Van Canto
Van Canto is a metal band with elements of a cappella from Germany. It was founded in 2006 and consists of five singers and a drummer. Despite the fact that they are classified as the a capella band, they use live drums in their songs instead beatboxing. Van Canto mixes a cappella with heavy or power metal, creating a new style that they call “epic metal with a cappella”. While two of them stand at the microphone stand, the other three imitate the sounds of guitars and bass using amplifiers. Soon after the band was founded, they released the debut album A Storm To Come. It includes 7 original songs, as well as a cover of Battery of Metallica and on Stora Rövardansen from the movie Ronja Rövardotter. Also there were videoclips for the songs The Mission, Battery and Rain.
By their way of performance, Van Canto change the idea of metal music. All the guitars and basses are replaced by vocal. They play classic power-metal, and roaring riffs and exciting solos and acoustic chords – all of this Van Canto perform by their voices. As the musicians confess, the process of creating compositions by Van Canto is not much different from how the usual metal bands record their songs. In addition to writing their own songs, Van Canto do covers of well-known metal compositions such as “Battery” and “Master of Puppets” by Metallica, “Fear of the Dark” by Iron Maiden, “Kings of Metal” Manowar and “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath.
In 2007, the group announced the replacement of their drummer Dennis Strillinger by Bastian Emig. In December of the same year, the band signed an international record deal with Gun Records / Sony BMG. Within more than ten years of its existence, Van Canto released six studio albums, had several tours through Europe, visited Russia three times, not to mention Germany, where the tickets for their concerts are sold out in a few weeks before the shows. They are always welcome in any European festival. Van Canto worked with such classics of the Metal scene like Blind Guardian, Grave Digger, Sabaton and Sonata Arctica, and at Wacken Open Air in 2014 they made a magnificent show, where their guests were Tarja Turunen, Chris Boltendahl (Grave Digger), Victor Smolski ( Rage), Jorg Michael (Stratovarius) and Stimmgewalt – the first heavy choir from Berlin.
This German group invented a unique genre of metal, to this day remaining its only representative. Therefore, to repeat the success of Van Canto is almost impossible. The unique sound distinguishes Van Canto from other bands and, perhaps, makes them unique.