Steve Saunders is Skull Cultist, a one human project hailing from lovely Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Incorporating everything from industrial, EBM, all sorts of techno, and cinematic scoring, Skull Cultist seeks to appeal to those looking to be pummeled into grimdark submission.
Around a decade ago, Steve had a massive back injury, and was told he’d never walk correctly again. So, he got himself a super rad cane and worked on trying to walk and run like the Terminator. In this he succeeded, and he just has a tiny stitch in his step today. But during that time, Steve spent a lot of time in bed– especially at the start– so he started making his own music. He’d worked as a crew chief, DJ, promoter, and such since the 1990s, but sheer boredom and creeping ennui drove him to finally do his own thing. And that he did, starting with the project Mr. Zoth and the Werespiders (dark ambient/soundtrack/etc) and, soon after, Klubovader– which was originally supposed to be “elevator club music”. Within a couple short years, both projects took on a life of their own, and before he knew it, Steve had actual band members made from human flesh. Through a collective record label, Steve also made a lot of excellent other-band people friends, several of whom wonderfully remixed Klubovader’s track, “Chokepoint Overdrive”. During this time, Mr. Zoth and the Werespiders and Klubovader played all kinds of shows and Drone Days. Attrition, Dance With The Dead, Oceanside85, Hocico, and OHMelectronic were just some of the bands Steve and his buds got to play with.
One of those buds, Ruby Parker, became a full member of Steve’s two projects, which became Steve and Ruby’s projects. And everything was amazing. Steve had this new supposed-to-be-dark-ambient-hip-hop project he called Skull Cultist, and working through grief and tragedy, Steve got to focused noodling.
Before long, “Blood Carvings” came into being. The first Skull Cultist EP. Since then, the “So Happy” EP (a pick for ReGen Magazine’s best EPs of 2023), the “Hopegrinder” extended EP (with positive reviews from Side-Line and ReGen), and the album “Hardcore Rituals” (which had positive reviews from I Die: You Die, ReGen, Onyx Music Reviews, Side-Line, and NecrogenesiS – Magyar Industrial Webzine) have been released, with Skull Cultist becoming a main-focus project. Which is weird, but also cool. Ruby and Steve still work on music together, do shows together, and Ruby is Skull Cultist’s in-house artist.
Another contributor to Skull Cultist is artist and vocalist Nicole Turner, who made the (probably terrible) decision to join Steve in life-crimes. In the short couple of years the project’s been around, Skull Cultist has had the honour to play with Eva X, Wolftron, Adoration Destroyed, Landscape Body Machine, Hem Netjer, Normoria, The Bifurcated, Nylon 6, The Chairmen, and various other bands. Skull Cultist has been happy to work with other bands doing remixes, and has been joined on tracks by Eva X and Lost Masters, as well as recently welcoming into its live ranks Erik Gustafson (Adoration Destroyed, Eva X) and Shaun Fransden (Glis). Steve has also been heavily involved in three fundraising compilations, “Aeternus Memoria”, “Insulin Shocks”, and “GUTS+GLORY”–the first with BFFF Ruby Parker, and the latter two with radrad Bryan Null.
Skull Cultist would not be complete without two important co-engineers, Mothra and Azrael, who are Steve and Nicole’s constant, adorable, fluffy shadows.
Bio-Mechanical Data
