So, just last Sunday (or maybe Monday), I was looking at the Genius homepage and I played around with the top ten user lists. I was looking at the "In Rock" top scholars and I clicked on "Of All Time" and I was surprised to see a name that I'd never recalled seeing before at the top of the list; especially since I'd gotten the "Top 50 Rock Users" page going less than a year ago, although things do change. So I clicked on the profile of BuhHromu and I was impressed by some of the band names I was seeing. So I thought that someone who I'd never heard of before might be perfect to get the user interviews going again. And here it is my friends, Genius' first user interview in over four months. Sincerely, theBloodyDrummer.

So the first thing I noticed about you was your music taste. At what age did you first hear metal/hardcore music and what were the earlier bands that you listened to?
I first started listening to that kind of music when I was about 15 years old. The first band I've listened to was actually Slipknot, I think the first song I've heard was "Wait and Bleed". After listening to them I quickly discovered some more extreme stuff, especially in the deathcore genre. My first album was "Our Endless War" by Whitechapel, other bands that I've discovered were bands like Oceano, Carnifex and I Declare War. I was 16 when I went to my first show, it was a concert by the Mexican grindcore band Brujeria and in a smaller club in Berlin, but it was really cool and after it I wanted to go to more shows, so now I'm normally going to at least one concert per month.


On that note, how old are you now?
I'm 18, I will do my abitur next year and after that I hope to find a place at a university in Berlin.


Are most of your transcriptions your own or copy-pasted?
Most are copied from things like bandcamp pages, lyric videos or band websites. Sometimes when bands release a new album I preorder the album so I can transcribe the songs from the booklet before anyone else does.


You notably transcribe numerous songs every day. How much time do you spend transcribing?
I would say an hour every day but it's not something I actually plan. Most of the time I just listen to music and sometimes a band I like releases a music video with the lyrics in the description or I just discover great music that isn't on genius and then decide to transcribe it.


Do you get snow around Christmas? If so, is it good or bad?
It depends, but where I live it hasn't snowed for the last three years or so on Christmas. I really miss it, because when I was a kid we always had snow on Christmas and would do things like snowball fights or sleigh riding.

What do you do for a living?
I'm currently a student and will graduate next year.

Do you have any siblings?
Yes, I have two sisters.
What was your mental reaction when I just messaged you out of the blue, telling you my first name and asking if you fancied an interview?
At first I was really surprised because I've never got a message like this but then I thought: "Hey, that seems pretty interesting, let's give it a try".


How do you pronounce your name and what does it mean?
The correct pronunciation is [buːx ˈɦrɔmʊ], but I don't expect everyone to pronounce it like that. It's also actually spelled BůhHromu, but unfortunately you can't use this diacritic on genius, so I just stick to BuhHromu. It's Czech and means thunder god (bůh means god, while hromu is the genitive case of hrom, which means thunder, word by word it means "god of thunder). I got the idea from "Twilight of the Thunder God", a song by Amon Amarth that is one of my all-time favorites.

Do you have any favourite albums?
If I had to pick one favourite album it would be a really hard choice because there are so many, but there are albums that I consider my favorite albums. I already mentioned "Our Endless War" by Whitechapel, others that I really like are "Perception" by Breakdown of Sanity, "Deaf to Our Prayers" by Heaven Shall Burn, "Incisions" by Oceano, "Dingir" by Rings of Saturn and "Deep Blue" by Parkway Drive.

What do you think being the number one Rock scholar makes you?
Not something really special I guess, I'm actually just a normal guy who's way too obsessed with music. Which does not mean that I don't like it, I'm happy that all the time and effort I've put into transcribing and editing metadata and all that stuff has led to this.

If I was to visit Berlin, what would you recommend?
Depends on what you're planning to do. Berlin is not your normal type of city, because it formed, when lots of smaller cities and villages formed together to one big town. This is why Berlin has no real center unlike other European cities like Paris. So you can find districts, that have the atmosphere of a quiet, small town next to districts with bars, clubs, cinemas and shopping centers, there's pretty much everything. If you want to go to concerts there are lots of places you can go, some bigger ones that I've been to that are really good are the Columbiahalle, the Astra-Kulturhaus and Huxleys Neue Welt. There are also smaller ones like the Bi Nuu, the Cassiopeia and the SO36, who are not as big but all have a great atmosphere. If you really want to go to underground shows by local bands, I recommend you go to the Slaughterhouse in Moabit, it's a really cool place where I've discovered lots of smaller bands.

Are there any other genres you listen to?
Occasionally, but most of the time I stick to metal/hardcore. I know there are people who get bored when they listen to one music genre over a longer period of time, but for me it's just fine, because you basically have genres for every mood and also lots of influences from other genres.

What colour is your hair and have you ever dyed it?
It's dark brown. I've never dyed it, mainly because I'm way too lazy to use more than just simple shampoo on my hair.

What is it about hardcore music that you like?
What I like about heavy music in general is that you have less borders when it comes to certain things, such as speed, aggression or lyrics. When it comes to speed for example, you'll find everything from extremely slow, almost slug-like riffs to the faster ones with a lot of rhythm and the ones that sound like a machine gun being fired. What I like about hardcore is also that type of diversity, especially when it comes to the lyrics. You can write an album, where one song is about personal struggles and dealing with grief and then the next song is about a highly political topic or about something completely fictional. I also like the passion of this music in general and that the ones who write these lyrics are not afraid to speak about their opinion on live shows to the audience and challenge them to overthink things.

If someone told you that your IQ points pay cash, would you transcribe more often, or do you find your 340,000+ IQ enough?
Maybe, I honestly don't know. I've always seen it more as a hobby, so transcribing for money would be pretty weird, but I'm not entirely sure how I would react to someone offering me money just for transcribing some songs.
Have you ever heard of The Amity Affliction? They're my favourite band.
I have, I like them too, although I have yet to see them live. I've actually discovered them accidentally when I was clicking through some music videos, the first song I've heard of them was "Pittsburgh".

Do your sisters have a similar music taste to you?
No, not at all. One of them is more into alternative rock and hip-hop, while the other one isn't really into music, which is weird because she plays two instruments.

What did you listen to as a kid?
I didn't listen to much music as a kid, the only band I remember are The Beatles.

Which country would you say has the best music?
Hard to say. I think it always depends on the genre, because every genre of music has a different popularity in countries around the world, so that some countries have a higher number of bands in this genre and as a result of this also a higher number of popular artists, that are considered influential in this genre. If I had to pick one country, I would probably say Sweden, because there are a ton of great bands from Sweden, although it is a country with only about 10 million people living there (although this is also true for other countries like Finland or Norway).

When and why did you sign up for Genius?
It was about a year ago, I don't remember the exact reason. Some reasons were the fact, that there were many great albums and even artists missing, a ton of metal songs, that were tagged as pop (which looks extremely absurd, imagine a song called "Meticulous Invagination" being tagged as pop) and a lot of missing metadata. These were also the things I started to edit in the beginning, although at first I was mainly editing metadata. If I had to sum up the reason I joined genius, I would say I did because some sections of rock like metal (and especially the more extreme ones like death metal) were and to some extent still are very unorganized and poorly formatted, so I thought, if nobody's doing anything about it, maybe I should do it.

How often do you write artist bios?
Not as often as I should, most of the time I do it, when I think that an artist deserves a bio, because he is very influential or his music is just awesome. It's also something I'm not the best at, because I find it hard to sum up an artist and his work in just a few sentences without losing myself in details.

Do you play any instruments yourself?
No, I don't. I'm very interested in languages (which is also the reason why I want to study linguistics), so the part about music, that always fascinated me the most were the lyrics and the stories behind them. When I've bought an album and listen to it for the first time, I always do that while reading the booklet with the lyrics. It's something that I think is very important, because one thing that separates good musicians/bands from bad ones in my opinion is that they actually put some effort into their lyrics rather than just having a team of ghostwriters or writing lyrics after some formula that is supposed to make them "catchy" or anything like that.

At what age did you learn to speak English?
I started learning English in the third grade I think, but I'm not entirely sure. I don't know, at which point I was able to speak and write it without any major problems, but I think it was around the time when I was thirteen. Fortunately, I always had good teachers.

What's the funniest foreign accent you've heard?
German with a Russian accent sounds pretty funny, so I guess if I had to choose, this one would probably be the funniest to me. I also find "ingrish" hilarious.
Final question, has this interview made you feel special in any way?
In a way yes. When I answered all these questions and thought about the answers, I realized how much time I already had spent on genius and that it is something very important and special to me. This is mainly because I had lots of great moments here, although I think these are moments that lots of people on genius had, like the moment, when you hit your first 1k iq or the moment you transcribe a song (or even an entire album) of your favorite band.