CRYING VESSEL 🇨đź‡
SWITZERLAND
HORROR, MEMORY, MACHINES AND THE EVOLUTION OF A LIVING MUSICAL UNIVERSE
WRITTEN INTERVIEW WITH SLADE TEMPLETONÂ AND BASIL OBERLI
Wed, Sep 9, 2026
ARTIST: Crying Vessel — Bern, Switzerland 🇨đź‡
INTERVIEWEES: Slade Templeton — USA 🇺🇸 / Switzerland 🇨đź‡Â Basil Oberli is from Switzerland 🇨đź‡.
INTERVIEWER: Gordon Lawrence Taylor — Australia 🇦🇺
DJ Infectious Unease
Voice In The Void
Infectious Unease Radio 🇦🇺 | Subterranean Zone Radio 🇦🇺
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Crying Vessel 🇨🇠has never existed simply as a succession of albums, singles and live performances. Emerging from Bern, Switzerland, the band has gradually developed an interconnected artistic universe in which horror, mortality, memory, fractured identity, desire, technology, human imperfection, redemption and psychological self-examination continually intersect. Rather than remaining fixed within a single genre or creative approach, Crying Vessel has evolved through the ideas, experiences and contributions of the people involved in the project.
Beginning with the experimental electronic world of Necrozine, Crying Vessel moved through trip-hop, downtempo electronics and industrial textures before increasingly incorporating darkwave, post-punk, coldwave, synth-pop and gothic rock. Across albums including Selfless, Everything Becomes Nothing, A Beautiful Curse, Pleasures For The Wicked, Before Life Was Death and the two-part Sepulchers project, the band continued to expand both musically and conceptually, developing an increasingly cinematic relationship between sound, imagery, narrative and psychological storytelling.
That evolution has never been confined to one individual. Music, production, performance, percussion, cinematography, filmmaking, vocals, guitars and visual storytelling have all contributed to the wider identity of Crying Vessel. In 2026, the arrival of Larry alongside Slade Templeton and Basil Oberli marked another important stage in that development, establishing Crying Vessel as a three-member band and opening new possibilities for collaborative songwriting, contrasting voices, visual narratives and character-based storytelling. Recent recordings including Forgotten Time, Bound In Mystery and Angels of Ruin demonstrate a band continuing to change while remaining connected to the conceptual world it has constructed over fifteen years.
Throughout this extensive written interview for Infectious Unease Radio 🇦🇺 Australia, Gordon Lawrence Taylor explores Crying Vessel as a collective creative entity: its fifteen-year evolution, musical and visual development, electronic and alternative foundations, mortality and personal transformation, horror and literature, human imperfection within digital production, artificial intelligence, filmmaking, psychological symbolism, inherited behaviour, digital disconnection and the continuing expansion of the Crying Vessel universe. The interview includes responses from Slade Templeton and Basil Oberli, while also examining Larry’s arrival and the new collaborative direction now developing within the band.
Infectious Unease Radio: Crying Vessel began in 2011 and has now existed for fifteen years, but the project that recorded Necrozine is substantially different from the Crying Vessel of 2026. When you look back across that entire trajectory — from an experimental electronic project through darkwave and post-punk and now into a three-member band — what do you regard as the essential idea that has remained unchanged at the centre of Crying Vessel?
SLADE TEMPLETON : I think, overall, the core concept of what Crying Vessel is has remained the same. Conceptually, it exists as a world or universe built around horror and self-reflection in their deepest forms, but it’s also a space for release, exploration, and confronting things that might otherwise remain buried. The sound has become more refined and direct over time. But I feel that the attitude, depth, and underlying layers of substance have remained at the heart of what Crying Vessel is.
Infectious Unease Radio: Slade, before Crying Vessel became your principal artistic vehicle, you worked extensively within electronic and club culture and toured internationally with Defunct!. Crying Vessel eventually moved toward guitars, live percussion, post-punk, goth and increasingly cinematic songwriting. Was that transformation a deliberate rejection of the electronic dance world, or did everything learned in that environment simply become part of Crying Vessel’s musical architecture?
SLADE TEMPLETON : I was actually in rock bands all through middle school and high school. The EDM and electronic dance world was really the “fluke” in my path. It was an amazing fluke, don’t get me wrong, but I originally came from a world of darker and heavier music, with a lot of emphasis on emotion, substance, and artistic vision.
I reached an age where I started finding myself in more “party” music environments, while at the same time being heavily inspired by artists like Underworld and Infected Mushroom. When I started producing more house-driven music, something just clicked. This was during the Myspace era, and somehow it caught on and took off. That eventually put me on the road and in the air for a solid decade, touring around the world.
But throughout that entire period, my escape from the club and electronic scene was coming home and working on Crying Vessel. It was always this darker creative world I could return to.
Before Crying Vessel, there was also a short-lived project of mine called Velox Music. I released a track with KMFDM on their album Brimborium and made one album under the Velox name. Looking back, that project was really a kind of conceptual pre-birth of Crying Vessel. A lot of the DNA was already there, it was just expressed through a much more industrial sound.
Infectious Unease Radio: Necrozine already brought together people such as Dean Garcia, Kim Welsh, Perry Pelanero and Preston Maddox and moved between trip-hop, electronica, darkwave and alternative music. Swiss coverage even produced the term “Spooktronica” to describe the music. Fifteen years later, how do you hear that first album now — as the beginning of the Crying Vessel sound, an experimental prototype, or almost the work of another artist?
CRYING VESSEL 🇨🇠— NECROZINE — BANDCAMP
https://cryingvessel.bandcamp.com/album/necrozine
SLADE TEMPLETON :Â I think this was getting my feet wet. I was exploring and experimenting and finding where I sit in all the music and for the most part; even the industry. Dean was a big influence in my career as he was a mentor type for me. We worked together in London and had a project called The Chrono Logic. I learned a huge amount from him and how to keep that 90s sound fresh into the modern times.
Infectious Unease Radio: Selfless was created following a near-death experience and prolonged hospitalisation in 2013. Rather than asking simply what happened, I am interested in what it changed artistically: did confronting mortality alter your understanding of what music was for, and can you still hear the person who came out of that experience when you listen to Crying Vessel today?
CRYING VESSEL 🇨🇠— SELFLESS — FULL ALBUM — BANDCAMP
https://cryingvessel.bandcamp.com/album/selfless
SELFLESS — TITLE TRACK — BANDCAMP
https://cryingvessel.bandcamp.com/track/selfless
SLADE TEMPLETON :Â I started to look inward. At the same time, I began developing an entirely new relationship with what music meant to me. By that point, I felt like the music industry had nearly killed me (which it quite literally almost did), particularly the club scene and the decisions I had made along the way.
Then I realized that Crying Vessel, which had been my escape vehicle the entire time, was actually something much more than that. It became a way to express things that were beyond words, and a way to confront what needed to change within myself. I could use the music almost like a mirror, looking at who I was, who I could become, and ultimately working toward becoming the person I knew I was capable of being.
Crying Vessel still holds that place for me today, even as I work on the tenth album. Each record has represented another building block of introspection and personal evolution. Selfless for example, came from a period when I was learning how to become exactly that: selfless.
Infectious Unease Radio: Across the catalogue there is an unusually persistent vocabulary of death, rebirth, mirrors, ghosts, fractured identity, memory, guilt, faith, desire and redemption. These ideas occur across records separated by many years. Are Crying Vessel’s albums independent stories, or has an unconscious mythology gradually developed in which each record is another part of the same psychological universe?
SLADE TEMPLETON : We’ve created a universe. It was something I had envisioned from the very beginning, but over the years it has snowballed into something that almost feels like a living, breathing entity of its own. Collaborating with Basil, and now Larry, has only added more fuel and new dimensions to that world.
Crying Vessel is entirely conceptual. Each album connects to the others in much the same way chapters or books within a larger series might. Every piece of the puzzle carries underlying currents, recurring themes, and subtle connections, much like a horror series where those who follow closely begin to recognize the threads running beneath the surface.
I’m also a horror novelist outside of the band, and I think working in literature has had a huge influence on how I approach Crying Vessel. Storytelling and world-building naturally find their way into everything from the lyrics and imagery to the atmosphere and depth of the sound design. At this point, the music and the world surrounding it have become deeply intertwined.
Infectious Unease Radio: Your earlier work contained clear elements of trip-hop, downtempo electronics and experimental production, whereas later records pushed post-punk, coldwave, synth-pop and gothic rock much further forward. Was there a particular recording, instrument, live experience or period in your lives when you realised what the mature Crying Vessel sound should actually be?
CRYING VESSEL 🇨🇠— A BEAUTIFUL CURSE — BANDCAMP
https://cryingvessel.bandcamp.com/album/a-beautiful-curse-2
SLADE TEMPLETON : When I started A Beautiful Curse, I realized I needed to dig deeper into what had actually shaped me as an artist and, more importantly, who I had become as a person. It wasn’t simply about what I was listening to or what music I loved. It was about understanding the things that had become part of my character.
That brought me back to bands like Type O Negative, The Cure, and Nine Inch Nails. The music of my youth. And suddenly, something just clicked. I wasn’t writing that way because it was what I happened to be listening to. I was writing that way because it was part of what I was made of.
Infectious Unease Radio: Slade, you have spoken about the interaction between human imperfection and machine precision — recording guitar or vocals with the natural instability of a performance while allowing sequenced electronics and synthesis to provide the structural backbone. After decades of increasingly perfect digital editing, do you think preserving imperfection has actually become more important to making emotionally believable music?
SLADE TEMPLETON : Absolutely. In fact, I say this all the time in the studio when I’m producing other bands: don’t just copy and paste the perfect take. Let’s use the one that has some nuances, some imperfections, something human in it. We’re living in an age where so much music and art can feel copied, pasted, cut, and perfected to the smallest detail. But as humans, we thrive on connection, and part of that connection comes from recognizing that none of us are flawless. Those little imperfections are often exactly what allow us to relate to something and feel that there is another human being behind it.
To truly feel that connection, even subconsciously, I think we have to remind ourselves what it means to be human. We strive for perfection, but there will always be little bumps along the way. Those bumps aren’t necessarily something to erase. Sometimes they’re the very thing that makes the art feel alive and what keep us making the art in the first place.
Infectious Unease Radio: You are also a professional producer, mixing engineer and mastering engineer. That technical knowledge gives you enormous control, but can expertise become dangerous to creativity? In other words, is there a point when knowing exactly how to make something technically “correct” can remove the accident, ugliness or instability that might have made it artistically powerful?
SLADE TEMPLETON : Yes, exactly. And as I mentioned above, I think this is something we need to retain even more in the age of AI. Over the years, I’ve learned to recognize what should be automated and, more importantly, where automation begins to interfere with the human touch that keeps the pulse of the music alive.
In mastering, we’ve had automated tools for well over a decade, including AI mastering. Yet clients still come to me because they want a human being on the other end. They want someone who can actually hear and feel the music, and then make decisions about how it should ultimately sound when it reaches the world.
So far, I haven’t seen that desire change at all throughout my career. That “ugliness,” as you put it, is something people actually crave. The imperfections, instincts, emotions, and subjective decisions are often what give the music its humanity in the first place.
Infectious Unease Radio:Â Basil, your contribution extends beyond percussion because you also work professionally in cinematography and filmmaking, and Crying Vessel’s visual world has become increasingly sophisticated. How early in the writing process do you begin imagining images, characters, locations and narrative? Does the music produce the film, or can a visual concept actually change the eventual composition of a song?
BASIL OBERLI: Visual ideas usually arrive very early for me, sometimes already in a rough version of a song. But they aren’t images yet in any concrete sense. They’re more like visual associations that come with the mood and the tonality of the music. A colour, a kind of light, a feeling of a place. And honestly, most of them are completely beyond anything we could ever realistically shoot.
The concrete picture only shows up once a song is actually finished. I’ve learned not to put too much energy into developing an idea before that point, because that decision often isn’t ours alone. It’s usually the label, or the totality of all the songs on a record, that determines which ones become singles and get a video. So I let those early associations sit until that’s actually clear.
I do think the video can be important as support for the music, especially in the age of Instagram and TikTok. But it turns out you also shouldn’t give it too much weight. For me it always comes back to the music. The visual part has this enveloping effect around it, something that wraps the song and gives people another way into it, but the core stays the music.
So no, I don’t believe a visual concept can change a song. The only exception would be if we were composing for a project like a feature film, where the images exist first. But then you’re starting from a completely different place.
Infectious Unease Radio: Horror has long been part of Crying Vessel’s language, but your work rarely seems interested in horror simply as decoration. The supernatural frequently becomes a metaphor for human experiences — grief, desire, psychological imprisonment, isolation or identity. What attracts you to horror as a vocabulary for discussing things that are fundamentally very human?
SLADE TEMPLETON : I can’t even fully explain it, to be honest. I’ve always wondered why I’m so attracted to horror and the darker side of almost everything. Sometimes I wonder if it comes from trauma, environment, the music I was raised on, or simply the choices and experiences that shaped me along the way.
Ultimately, I just live in it. I find my quiet place and my creative energy somewhere within this dark, isolated realm that I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s actually that unknown quality that makes it feel so strangely welcoming to me.
I’m also a huge gamer, and that naturally fuels a lot of the visual storytelling behind the music. That influence is much easier for me to recognize and explain. But the deeper relationship I have with the darker side of life is harder to define. I don’t completely understand where it comes from, and perhaps I never will. I just know that creatively, it has always felt like home.
Infectious Unease Radio: Pleasures for the Wicked developed into something closer to a complete narrative environment than a conventional sequence of unrelated tracks. When you construct a concept record, how much of the mythology exists before the first music is written? Are you effectively writing characters and a story first, or does the narrative reveal itself through the songs?
CRYING VESSEL 🇨🇠— PLEASURES FOR THE WICKED — BANDCAMP
https://cryingvessel.bandcamp.com/album/pleasures-for-the-wicked
SLADE TEMPLETON :Â We wrote this album during the same period that I was writing my first novel, Truth of the Shadows. It felt like my creative worlds started to fracture and then slowly melt into one another. Storytelling became music, the music found its way into the book, and the book became almost like a dream state that I could pull from and feed back into the music.
It was surreal, to be honest. There were moments where it became difficult to tell where one world ended and the other began. But looking back, it all just made sense. That collision gave us an album that felt truly unique and completely conceptual, with its own standalone storyline unfolding from beginning to end.