Sceneazine.com
Impurity
By Jenny Johnston
Let’s start off by
introducing the band.
Who are members and
what instruments do
they play?
DAMIAN: Jeremy
Caldwell and Michael
Lindenmuth play the
guitars, Darby Salter
plays the bass guitar,
Mike Shaw plays the
drums, and I (Damian
Scott) am the vocalist.
So how long have
you guys been playing
in this band? And is this
everyone’s first band they’ve played with?
DAMIAN: The band has been active since October of 1998. I founded Impurity with former drummer
Andrew Thorkildson. Over the course of its existence,
Jeremy, the two Mikes, and Darby joined the band in
place of previous members. For most of us, myself included, Impurity has been one of several projects each
of us have been a member of at one point or another. I
was a member of a gore/grind band called Scab Maggot,
Jeremy played in a black metal band called Lunar Reign,
and Mike Shaw played in Extremely Rotten for a stint.
Who in the band came up with your name? What,
if any, reason did you guys choose it? Does it have a
meaning behind it or does it stand for something?
DAMIAN: I came up with the name “Impurity”.
At the time, the other metal bands who share the same
name had no presence on the internet. There is a Brazilian black metal band with the same name, but I didn’t
know they existed when I selected our band name. The
only prerequisite I chose to follow when I picked the
name was that it should represent an idea or be a descriptor for a wide array of concepts. I didn’t want the
name to limit the band lyrically, and “Impurity” seemed
like one that would allow for a large number of future
topics and ideas.
Is there one person who writes all the songs or do
you guys write as a band?
DAMIAN: Up until around 2009, I handled all of
the songwriting and lyric writing. Jeremy contributed
to a few riffs here and there but until that point I was
handling a majority of it. Since then, myself, Jeremy,
and Mike Shaw have been sharing the song writ