Intro/Ceremony Interview

I know a small number of you who will read this have gotten your hands on one of my print zines by the same name, alas, I can’t afford to do it anymore, the time and monetary investment is just not possible at this time. So this is my “Webzine”, I will post some good stuff on here, I promise, such as what follows…

Ceremony came to Toronto with Sabertooth Zombie and Life Long Tragedy on June 1, it was an unreal show, each one of us was soaked in sweat and emotion jumping over one another to get the chance to scream the words. It seemed almost every single body in the place was there for Ceremony, with each and every person in sight, losing their fucking mind when they began playing. It’s hard to express how I feel and how I know everyone else feels when you can go off like this, you don’t care what anyone else thinks, and you have no intention on slowing down. If you read the interview with Ceremony in the print edition, it was with Ryan, as Ross explained off the record, they used to do interviews like complete jokes but have since stopped, Ryan didn’t get the memo, so I asked all the same questions to Ross. This is an interview with Ross.

Who are you and what do you do in the band?

My name is Ross J. Ferrar and I do the vox in the band, and I do the lyric writing, some of the art, most of the conceptual work really.

When you started this band did you have any real goals in mind?

Not really, when we started the band we weren’t really sure what we wanted to do with it, originally in the very very beginning it was going to be called Violent World, which is a take off on The Misfits but we decided to change that. We were going to play slower music too, like more sludgier kind of New York kind of slow hardcore, but then we changed that, and we were like lets just do fast hardcore, just do old school type of shit, and that was sort of the start of Ceremony. You know the EP has slow songs and fast songs, Kersed was kind of the beginning of Violent World, but then we wanted to do different shit like, Its Going To Be A Cold Winter, thats when we wanted to start doing more thrashy music so from then on we started to do some more thrashy music, and we kinda wanted to keep it fast and agressive we do slow stuff of course but we like to keep it fast.

Playing music as pissed off as you do you have to have some sort of inspiration and source of your anger?

I do most of the lyric writing like I said, and I’m not a very angry person most of the time, I can’t really…the muse for the music is more when I am in certain times in my life, if I am going through hard times, I will write about Ceremony, I don’t really write about anything in ceremony when I am in a better place and have a good piece of mind, a lot of the music has been written while I was in jail…for various crimes, and thats kinda the best way to do it, its mostly times of desperation when im writing lyrics and doing stuff like that, Anthony writes stuff all the time because hes a musical genius, but lyrically its mostly societal shit and the government and religion and all the shit you read about in general.

You don’t tour a lot, but when you do its with sweet bands, what your favourite tour you have been on and what made it so rad?

Favourite tour is the tour we are on right now because we are with all of our best friends from the city we grew up in North Bay, we’ve only played about 7 shows but its still the best tour because we are surrounded by the people we love and we get to have alot of fun and fuck around all day, its great.

How do you personally feel about downloading music?/ people downloading your music?

Nah, I don’t care about all that.

Whats your favourite album right now?

Probably the beatles sgt. Pepper, because i dont have an ipod or anything right now, so I’m just kinda listening to everyones music on tour but thats probably been a solid album for the last 3 months.

Whats the worst thing about hardcore right now?

I don’t really know, I’m not really political in hardcore or in the scene or anything.

Whats the best thing about hardcore right now?

Probably Sabertooth Zombie, they are very much an inspiration to me, being around Cody the lead singer, he is very much a muse in my life, and he is very eclectic and excentric and articulate and all that shit. He is a very amazing front man and person.

Last words?

Still Nothing Moves You.

We then got up and commenced walking back towards the venue, on the way he explained the whole joke interview thing and how they did it because Black Flag used to to it. Then a few sets later Ceremony went on, this is what happened…