Biography
The Name
"ВЕТЕРАН" was founded in March 2015. You might ask yourselves what the hell is "ВЕТЕРАН" supposed to be, is it some evil ancient God? Or maybe a meaningless combination of letters? It is neither."Ветеран" is actually written in Cyrillic and means "Veteran" in Russian, the uppercase version looks like it could be "Betepah" in Latin, but it is not, the Latin and Cyrillic letters just happen to look the same here, but not all of them have the same sound and meaning. So remember, "ВЕТЕРАН" is "VETERAN", not "Betepah"! "Ветеран" is pronounced similarly as in English.
History
"BETEPAH" is not really a new band, but rather a renamed version of "DEADLOCK", the original project of Sergey Bostandzhyan and Andreas Uko from 1997. With the upcoming release of "The Second Campaign" album a new band name became necessary in order to avoid confusion. The "other" band with the name "DEADLOCK" became too popular during the last years and while our original project was born about a year before theirs, we had to recognize that sharing names was not an option anymore.The Origins
The original band was founded in summer 1997, when Sergey Bostandzhyan and Andreas Uko jammed at a quiet afternoon and decided to form a metal band. Short time after they began to search for musicians to join the project.With Genadz Batsyan on the bass guitar the first three man line-up was set. By the end of October the name "DEADLOCK", was chosen to mark a new brutal era in metal history. The line-up was complete for the first time, when Markus Keller joined the band in November '97.
The first change on the bass guitar came in early '98, when Genadz Batsyan unexpectedly left the band. Bernhard Moser, a bass guitarist from Sergey Bostandzhyan's former project "NEGATOR", took his place. The second change on the bass guitar happened by the end of '99, when Bernhard Moser left the band because of musical differences. Johannes Hug took his place and ended the search for a complete line-up.
The Rise
The band recorded their first Demo-CD in November 2000 at the Mystic Vision Studios in Vienna. Featuring four tracks with a total length of 20 minutes it set a new record in the band's history.The second album named "Veteran" was recorded in February 2002 at the Mystic Vision Studios in Vienna and released in march. Featuring four killer tracks it set a new level and defined the band's sound and style: fast machine gun like passages followed by groovy riffs should from now on be a central aspect of all compositions.
The Deadlock
Instead of building momentum the band fell apart due to a personal crisis of the frontman. As the result of the the bands inactivity Johannes Hug left to pursue his own project while Markus Keller retired. It took several years until Sergey Bostandzhyan and Andreas Uko finally found back together and started to work on new material. Things got back on track and with new songs in the making Markus Keller rejoined the band around 2007.Five new songs paved the way for a new album, titled "The Second Campaign". Anton Mingalev, a long time friend of Sergey, agreed to help out on the base guitar, allowing the band to record their third album in February 2008 at the Mystic Vision Studios in Vienna.
Unfortunately, this time things went terribly wrong. Hasty changes of mind which lead to exchange sound engineers, faulty hardware, data loss without appropriate backups and overall lack of organization did not only lead to some financial losses, but also delayed the mix for a period of almost 7 years! The result was a demo quality version of the album which was finished in summer 2014. During that time the band once again fell apart with Anton leaving and Markus retiring.
The Rebirth
Early 2014 Sergey Bostandzhyan and Andreas Uko once again started jamming on a regular basis. New ideas developed, new riffs were born, new songs got on the way. Finally, a decision to release "The Second Campaign" album under a new band name was made. With the idea of being "death metal veterans" and with a theme of war related lyrics which could be traced in each album, Andreas suggested to use the name "VETERAN" as the new band's name. Sergey proposed to use the Cyrillic version, which is pronounced the same way as the English one, but which is written differently, thus allowing to grab a free domain name.A new band logo was designed and the first version of the new homepage went online in April, starting with the release of the first track "Disassembler" of the new album "The Second Campaign".
A goal to play live shows in 2016 was set, so a search for new band members has begun. By the end of September the spot of the bass guitarist was taken by Pavol Stanko from Bratislava and about a month later Markus Keller once again rejoined the band on the lead guitar to complete the lineup.
The Demise
With the distance between Vienna and Bratislava things were not working out. Sergey was not able to dedicate more time to the band while Andreas and Markus aimed for a more professional approach. Yet, the band managed to record enough material for the next album around 2018, however recording never fully completed and the raw material never got mixed.Once again, history repeated itself, we basically returned to our beginnings and lived up to our founding name - "Deadlock". The lack of progress marked the end of the project. R.I.P. "Veteran"!