With their modern hard rock and heavy metal style, as well as a professional, rock-solid band sound, Ravenous Feast is one of the most promising relative newcomers in the Venezuelan scene. Fronting the band is Sean de Boer, who traded Western Canada for Margarita Island around 25 years ago and had a big impact on the scene since.

“I have been in Venezuela since 1999”, De Boer says. “I live on Margarita Island. When I first got here, the island was full of Dutch people, Germans, Italians, French people, Canadians… And then, over the course of the last twenty years, for one reason or another, people have kind of fled. I’m like one of the last men standing here on the island, haha! But man, I love it here.

In Canada, I was playing in a band called Storm Warning. For about eight years, we were pretty successful. We were touring around Canada. We were just the second level; we were opening for bands like Helix, April Wine, Rik Emmett from Triumph… Some big bands in Canada. And then, we moved from Calgary to Vancouver, a bunch of kind of bad things happened, and the band ended up breaking up, and I had to get a job for the first time in my life, haha!

I had this big five-ton truck that we used to haul our PA system touring Canada, so I opened kind of like a moving company, moving pianos and things. We actually moved Bryan Adams’ piano a couple of times. Then, I took a job for a company, and coming to Margarita Island was supposed to be only for three months, then three months turned into six months, and then six months turned into a year, and now it’s been twenty-five.

It’s not an uncommon story. People come here, and they get captivated. For a Canadian growing up in the cold, living in the Caribbean is not such a bad thing, haha! Venezuela, for all its problems, I love it here.”

Two Hundred Responses

“There was a bar here on the island that I ran from 2004 to 2006. It was called Brazil Rocks. It was the first bar that tried to bring original bands, heavy metal bands playing their own music, to the island. This was before Facebook. I think MySpace might have just kind of gotten started. But I put an ad in the newspaper that was distributed on the mainland.

The ad said something like: I’ve got a bar on Margarita Island, we’ve got a backline, we can’t pay you, all we can do is pay for you to take the ferry, we’ll pick you up, put you in a hotel, give you something to eat, and you can play your own music. All I thought was: let’s see what happens. I ended up getting like two hundred responses, haha! Two hundred bands from all over Venezuela sending demos and videos and things, because they wanted to come here.

Because at that time, there was nowhere to play, really. Only for cover bands. And I brought bands from all over the country – from Caracas, from Puerto Ordaz, from Puerto La Cruz, from Cumaná – a lot of great talent to the island. And also, a lot of bands from here on the island had a chance to play original music.”

Kind of Got Itchy Again

“When I first came to the island, I met a friend from England who was opening a bar called The British Bulldog. I had just been here for a week, and I met some guys who were playing on the beach, and I sang a few songs with them. Some blues, The Doors and Eric Clapton and stuff like that. Then I was walking down the street and I saw this British flag. So I walked up the stairs and I ended up talking to the owner of the bar.

He was just opening this British pub, and he had just arrived as well. I told him: you should put a live band in here. He said: we don’t have the space. I said: yes, you do, you can put a stage right there, and I just met some guys a couple of days ago. So I brought them there, and they ended up playing there for about ten years. And I used to get up and sing with them. It was the late nineties, early 2000’s, so it was like Nickelback, Staind, stuff like that.

Then, after a couple of years, I kind of got itchy again, and I wanted to put a band together. That’s why I started a band here in 2003 called Deep Seven. Actually, our second show, we ended up opening for Molotov. They were a huge band from Mexico. They were really big in Latin America. It was kind of spring break here, and we ended up opening the show for them, in front of around eight thousand people. We played around the island and all over Venezuela, singing in English, all original music.”

Things Started Rolling

“Around 2008, we met Carlos Toxic (Marquez, Ravenous Feast guitarist), and he wanted to come into the band. So for a while, we had two guitar players. And then, Deep Seven kind of disintegrated, and we formed Ravenous Feast in 2013. We released our first album (‘Listen to Me’, 2013), and then, we worked on another album that was kind of in progress – we had like half the songs written, and we made a couple of videos.

But Carlos left the country for a while, went to Peru, then tired to come back. Then we got hit by the pandemic, and we started writing the second half of the album long-distance. Half the songs on ‘Song of Heroes’ were written around 2016 or 2017. We made a video for ‘Blind Leading Blind’ in 2016. ‘Feed My Ego’, ‘Lawless Life’, ‘Song of Heroes’… Those songs we had all written earlier.

When Carlos left the country, everything kind of got put on hold. Then, during the pandemic, we kind of started writing new songs, and we could actually finish ‘Song of Heroes’ in 2023. That’s when things kind of started rolling for us, and we recently were able to release our new album ‘Call Me a Freak’. Carlos and I have been working together for a long time. When you find someone you can work with, you’ve got to stick together, because a lot of people have left.”

Straight North

“Actually, ‘Riding High’ was a song I actually wrote in Canada around 1995. I used to ride my motorcycle from Calgary to Edmonton for a construction job, straight north on a Monday morning or Sunday morning, and I would come back Friday afternoon. I had this thing in my head: all I need is a road beneath me, I’m riding high. I had this song kind of running around my head for like a year. At some point, I finally convinced my band at the time to play the song.

Storm Warning never actually recorded it on an album, but we did play it live, and we had a video that was filmed of us playing that song live on a VHS. Years later, here on the island, I was able to convert the video, put it on YouTube, and show it to the Ravenous guys. They really liked it and wanted to play the song.

The cool thing is: when we finally decided to record the song, my old guitar player from Storm Warning in Vancouver, Greg Whitbeck, recorded some guitar and keyboard parts, a bunch of stuff, and filmed himself playing guitar in front of a green screen, so we were able to put him in the video. He’s actually got his own project in Vancouver these days, and he’s quite successful there.”

Everything Together All at Once

“Carlos Toxic and I have been playing and writing together since 2008, but ‘Call Me a Freak’ was the first time we actually had the chance to do everything together all at once. We kind of wrote all the songs from December 2024 to February 2025. I live on the island, he lives on the mainland. So we would kind of pass ideas back and forth. He would send me guitar parts and things, I would sing vocal parts, just very crudely, by singing into my phone or something. After that, we would kind of edit the songs.

Within two or three months, we had written thirteen songs, and we made demos, gave them to the drummer and the bass player to learn, and we went into the studio here in Venezuela to record. We were shopping for a producer/engineer. We were talking to Tommy Vetterli. I was in Switzerland last year, and a friend of mine plays in a band there that works with him. We initially wanted him to mix the album, but Coroner was on tour in the United States, and the timing wasn’t really working out.

We approached Mike Fraser in Vancouver, who I also know, and he is buddies with my old guitar player in Canada. We were looking at different producers and engineers, but some of them were very expensive, and some of them didn’t want to mix tracks that they didn’t record, because we had recorded our own tracks.

At one point, we were listening to ‘Follow the Blind Man’ by Jelusick, the band featuring Dino Jelusić. We thought: where did these guys record? Who did that? I thought they were from the United States, but it turned out that the band is from Croatia, and they mixed the album in Slovenia. So we found out that the engineer is Simon Jovanović from Evolution Studios in Slovenia.”

Over and Above

“So we talked to Simon, and we said: we really like the work you did on this album. That’s how we want our drums to sound, that’s how we want our vocals to sound. Turns out he also did an album for Joe Lynn Turner and one of the Dream Theater guys. He has worked with some heavyweights. He was glad his work has gotten all the way to Venezuela.

We sent him the tracks, and man, he did an amazing, amazing job. For the first time in my life – and I’ve been writing and recording for decades, my first album was in 1990 – and this is the first time that finally something sounds exactly the way I want it to sound. The guitar sounds awesome, the drums sound awesome, the vocals sound awesome; everything sounds huge. Just perfect. Every song just sounded amazing.

Also, he was really fast. We would send him three songs, and every two days, he would send us a mix. And there would maybe be one or two little things where we thought: let’s tweak this, let’s do that. But after we did the first couple of tweaks, every song was just perfect.

When we finished the project, we paid him for his work, and normally, that would be it, right? But he sent me an e-mail about a month and a half later, and he said: you know, I’ve been listening to the album with fresh ears, and I noticed that if you listen to it for an extended time, there’s a frequency in the mids that’s a little bit annoying, so I made a new mix. Changed the EQ on the snare drum, changed a couple of things.

He sent us a new mix of ‘Call Me a Freak’, and he said: if you like it, let me know, I’ll apply this template to the rest of the songs. It was much better! And we were really happy with the original mix! But this guy… We love him. We will definitely be working with him again. He did an amazing job, and went over and beyond.”

Wanting to Be Blown Away

“A lot of bands here are kind of plug-and-play. For us, it has always been very important to come in and do a soundcheck and make sure that everything is perfect and glorious. Unfortunately, that kind of worked against us when we tried to go on the Wacken Metal Battle last year, because you’re on the clock. You’ve got thirty minutes to get on stage, set up, play your set, and get off. My advice to anyone who goes into the Wacken Metal Battle is: use the cord mic the band soundcheck with, plug your guitar into an amp, don’t use any sequencers.

Normally though, we try to make everything sound as it should. When you go to a show as a fan, you want to be blown away. I saw Pink Floyd in 1995 on the ‘The Division Bell’ tour, and I was right behind the consoles. They had the quadrophonic sound, speakers on all four sides of an open stadium, and it was amazing. Also, I saw Bowie in 1984 on the ‘Let’s Dance’ tour, and the sound was amazing. I saw Porcupine Tree at the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam, and they were just beautiful, perfect.

That’s what you want: you don’t want any errors, you don’t want any problems sonically or performance-wise. If people pay to come and see you, everything should be perfect. That’s how I feel about it, at least. I used to bring my own monitors. I used to bring more gear than our drummer. Because whenever we would play a show, they would have a backline with these massive Marshall 4×12″ cabinets and big Ampegs and everything, and for the singer, they would have a tiny monitor or something.

So I used to have a pair of these killer Yamaha floor monitors that I would used to bring, and I would want them as loud as they can go. I could stand on them, put my foot on them, and do whatever I want, because they’re mine, haha! But in the last two or three years, I got into the in-ear monitor thing. So now I’ve just got my two little cases: my wireless mic set in one hand, my little FIR Audio Radon 6 in-ear case in the other. They are made to my ears, and they sound fucking glorious. I didn’t want to use in-ears for the longest time, but I’ve been converted.”

Donating Time

“We never spend a lot of money on our videos. They look like we spent a lot of money on them, but so much of the stuff that you see in the videos is just friends of ours or people who work with our director that just want to participate and help us out. The motorcycle club in Puerto La Cruz, Espíritu Rebelde, helped us a lot with the ‘Riding High’ video. The president loaned me his Harley, a ‘99 Fat Boy. I used to have the same bike, but a ‘98 one. Then after that video, I got the bug again. After we filmed it, I got myself a 2022 Indian imported from Miami.

The theater where we filmed ‘Call Me a Freak’ is the Teatro Gajigal, which is a 120-year-old kind of gothic theater, and they let us use the site for free. We just had to buy them lunch. It took a little convincing, because they thought: oh, you guys are a heavy metal band, you’re going to bite the head off a bat or something. We filmed ‘Blind Leading Blind’ in an abandoned building, and all the zombies were part of a group of actors who were working with our director, Hector Bastardo, with whom we did six or seven videos. Everyone just donated their time.

The sniper in the new video is an actual sniper. It was a live show, so I had to tell everyone before the show: look, he’s not going to kill me, don’t panic, haha! But there’s a guy up there with a real gun, with real bullets. And he just said: just put my name on that video, I’ve got a security company. We have had so much help here in Venezuela. So many people helped us out all along the way.”

Not That Many Big Shows Anymore

“Last year, we did Gillmanfest, which I think was about two thousand people. We also did a show in Teatrex in Caracas, which was around five hundred people, if I’m not mistaking. We did a show in Barquisimeto to a few hundred people as well. There’s not that many big shows here anymore, because a lot of the heavy metal crowd has left. There used to be a lot more.

It blows my mind that they’ll bring a reggaeton band, and it will just be packed, and then the metal bands… It’s gotten a little tough. This year, 2026, we’re booking shows in Colombia and Ecuador. Colombia is very much a heavy metal and hard rock country. Bogotá in particular. We’re doing what we can, and the new album is getting a lot of traction.”