Slept On: Vampire Rodents

In this and further Slept On installments, we'll be shouting out bands past and present (but mostly the former) who never received their due.

Vampire Rodents were a sample-based outfit who released five albums over the course of the 90s. A far cry from the quirky synth-gurgles of fellow sample-fiends Severed Heads, core members Daniel Vahnke and Victor Wulf (50 points for not needing stage names to sound industrial as fuck) turned to musique concrete and other abrasive forms of recent classical music for their inspiration, while their DIY ethic (pictured at left: custom notation for sample orchestration) led them to collaborate with Dan Gatto of Babyland infamy on several tracks. Jarring string sections were thickly layered overtop of rackety, Foetus-like percussion, with occasional forays into funk and disco breaks. It's what we wanky critics like to call "difficult" music, and chronic problems with record labels prevented much more than a cult following from ever emerging. I can't help but think that had Nettwerk maintained its initial commitment to legitimately underground music (rather than selling short their foundational artists once Sarah McLachlan broke in the US), they could've helped turn Skinny Puppy's fanbase on to Vampire Rodents.

Items of interest:

-Official MySpace page with unreleased archival pieces.
-An entertaining and caustic interview from 1996 in which Vahnke holds forth on sampling, the record industry and the like.
-The eBay account where Vahnke sells old VR records from time to time, although contacting him through MySpace might be a better gamble.

Vampire Rodents, "Trilobite"