do heavier. I want to do like Testament, “chug-chug-chug-chug”, that heavy chunk. Early Sepultura, Arise and Beneath the Remains, I want that heaviness, that crunch.” When that band had run its course real quick, I stumbled onto a bunch of kids. Jason Hellman, I think he was 15 or 16. (Guitarist) Jesse (Rofritz)…these guys were kids. Here I’m like 21 and they’re all 15, 16, but they had a lot of energy. They really wanted to do this.
That Death Leprosy record, I always give it the highest kudos because that was my first listen to death metal. Next it was Obituary, and then it was Pestilence, and then it was Sadus. The list just keeps going on and on. I’ll never forget it because at the time, Jason’s mom, God bless her, she was so supportive of the band, not that I didn’t have a car, but she’d drive us. “C’mon, let’s go to the record store!” She’d take us to the record store and have us pick out all these cassettes and buy them for us! Eric Greif was like, “Hey man, you should probably go out to the store. If you want to play this style of music, you should probably get familiar with it.
So we went to the store and she’s picking cassettes and we’re telling her, “We want Pestilence! We want Obituary! We want Sadus!” We were kids with a big cartful of cassettes. We’re all happy and skipping off in the land of Oz and went home and really just consumed ourselves with this music day and night. It was in my car cassette player. It was in our stereo at home. That’s all we did besides go to work, if you even had a job at the time, you did, otherwise, we listened to that music 24/7.
I’d be remiss to not ask this next question: Seven Churches or Scream Bloody Gore?
DG: Ooh…that’s hard because I’m really not a fan of either. I know people are gonna be like, “What?!” I never really got into Possessed like everybody else did. I listened to them. I heard them. I just didn’t…Scream Bloody Gore for me, like I said, it wasn’t my first introduction. Now that I’m older, I go back and listen to it. “Zombie Ritual” is an awesome song. I guess with that being said, and I’ll probably get people at my house with pitchforks and flames like, “How dare you!” I’m not saying Possessed is a bad band. It just wasn’t prevalent for me, so I would have to go with Scream Bloody Gore.
That’s wild considering 99% of all death metallists worship both albums. The only other person besides you who feels that way about Possessed is King Fowley from Deceased.
DG: Oh yeah! That dude’s awesome! He’s hilarious.
I saw an interview with him last year where, I’m sure I’m paraphrasing, but he said something along the lines of, “Possessed? First demo and that’s it!”
DG: Yup! Yeah, that guy’s got some great stories too. I did an interview with somebody once too and they were like, “What? You don’t like Possessed? Oh man!” “Nah man. I don’t know. I like what I like!”
Last year saw Morta Skuld play the newly resurrected Milwaukee Metal Fest. What was that experience like and what are your memories of MMFs of years past?
DG: We were very honored, privileged, blessed, whatever you wanna call it to play that because we had been a staple of the Milwaukee Metal Fest for 8 years, I think pretty consecutive. There might have been a year here, a year there were we weren’t. Jack Koshick ran Metal Fest. It was his baby. He managed us off and on, so we always got good slots. The perks of that being, that I really, really loved, was that I knew where everybody was staying. There was this hotel down on Wells. I can’t remember the name of it. Not the Ambassador. It was further down I think, but all the bands stayed there.
I don’t know what year this was or which Metal Fest, but I remember going down there and meeting Alex (Webster) and Cannibal Corpse, Phil (Fasciana) from Malevolent Creation, Atheist, Suffocation: Everybody was there. It was so awesome because I literally went from room to room to room to room. It was nothing crazy. We’d smoke a little weed here, drink some beer, shoot the shit. It was cool because there was this camaraderie and this…I can’t even think of the word, but this solidarity between all of us. Even though Morta Skuld is a second generation death metal band, and these guys were all first generation, it didn’t matter. We all got along. They loved us. We loved them. I’ll never forget it. It was super, super awesome.
Leading up to last year, I was like, “Holy crap! This is super amazing! I’m meeting a lot of the bands that I haven’t played with in 20 years. I’m seeing them. They’re seeing me.” It was just great camaraderie. The one thing I really remember about it is the newer bands, like the guys in Frozen Soul and Gatecreeper. We met them once before. They came to a show of ours in Texas, the guys in Frozen Soul, but they couldn’t stay. They were literally a mile or two down the street on some big major tour and they decided to come over and see us. They couldn’t. They had to leave, but then at Metal Fest, we get off the stage and they’re right there.
I’m like, “Woah! Hey, what’s up guys?” “Oh my God! That was so awesome!” “Oh, dude. You’re killing me man. You’re killing me.” Those guys are so good and they’re getting really big. Even watching them perform, I was like, “Oh my God.” They were literally in…I don’t wanna say “awe”, but they were like, “Oh my God, this is a bucket list.” That was really humbling for me to hear. I was like, “What?! What are you talking about? You’re doing all the touring. You’re doing all the shows and all this other stuff. We’re still fighting for scraps off the table.”, so I was very, very humbled. Later on, I was going through a green room to get paid for the show and I ran into the guys from Gatecreeper. They were like, “Dude, you don’t know how you influenced us younger bands.” “Are you serious?!” “Yeah, Dying Remains, my God!”
I heard a lot of that at the Milwaukee Metal Fest and it was very humbling, but at the same time, it was an awesome experience to see these younger bands that are forging the styles that us and the first gen bands brought in, forging that to new heights. It was just an awesome experience. I was drawn back by it. I was very humbled, but at the same time, I was glad that we had a great performance. We had an amazing crowd for us at 3:30 in the afternoon. It was just a great experience and like I said, we thank Jamey (Jasta) and the powers that be that brought us. We look forward to hopefully playing again someday.
Being part of that younger generation, that weekend was quite the experience. Growing up in Chicago, every old school metalhead has their stories of that festival. You couldn’t help but wonder what would be if it ever came back. Lo and behold, it did. It was a great mix of old and new bands, to have Sanguisugabogg and Molder, and then Morta Skuld and Vio-Lence and Raven and so forth. It was a great blend of a lineup, great blend of a crowd, and I’m looking forward to it this year.
DG: Good! Awesome. Yeah, I’m gonna try to go. I’ve seen Death to All twice before, but those guys are so…I love Bobby Koelble. Those guys are so good, so good. We were fortunate enough to open for them at the House of Blues the very first year that all got together. I literally had goosebumps. It took me back to being a kid in 1991. Oh my God, they did it so well. I would really, really like to…them and I Am Morbid, that would be the two bands that I really, really want to see.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Morta Skuld’s second album, As Humanity Fades. What are your memories of this era? Was there any pressure on the band following the colossal Dying Remains?
DG: The band actually broke up after Dying Remains. Here’s the story. Dying Remains was recorded a year and a half before it was released. We had recorded that album in late ’91. It took up until 1993 to get released for some reason. There were some label problems, budget problems at the time. We were on Deaf Records. We weren’t on Peaceville yet, so there were some issues with that. There was a big delay, but that album had been written and already off to the press. We were like, “Wow, when is this coming out?”
What happened was I had gotten married in between that time. I married somebody I shouldn’t have married. It was just a bad mix. I was having a lot of personal problems with that. What happened was that led to a breakup between me and the guys. Back then, it was different. We were…I don’t know. What’s the word I’m looking for? There wasn’t any sympathy. There was no empathy. It wasn’t, “Oh, we’re really sorry you’re going through this.” It was more like, “Hey man. All for one, one for all. Get your act together.” Unfortunately, I don’t recall a lot of it, but I know Kent and I have talked about it. Since he doesn’t drink or do any drugs, I was like, “OK, your memory is probably better than mine.”
He had mentioned too that my now ex…I was with this person and we had a kid. She just didn’t want me to play music and all this other stuff. There was a lot of skipped rehearsals and stuff like that. Basically, what happened was they went their way, I went my way. They were trying to find somebody to replace me as they were writing new music, so they tuned up to D standard in stead of drop C which Dying Remains was in. They tuned up to D standard, started writing new songs. Jason (O’Connell), the guitar player at the time, was really heavily into Malevolent Creation, which is great. I feel like you can hear that influence on As Humanity Fades.
Like I said, they went their way, I went my way, and I started jamming with a whole bunch of new guys. We started playing out as Morta Skuld. I wrote a couple songs with these guys and everything was going great. Then, they wanted to get back with their old singer, so they were like, “Yeah, we’re gonna go back with our old singer.” I’m like, “Oh man.” So I didn’t have a band. We were at…there was some party. It was a Halloween party. There’s a band in town, a pretty popular thrash band called Realm. Realm was throwing this party.
I get there and I see Kent, our drummer, behind the kit. I’m like, “You’re playing with Realm?! Get the hell out of here!” He’s like, “I’m just filling in, doing some shows.” “Ah, OK. Fine.” Jason was there and Jason was there. It was kind of like you broke up with your girlfriend, but then you’re at a party and you see her. It’s awkward. Then we started talking and they’re like, “Yeah man. We really can’t find anybody to take your place.” “Really?” “No, we tried guitar players, singers. We just can’t find anybody.” I was like, “Yeah, I just lost the guys I was playing with too.” “Well, we have a bunch of new material written. Would you like to come over and check it out?”
That led to the reformation. I went over there. I checked out the material. Then, I started learning some of the stuff. It was a difficult record for me because they had started getting a little more technical. I never wanted to play technical, but Jason O’Connell wanted to write technical. He wanted to write faster Malevolent type stuff, so I had to adapt to that when I came back to the band. That was really hard for me. I remember that record was a real hard record for me playing-wise. There was a lot of intricate shit there. There was a lot of intricate stuff that was going on in the riffs. They had 8 songs written. I think I picked 5 and then I think we wrote another 5 or 6 together as a band. That’s what became As Humanity Fades.
In closing, what does the rest of 2024 have in store for Morta Skuld?
DG: Well, we’re impatiently waiting for this release because we’ve been done since June of last year with this album. We got offered a December release and we were like, “Eh. Let’s do the new year. Start off fresh.” Right now, what we have going on is, like I said, waiting for the release of that. Next week or something like that will be the video for “Perfect Prey”. Then, we’ve got a four date run our buddies in Skeletal Remains in California. It’s three dates in California and then a Vegas date. Two weeks after that, we are scheduled to go to South America with Malevolent Creation. That’s what we have in the works.
The new Morta Skuld album, Creation Undone, releases Friday, February 23rd on Peaceville Records. For more information on Morta Skuld, visit www.facebook.com/MortaSkuld.