Hearing Genocide denier is horrific - Serj Tankian talks of Genocide film music, new plans for System of Down
Reports of Serj Tankian never wanting to sing again are greatly exaggerated. Earlier this month, news spread that the System of a Down frontman was interested only in instrumental music now and that in an interview he'd even said, "Screw vocals." When he thinks about that story now, he laughs, Rollingstone.com reports.
"That was from an interview I'd done, like, five or six months ago when I was in Moscow doing press for the movie Furious – The Legend of Kolovrat, which I did the score for," he said. "I don't remember saying 'screw vocals,' but it may have been when they were showing the film and someone was asking me about vocals, and I said something like, 'Screw the vocals, look at the screen.' What's funny is I'm doing all these vocal sessions this week. How about that?"
The day before speaking with Rolling Stone, the singer recorded vocals for a track on Mindless Self Indulgence frontman Jimmy Urine's upcoming solo album. On the night of the chat, he's singing a song for System of a Down drummer (and Tankian's brother-in-law) John Dolmayan's These Grey Men side project. "It's like vocal week for me," he said with a laugh. "It's not that I don't ever want to sing. It's just that I'm focused on doing film music more than anything right now. It's where I'm really feeling the muse come."
This year, Tankian scored two films and released soundtrack albums for each. The documentary Intent to Destroy explores how for more than a century the Turkish government has denied that the Armenian Genocide ever took place, and it features a shadowy, nuanced score. Meanwhile, the Russian-language Furious is an action film about a 13th-century battle, which allowed Tankian to create majestic tapestries of choirs, symphony, electric guitar and Tuvan throat singing. He's currently working on music for Spitak, a Russian-Armenian co-production about the Armenian earthquake of 1988. "It's a really heavy film," he said. "I'm writing a modern-sounding score with very light pianos and ethereal soundscapes for this one. It's very dreamy, sometimes dark, sometimes bright. I'm halfway through it." Tankian has a few others on the docket for the coming year too.