Brian Manowitz (a.k.a. Vegan Black Metal Chef) (photo: YouTube)
Interview by Jason Schreurs
Definitely one of the best things I’ve recently stumbled upon online is a website and series of YouTube videos called Vegan Black Metal Chef. Combining the two seemingly unrelated topics of vegan cooking and extreme black metal music, Vegan Black Metal Chef is the cooking show brainchild of Orlando, Florida musician and cooking enthusiast Brian Manowitz. A metal musician with such projects as Forever Dawn, Manowitz has been focusing his efforts on developing episodes of his truly one-of-a-king cooking shows, which combines easy-to-make vegan recipes with ear-piercing black metal. The best part? Manowitz screams out the recipe directions in a shrieking black metal vocal style (and, yes, don’t worry, there are subtitles)! We recently got Manowitz on the blower to see what’s up.
So where did the idea come from to do this cooking show?
I guess it all started about three years ago. I was sitting around and thinking that I’d been vegan for about 12 years at the time, and I thought that the food I made fucking tasted awesome and wasn’t expensive, and I get a lot of my shit from normal grocery stores and it’s just not very difficult to cook vegan. I don’t know, the world needs to know that veganism is incredibly doable, and so I thought about making some sort of cooking show, and regular cooking shows just put me the fuck to sleep, so I just combined my passions of making music and cooking, and I made the cooking show I wanted to see.
Some people might say that veganism isn’t very kvlt, and that black metal and veganism don’t really go together. You think of black metal dudes tackling animals in the forest or something.
Yeah, but that’s everyone [laughs]. Everyone eats meat. Black metal and veganism really have no relation to each other, but it’s just the cooking show I wanted, and it’s what I’m into. It’s the type of music I wanted to make, and it’s just what I wanted to see, and I’m glad other people wanted to see it, too. If I was going to make this shit, whether anyone else wanted to watch it, I have to want to watch it.
Yeah, well you’re the guy who’s editing the videos, so you’ll be watching them a lot. What’s been the response so far from vegans?
Well, it’s been pretty good all over the place. Vegans seem to dig it and a lot of non-vegans seem to dig it. And it’s not for everyone, but if it was for everyone, it would be for no one. If some people will freak out that I’d use a bit more oil than they would use, or put some salt in the food, like god fucking forbid… so you definitely get people freaking out about their own little version of the fucking perfect world, but if you concentrate on the little things, you miss the fact that animals are going through utter hell.
What’s been the response from the black metal crowd?
Um, it’s a mixed bag. Some like it, and some hate it!
So you get some pretty harsh comments on your website?
Yeah, everything from “this is the best thing ever” to “die, you fucking pussy!”
How long have you been into black metal?
Well, I guess I’ve been into metal in general for a really long time. One of my first tapes ever was Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood, which I think I got in kindergarten, and I’ve been into metal for a long time, into industrial for awhile… I didn’t actually get into black metal until much later in life, near the end of college and after. When I first heard it, I thought, “This is fucking horrible. Who the hell put keyboards in my metal? This is just fucking dumb.” But then it really grew on me. So I’ve been listening to it for 14 or 15 years now.
One of things that surprised me is that you were really adamant that this cooking show isn’t a joke. It’s obviously funny and it’s got some humour in it, but it’s a serious thing for you, right?
Yeah! It’s not a joke. There’s cooking instruction and there’s humour along with it, but at the heart of it, it is a cooking instruction show, and that’s it’s main focus and purpose.
How do you come up with the music for the recipes?
I write, record, mix and master everything myself. The drums are programmed, but everything else is played by me. So I’ll film the episode and edit it down and then write the music, then write the lyrics and record the vocals, then put in some subtitles, in case you don’t speak metal, and then an episode is born.
So what would you do if someone big came along and wanted the show, like MTV or the Food Network or something?
At the very beginning, that sort of happened, but nothing really resulted from it. But, yeah, I’m open to all win-win situations, and if it’s a win for both of us, then I’m game. But if not, I’m not game [laughs].
When you’re not all corpse-painted up, what do you like to cook at home?
What you’re seeing in the videos is exactly what I make and eat normally. I just have a ton of different meals that I make and eat all of the time, and the videos are exactly that. This is just what I eat on a daily basis. I’m not the kind of guy that will do a lot of prep for meals, or spend eight hours coming up with dinner that night; it’s got to be livable, doable veganism, so it’s not about the garnishing or a bunch of ridiculous prep work. And not everything’s from scratch; I don’t grow my own wheat in the backyard. There’s nothing wrong with growing your own food, but you don’t need to do everything from scratch to be vegan.
Do you ever get all dressed and corpse-painted up and then someone comes over and spots you through the kitchen window and says, “What the hell are you doing?”
[Laughs] Well, that would be awesome if people cared that much to sneak over to my house when they happened to know that I might be filming. But filming is an incredibly boring process and people always say, “Oh, yeah, I totally want to come by and help you do an episode,” and they don’t realize it goes from 7 or 8 pm until about 3 or 4 am, and it’s a tedious, boring process. It takes way longer to film the cooking of food than it actually does to cook food.
How are your metal bands going?
Well, I’m not really in any bands right now. I’ve just been focusing on getting the Vegan Black Metal Chef show up and running and the Forever Dawn stuff, which is my own personal project that I’ll have a band for near the end of the year when I finish making the stage show for it, and I’ll get other members to play live with me.
So, in some ways, the Vegan Black Metal Chef is your own one-man black metal project?
Yeah, that’s definitely correct.
Check out Vegan Black Metal Chef on YouTube.
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