With the announcement of this year’s Substance Festival at the Great American Music Hall, we here at SF Sonic wanted to highlight some of the bands and artists playing over the three nights, whether they’ve been around for years or are early in their musical journey. Bestial Mouths is a musical powerhouse. Initially created by Lynette Cerezo and her ex-husband, over time it has turned into a solo project led by Lynette featuring her emotionally powerful vocals and dense danceable instrumentation. Scheduled to play the second day of Substance Festival on November 1st, I talked to her about her musical inspirations, her approach to performing live, and meeting The Ramones.
Tyler King: First of all I want to say thank you for taking the time to let me pick your brain a bit.
Lynette Cerezo: Oh, thanks for having me!
TK: First of all, what inspired your recent move to the Bay Area?
LC: My boyfriend’s a lineman, so we travel a lot for his work. We were living outside of Sacramento. And as soon as I moved to Sacramento, someone told how bad that area is for allergies, and mine are awful. I’ve never been that sick. So my partner was like, “We need to get you out of here, and I can get work closer in the Bay Area, so, let’s go there”.
TK: Even as far back as your first EP, your music has always had a very strong, for lack of a better term, tribal element to it, to the point where the first song on your first release is called “Wigwam,” and I’m wondering first of all, what about that kind of music appeals to you? And did you set out to have that through-line throughout all of your music, even going so far as to what you’re working on right now?
LC: I actually didn’t set out to do that, no. When Bestial Mouths started, it was really to just create what we liked and what was inside of us. I didn’t really notice so much the tribal stuff until later on once people started pointing it out. I’m Puerto Rican, and I have taino Indian ancestry, and I really realized that has a huge influence on the music that I make. I’ve always loved Native American and indigenous culture and the idea of getting to a trance-like state. So that element of the music has continued, even down to our last album, R.O.T.T.. A lot of people don’t realize it stands for “Road Of Thousand Tears.” And that’s the name of the last song on the album, where I sing in Spanish and English.
TK: That’s kind of jumping ahead, because that was a question that I was going to save for later on, but what was the reasoning for singing in Spanish on that song?
LC: I realized I wanted to embrace more of my heritage, and a lot of people don’t realize that I’m Spanish, and so I was like, “Well, this is my life. I do Spanish and English.”
TK: There are certain bands where you listen to them, and it’s very obvious that a song or a certain group of songs might have been written on a piano, or they might be more bass driven, and your music has always been, at least for me, More percussive driven than anything else. I’m wondering, is that generally how you start songwriting, and what is the importance of a strong percussive element to you?
LC: It’s changed a lot throughout the years of how we write songs. In the very beginning, it was all done with live instruments with acoustic drums, and now most of that is done one a sampler. But every song is different, like “Road Of Thousand Tears” was actually just written around this synth melody. I heard it, and I was, like, “Don’t touch it, I want to sing to that.” And then we’ll add drums and everything afterwards. So there’s a whole variation of it in terms of the tribal element.
TK: Unfortunately, and I say unfortunately because I feel like almost every woman/female singer in the goth scene gets compared to Siouxsie Sioux, but I do hear a little bit of her voice in yours. I do hear some Sleater-Kinney in your voice as well. I’m wondering how you found your voice as a singer and what your inspirations were.
LC: I actually have no training at all in music. So to this day, I still don’t really even know what a note is or how to write anything, I don’t even know how I’m doing any of it. I’ve been told maybe I have a little bit of synesthesia. So when it comes to working with Brant Showers, we’ve been working together so long it’s great, we call it “decoding Lynette’s speech”. I will use words to describe sounds and feelings and things that other people kind of don’t.
I love recreating sounds, like I’ll try to do bird calls, or weird sounds, I’ll do whatever, so that’s part of it. So for me my inspirations would be people like PJ Harvey, Anohni, anybody who has got a really emotional sound to it in the voice that evokes a feeling. And that’s just what I like, and like I said, I don’t really know what I’m doing, so maybe that’s just part of it.
TK: There was a promotional video made for the Talking Heads live concert film Stop Making Sense where it’s David Byrne in different outfits, interviewing himself and one of the things that he says in it is something like, “I tend to believe what bad singers say more than what I believe what good singers say.”
LC: That’s amazing, and there’s another great vocalist too. I’ve heard like you either like the way I sing or you don’t. I’ve been ridiculed a lot, like in the very beginning when we started there weren’t a lot of women doing dark music or noise or anything like that. And I was asked early on, “Why don’t you sing like this? Why don’t you sing like that?” Which actually just fueled the fire and made me adamant that I’m gonna do what I want to do.
TK: Also since the beginning of Bestial Mouths, you’ve had a very strong visual identity. I’m wondering, what was the evolution of that? How early on did you realize the importance of having your own visual identity, and what were your inspirations for that?
LC: Bestial Mouths to me is an art project, and that’s kind of how we always approached it. Plus, I have an art background. I have a degree in fashion design and a minor in art history. So when I graduated, I lived in New York for a long time, worked as a design assistant, had my own line for a while. I’ve done costume design, I’ve worked with stylists on photo shoots, I did visuals. And like I said, the way I approach music and anything else, a lot of it is a feeling, and there’s just a visual that goes with it. So I really love to be able to create a visual because I want people to feel something and have their own emotional connection to our music, and so putting a visual with it can help them to be able to connect with it.
I have a really fun time doing the artwork and setting it up, and I really love to collaborate. So, working with talented photographers, makeup artists, other designers, kind of just giving them an idea of what we’re doing sometimes to see what they’re going to do, I love it. Same for some of the videos. I’m like, “Here’s the song. What do you hear in it?”
TK: And when it comes to live presentation, do the songs in your setlist influence what you want to get across to the audience visually, or do your visuals come first and does that impact what songs you want to play?
LC: I think for the live set I tend to pick stuff that is a little more energetic. Because I feel like, right now anyways because it’ll change sometimes, I really want this thing of energy and emotion and I want the audience to sing along and dance. So that’s a lot of the ones we’ll pick for the live set. I do really love to perform. I was also a ballerina for around 10 years. I’m not the kind of performer who can talk with the audience and do banter and stuff, that’s not me. I’m a character. It’s definitely a performance and a kind of trance for me as well. And we do visuals as well, and we’ll take either some of the things from our music videos or create our own visuals, but we don’t always have them because I think the energy of the performance is the most important part of it.
TK: What was the jump to that from your 2022 album Resurrectedinblack to the 2023 R.O.T.T. album? And do you intentionally set out to make an album, or is it more of a matter of having stray songs lying around that you notice have something in common and working off of that?
LC: I definitely go into it with the mindset of making an album. I have a strong conceptual vision of what each album would be about, what it the visuals look like and the sound. So with Resurrectedinblack and R.O.T.T., it was exactly like that. My ex-husband, we started the band together, and then when we split, I took it over. He’s completely happy with it and he wanted to see it really live on, and the first thing I had ever done alone, because I’d never done music without anyone else, was the 2019 Inshrouds EP. And if you look at it, Inshrouds through to Resurrectedinblack, through Road Of Thousand Tears, it follows my life of what I’ve done and what I went through.
TK: Is that where the song “Slitskin” comes from? I really love the line, “My body is my dwelling.” What was the inspiration for that line specifically?
LC: The idea is, I’ve grown into myself and into my skin now, but it’s also that I can’t take any more in this life. Like, I’m oversaturated from so much pain and exhaustion. Everything that my body won’t hold in anymore. So, that’s the idea of the skin being slit, but it’s also my body. It’s like, don’t tell me what my life’s supposed to do. Don’t tell me what I’m supposed to be. I’m taking it back.
TK: That’s definitely my favorite song on the album and one of my favorite songs of yours.
LC: Thank you! It’s fun to do live!
TK: You’ve said you’re starting to work on a new album. What’s the idea for the new album?
LC: It’s called Deadlines. We’ve come up with eight songs and we really liked the sound of them. And then I looked at all of these lyrics that I’ve had lying around and then I started feeling the feel of them more, and I knew that I wanted this one to be a little more political, especially with everything going on the world. What have we done to this world? Things like that. The lyrics are more about the power that we have to take back. We still have to continue, and some of the other ones are more like, let’s come together, but it’s all the same themes.
TK: When we initially tried scheduling this interview, you said that you were going to be in Los Angeles shooting music video. How did that go and when can we expect to see it?
LC: I travel a lot, and we try to take advantage of it as much as we can as far as trying to get things like music videos and photoshoots done when I’m in different parts of the world. We have one song I felt that was going to stay pretty similar to how it currently sounds, and I sent that to the music video director. We came up with some ideas together. I was just there, and I think it’s going to turn out really good. Even the album art has already been photographed. We’ve already done that. I’m using the same photographer that did the last album cover. It’s an all-new conceptual thing. When I was in Chicago playing a show, I then went to Wisconsin to write, and then we drove and did the album cover in Indiana. I was like, “Let’s take advantage of this, go, go, go.” It will probably be out in a couple of months, hopefully!
TK: How did you find darkwave and industrial music? And was there a specific “light bulb going off” moment for you when you realized, that that was the kind of music that you wanted to keep listening to?
LC: I don’t remember specifically how I found it. I have an older brother, even though he’s more like a skater and was into Echo and the Bunnymen and stuff like that. I grew up in Florida. There was a little goth community and stuff like that, and I remember my first show I ever went to was The Ramones, and I got their autographs.
TK: Do you still have their autographs?
LC: That’s the problem. I don’t know if my dad stole it, which he may have or I lost it because I’ve moved so much over the years. But before the show I stopped by the local record store, and they just happened to be doing a signing there! I remember asking my mom if I could go to the show and she said, “You just have to go to school the next day.” I’m like, “Yeah, of course, I don’t care.” That was the coolest thing, I met them and we went to the show.
TK: In a few months, you’re gonna be playing Substance Festival in San Francisco. What other bands on the bill are you looking forward to seeing?
LC: I feel like this is a cop-out, but I feel like this is such a stacked lineup of amazing artists and I’m just looking forward to seeing everyone. But I’ve never seen TR/ST live! And I’ve been a huge fan for a long time, and I just found out we’re playing the same night, so I’m really hoping I get to meet him.
TK: You talked about how you like to have a very visual element to your live presentation. What can the people who are going to be seeing Bestial Mouths live for the first time at Substance Fest expect?
LC: For this show I will be playing with Ely of the band Crune, so we will have a theremin onstage, which is always cool. Hopefully we will be able to have our visuals that are crafted just for our live experience as well.
Follow Bestial Mouths on Instagram here
Tickets for Substance Fest can be purchased here
