Live Report: Berserker IV Day 2

Mizmor’s recent releases have pulled listeners deeper into the ever yawning gravitational well at the center of the project, seeing the band swallow droning ambience (with ambient composer Andrew Black), Louisiana sludge (with Thou), and spoken psychedelia (on their Wit's End EP). With all that soaring expansion behind it, the band would surely at some point make a conscious descent back to Earth, to taste dirt once more.

Enter Prosaic, the most human, feral album of Mizmor's career. In both sound and subject matter, the 4 songs here reflect the contortions our bodies make to accommodate lives of unspectacular repetition, and the toll taken in doing so. We spoke with ALN who as ever wrote, performed, and produced the record in isolation, about the changes required to create an album with its feet planted firmly on the ground.

–Luke Jackson

...

...

When listening to a new work from an established artist, people tend to have questions about how it’s going to relate to their body of work, stylistically speaking. Prosaic hammers out of the gate with "Only An Expanse," which has this searing punk energy, it gives you so many answers about the album within the first 10 seconds of pressing play. Was that deliberate?

Yeah, I wanted to start the record with a bang, in the sense that my approach to making Prosaic was all about trying to trim the fat, keep it punchy and interesting, and just kind of get in and get out as quickly as I could, within reason and without making it sound like an entirely different band. So I wanted to start things loud and fast and grab your attention from the get go, get right into it.

We're used to hearing your work described as black doom, what does it mean to have creative access to those two extreme ends of the spectrum in terms of tempo and style? What does it mean for your songwriting, both technically and in terms of the stories you want to tell?

Those have always been my two favorite sub genres of extreme metal, and I think that's probably because they tap into melancholy so effectively. They have sad melodies, as opposed to other sub genres that are more concerned with venting emotion and anger–I'm in it for the sad shit. So black metal reaches more of the angsty side of that for me and doom metal gets to more of the really depressing side of things. I could never pick between sub genres for a sound because I always want to do them both, so I've always interwoven them with droney passages and whatnot. It is nice, I like the way you put that question, it is nice to have access to both of those tempos, because it does give you more space to work in, more places that you can take the song, and more emotions you can evoke in the narrative that you're trying to tell. So often I find that melodies I write that I'm planning to play very slowly, also sound really cool with a blast beat behind them. So I might be able to transition those two parts together and then take it to a different spot.

You do have quite the singular voice in doing so. If we take the holy trinity of black, death, and doom: there are quite a few death doom bands operating out there, quite a lot of blackened death too, but black doom seems to be like a less populated space.

It’s certainly not intentional for me at all but yeah, doom metal is just not very popular compared to the other two. Because it's not fast and a lot of people find it boring but it was my first love in the metal world. It just works for me really well. I don't know why.

I was immediately taken aback with the artwork for Prosaic by Bryan Proteau. Your recent releases leant into these grand painterly landscapes, I think you were the first I recall featuring a Lewandowski for a cover as you did with Cairn, but Prosaic could not be more different; it has the energy of a middle ages woodcut image, how does that shift tie in with the album?

Totally, so I’ve done illustrations for covers a while back, and then I kind of got into the painting thing for a few albums in a row there. But going back to illustration this time was a deliberate choice, because I wanted to make a record that was less grandiose, and less epic sounding. I didn't want to make an album that had the vibe it felt like it was a masterpiece, some huge thing, I just wanted it to be more humble, human, and straightforward. The themes center around work, and the day in day out slice of life, monotony, and the purpose that we struggle to find or do find in work and how that both propels us and also makes us suffer. To me these themes were very plain, in a good way. And I just wanted it to look a lot more from the hip and raw, to me that was a drawing. I’ve also leaned more into classic black metal sound throughout the record, so there are a lot of obvious art references of older classic black metal records that were presented alongside illustrations in a style that I wanted to evoke, like peasantry, working and being a plain person.

You’ve said that in producing this album you asked yourself some questions, questions about whether you can forefront the fun and the self love aspects of creation, rather than getting super down in the weeds of perfectionism and needing it to sound a certain way. What did you have to do to keep that in check throughout the album's creation?

It was a real active practice, almost like a mindfulness or meditative practice where you deliberately notice your thoughts and your feelings arise, seeing them going in a certain direction, and intentionally not becoming enraptured in them and course correcting back to the goal, the exact task that you want to do. And that's obviously hard, it was a challenge. I mostly succeeded in it. I just became curious about what the final product would be, what the record would sound like if I stuck to this approach. And so there were always temptations to, to obsess and become unproductive, in my opinion, trying a performance or a take over and over and over again, or trying to troubleshoot this tiny, tiny little sound that you don't like. I did that to an extent, to try to and make something that's good, but all the while trying to default back to this mode of “is it good enough? Yeah, it is. Let's just keep going.” And so it was more about making a record that's good enough, while keeping a positive mental attitude, than it was about making a record that was quote-unquote perfect, despite having to tap into a negative headspace, because I've definitely made that record before, and worked that way before. And once you’ve made records over and over again, you become curious about different ways to do it, for yourself and to keep it interesting, right? So I was like, you know, it could turn out like total trash, but what if I didn't have to suffer quite as much for the record? Could it still be a great record? Could I make my process easier, more fun, more interesting for me so that I'm excited every day that I go into the studio to make it instead of feeling like, here we go again? And you know what, it turned out that I really loved how it came out, I liked the results of the experiment.

Reminds me of something Trent Reznor said, he was talking about the Nine Inch Nails live album and was saying, sometimes there's a weird hiss, or a note that doesn't sound perfect, and that can be the right thing or it can be the wrong thing: it's about deciding what to address.

Totally.

Alongside the artistic momentum and change that’s embodied in Prosaic you’ve said the songs are more slice of life in their narratives, touching on mundanity, repetition and labour, in turn steering the narrative of the album away from your personal philosophy and history. Did that feel liberating as a creator? Did it feel like hey, I can go anywhere now?

Yeah, totally. It’s just time to think about and talk about other stuff. And that I've come to naturally. You don't want to make the same record over and over again. And that plays into a few different areas like the approach to the production we just talked about, but also the lyrics and the themes. Am I going to talk about being an ex Christian for the rest of my life? I mean, no, I've made peace with that, and I've come to a good place, one of healing and growth and acceptance. And at least right now in my life, I don't need to talk about that. So it felt good to talk about something else, to talk about a few different things, not like one singular concept. I can construe a singular concept about the record in hindsight now, but at the time, it was like this song’s about time and our conception of time, this song’s about feeling like the grass is always greener, but that that's an illusion. And being in the present moment, this song's about, you know, depression. So, yeah, it was freeing not to feel like my identity as a person or as an artist is limited to just talking about God and atheism, and things like that.

Mizmor has been a touring band for a while now, but people have this strong association between the act and with you personally, reinforced by the fact that you’re writing, producing, performing, and creating records in isolation. But then in total contrast to the image of the lone metal wanderer, it seems like collaboration and friendship are really important to your ongoing work–how crucial is it to have both independent work, and then these big collaborations with Thou, Andrew Black etc. in your creative life?

It's really important, I definitely need the solo endeavor first and foremost, because if I was only in a band, or a collaborative project, I would go a little crazy. I need to have one outlet that doesn't get changed and that other opinions and edits aren't introduced into, for me to feel okay. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. It's how I process my thoughts and my feelings, it's like a journal, and over the ages, it just became metal and became Mizmor, but it's been many other things in the past.

So if I have that, then I feel like I can collaborate with other artists and not feel like I have to get my way, and be more open to seeing how things can evolve naturally by combining ideas, because I already have this thing scratching this other itch for me. And in taking Mizmor from the studio, the live band is really important. For the experience of the audience, it's really powerful to have all the instruments played live in front of you. The people that are my live band are really, really close friends of mine that I've been playing music with for between ten and 20 years, so we have this wonderful friendship and personal dynamic, but we also have this musical chemistry that takes a really long time to build up that's full of subtleties, nuances and idiosyncrasies. And I think that's really important, and I think the audience can feel that. It's great to just be able to do this serious, intense, extreme thing, but you're with all your friends and the second you're done performing, you're back to just making jokes and being there for each other. So it balances it out a lot and it keeps it positive, which I think is really important as well.

I think ultimately, I make this music because I have to for me, but I also have gotten to the point with the project that I do feel like I'm making it for other people as well. Because I've learned over the years that it's important to other people, and they resonate with it; that gives me a way bigger sense of purpose than just being a hermit, only making music for me, which is a really isolating and ultimately self centered practice. I really like approaching it in the sense that it can be helpful to other people - they want to gather in the same room and hear the sound waves and have a cathartic experience and connect with the lyrics. And it becomes bigger than just me, and my thoughts and feelings and whatnot. And so between that and the band it becomes so much more special, My process will always start with just me, and then eventually it ripples out and includes other people, I think both are important stages of artistic development.

It makes a lot of sense to want to come offstage and be surrounded by your friends and have fun and celebrate what you've done, especially after something so intense.

Yeah, totally. I mean, ultimately, life is completely absurd. And pain is part of that. And so is silliness. So, I kind of think they go hand in hand in a weird way, you know?

Metal is inherently silly and better for it! So Mizmor was never conceived in your mind as something that you could do live by yourself, and explore how those arrangements would work?

Not with the music that I'm currently writing, I think it needs to be performed with a full band. If I ever got to a place where I wanted to write a record that actually sounded like just a person playing an instrument and singing, for example, then I would probably be able to do that by myself live. But I don't want to be playing guitar and screaming with drum tracks. And I don't want to be playing drums screaming with guitar tracks, it's just not as interesting to watch. The live performance thing with these types of compositions and arrangements, I think both for the performers and the audience, it takes that full band chemistry and synergy to get everyone vibing and sharing in the experience.

On collaborations for a second, I was wondering how fun/difficult it was to keep Myopia a secret, and then to perform the album essentially on the day that it was announced?

It was difficult! That approach to releasing it was not my idea [laughs]. I like to have fun with peeling back the layers and teasing things and building some anticipation, not just for supporters out there, but for me, I think that's fun. It's also fun to drop a big surprise like that, but it was hard for me, because I was just so excited that I just wanted people to start knowing about it. Having said that, it certainly made some waves and was a lot of fun. That's why you collaborate, to do things you wouldn't normally do.

Prosaic is your first record on a new label, how has that impacted the workflow of its creation, and happens post release?

Chris [Bruni] at Profound Lore has been incredibly easy to work with, and is very responsive, things just move really quickly and effortlessly between him and I. I changed labels for a few different reasons, but one of them was to reach new people and a larger amount of people. And I think we've done that a little bit already, I'm really excited to see more of the after effects of that post release.

So there's another collaboration that's come around with this album, and that’s with the video for "No Place To Arrive." How did you end up working with Emma [Ruth-Rundle] on that piece, what’s your shared history?

Emma is actually my sister-in-law, I'm married to her sister. And we have been good friends for, I don't know, nine or ten years now. Over the course of that time, every once in a while, we’ve been a part of each other's work, and helped each other out with things. And so the idea came about to make this video. Zev Deans the director is a friend of mine, he had done the animated video for “Wit's End” a couple of years ago, and he sent me a message saying hey, me and a crew member, and some gear are coincidentally going to be in Portland for a few days, we’re between projects, and we have time off that we want to fill, do you want to make a music video for like, a reasonable budget? And I was like, Shit, yeah! So I made some phone calls and figured out the budget and how we were going to do it. And then I needed a concept and a story kind of quickly, and I had a rough idea but I didn't know if it could fill 10 minutes and be interesting, so that's when I called Emma because she has made a few music videos that are really, really awesome. And this is more like her world that I'm just not as familiar with, I actually never really saw myself making a live action music video for this project. So she helped me make sure it was cool and interesting. She spent a session or two with me brainstorming and organising a shot list and that kind of stuff. And then I developed that more with Zev, and then we all met up outside of Salem, Oregon, and she was only able to come for a few hours of the first day to make sure that it was achieving what we had talked about, and to meet the dudes.

The song is about staying in the present moment and not being distracted, keeping coming back to the task of making the fire, trying not to be distracted by really surreal stuff, so there’s this tension in there between the real and the surreal, you know, fiction, and fantasy and real life. It sounded perfect, so we jumped at doing that treatment.

How did the prompt generation part of creation work? It’s a hot subject at the moment.

That part is still a mystery to me, because I was not involved in that whatsoever. But they did such a beautiful job of putting it into the video, and having it look like it's blended, you know, with, I mean, there's one section that’s purely animated, but for the most part, it's blended with the live action shots. And it just looks so cool.

Given the success that you've had working out of your home studio for a number of albums now, has it led to any kind of wild experiments in creation, anything unexpected or distinctly un-Mizmor?

You know, the one thing that I've added to my process over the last couple of years that's kind of un-Mizmor is using tape machines here and there, which is something I got from my friend and collaborator Andrew Black, because he makes ambient music and almost everything he does has tape in it of some form. After we made our collab together, I realised how wonderful something like an acoustic guitar sounds when it's on a shitty micro cassette and sounds all wobbly and blown out and unlike it's coming out of a radio in terms of like the EQ. So that kind of changed my approach because I do a fair amount of acoustic or clean guitar, sparse sections, peppered in throughout the songs. And it's kind of nice sometimes to be like yeah, that's sounds a little boring, I guess what if it sounded a little old and fucked up and not just like a regular guitar? So that in combination with having produced a couple of other artists’ albums, kind of put me into this headspace of asking myself is that done? Is that interesting enough? Sometimes that takes going too far, and then pulling it back. That's too crazy and indulgent. You know, let's find the limit, and then we dial it back. But I think it took collaborating with other artists and occupying a producer engineer role for a couple other projects to change how I approached my own music, and not just be like I wrote the songs, I recorded them and now it's done. Now I can put on this other hat and ask a few other questions in search of different tones, and not call it done right away because we got the performance, which at first felt un-Mizmor-ish because I had typically said you press record, you get the take and that's it, like true cult raw black metal - If you try too hard, then it's too polished. It's all in the evolution I suppose.

There’s still some time before release, what do you want people to have in mind when they hear the album?

I guess I'm not necessarily nervous about the reception. But to me, it's very different. And I hope people like it. I suppose whether they do or don't, it doesn't matter in a sense, it's too late, the record’s done. You know, when you do something different, you just hope that people are along for the ride with you as an artist, and they'll go with you where you go. Without too much kicking and screaming.

...

Prosaic is out now via Profound Lore Records, and can be purchased here.

Mizmor’s recent releases have pulled listeners deeper into the ever yawning gravitational well at the center of the project, seeing the band swallow droning ambience (with ambient composer Andrew Black), Louisiana sludge (with Thou), and spoken psychedelia (on their Wit's End EP). With all that soaring expansion behind it, the band would surely at some point make a conscious descent back to Earth, to taste dirt once more.

Enter Prosaic, the most human, feral album of Mizmor's career. In both sound and subject matter, the 4 songs here reflect the contortions our bodies make to accommodate lives of unspectacular repetition, and the toll taken in doing so. We spoke with ALN who as ever wrote, performed, and produced the record in isolation, about the changes required to create an album with its feet planted firmly on the ground.

–Luke Jackson

...

...

When listening to a new work from an established artist, people tend to have questions about how it’s going to relate to their body of work, stylistically speaking. Prosaic hammers out of the gate with "Only An Expanse," which has this searing punk energy, it gives you so many answers about the album within the first 10 seconds of pressing play. Was that deliberate?

Yeah, I wanted to start the record with a bang, in the sense that my approach to making Prosaic was all about trying to trim the fat, keep it punchy and interesting, and just kind of get in and get out as quickly as I could, within reason and without making it sound like an entirely different band. So I wanted to start things loud and fast and grab your attention from the get go, get right into it.

We're used to hearing your work described as black doom, what does it mean to have creative access to those two extreme ends of the spectrum in terms of tempo and style? What does it mean for your songwriting, both technically and in terms of the stories you want to tell?

Those have always been my two favorite sub genres of extreme metal, and I think that's probably because they tap into melancholy so effectively. They have sad melodies, as opposed to other sub genres that are more concerned with venting emotion and anger–I'm in it for the sad shit. So black metal reaches more of the angsty side of that for me and doom metal gets to more of the really depressing side of things. I could never pick between sub genres for a sound because I always want to do them both, so I've always interwoven them with droney passages and whatnot. It is nice, I like the way you put that question, it is nice to have access to both of those tempos, because it does give you more space to work in, more places that you can take the song, and more emotions you can evoke in the narrative that you're trying to tell. So often I find that melodies I write that I'm planning to play very slowly, also sound really cool with a blast beat behind them. So I might be able to transition those two parts together and then take it to a different spot.

You do have quite the singular voice in doing so. If we take the holy trinity of black, death, and doom: there are quite a few death doom bands operating out there, quite a lot of blackened death too, but black doom seems to be like a less populated space.

It’s certainly not intentional for me at all but yeah, doom metal is just not very popular compared to the other two. Because it's not fast and a lot of people find it boring but it was my first love in the metal world. It just works for me really well. I don't know why.

I was immediately taken aback with the artwork for Prosaic by Bryan Proteau. Your recent releases leant into these grand painterly landscapes, I think you were the first I recall featuring a Lewandowski for a cover as you did with Cairn, but Prosaic could not be more different; it has the energy of a middle ages woodcut image, how does that shift tie in with the album?

Totally, so I’ve done illustrations for covers a while back, and then I kind of got into the painting thing for a few albums in a row there. But going back to illustration this time was a deliberate choice, because I wanted to make a record that was less grandiose, and less epic sounding. I didn't want to make an album that had the vibe it felt like it was a masterpiece, some huge thing, I just wanted it to be more humble, human, and straightforward. The themes center around work, and the day in day out slice of life, monotony, and the purpose that we struggle to find or do find in work and how that both propels us and also makes us suffer. To me these themes were very plain, in a good way. And I just wanted it to look a lot more from the hip and raw, to me that was a drawing. I’ve also leaned more into classic black metal sound throughout the record, so there are a lot of obvious art references of older classic black metal records that were presented alongside illustrations in a style that I wanted to evoke, like peasantry, working and being a plain person.

You’ve said that in producing this album you asked yourself some questions, questions about whether you can forefront the fun and the self love aspects of creation, rather than getting super down in the weeds of perfectionism and needing it to sound a certain way. What did you have to do to keep that in check throughout the album's creation?

It was a real active practice, almost like a mindfulness or meditative practice where you deliberately notice your thoughts and your feelings arise, seeing them going in a certain direction, and intentionally not becoming enraptured in them and course correcting back to the goal, the exact task that you want to do. And that's obviously hard, it was a challenge. I mostly succeeded in it. I just became curious about what the final product would be, what the record would sound like if I stuck to this approach. And so there were always temptations to, to obsess and become unproductive, in my opinion, trying a performance or a take over and over and over again, or trying to troubleshoot this tiny, tiny little sound that you don't like. I did that to an extent, to try to and make something that's good, but all the while trying to default back to this mode of “is it good enough? Yeah, it is. Let's just keep going.” And so it was more about making a record that's good enough, while keeping a positive mental attitude, than it was about making a record that was quote-unquote perfect, despite having to tap into a negative headspace, because I've definitely made that record before, and worked that way before. And once you’ve made records over and over again, you become curious about different ways to do it, for yourself and to keep it interesting, right? So I was like, you know, it could turn out like total trash, but what if I didn't have to suffer quite as much for the record? Could it still be a great record? Could I make my process easier, more fun, more interesting for me so that I'm excited every day that I go into the studio to make it instead of feeling like, here we go again? And you know what, it turned out that I really loved how it came out, I liked the results of the experiment.

Reminds me of something Trent Reznor said, he was talking about the Nine Inch Nails live album and was saying, sometimes there's a weird hiss, or a note that doesn't sound perfect, and that can be the right thing or it can be the wrong thing: it's about deciding what to address.

Totally.

Alongside the artistic momentum and change that’s embodied in Prosaic you’ve said the songs are more slice of life in their narratives, touching on mundanity, repetition and labour, in turn steering the narrative of the album away from your personal philosophy and history. Did that feel liberating as a creator? Did it feel like hey, I can go anywhere now?

Yeah, totally. It’s just time to think about and talk about other stuff. And that I've come to naturally. You don't want to make the same record over and over again. And that plays into a few different areas like the approach to the production we just talked about, but also the lyrics and the themes. Am I going to talk about being an ex Christian for the rest of my life? I mean, no, I've made peace with that, and I've come to a good place, one of healing and growth and acceptance. And at least right now in my life, I don't need to talk about that. So it felt good to talk about something else, to talk about a few different things, not like one singular concept. I can construe a singular concept about the record in hindsight now, but at the time, it was like this song’s about time and our conception of time, this song’s about feeling like the grass is always greener, but that that's an illusion. And being in the present moment, this song's about, you know, depression. So, yeah, it was freeing not to feel like my identity as a person or as an artist is limited to just talking about God and atheism, and things like that.

Mizmor has been a touring band for a while now, but people have this strong association between the act and with you personally, reinforced by the fact that you’re writing, producing, performing, and creating records in isolation. But then in total contrast to the image of the lone metal wanderer, it seems like collaboration and friendship are really important to your ongoing work–how crucial is it to have both independent work, and then these big collaborations with Thou, Andrew Black etc. in your creative life?

It's really important, I definitely need the solo endeavor first and foremost, because if I was only in a band, or a collaborative project, I would go a little crazy. I need to have one outlet that doesn't get changed and that other opinions and edits aren't introduced into, for me to feel okay. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. It's how I process my thoughts and my feelings, it's like a journal, and over the ages, it just became metal and became Mizmor, but it's been many other things in the past.

So if I have that, then I feel like I can collaborate with other artists and not feel like I have to get my way, and be more open to seeing how things can evolve naturally by combining ideas, because I already have this thing scratching this other itch for me. And in taking Mizmor from the studio, the live band is really important. For the experience of the audience, it's really powerful to have all the instruments played live in front of you. The people that are my live band are really, really close friends of mine that I've been playing music with for between ten and 20 years, so we have this wonderful friendship and personal dynamic, but we also have this musical chemistry that takes a really long time to build up that's full of subtleties, nuances and idiosyncrasies. And I think that's really important, and I think the audience can feel that. It's great to just be able to do this serious, intense, extreme thing, but you're with all your friends and the second you're done performing, you're back to just making jokes and being there for each other. So it balances it out a lot and it keeps it positive, which I think is really important as well.

I think ultimately, I make this music because I have to for me, but I also have gotten to the point with the project that I do feel like I'm making it for other people as well. Because I've learned over the years that it's important to other people, and they resonate with it; that gives me a way bigger sense of purpose than just being a hermit, only making music for me, which is a really isolating and ultimately self centered practice. I really like approaching it in the sense that it can be helpful to other people - they want to gather in the same room and hear the sound waves and have a cathartic experience and connect with the lyrics. And it becomes bigger than just me, and my thoughts and feelings and whatnot. And so between that and the band it becomes so much more special, My process will always start with just me, and then eventually it ripples out and includes other people, I think both are important stages of artistic development.

It makes a lot of sense to want to come offstage and be surrounded by your friends and have fun and celebrate what you've done, especially after something so intense.

Yeah, totally. I mean, ultimately, life is completely absurd. And pain is part of that. And so is silliness. So, I kind of think they go hand in hand in a weird way, you know?

Metal is inherently silly and better for it! So Mizmor was never conceived in your mind as something that you could do live by yourself, and explore how those arrangements would work?

Not with the music that I'm currently writing, I think it needs to be performed with a full band. If I ever got to a place where I wanted to write a record that actually sounded like just a person playing an instrument and singing, for example, then I would probably be able to do that by myself live. But I don't want to be playing guitar and screaming with drum tracks. And I don't want to be playing drums screaming with guitar tracks, it's just not as interesting to watch. The live performance thing with these types of compositions and arrangements, I think both for the performers and the audience, it takes that full band chemistry and synergy to get everyone vibing and sharing in the experience.

On collaborations for a second, I was wondering how fun/difficult it was to keep Myopia a secret, and then to perform the album essentially on the day that it was announced?

It was difficult! That approach to releasing it was not my idea [laughs]. I like to have fun with peeling back the layers and teasing things and building some anticipation, not just for supporters out there, but for me, I think that's fun. It's also fun to drop a big surprise like that, but it was hard for me, because I was just so excited that I just wanted people to start knowing about it. Having said that, it certainly made some waves and was a lot of fun. That's why you collaborate, to do things you wouldn't normally do.

Prosaic is your first record on a new label, how has that impacted the workflow of its creation, and happens post release?

Chris [Bruni] at Profound Lore has been incredibly easy to work with, and is very responsive, things just move really quickly and effortlessly between him and I. I changed labels for a few different reasons, but one of them was to reach new people and a larger amount of people. And I think we've done that a little bit already, I'm really excited to see more of the after effects of that post release.

So there's another collaboration that's come around with this album, and that’s with the video for "No Place To Arrive." How did you end up working with Emma [Ruth-Rundle] on that piece, what’s your shared history?

Emma is actually my sister-in-law, I'm married to her sister. And we have been good friends for, I don't know, nine or ten years now. Over the course of that time, every once in a while, we’ve been a part of each other's work, and helped each other out with things. And so the idea came about to make this video. Zev Deans the director is a friend of mine, he had done the animated video for “Wit's End” a couple of years ago, and he sent me a message saying hey, me and a crew member, and some gear are coincidentally going to be in Portland for a few days, we’re between projects, and we have time off that we want to fill, do you want to make a music video for like, a reasonable budget? And I was like, Shit, yeah! So I made some phone calls and figured out the budget and how we were going to do it. And then I needed a concept and a story kind of quickly, and I had a rough idea but I didn't know if it could fill 10 minutes and be interesting, so that's when I called Emma because she has made a few music videos that are really, really awesome. And this is more like her world that I'm just not as familiar with, I actually never really saw myself making a live action music video for this project. So she helped me make sure it was cool and interesting. She spent a session or two with me brainstorming and organising a shot list and that kind of stuff. And then I developed that more with Zev, and then we all met up outside of Salem, Oregon, and she was only able to come for a few hours of the first day to make sure that it was achieving what we had talked about, and to meet the dudes.

The song is about staying in the present moment and not being distracted, keeping coming back to the task of making the fire, trying not to be distracted by really surreal stuff, so there’s this tension in there between the real and the surreal, you know, fiction, and fantasy and real life. It sounded perfect, so we jumped at doing that treatment.

How did the prompt generation part of creation work? It’s a hot subject at the moment.

That part is still a mystery to me, because I was not involved in that whatsoever. But they did such a beautiful job of putting it into the video, and having it look like it's blended, you know, with, I mean, there's one section that’s purely animated, but for the most part, it's blended with the live action shots. And it just looks so cool.

Given the success that you've had working out of your home studio for a number of albums now, has it led to any kind of wild experiments in creation, anything unexpected or distinctly un-Mizmor?

You know, the one thing that I've added to my process over the last couple of years that's kind of un-Mizmor is using tape machines here and there, which is something I got from my friend and collaborator Andrew Black, because he makes ambient music and almost everything he does has tape in it of some form. After we made our collab together, I realised how wonderful something like an acoustic guitar sounds when it's on a shitty micro cassette and sounds all wobbly and blown out and unlike it's coming out of a radio in terms of like the EQ. So that kind of changed my approach because I do a fair amount of acoustic or clean guitar, sparse sections, peppered in throughout the songs. And it's kind of nice sometimes to be like yeah, that's sounds a little boring, I guess what if it sounded a little old and fucked up and not just like a regular guitar? So that in combination with having produced a couple of other artists’ albums, kind of put me into this headspace of asking myself is that done? Is that interesting enough? Sometimes that takes going too far, and then pulling it back. That's too crazy and indulgent. You know, let's find the limit, and then we dial it back. But I think it took collaborating with other artists and occupying a producer engineer role for a couple other projects to change how I approached my own music, and not just be like I wrote the songs, I recorded them and now it's done. Now I can put on this other hat and ask a few other questions in search of different tones, and not call it done right away because we got the performance, which at first felt un-Mizmor-ish because I had typically said you press record, you get the take and that's it, like true cult raw black metal - If you try too hard, then it's too polished. It's all in the evolution I suppose.

There’s still some time before release, what do you want people to have in mind when they hear the album?

I guess I'm not necessarily nervous about the reception. But to me, it's very different. And I hope people like it. I suppose whether they do or don't, it doesn't matter in a sense, it's too late, the record’s done. You know, when you do something different, you just hope that people are along for the ride with you as an artist, and they'll go with you where you go. Without too much kicking and screaming.

...

Prosaic is out now via Profound Lore Records, and can be purchased here.

...

Siccing the pitch-black shadows of night upon the archetypes of hardcore isn't a novel idea, but it's always a damn good one -- nothing deepens and extends punked-up fury like casting the resulting musical altercation into absolute darkness. And while black metal (for instance) and hardcore may comprise very different aesthetics and atmospherics, a delicate and angry set of hands and minds can wrangle the two into a special kind of abrasive cohesion. Chicago quintet Tides Cult has done just that with Your Memory Has Tarnished This Beautiful Place, their upcoming debut which finds synchrony between hardcore's straightforward gut-punch and the abstraction that blackened styles openly welcome. Check out an exclusive stream of the album's penultimate song "Athame" below.

...

...

Tides Cult's potent and particular blend banks heavily on the feeling of movement, something which exists in all music but substantially so in the blackened hardcore realm. Both the ground and the air of the music, so to speak, must be in constant flux to sustain momentum -- "Athame" characterizes well both the tumultuous winds of the sky and the grounds they are slowly but unceasingly polishing flat. The difference here is that while erosion is excruciatingly slow and boring, Tides Cult is most certainly not. It's down to frequent tempo shifts, a dynamic guitar/bass interplay, and the vicious vocal performance which keep this band's blade extremely sharp but dangerously unpredictable. Abstraction, here, is a derivative of fear, itself exacerbated by aggression (of which there's plenty), all wrapped up under under a night-cloak not "spooky" but actually downright sinister. Halloween, please come sooner (and stay longer).

...

Your Memory Has Tarnished This Beautiful Place releases October 31st. Pre-orders available now via Bandcamp.

...

Support Invisible Oranges on Patreon and check out our merch.

...

...

Siccing the pitch-black shadows of night upon the archetypes of hardcore isn't a novel idea, but it's always a damn good one -- nothing deepens and extends punked-up fury like casting the resulting musical altercation into absolute darkness. And while black metal (for instance) and hardcore may comprise very different aesthetics and atmospherics, a delicate and angry set of hands and minds can wrangle the two into a special kind of abrasive cohesion. Chicago quintet Tides Cult has done just that with Your Memory Has Tarnished This Beautiful Place, their upcoming debut which finds synchrony between hardcore's straightforward gut-punch and the abstraction that blackened styles openly welcome. Check out an exclusive stream of the album's penultimate song "Athame" below.

...

...

Tides Cult's potent and particular blend banks heavily on the feeling of movement, something which exists in all music but substantially so in the blackened hardcore realm. Both the ground and the air of the music, so to speak, must be in constant flux to sustain momentum -- "Athame" characterizes well both the tumultuous winds of the sky and the grounds they are slowly but unceasingly polishing flat. The difference here is that while erosion is excruciatingly slow and boring, Tides Cult is most certainly not. It's down to frequent tempo shifts, a dynamic guitar/bass interplay, and the vicious vocal performance which keep this band's blade extremely sharp but dangerously unpredictable. Abstraction, here, is a derivative of fear, itself exacerbated by aggression (of which there's plenty), all wrapped up under under a night-cloak not "spooky" but actually downright sinister. Halloween, please come sooner (and stay longer).

...

Your Memory Has Tarnished This Beautiful Place releases October 31st. Pre-orders available now via Bandcamp.

...

Support Invisible Oranges on Patreon and check out our merch.

...

...

Siccing the pitch-black shadows of night upon the archetypes of hardcore isn't a novel idea, but it's always a damn good one -- nothing deepens and extends punked-up fury like casting the resulting musical altercation into absolute darkness. And while black metal (for instance) and hardcore may comprise very different aesthetics and atmospherics, a delicate and angry set of hands and minds can wrangle the two into a special kind of abrasive cohesion. Chicago quintet Tides Cult has done just that with Your Memory Has Tarnished This Beautiful Place, their upcoming debut which finds synchrony between hardcore's straightforward gut-punch and the abstraction that blackened styles openly welcome. Check out an exclusive stream of the album's penultimate song "Athame" below.

...

...

Tides Cult's potent and particular blend banks heavily on the feeling of movement, something which exists in all music but substantially so in the blackened hardcore realm. Both the ground and the air of the music, so to speak, must be in constant flux to sustain momentum -- "Athame" characterizes well both the tumultuous winds of the sky and the grounds they are slowly but unceasingly polishing flat. The difference here is that while erosion is excruciatingly slow and boring, Tides Cult is most certainly not. It's down to frequent tempo shifts, a dynamic guitar/bass interplay, and the vicious vocal performance which keep this band's blade extremely sharp but dangerously unpredictable. Abstraction, here, is a derivative of fear, itself exacerbated by aggression (of which there's plenty), all wrapped up under under a night-cloak not "spooky" but actually downright sinister. Halloween, please come sooner (and stay longer).

...

Your Memory Has Tarnished This Beautiful Place releases October 31st. Pre-orders available now via Bandcamp.

...

Support Invisible Oranges on Patreon and check out our merch.

...

Mizmor’s recent releases have pulled listeners deeper into the ever yawning gravitational well at the center of the project, seeing the band swallow droning ambience (with ambient composer Andrew Black), Louisiana sludge (with Thou), and spoken psychedelia (on their Wit's End EP). With all that soaring expansion behind it, the band would surely at some point make a conscious descent back to Earth, to taste dirt once more.

Enter Prosaic, the most human, feral album of Mizmor's career. In both sound and subject matter, the 4 songs here reflect the contortions our bodies make to accommodate lives of unspectacular repetition, and the toll taken in doing so. We spoke with ALN who as ever wrote, performed, and produced the record in isolation, about the changes required to create an album with its feet planted firmly on the ground.

–Luke Jackson

...

...

When listening to a new work from an established artist, people tend to have questions about how it’s going to relate to their body of work, stylistically speaking. Prosaic hammers out of the gate with "Only An Expanse," which has this searing punk energy, it gives you so many answers about the album within the first 10 seconds of pressing play. Was that deliberate?

Yeah, I wanted to start the record with a bang, in the sense that my approach to making Prosaic was all about trying to trim the fat, keep it punchy and interesting, and just kind of get in and get out as quickly as I could, within reason and without making it sound like an entirely different band. So I wanted to start things loud and fast and grab your attention from the get go, get right into it.

We're used to hearing your work described as black doom, what does it mean to have creative access to those two extreme ends of the spectrum in terms of tempo and style? What does it mean for your songwriting, both technically and in terms of the stories you want to tell?

Those have always been my two favorite sub genres of extreme metal, and I think that's probably because they tap into melancholy so effectively. They have sad melodies, as opposed to other sub genres that are more concerned with venting emotion and anger–I'm in it for the sad shit. So black metal reaches more of the angsty side of that for me and doom metal gets to more of the really depressing side of things. I could never pick between sub genres for a sound because I always want to do them both, so I've always interwoven them with droney passages and whatnot. It is nice, I like the way you put that question, it is nice to have access to both of those tempos, because it does give you more space to work in, more places that you can take the song, and more emotions you can evoke in the narrative that you're trying to tell. So often I find that melodies I write that I'm planning to play very slowly, also sound really cool with a blast beat behind them. So I might be able to transition those two parts together and then take it to a different spot.

You do have quite the singular voice in doing so. If we take the holy trinity of black, death, and doom: there are quite a few death doom bands operating out there, quite a lot of blackened death too, but black doom seems to be like a less populated space.

It’s certainly not intentional for me at all but yeah, doom metal is just not very popular compared to the other two. Because it's not fast and a lot of people find it boring but it was my first love in the metal world. It just works for me really well. I don't know why.

I was immediately taken aback with the artwork for Prosaic by Bryan Proteau. Your recent releases leant into these grand painterly landscapes, I think you were the first I recall featuring a Lewandowski for a cover as you did with Cairn, but Prosaic could not be more different; it has the energy of a middle ages woodcut image, how does that shift tie in with the album?

Totally, so I’ve done illustrations for covers a while back, and then I kind of got into the painting thing for a few albums in a row there. But going back to illustration this time was a deliberate choice, because I wanted to make a record that was less grandiose, and less epic sounding. I didn't want to make an album that had the vibe it felt like it was a masterpiece, some huge thing, I just wanted it to be more humble, human, and straightforward. The themes center around work, and the day in day out slice of life, monotony, and the purpose that we struggle to find or do find in work and how that both propels us and also makes us suffer. To me these themes were very plain, in a good way. And I just wanted it to look a lot more from the hip and raw, to me that was a drawing. I’ve also leaned more into classic black metal sound throughout the record, so there are a lot of obvious art references of older classic black metal records that were presented alongside illustrations in a style that I wanted to evoke, like peasantry, working and being a plain person.

You’ve said that in producing this album you asked yourself some questions, questions about whether you can forefront the fun and the self love aspects of creation, rather than getting super down in the weeds of perfectionism and needing it to sound a certain way. What did you have to do to keep that in check throughout the album's creation?

It was a real active practice, almost like a mindfulness or meditative practice where you deliberately notice your thoughts and your feelings arise, seeing them going in a certain direction, and intentionally not becoming enraptured in them and course correcting back to the goal, the exact task that you want to do. And that's obviously hard, it was a challenge. I mostly succeeded in it. I just became curious about what the final product would be, what the record would sound like if I stuck to this approach. And so there were always temptations to, to obsess and become unproductive, in my opinion, trying a performance or a take over and over and over again, or trying to troubleshoot this tiny, tiny little sound that you don't like. I did that to an extent, to try to and make something that's good, but all the while trying to default back to this mode of “is it good enough? Yeah, it is. Let's just keep going.” And so it was more about making a record that's good enough, while keeping a positive mental attitude, than it was about making a record that was quote-unquote perfect, despite having to tap into a negative headspace, because I've definitely made that record before, and worked that way before. And once you’ve made records over and over again, you become curious about different ways to do it, for yourself and to keep it interesting, right? So I was like, you know, it could turn out like total trash, but what if I didn't have to suffer quite as much for the record? Could it still be a great record? Could I make my process easier, more fun, more interesting for me so that I'm excited every day that I go into the studio to make it instead of feeling like, here we go again? And you know what, it turned out that I really loved how it came out, I liked the results of the experiment.

Reminds me of something Trent Reznor said, he was talking about the Nine Inch Nails live album and was saying, sometimes there's a weird hiss, or a note that doesn't sound perfect, and that can be the right thing or it can be the wrong thing: it's about deciding what to address.

Totally.

Alongside the artistic momentum and change that’s embodied in Prosaic you’ve said the songs are more slice of life in their narratives, touching on mundanity, repetition and labour, in turn steering the narrative of the album away from your personal philosophy and history. Did that feel liberating as a creator? Did it feel like hey, I can go anywhere now?

Yeah, totally. It’s just time to think about and talk about other stuff. And that I've come to naturally. You don't want to make the same record over and over again. And that plays into a few different areas like the approach to the production we just talked about, but also the lyrics and the themes. Am I going to talk about being an ex Christian for the rest of my life? I mean, no, I've made peace with that, and I've come to a good place, one of healing and growth and acceptance. And at least right now in my life, I don't need to talk about that. So it felt good to talk about something else, to talk about a few different things, not like one singular concept. I can construe a singular concept about the record in hindsight now, but at the time, it was like this song’s about time and our conception of time, this song’s about feeling like the grass is always greener, but that that's an illusion. And being in the present moment, this song's about, you know, depression. So, yeah, it was freeing not to feel like my identity as a person or as an artist is limited to just talking about God and atheism, and things like that.

Mizmor has been a touring band for a while now, but people have this strong association between the act and with you personally, reinforced by the fact that you’re writing, producing, performing, and creating records in isolation. But then in total contrast to the image of the lone metal wanderer, it seems like collaboration and friendship are really important to your ongoing work–how crucial is it to have both independent work, and then these big collaborations with Thou, Andrew Black etc. in your creative life?

It's really important, I definitely need the solo endeavor first and foremost, because if I was only in a band, or a collaborative project, I would go a little crazy. I need to have one outlet that doesn't get changed and that other opinions and edits aren't introduced into, for me to feel okay. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. It's how I process my thoughts and my feelings, it's like a journal, and over the ages, it just became metal and became Mizmor, but it's been many other things in the past.

So if I have that, then I feel like I can collaborate with other artists and not feel like I have to get my way, and be more open to seeing how things can evolve naturally by combining ideas, because I already have this thing scratching this other itch for me. And in taking Mizmor from the studio, the live band is really important. For the experience of the audience, it's really powerful to have all the instruments played live in front of you. The people that are my live band are really, really close friends of mine that I've been playing music with for between ten and 20 years, so we have this wonderful friendship and personal dynamic, but we also have this musical chemistry that takes a really long time to build up that's full of subtleties, nuances and idiosyncrasies. And I think that's really important, and I think the audience can feel that. It's great to just be able to do this serious, intense, extreme thing, but you're with all your friends and the second you're done performing, you're back to just making jokes and being there for each other. So it balances it out a lot and it keeps it positive, which I think is really important as well.

I think ultimately, I make this music because I have to for me, but I also have gotten to the point with the project that I do feel like I'm making it for other people as well. Because I've learned over the years that it's important to other people, and they resonate with it; that gives me a way bigger sense of purpose than just being a hermit, only making music for me, which is a really isolating and ultimately self centered practice. I really like approaching it in the sense that it can be helpful to other people - they want to gather in the same room and hear the sound waves and have a cathartic experience and connect with the lyrics. And it becomes bigger than just me, and my thoughts and feelings and whatnot. And so between that and the band it becomes so much more special, My process will always start with just me, and then eventually it ripples out and includes other people, I think both are important stages of artistic development.

It makes a lot of sense to want to come offstage and be surrounded by your friends and have fun and celebrate what you've done, especially after something so intense.

Yeah, totally. I mean, ultimately, life is completely absurd. And pain is part of that. And so is silliness. So, I kind of think they go hand in hand in a weird way, you know?

Metal is inherently silly and better for it! So Mizmor was never conceived in your mind as something that you could do live by yourself, and explore how those arrangements would work?

Not with the music that I'm currently writing, I think it needs to be performed with a full band. If I ever got to a place where I wanted to write a record that actually sounded like just a person playing an instrument and singing, for example, then I would probably be able to do that by myself live. But I don't want to be playing guitar and screaming with drum tracks. And I don't want to be playing drums screaming with guitar tracks, it's just not as interesting to watch. The live performance thing with these types of compositions and arrangements, I think both for the performers and the audience, it takes that full band chemistry and synergy to get everyone vibing and sharing in the experience.

On collaborations for a second, I was wondering how fun/difficult it was to keep Myopia a secret, and then to perform the album essentially on the day that it was announced?

It was difficult! That approach to releasing it was not my idea [laughs]. I like to have fun with peeling back the layers and teasing things and building some anticipation, not just for supporters out there, but for me, I think that's fun. It's also fun to drop a big surprise like that, but it was hard for me, because I was just so excited that I just wanted people to start knowing about it. Having said that, it certainly made some waves and was a lot of fun. That's why you collaborate, to do things you wouldn't normally do.

Prosaic is your first record on a new label, how has that impacted the workflow of its creation, and happens post release?

Chris [Bruni] at Profound Lore has been incredibly easy to work with, and is very responsive, things just move really quickly and effortlessly between him and I. I changed labels for a few different reasons, but one of them was to reach new people and a larger amount of people. And I think we've done that a little bit already, I'm really excited to see more of the after effects of that post release.

So there's another collaboration that's come around with this album, and that’s with the video for "No Place To Arrive." How did you end up working with Emma [Ruth-Rundle] on that piece, what’s your shared history?

Emma is actually my sister-in-law, I'm married to her sister. And we have been good friends for, I don't know, nine or ten years now. Over the course of that time, every once in a while, we’ve been a part of each other's work, and helped each other out with things. And so the idea came about to make this video. Zev Deans the director is a friend of mine, he had done the animated video for “Wit's End” a couple of years ago, and he sent me a message saying hey, me and a crew member, and some gear are coincidentally going to be in Portland for a few days, we’re between projects, and we have time off that we want to fill, do you want to make a music video for like, a reasonable budget? And I was like, Shit, yeah! So I made some phone calls and figured out the budget and how we were going to do it. And then I needed a concept and a story kind of quickly, and I had a rough idea but I didn't know if it could fill 10 minutes and be interesting, so that's when I called Emma because she has made a few music videos that are really, really awesome. And this is more like her world that I'm just not as familiar with, I actually never really saw myself making a live action music video for this project. So she helped me make sure it was cool and interesting. She spent a session or two with me brainstorming and organising a shot list and that kind of stuff. And then I developed that more with Zev, and then we all met up outside of Salem, Oregon, and she was only able to come for a few hours of the first day to make sure that it was achieving what we had talked about, and to meet the dudes.

The song is about staying in the present moment and not being distracted, keeping coming back to the task of making the fire, trying not to be distracted by really surreal stuff, so there’s this tension in there between the real and the surreal, you know, fiction, and fantasy and real life. It sounded perfect, so we jumped at doing that treatment.

How did the prompt generation part of creation work? It’s a hot subject at the moment.

That part is still a mystery to me, because I was not involved in that whatsoever. But they did such a beautiful job of putting it into the video, and having it look like it's blended, you know, with, I mean, there's one section that’s purely animated, but for the most part, it's blended with the live action shots. And it just looks so cool.

Given the success that you've had working out of your home studio for a number of albums now, has it led to any kind of wild experiments in creation, anything unexpected or distinctly un-Mizmor?

You know, the one thing that I've added to my process over the last couple of years that's kind of un-Mizmor is using tape machines here and there, which is something I got from my friend and collaborator Andrew Black, because he makes ambient music and almost everything he does has tape in it of some form. After we made our collab together, I realised how wonderful something like an acoustic guitar sounds when it's on a shitty micro cassette and sounds all wobbly and blown out and unlike it's coming out of a radio in terms of like the EQ. So that kind of changed my approach because I do a fair amount of acoustic or clean guitar, sparse sections, peppered in throughout the songs. And it's kind of nice sometimes to be like yeah, that's sounds a little boring, I guess what if it sounded a little old and fucked up and not just like a regular guitar? So that in combination with having produced a couple of other artists’ albums, kind of put me into this headspace of asking myself is that done? Is that interesting enough? Sometimes that takes going too far, and then pulling it back. That's too crazy and indulgent. You know, let's find the limit, and then we dial it back. But I think it took collaborating with other artists and occupying a producer engineer role for a couple other projects to change how I approached my own music, and not just be like I wrote the songs, I recorded them and now it's done. Now I can put on this other hat and ask a few other questions in search of different tones, and not call it done right away because we got the performance, which at first felt un-Mizmor-ish because I had typically said you press record, you get the take and that's it, like true cult raw black metal - If you try too hard, then it's too polished. It's all in the evolution I suppose.

There’s still some time before release, what do you want people to have in mind when they hear the album?

I guess I'm not necessarily nervous about the reception. But to me, it's very different. And I hope people like it. I suppose whether they do or don't, it doesn't matter in a sense, it's too late, the record’s done. You know, when you do something different, you just hope that people are along for the ride with you as an artist, and they'll go with you where you go. Without too much kicking and screaming.

...

Prosaic is out now via Profound Lore Records, and can be purchased here.

Mizmor’s recent releases have pulled listeners deeper into the ever yawning gravitational well at the center of the project, seeing the band swallow droning ambience (with ambient composer Andrew Black), Louisiana sludge (with Thou), and spoken psychedelia (on their Wit's End EP). With all that soaring expansion behind it, the band would surely at some point make a conscious descent back to Earth, to taste dirt once more.

Enter Prosaic, the most human, feral album of Mizmor's career. In both sound and subject matter, the 4 songs here reflect the contortions our bodies make to accommodate lives of unspectacular repetition, and the toll taken in doing so. We spoke with ALN who as ever wrote, performed, and produced the record in isolation, about the changes required to create an album with its feet planted firmly on the ground.

–Luke Jackson

...

...

When listening to a new work from an established artist, people tend to have questions about how it’s going to relate to their body of work, stylistically speaking. Prosaic hammers out of the gate with "Only An Expanse," which has this searing punk energy, it gives you so many answers about the album within the first 10 seconds of pressing play. Was that deliberate?

Yeah, I wanted to start the record with a bang, in the sense that my approach to making Prosaic was all about trying to trim the fat, keep it punchy and interesting, and just kind of get in and get out as quickly as I could, within reason and without making it sound like an entirely different band. So I wanted to start things loud and fast and grab your attention from the get go, get right into it.

We're used to hearing your work described as black doom, what does it mean to have creative access to those two extreme ends of the spectrum in terms of tempo and style? What does it mean for your songwriting, both technically and in terms of the stories you want to tell?

Those have always been my two favorite sub genres of extreme metal, and I think that's probably because they tap into melancholy so effectively. They have sad melodies, as opposed to other sub genres that are more concerned with venting emotion and anger–I'm in it for the sad shit. So black metal reaches more of the angsty side of that for me and doom metal gets to more of the really depressing side of things. I could never pick between sub genres for a sound because I always want to do them both, so I've always interwoven them with droney passages and whatnot. It is nice, I like the way you put that question, it is nice to have access to both of those tempos, because it does give you more space to work in, more places that you can take the song, and more emotions you can evoke in the narrative that you're trying to tell. So often I find that melodies I write that I'm planning to play very slowly, also sound really cool with a blast beat behind them. So I might be able to transition those two parts together and then take it to a different spot.

You do have quite the singular voice in doing so. If we take the holy trinity of black, death, and doom: there are quite a few death doom bands operating out there, quite a lot of blackened death too, but black doom seems to be like a less populated space.

It’s certainly not intentional for me at all but yeah, doom metal is just not very popular compared to the other two. Because it's not fast and a lot of people find it boring but it was my first love in the metal world. It just works for me really well. I don't know why.

I was immediately taken aback with the artwork for Prosaic by Bryan Proteau. Your recent releases leant into these grand painterly landscapes, I think you were the first I recall featuring a Lewandowski for a cover as you did with Cairn, but Prosaic could not be more different; it has the energy of a middle ages woodcut image, how does that shift tie in with the album?

Totally, so I’ve done illustrations for covers a while back, and then I kind of got into the painting thing for a few albums in a row there. But going back to illustration this time was a deliberate choice, because I wanted to make a record that was less grandiose, and less epic sounding. I didn't want to make an album that had the vibe it felt like it was a masterpiece, some huge thing, I just wanted it to be more humble, human, and straightforward. The themes center around work, and the day in day out slice of life, monotony, and the purpose that we struggle to find or do find in work and how that both propels us and also makes us suffer. To me these themes were very plain, in a good way. And I just wanted it to look a lot more from the hip and raw, to me that was a drawing. I’ve also leaned more into classic black metal sound throughout the record, so there are a lot of obvious art references of older classic black metal records that were presented alongside illustrations in a style that I wanted to evoke, like peasantry, working and being a plain person.

You’ve said that in producing this album you asked yourself some questions, questions about whether you can forefront the fun and the self love aspects of creation, rather than getting super down in the weeds of perfectionism and needing it to sound a certain way. What did you have to do to keep that in check throughout the album's creation?

It was a real active practice, almost like a mindfulness or meditative practice where you deliberately notice your thoughts and your feelings arise, seeing them going in a certain direction, and intentionally not becoming enraptured in them and course correcting back to the goal, the exact task that you want to do. And that's obviously hard, it was a challenge. I mostly succeeded in it. I just became curious about what the final product would be, what the record would sound like if I stuck to this approach. And so there were always temptations to, to obsess and become unproductive, in my opinion, trying a performance or a take over and over and over again, or trying to troubleshoot this tiny, tiny little sound that you don't like. I did that to an extent, to try to and make something that's good, but all the while trying to default back to this mode of “is it good enough? Yeah, it is. Let's just keep going.” And so it was more about making a record that's good enough, while keeping a positive mental attitude, than it was about making a record that was quote-unquote perfect, despite having to tap into a negative headspace, because I've definitely made that record before, and worked that way before. And once you’ve made records over and over again, you become curious about different ways to do it, for yourself and to keep it interesting, right? So I was like, you know, it could turn out like total trash, but what if I didn't have to suffer quite as much for the record? Could it still be a great record? Could I make my process easier, more fun, more interesting for me so that I'm excited every day that I go into the studio to make it instead of feeling like, here we go again? And you know what, it turned out that I really loved how it came out, I liked the results of the experiment.

Reminds me of something Trent Reznor said, he was talking about the Nine Inch Nails live album and was saying, sometimes there's a weird hiss, or a note that doesn't sound perfect, and that can be the right thing or it can be the wrong thing: it's about deciding what to address.

Totally.

Alongside the artistic momentum and change that’s embodied in Prosaic you’ve said the songs are more slice of life in their narratives, touching on mundanity, repetition and labour, in turn steering the narrative of the album away from your personal philosophy and history. Did that feel liberating as a creator? Did it feel like hey, I can go anywhere now?

Yeah, totally. It’s just time to think about and talk about other stuff. And that I've come to naturally. You don't want to make the same record over and over again. And that plays into a few different areas like the approach to the production we just talked about, but also the lyrics and the themes. Am I going to talk about being an ex Christian for the rest of my life? I mean, no, I've made peace with that, and I've come to a good place, one of healing and growth and acceptance. And at least right now in my life, I don't need to talk about that. So it felt good to talk about something else, to talk about a few different things, not like one singular concept. I can construe a singular concept about the record in hindsight now, but at the time, it was like this song’s about time and our conception of time, this song’s about feeling like the grass is always greener, but that that's an illusion. And being in the present moment, this song's about, you know, depression. So, yeah, it was freeing not to feel like my identity as a person or as an artist is limited to just talking about God and atheism, and things like that.

Mizmor has been a touring band for a while now, but people have this strong association between the act and with you personally, reinforced by the fact that you’re writing, producing, performing, and creating records in isolation. But then in total contrast to the image of the lone metal wanderer, it seems like collaboration and friendship are really important to your ongoing work–how crucial is it to have both independent work, and then these big collaborations with Thou, Andrew Black etc. in your creative life?

It's really important, I definitely need the solo endeavor first and foremost, because if I was only in a band, or a collaborative project, I would go a little crazy. I need to have one outlet that doesn't get changed and that other opinions and edits aren't introduced into, for me to feel okay. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. It's how I process my thoughts and my feelings, it's like a journal, and over the ages, it just became metal and became Mizmor, but it's been many other things in the past.

So if I have that, then I feel like I can collaborate with other artists and not feel like I have to get my way, and be more open to seeing how things can evolve naturally by combining ideas, because I already have this thing scratching this other itch for me. And in taking Mizmor from the studio, the live band is really important. For the experience of the audience, it's really powerful to have all the instruments played live in front of you. The people that are my live band are really, really close friends of mine that I've been playing music with for between ten and 20 years, so we have this wonderful friendship and personal dynamic, but we also have this musical chemistry that takes a really long time to build up that's full of subtleties, nuances and idiosyncrasies. And I think that's really important, and I think the audience can feel that. It's great to just be able to do this serious, intense, extreme thing, but you're with all your friends and the second you're done performing, you're back to just making jokes and being there for each other. So it balances it out a lot and it keeps it positive, which I think is really important as well.

I think ultimately, I make this music because I have to for me, but I also have gotten to the point with the project that I do feel like I'm making it for other people as well. Because I've learned over the years that it's important to other people, and they resonate with it; that gives me a way bigger sense of purpose than just being a hermit, only making music for me, which is a really isolating and ultimately self centered practice. I really like approaching it in the sense that it can be helpful to other people - they want to gather in the same room and hear the sound waves and have a cathartic experience and connect with the lyrics. And it becomes bigger than just me, and my thoughts and feelings and whatnot. And so between that and the band it becomes so much more special, My process will always start with just me, and then eventually it ripples out and includes other people, I think both are important stages of artistic development.

It makes a lot of sense to want to come offstage and be surrounded by your friends and have fun and celebrate what you've done, especially after something so intense.

Yeah, totally. I mean, ultimately, life is completely absurd. And pain is part of that. And so is silliness. So, I kind of think they go hand in hand in a weird way, you know?

Metal is inherently silly and better for it! So Mizmor was never conceived in your mind as something that you could do live by yourself, and explore how those arrangements would work?

Not with the music that I'm currently writing, I think it needs to be performed with a full band. If I ever got to a place where I wanted to write a record that actually sounded like just a person playing an instrument and singing, for example, then I would probably be able to do that by myself live. But I don't want to be playing guitar and screaming with drum tracks. And I don't want to be playing drums screaming with guitar tracks, it's just not as interesting to watch. The live performance thing with these types of compositions and arrangements, I think both for the performers and the audience, it takes that full band chemistry and synergy to get everyone vibing and sharing in the experience.

On collaborations for a second, I was wondering how fun/difficult it was to keep Myopia a secret, and then to perform the album essentially on the day that it was announced?

It was difficult! That approach to releasing it was not my idea [laughs]. I like to have fun with peeling back the layers and teasing things and building some anticipation, not just for supporters out there, but for me, I think that's fun. It's also fun to drop a big surprise like that, but it was hard for me, because I was just so excited that I just wanted people to start knowing about it. Having said that, it certainly made some waves and was a lot of fun. That's why you collaborate, to do things you wouldn't normally do.

Prosaic is your first record on a new label, how has that impacted the workflow of its creation, and happens post release?

Chris [Bruni] at Profound Lore has been incredibly easy to work with, and is very responsive, things just move really quickly and effortlessly between him and I. I changed labels for a few different reasons, but one of them was to reach new people and a larger amount of people. And I think we've done that a little bit already, I'm really excited to see more of the after effects of that post release.

So there's another collaboration that's come around with this album, and that’s with the video for "No Place To Arrive." How did you end up working with Emma [Ruth-Rundle] on that piece, what’s your shared history?

Emma is actually my sister-in-law, I'm married to her sister. And we have been good friends for, I don't know, nine or ten years now. Over the course of that time, every once in a while, we’ve been a part of each other's work, and helped each other out with things. And so the idea came about to make this video. Zev Deans the director is a friend of mine, he had done the animated video for “Wit's End” a couple of years ago, and he sent me a message saying hey, me and a crew member, and some gear are coincidentally going to be in Portland for a few days, we’re between projects, and we have time off that we want to fill, do you want to make a music video for like, a reasonable budget? And I was like, Shit, yeah! So I made some phone calls and figured out the budget and how we were going to do it. And then I needed a concept and a story kind of quickly, and I had a rough idea but I didn't know if it could fill 10 minutes and be interesting, so that's when I called Emma because she has made a few music videos that are really, really awesome. And this is more like her world that I'm just not as familiar with, I actually never really saw myself making a live action music video for this project. So she helped me make sure it was cool and interesting. She spent a session or two with me brainstorming and organising a shot list and that kind of stuff. And then I developed that more with Zev, and then we all met up outside of Salem, Oregon, and she was only able to come for a few hours of the first day to make sure that it was achieving what we had talked about, and to meet the dudes.

The song is about staying in the present moment and not being distracted, keeping coming back to the task of making the fire, trying not to be distracted by really surreal stuff, so there’s this tension in there between the real and the surreal, you know, fiction, and fantasy and real life. It sounded perfect, so we jumped at doing that treatment.

How did the prompt generation part of creation work? It’s a hot subject at the moment.

That part is still a mystery to me, because I was not involved in that whatsoever. But they did such a beautiful job of putting it into the video, and having it look like it's blended, you know, with, I mean, there's one section that’s purely animated, but for the most part, it's blended with the live action shots. And it just looks so cool.

Given the success that you've had working out of your home studio for a number of albums now, has it led to any kind of wild experiments in creation, anything unexpected or distinctly un-Mizmor?

You know, the one thing that I've added to my process over the last couple of years that's kind of un-Mizmor is using tape machines here and there, which is something I got from my friend and collaborator Andrew Black, because he makes ambient music and almost everything he does has tape in it of some form. After we made our collab together, I realised how wonderful something like an acoustic guitar sounds when it's on a shitty micro cassette and sounds all wobbly and blown out and unlike it's coming out of a radio in terms of like the EQ. So that kind of changed my approach because I do a fair amount of acoustic or clean guitar, sparse sections, peppered in throughout the songs. And it's kind of nice sometimes to be like yeah, that's sounds a little boring, I guess what if it sounded a little old and fucked up and not just like a regular guitar? So that in combination with having produced a couple of other artists’ albums, kind of put me into this headspace of asking myself is that done? Is that interesting enough? Sometimes that takes going too far, and then pulling it back. That's too crazy and indulgent. You know, let's find the limit, and then we dial it back. But I think it took collaborating with other artists and occupying a producer engineer role for a couple other projects to change how I approached my own music, and not just be like I wrote the songs, I recorded them and now it's done. Now I can put on this other hat and ask a few other questions in search of different tones, and not call it done right away because we got the performance, which at first felt un-Mizmor-ish because I had typically said you press record, you get the take and that's it, like true cult raw black metal - If you try too hard, then it's too polished. It's all in the evolution I suppose.

There’s still some time before release, what do you want people to have in mind when they hear the album?

I guess I'm not necessarily nervous about the reception. But to me, it's very different. And I hope people like it. I suppose whether they do or don't, it doesn't matter in a sense, it's too late, the record’s done. You know, when you do something different, you just hope that people are along for the ride with you as an artist, and they'll go with you where you go. Without too much kicking and screaming.

...

Prosaic is out now via Profound Lore Records, and can be purchased here.

...

A few weeks before yesterday's Vastum album debut, I asked the band's publicist for its lyric sheet. I knew that Vastum's lyrics addressed eroticism and sexuality, but the lyrics certainly don't read like most writing on those subjects. Here are some samples:

"Our depths of joy in this saturation / In our polymorphously perverse constitution / The dissolution of our grief comes in libidinal death and the grace of mourning" "Deprivations of the flesh / A quarantine in abject absence / Euphoria denied: dripping, unsated phantom limb / Suffocated, stifled mass can feel the temperature rise / By knowledge unrealized: a tumorous, parasitic grief" "I am held in blood warmth / Sanguine, sublime fetishization / To bind desire into chasms of suffering / Where the dead meet the living"

You can tell what Vastum are talking about after focusing for a bit, but at first, their lyrics reads like something from a Suffocation album. Vastum write lyrics in Death Metal English.

...

Like other forms of English, Death Metal English is a tool kit. It can be used well or poorly; Vastum use it quite effectively. You can employ Death Metal English in other realms, but it's designed to make death metal lyrics sound more brutal. Why do DM bands write this way? Perhaps because a few early tastemakers chose to, and everyone else just followed along. Perhaps because all those lengthy words resonate nicely in the front of your face when you utter a death growl. Perhaps because its ponderous diction mirrors the blocky nature of the music. My best guess is that death metal bands use Death Metal English because it's innately awesome. Bands like Celtic Frost and Slayer gave us the roots of Death Metal English, just as they helped to build the foundations of the genre itself. Suffocation's song titles and lyrics might be the archetypal examples of purebred Death Metal English, though Nile's are up there too. Both American and Mexican Disgorges practice Death Metal English, albeit differently. Exhumed use aspects of Death Metal English for brainier ends. It is most common in Anglophone countries, but it has traveled elsewhere too. Dismember get down with Death Metal English on occasion, but not always; Mike Åkerfeldt plays it for laughs in Bloodbath. Demilich took Death Metal English further into impenetrable weirdness than most bands before or since. Carcass helped to develop Death Metal English with the whole medical thing, and then started applying it to non-gore topics. Not all death metal bands write in Death Metal English; notably, Chuck Schuldiner of Death did not, but his disciples in bands like Decrepit Birth do. I've identified some common traits of Death Metal English below:

Big, polysyllabic words: You don't have to use them correctly; you just have to use them. Bonus points for Greco-Latinate words that end in "-ition," "-ation," "-ution," "-ous," "-ized," "-ism," "-ance," "-ial," "-ity," and variations thereon. Double bonus points for words ending semi-inappropriately in "-ment," as in "Torn Into Enthrallment." These words don't even have to be real. Is Wormed's "Multivectorial Reionization" a real thing? Who cares? Adjectives: In Death Metal English, they're like guitar solos. You aren't using enough. Add more. Prepositional phrases: Same is true here, too — the more prepositional phrases, the better. "(-ation word) of the (ominous word)" is perhaps the most brutal of all grammatical constructions, which is why "Procreation (of the Wicked)" is one of the best song titles ever. It also has parentheses, which are a less common but still valued component of Death Metal English. Progressive tense: Especially useful for song titles. "(Verb)ing the (noun)" is also a great default song title, as in "Cloning the Stillborn," "Infecting the Crypts," and "Christening the Afterbirth." Passive voice: Active verbs aren't brutal. Passive voice is useful when you need to add more syllables to a line to make it fit the riff. Plus, it highlights whatever weird power dynamic is going on in your lyrics. Why say "The beast hath consumed him" when you could say "He hath been consumed by the beast"? Speaking of which — Archaic or pseudo-Biblical verbiage: If you write like you are some kind of ancient, ageless force who is unfamiliar with modern grammatical conventions, you are probably pretty evil. Bonus points for using constructions that evoke the King James Bible, which is ironically among the most metal texts in the English canon. "Thou," "hast," "thine," and so forth are all great; "unto" is my personal favorite. Yoda-style unconventional sentences can achieve the same effect, as in "Civilized I shall not be / By the holy strain of laws" or "I know the texts divine" (both from Morbid Angel's "Brainstorm"). Dave Vincent and Glen Benton are probably responsible for popularizing these tricks in a death metal context, but Nile raised them to an art form. Speaking of which: award more bonus points for each reference to any obscure or fictional non-Christian deity. Grandiloquent metaphor: This is death metal. Make whatever you're talking about sound really big and important. Illogical or meaningless sentences: This one certainly isn't unique to Death Metal English, but it's popular in the realm. Writing lyrics that make grammatical and substantive sense is not sufficiently off-putting and obscurantist for some bands, and doing so over crazy shred riffage is pretty hard to boot. Instead, why not say, as Impetuous Ritual did on "Convoluting Unto Despondent Anachronism," something like this: "Propagate correlated malediction / Reclamation of hierarchic genetic throne / Bound to iniquitous subordinancy / Coerced through conductive bedlam"? (The lyrics to Impetuous Ritual's Relentless Execution of Ceremonial Excrescence are a treasure trove of Death Metal English without peer.)

My favorite thing about Death Metal English is that it isn't subject matter-specific. Of course, it works best when you're talking about Satan, or Lovecraft, or murder or whatever. But you can turn pretty much any phrase or sentence into fodder for a sick death metal song using the same tropes:

Normal English: "Commuting to work" Death Metal English: "TRANSPORTATION OF THE WAGEBOUND UNTO THE NEXUS OF PERPETUAL QUOTIDIAN ENSLAVEMENT" Normal English: "This bok choy isn't very good" Death Metal English: "CASTIGATING THE VERDANT ISSUANCE OF THE SOILS OF JIANGNAN" Normal English: "I need to take a nap" Death Metal English: "RIPPED INTO THE UTTER EXHAUSTION OF THE MIDDLE DAY" Normal English: "Thanks for explaining the train schedule" Death Metal English: "PROFFERING GRATITUDE UPON THE CHRONOCRATION OF THE JUGGERNAUTS OF RETICULATED METALS AND FIRE" Normal English: "You have to mow the lawn" Death Metal English: "BRING DOWN THE SCYTHE OF GODS UPON THE NECKS OF THE GREEN-RIBBED LEGIONS AND SWEEP AWAY THEIR WRETCHED BODIES; THOU ART IMPLORED BY ME"

I could do this all day. Enjoy one of Nile's finest ventures into Death Metal English below.

...

Nile - "Chapter Of Obeisance Before Giving Breath To The Inert One In The Presence Of The Cresent-Shaped Horns" (lyrics here)

...

...

A few weeks before yesterday's Vastum album debut, I asked the band's publicist for its lyric sheet. I knew that Vastum's lyrics addressed eroticism and sexuality, but the lyrics certainly don't read like most writing on those subjects. Here are some samples:

"Our depths of joy in this saturation / In our polymorphously perverse constitution / The dissolution of our grief comes in libidinal death and the grace of mourning" "Deprivations of the flesh / A quarantine in abject absence / Euphoria denied: dripping, unsated phantom limb / Suffocated, stifled mass can feel the temperature rise / By knowledge unrealized: a tumorous, parasitic grief" "I am held in blood warmth / Sanguine, sublime fetishization / To bind desire into chasms of suffering / Where the dead meet the living"

You can tell what Vastum are talking about after focusing for a bit, but at first, their lyrics reads like something from a Suffocation album. Vastum write lyrics in Death Metal English.

...

Like other forms of English, Death Metal English is a tool kit. It can be used well or poorly; Vastum use it quite effectively. You can employ Death Metal English in other realms, but it's designed to make death metal lyrics sound more brutal. Why do DM bands write this way? Perhaps because a few early tastemakers chose to, and everyone else just followed along. Perhaps because all those lengthy words resonate nicely in the front of your face when you utter a death growl. Perhaps because its ponderous diction mirrors the blocky nature of the music. My best guess is that death metal bands use Death Metal English because it's innately awesome. Bands like Celtic Frost and Slayer gave us the roots of Death Metal English, just as they helped to build the foundations of the genre itself. Suffocation's song titles and lyrics might be the archetypal examples of purebred Death Metal English, though Nile's are up there too. Both American and Mexican Disgorges practice Death Metal English, albeit differently. Exhumed use aspects of Death Metal English for brainier ends. It is most common in Anglophone countries, but it has traveled elsewhere too. Dismember get down with Death Metal English on occasion, but not always; Mike Åkerfeldt plays it for laughs in Bloodbath. Demilich took Death Metal English further into impenetrable weirdness than most bands before or since. Carcass helped to develop Death Metal English with the whole medical thing, and then started applying it to non-gore topics. Not all death metal bands write in Death Metal English; notably, Chuck Schuldiner of Death did not, but his disciples in bands like Decrepit Birth do. I've identified some common traits of Death Metal English below:

Big, polysyllabic words: You don't have to use them correctly; you just have to use them. Bonus points for Greco-Latinate words that end in "-ition," "-ation," "-ution," "-ous," "-ized," "-ism," "-ance," "-ial," "-ity," and variations thereon. Double bonus points for words ending semi-inappropriately in "-ment," as in "Torn Into Enthrallment." These words don't even have to be real. Is Wormed's "Multivectorial Reionization" a real thing? Who cares? Adjectives: In Death Metal English, they're like guitar solos. You aren't using enough. Add more. Prepositional phrases: Same is true here, too — the more prepositional phrases, the better. "(-ation word) of the (ominous word)" is perhaps the most brutal of all grammatical constructions, which is why "Procreation (of the Wicked)" is one of the best song titles ever. It also has parentheses, which are a less common but still valued component of Death Metal English. Progressive tense: Especially useful for song titles. "(Verb)ing the (noun)" is also a great default song title, as in "Cloning the Stillborn," "Infecting the Crypts," and "Christening the Afterbirth." Passive voice: Active verbs aren't brutal. Passive voice is useful when you need to add more syllables to a line to make it fit the riff. Plus, it highlights whatever weird power dynamic is going on in your lyrics. Why say "The beast hath consumed him" when you could say "He hath been consumed by the beast"? Speaking of which — Archaic or pseudo-Biblical verbiage: If you write like you are some kind of ancient, ageless force who is unfamiliar with modern grammatical conventions, you are probably pretty evil. Bonus points for using constructions that evoke the King James Bible, which is ironically among the most metal texts in the English canon. "Thou," "hast," "thine," and so forth are all great; "unto" is my personal favorite. Yoda-style unconventional sentences can achieve the same effect, as in "Civilized I shall not be / By the holy strain of laws" or "I know the texts divine" (both from Morbid Angel's "Brainstorm"). Dave Vincent and Glen Benton are probably responsible for popularizing these tricks in a death metal context, but Nile raised them to an art form. Speaking of which: award more bonus points for each reference to any obscure or fictional non-Christian deity. Grandiloquent metaphor: This is death metal. Make whatever you're talking about sound really big and important. Illogical or meaningless sentences: This one certainly isn't unique to Death Metal English, but it's popular in the realm. Writing lyrics that make grammatical and substantive sense is not sufficiently off-putting and obscurantist for some bands, and doing so over crazy shred riffage is pretty hard to boot. Instead, why not say, as Impetuous Ritual did on "Convoluting Unto Despondent Anachronism," something like this: "Propagate correlated malediction / Reclamation of hierarchic genetic throne / Bound to iniquitous subordinancy / Coerced through conductive bedlam"? (The lyrics to Impetuous Ritual's Relentless Execution of Ceremonial Excrescence are a treasure trove of Death Metal English without peer.)

My favorite thing about Death Metal English is that it isn't subject matter-specific. Of course, it works best when you're talking about Satan, or Lovecraft, or murder or whatever. But you can turn pretty much any phrase or sentence into fodder for a sick death metal song using the same tropes:

Normal English: "Commuting to work" Death Metal English: "TRANSPORTATION OF THE WAGEBOUND UNTO THE NEXUS OF PERPETUAL QUOTIDIAN ENSLAVEMENT" Normal English: "This bok choy isn't very good" Death Metal English: "CASTIGATING THE VERDANT ISSUANCE OF THE SOILS OF JIANGNAN" Normal English: "I need to take a nap" Death Metal English: "RIPPED INTO THE UTTER EXHAUSTION OF THE MIDDLE DAY" Normal English: "Thanks for explaining the train schedule" Death Metal English: "PROFFERING GRATITUDE UPON THE CHRONOCRATION OF THE JUGGERNAUTS OF RETICULATED METALS AND FIRE" Normal English: "You have to mow the lawn" Death Metal English: "BRING DOWN THE SCYTHE OF GODS UPON THE NECKS OF THE GREEN-RIBBED LEGIONS AND SWEEP AWAY THEIR WRETCHED BODIES; THOU ART IMPLORED BY ME"

I could do this all day. Enjoy one of Nile's finest ventures into Death Metal English below.

...

Nile - "Chapter Of Obeisance Before Giving Breath To The Inert One In The Presence Of The Cresent-Shaped Horns" (lyrics here)

...

...

A few weeks before yesterday's Vastum album debut, I asked the band's publicist for its lyric sheet. I knew that Vastum's lyrics addressed eroticism and sexuality, but the lyrics certainly don't read like most writing on those subjects. Here are some samples:

"Our depths of joy in this saturation / In our polymorphously perverse constitution / The dissolution of our grief comes in libidinal death and the grace of mourning" "Deprivations of the flesh / A quarantine in abject absence / Euphoria denied: dripping, unsated phantom limb / Suffocated, stifled mass can feel the temperature rise / By knowledge unrealized: a tumorous, parasitic grief" "I am held in blood warmth / Sanguine, sublime fetishization / To bind desire into chasms of suffering / Where the dead meet the living"

You can tell what Vastum are talking about after focusing for a bit, but at first, their lyrics reads like something from a Suffocation album. Vastum write lyrics in Death Metal English.

...

Like other forms of English, Death Metal English is a tool kit. It can be used well or poorly; Vastum use it quite effectively. You can employ Death Metal English in other realms, but it's designed to make death metal lyrics sound more brutal. Why do DM bands write this way? Perhaps because a few early tastemakers chose to, and everyone else just followed along. Perhaps because all those lengthy words resonate nicely in the front of your face when you utter a death growl. Perhaps because its ponderous diction mirrors the blocky nature of the music. My best guess is that death metal bands use Death Metal English because it's innately awesome. Bands like Celtic Frost and Slayer gave us the roots of Death Metal English, just as they helped to build the foundations of the genre itself. Suffocation's song titles and lyrics might be the archetypal examples of purebred Death Metal English, though Nile's are up there too. Both American and Mexican Disgorges practice Death Metal English, albeit differently. Exhumed use aspects of Death Metal English for brainier ends. It is most common in Anglophone countries, but it has traveled elsewhere too. Dismember get down with Death Metal English on occasion, but not always; Mike Åkerfeldt plays it for laughs in Bloodbath. Demilich took Death Metal English further into impenetrable weirdness than most bands before or since. Carcass helped to develop Death Metal English with the whole medical thing, and then started applying it to non-gore topics. Not all death metal bands write in Death Metal English; notably, Chuck Schuldiner of Death did not, but his disciples in bands like Decrepit Birth do. I've identified some common traits of Death Metal English below:

Big, polysyllabic words: You don't have to use them correctly; you just have to use them. Bonus points for Greco-Latinate words that end in "-ition," "-ation," "-ution," "-ous," "-ized," "-ism," "-ance," "-ial," "-ity," and variations thereon. Double bonus points for words ending semi-inappropriately in "-ment," as in "Torn Into Enthrallment." These words don't even have to be real. Is Wormed's "Multivectorial Reionization" a real thing? Who cares? Adjectives: In Death Metal English, they're like guitar solos. You aren't using enough. Add more. Prepositional phrases: Same is true here, too — the more prepositional phrases, the better. "(-ation word) of the (ominous word)" is perhaps the most brutal of all grammatical constructions, which is why "Procreation (of the Wicked)" is one of the best song titles ever. It also has parentheses, which are a less common but still valued component of Death Metal English. Progressive tense: Especially useful for song titles. "(Verb)ing the (noun)" is also a great default song title, as in "Cloning the Stillborn," "Infecting the Crypts," and "Christening the Afterbirth." Passive voice: Active verbs aren't brutal. Passive voice is useful when you need to add more syllables to a line to make it fit the riff. Plus, it highlights whatever weird power dynamic is going on in your lyrics. Why say "The beast hath consumed him" when you could say "He hath been consumed by the beast"? Speaking of which — Archaic or pseudo-Biblical verbiage: If you write like you are some kind of ancient, ageless force who is unfamiliar with modern grammatical conventions, you are probably pretty evil. Bonus points for using constructions that evoke the King James Bible, which is ironically among the most metal texts in the English canon. "Thou," "hast," "thine," and so forth are all great; "unto" is my personal favorite. Yoda-style unconventional sentences can achieve the same effect, as in "Civilized I shall not be / By the holy strain of laws" or "I know the texts divine" (both from Morbid Angel's "Brainstorm"). Dave Vincent and Glen Benton are probably responsible for popularizing these tricks in a death metal context, but Nile raised them to an art form. Speaking of which: award more bonus points for each reference to any obscure or fictional non-Christian deity. Grandiloquent metaphor: This is death metal. Make whatever you're talking about sound really big and important. Illogical or meaningless sentences: This one certainly isn't unique to Death Metal English, but it's popular in the realm. Writing lyrics that make grammatical and substantive sense is not sufficiently off-putting and obscurantist for some bands, and doing so over crazy shred riffage is pretty hard to boot. Instead, why not say, as Impetuous Ritual did on "Convoluting Unto Despondent Anachronism," something like this: "Propagate correlated malediction / Reclamation of hierarchic genetic throne / Bound to iniquitous subordinancy / Coerced through conductive bedlam"? (The lyrics to Impetuous Ritual's Relentless Execution of Ceremonial Excrescence are a treasure trove of Death Metal English without peer.)

My favorite thing about Death Metal English is that it isn't subject matter-specific. Of course, it works best when you're talking about Satan, or Lovecraft, or murder or whatever. But you can turn pretty much any phrase or sentence into fodder for a sick death metal song using the same tropes:

Normal English: "Commuting to work" Death Metal English: "TRANSPORTATION OF THE WAGEBOUND UNTO THE NEXUS OF PERPETUAL QUOTIDIAN ENSLAVEMENT" Normal English: "This bok choy isn't very good" Death Metal English: "CASTIGATING THE VERDANT ISSUANCE OF THE SOILS OF JIANGNAN" Normal English: "I need to take a nap" Death Metal English: "RIPPED INTO THE UTTER EXHAUSTION OF THE MIDDLE DAY" Normal English: "Thanks for explaining the train schedule" Death Metal English: "PROFFERING GRATITUDE UPON THE CHRONOCRATION OF THE JUGGERNAUTS OF RETICULATED METALS AND FIRE" Normal English: "You have to mow the lawn" Death Metal English: "BRING DOWN THE SCYTHE OF GODS UPON THE NECKS OF THE GREEN-RIBBED LEGIONS AND SWEEP AWAY THEIR WRETCHED BODIES; THOU ART IMPLORED BY ME"

I could do this all day. Enjoy one of Nile's finest ventures into Death Metal English below.

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Nile - "Chapter Of Obeisance Before Giving Breath To The Inert One In The Presence Of The Cresent-Shaped Horns" (lyrics here)

...

Mizmor’s recent releases have pulled listeners deeper into the ever yawning gravitational well at the center of the project, seeing the band swallow droning ambience (with ambient composer Andrew Black), Louisiana sludge (with Thou), and spoken psychedelia (on their Wit's End EP). With all that soaring expansion behind it, the band would surely at some point make a conscious descent back to Earth, to taste dirt once more.

Enter Prosaic, the most human, feral album of Mizmor's career. In both sound and subject matter, the 4 songs here reflect the contortions our bodies make to accommodate lives of unspectacular repetition, and the toll taken in doing so. We spoke with ALN who as ever wrote, performed, and produced the record in isolation, about the changes required to create an album with its feet planted firmly on the ground.

–Luke Jackson

...

...

When listening to a new work from an established artist, people tend to have questions about how it’s going to relate to their body of work, stylistically speaking. Prosaic hammers out of the gate with "Only An Expanse," which has this searing punk energy, it gives you so many answers about the album within the first 10 seconds of pressing play. Was that deliberate?

Yeah, I wanted to start the record with a bang, in the sense that my approach to making Prosaic was all about trying to trim the fat, keep it punchy and interesting, and just kind of get in and get out as quickly as I could, within reason and without making it sound like an entirely different band. So I wanted to start things loud and fast and grab your attention from the get go, get right into it.

We're used to hearing your work described as black doom, what does it mean to have creative access to those two extreme ends of the spectrum in terms of tempo and style? What does it mean for your songwriting, both technically and in terms of the stories you want to tell?

Those have always been my two favorite sub genres of extreme metal, and I think that's probably because they tap into melancholy so effectively. They have sad melodies, as opposed to other sub genres that are more concerned with venting emotion and anger–I'm in it for the sad shit. So black metal reaches more of the angsty side of that for me and doom metal gets to more of the really depressing side of things. I could never pick between sub genres for a sound because I always want to do them both, so I've always interwoven them with droney passages and whatnot. It is nice, I like the way you put that question, it is nice to have access to both of those tempos, because it does give you more space to work in, more places that you can take the song, and more emotions you can evoke in the narrative that you're trying to tell. So often I find that melodies I write that I'm planning to play very slowly, also sound really cool with a blast beat behind them. So I might be able to transition those two parts together and then take it to a different spot.

You do have quite the singular voice in doing so. If we take the holy trinity of black, death, and doom: there are quite a few death doom bands operating out there, quite a lot of blackened death too, but black doom seems to be like a less populated space.

It’s certainly not intentional for me at all but yeah, doom metal is just not very popular compared to the other two. Because it's not fast and a lot of people find it boring but it was my first love in the metal world. It just works for me really well. I don't know why.

I was immediately taken aback with the artwork for Prosaic by Bryan Proteau. Your recent releases leant into these grand painterly landscapes, I think you were the first I recall featuring a Lewandowski for a cover as you did with Cairn, but Prosaic could not be more different; it has the energy of a middle ages woodcut image, how does that shift tie in with the album?

Totally, so I’ve done illustrations for covers a while back, and then I kind of got into the painting thing for a few albums in a row there. But going back to illustration this time was a deliberate choice, because I wanted to make a record that was less grandiose, and less epic sounding. I didn't want to make an album that had the vibe it felt like it was a masterpiece, some huge thing, I just wanted it to be more humble, human, and straightforward. The themes center around work, and the day in day out slice of life, monotony, and the purpose that we struggle to find or do find in work and how that both propels us and also makes us suffer. To me these themes were very plain, in a good way. And I just wanted it to look a lot more from the hip and raw, to me that was a drawing. I’ve also leaned more into classic black metal sound throughout the record, so there are a lot of obvious art references of older classic black metal records that were presented alongside illustrations in a style that I wanted to evoke, like peasantry, working and being a plain person.

You’ve said that in producing this album you asked yourself some questions, questions about whether you can forefront the fun and the self love aspects of creation, rather than getting super down in the weeds of perfectionism and needing it to sound a certain way. What did you have to do to keep that in check throughout the album's creation?

It was a real active practice, almost like a mindfulness or meditative practice where you deliberately notice your thoughts and your feelings arise, seeing them going in a certain direction, and intentionally not becoming enraptured in them and course correcting back to the goal, the exact task that you want to do. And that's obviously hard, it was a challenge. I mostly succeeded in it. I just became curious about what the final product would be, what the record would sound like if I stuck to this approach. And so there were always temptations to, to obsess and become unproductive, in my opinion, trying a performance or a take over and over and over again, or trying to troubleshoot this tiny, tiny little sound that you don't like. I did that to an extent, to try to and make something that's good, but all the while trying to default back to this mode of “is it good enough? Yeah, it is. Let's just keep going.” And so it was more about making a record that's good enough, while keeping a positive mental attitude, than it was about making a record that was quote-unquote perfect, despite having to tap into a negative headspace, because I've definitely made that record before, and worked that way before. And once you’ve made records over and over again, you become curious about different ways to do it, for yourself and to keep it interesting, right? So I was like, you know, it could turn out like total trash, but what if I didn't have to suffer quite as much for the record? Could it still be a great record? Could I make my process easier, more fun, more interesting for me so that I'm excited every day that I go into the studio to make it instead of feeling like, here we go again? And you know what, it turned out that I really loved how it came out, I liked the results of the experiment.

Reminds me of something Trent Reznor said, he was talking about the Nine Inch Nails live album and was saying, sometimes there's a weird hiss, or a note that doesn't sound perfect, and that can be the right thing or it can be the wrong thing: it's about deciding what to address.

Totally.

Alongside the artistic momentum and change that’s embodied in Prosaic you’ve said the songs are more slice of life in their narratives, touching on mundanity, repetition and labour, in turn steering the narrative of the album away from your personal philosophy and history. Did that feel liberating as a creator? Did it feel like hey, I can go anywhere now?

Yeah, totally. It’s just time to think about and talk about other stuff. And that I've come to naturally. You don't want to make the same record over and over again. And that plays into a few different areas like the approach to the production we just talked about, but also the lyrics and the themes. Am I going to talk about being an ex Christian for the rest of my life? I mean, no, I've made peace with that, and I've come to a good place, one of healing and growth and acceptance. And at least right now in my life, I don't need to talk about that. So it felt good to talk about something else, to talk about a few different things, not like one singular concept. I can construe a singular concept about the record in hindsight now, but at the time, it was like this song’s about time and our conception of time, this song’s about feeling like the grass is always greener, but that that's an illusion. And being in the present moment, this song's about, you know, depression. So, yeah, it was freeing not to feel like my identity as a person or as an artist is limited to just talking about God and atheism, and things like that.

Mizmor has been a touring band for a while now, but people have this strong association between the act and with you personally, reinforced by the fact that you’re writing, producing, performing, and creating records in isolation. But then in total contrast to the image of the lone metal wanderer, it seems like collaboration and friendship are really important to your ongoing work–how crucial is it to have both independent work, and then these big collaborations with Thou, Andrew Black etc. in your creative life?

It's really important, I definitely need the solo endeavor first and foremost, because if I was only in a band, or a collaborative project, I would go a little crazy. I need to have one outlet that doesn't get changed and that other opinions and edits aren't introduced into, for me to feel okay. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. It's how I process my thoughts and my feelings, it's like a journal, and over the ages, it just became metal and became Mizmor, but it's been many other things in the past.

So if I have that, then I feel like I can collaborate with other artists and not feel like I have to get my way, and be more open to seeing how things can evolve naturally by combining ideas, because I already have this thing scratching this other itch for me. And in taking Mizmor from the studio, the live band is really important. For the experience of the audience, it's really powerful to have all the instruments played live in front of you. The people that are my live band are really, really close friends of mine that I've been playing music with for between ten and 20 years, so we have this wonderful friendship and personal dynamic, but we also have this musical chemistry that takes a really long time to build up that's full of subtleties, nuances and idiosyncrasies. And I think that's really important, and I think the audience can feel that. It's great to just be able to do this serious, intense, extreme thing, but you're with all your friends and the second you're done performing, you're back to just making jokes and being there for each other. So it balances it out a lot and it keeps it positive, which I think is really important as well.

I think ultimately, I make this music because I have to for me, but I also have gotten to the point with the project that I do feel like I'm making it for other people as well. Because I've learned over the years that it's important to other people, and they resonate with it; that gives me a way bigger sense of purpose than just being a hermit, only making music for me, which is a really isolating and ultimately self centered practice. I really like approaching it in the sense that it can be helpful to other people - they want to gather in the same room and hear the sound waves and have a cathartic experience and connect with the lyrics. And it becomes bigger than just me, and my thoughts and feelings and whatnot. And so between that and the band it becomes so much more special, My process will always start with just me, and then eventually it ripples out and includes other people, I think both are important stages of artistic development.

It makes a lot of sense to want to come offstage and be surrounded by your friends and have fun and celebrate what you've done, especially after something so intense.

Yeah, totally. I mean, ultimately, life is completely absurd. And pain is part of that. And so is silliness. So, I kind of think they go hand in hand in a weird way, you know?

Metal is inherently silly and better for it! So Mizmor was never conceived in your mind as something that you could do live by yourself, and explore how those arrangements would work?

Not with the music that I'm currently writing, I think it needs to be performed with a full band. If I ever got to a place where I wanted to write a record that actually sounded like just a person playing an instrument and singing, for example, then I would probably be able to do that by myself live. But I don't want to be playing guitar and screaming with drum tracks. And I don't want to be playing drums screaming with guitar tracks, it's just not as interesting to watch. The live performance thing with these types of compositions and arrangements, I think both for the performers and the audience, it takes that full band chemistry and synergy to get everyone vibing and sharing in the experience.

On collaborations for a second, I was wondering how fun/difficult it was to keep Myopia a secret, and then to perform the album essentially on the day that it was announced?

It was difficult! That approach to releasing it was not my idea [laughs]. I like to have fun with peeling back the layers and teasing things and building some anticipation, not just for supporters out there, but for me, I think that's fun. It's also fun to drop a big surprise like that, but it was hard for me, because I was just so excited that I just wanted people to start knowing about it. Having said that, it certainly made some waves and was a lot of fun. That's why you collaborate, to do things you wouldn't normally do.

Prosaic is your first record on a new label, how has that impacted the workflow of its creation, and happens post release?

Chris [Bruni] at Profound Lore has been incredibly easy to work with, and is very responsive, things just move really quickly and effortlessly between him and I. I changed labels for a few different reasons, but one of them was to reach new people and a larger amount of people. And I think we've done that a little bit already, I'm really excited to see more of the after effects of that post release.

So there's another collaboration that's come around with this album, and that’s with the video for "No Place To Arrive." How did you end up working with Emma [Ruth-Rundle] on that piece, what’s your shared history?

Emma is actually my sister-in-law, I'm married to her sister. And we have been good friends for, I don't know, nine or ten years now. Over the course of that time, every once in a while, we’ve been a part of each other's work, and helped each other out with things. And so the idea came about to make this video. Zev Deans the director is a friend of mine, he had done the animated video for “Wit's End” a couple of years ago, and he sent me a message saying hey, me and a crew member, and some gear are coincidentally going to be in Portland for a few days, we’re between projects, and we have time off that we want to fill, do you want to make a music video for like, a reasonable budget? And I was like, Shit, yeah! So I made some phone calls and figured out the budget and how we were going to do it. And then I needed a concept and a story kind of quickly, and I had a rough idea but I didn't know if it could fill 10 minutes and be interesting, so that's when I called Emma because she has made a few music videos that are really, really awesome. And this is more like her world that I'm just not as familiar with, I actually never really saw myself making a live action music video for this project. So she helped me make sure it was cool and interesting. She spent a session or two with me brainstorming and organising a shot list and that kind of stuff. And then I developed that more with Zev, and then we all met up outside of Salem, Oregon, and she was only able to come for a few hours of the first day to make sure that it was achieving what we had talked about, and to meet the dudes.

The song is about staying in the present moment and not being distracted, keeping coming back to the task of making the fire, trying not to be distracted by really surreal stuff, so there’s this tension in there between the real and the surreal, you know, fiction, and fantasy and real life. It sounded perfect, so we jumped at doing that treatment.

How did the prompt generation part of creation work? It’s a hot subject at the moment.

That part is still a mystery to me, because I was not involved in that whatsoever. But they did such a beautiful job of putting it into the video, and having it look like it's blended, you know, with, I mean, there's one section that’s purely animated, but for the most part, it's blended with the live action shots. And it just looks so cool.

Given the success that you've had working out of your home studio for a number of albums now, has it led to any kind of wild experiments in creation, anything unexpected or distinctly un-Mizmor?

You know, the one thing that I've added to my process over the last couple of years that's kind of un-Mizmor is using tape machines here and there, which is something I got from my friend and collaborator Andrew Black, because he makes ambient music and almost everything he does has tape in it of some form. After we made our collab together, I realised how wonderful something like an acoustic guitar sounds when it's on a shitty micro cassette and sounds all wobbly and blown out and unlike it's coming out of a radio in terms of like the EQ. So that kind of changed my approach because I do a fair amount of acoustic or clean guitar, sparse sections, peppered in throughout the songs. And it's kind of nice sometimes to be like yeah, that's sounds a little boring, I guess what if it sounded a little old and fucked up and not just like a regular guitar? So that in combination with having produced a couple of other artists’ albums, kind of put me into this headspace of asking myself is that done? Is that interesting enough? Sometimes that takes going too far, and then pulling it back. That's too crazy and indulgent. You know, let's find the limit, and then we dial it back. But I think it took collaborating with other artists and occupying a producer engineer role for a couple other projects to change how I approached my own music, and not just be like I wrote the songs, I recorded them and now it's done. Now I can put on this other hat and ask a few other questions in search of different tones, and not call it done right away because we got the performance, which at first felt un-Mizmor-ish because I had typically said you press record, you get the take and that's it, like true cult raw black metal - If you try too hard, then it's too polished. It's all in the evolution I suppose.

There’s still some time before release, what do you want people to have in mind when they hear the album?

I guess I'm not necessarily nervous about the reception. But to me, it's very different. And I hope people like it. I suppose whether they do or don't, it doesn't matter in a sense, it's too late, the record’s done. You know, when you do something different, you just hope that people are along for the ride with you as an artist, and they'll go with you where you go. Without too much kicking and screaming.

...

Prosaic is out now via Profound Lore Records, and can be purchased here.

Mizmor’s recent releases have pulled listeners deeper into the ever yawning gravitational well at the center of the project, seeing the band swallow droning ambience (with ambient composer Andrew Black), Louisiana sludge (with Thou), and spoken psychedelia (on their Wit's End EP). With all that soaring expansion behind it, the band would surely at some point make a conscious descent back to Earth, to taste dirt once more.

Enter Prosaic, the most human, feral album of Mizmor's career. In both sound and subject matter, the 4 songs here reflect the contortions our bodies make to accommodate lives of unspectacular repetition, and the toll taken in doing so. We spoke with ALN who as ever wrote, performed, and produced the record in isolation, about the changes required to create an album with its feet planted firmly on the ground.

–Luke Jackson

...

...

When listening to a new work from an established artist, people tend to have questions about how it’s going to relate to their body of work, stylistically speaking. Prosaic hammers out of the gate with "Only An Expanse," which has this searing punk energy, it gives you so many answers about the album within the first 10 seconds of pressing play. Was that deliberate?

Yeah, I wanted to start the record with a bang, in the sense that my approach to making Prosaic was all about trying to trim the fat, keep it punchy and interesting, and just kind of get in and get out as quickly as I could, within reason and without making it sound like an entirely different band. So I wanted to start things loud and fast and grab your attention from the get go, get right into it.

We're used to hearing your work described as black doom, what does it mean to have creative access to those two extreme ends of the spectrum in terms of tempo and style? What does it mean for your songwriting, both technically and in terms of the stories you want to tell?

Those have always been my two favorite sub genres of extreme metal, and I think that's probably because they tap into melancholy so effectively. They have sad melodies, as opposed to other sub genres that are more concerned with venting emotion and anger–I'm in it for the sad shit. So black metal reaches more of the angsty side of that for me and doom metal gets to more of the really depressing side of things. I could never pick between sub genres for a sound because I always want to do them both, so I've always interwoven them with droney passages and whatnot. It is nice, I like the way you put that question, it is nice to have access to both of those tempos, because it does give you more space to work in, more places that you can take the song, and more emotions you can evoke in the narrative that you're trying to tell. So often I find that melodies I write that I'm planning to play very slowly, also sound really cool with a blast beat behind them. So I might be able to transition those two parts together and then take it to a different spot.

You do have quite the singular voice in doing so. If we take the holy trinity of black, death, and doom: there are quite a few death doom bands operating out there, quite a lot of blackened death too, but black doom seems to be like a less populated space.

It’s certainly not intentional for me at all but yeah, doom metal is just not very popular compared to the other two. Because it's not fast and a lot of people find it boring but it was my first love in the metal world. It just works for me really well. I don't know why.

I was immediately taken aback with the artwork for Prosaic by Bryan Proteau. Your recent releases leant into these grand painterly landscapes, I think you were the first I recall featuring a Lewandowski for a cover as you did with Cairn, but Prosaic could not be more different; it has the energy of a middle ages woodcut image, how does that shift tie in with the album?

Totally, so I’ve done illustrations for covers a while back, and then I kind of got into the painting thing for a few albums in a row there. But going back to illustration this time was a deliberate choice, because I wanted to make a record that was less grandiose, and less epic sounding. I didn't want to make an album that had the vibe it felt like it was a masterpiece, some huge thing, I just wanted it to be more humble, human, and straightforward. The themes center around work, and the day in day out slice of life, monotony, and the purpose that we struggle to find or do find in work and how that both propels us and also makes us suffer. To me these themes were very plain, in a good way. And I just wanted it to look a lot more from the hip and raw, to me that was a drawing. I’ve also leaned more into classic black metal sound throughout the record, so there are a lot of obvious art references of older classic black metal records that were presented alongside illustrations in a style that I wanted to evoke, like peasantry, working and being a plain person.

You’ve said that in producing this album you asked yourself some questions, questions about whether you can forefront the fun and the self love aspects of creation, rather than getting super down in the weeds of perfectionism and needing it to sound a certain way. What did you have to do to keep that in check throughout the album's creation?

It was a real active practice, almost like a mindfulness or meditative practice where you deliberately notice your thoughts and your feelings arise, seeing them going in a certain direction, and intentionally not becoming enraptured in them and course correcting back to the goal, the exact task that you want to do. And that's obviously hard, it was a challenge. I mostly succeeded in it. I just became curious about what the final product would be, what the record would sound like if I stuck to this approach. And so there were always temptations to, to obsess and become unproductive, in my opinion, trying a performance or a take over and over and over again, or trying to troubleshoot this tiny, tiny little sound that you don't like. I did that to an extent, to try to and make something that's good, but all the while trying to default back to this mode of “is it good enough? Yeah, it is. Let's just keep going.” And so it was more about making a record that's good enough, while keeping a positive mental attitude, than it was about making a record that was quote-unquote perfect, despite having to tap into a negative headspace, because I've definitely made that record before, and worked that way before. And once you’ve made records over and over again, you become curious about different ways to do it, for yourself and to keep it interesting, right? So I was like, you know, it could turn out like total trash, but what if I didn't have to suffer quite as much for the record? Could it still be a great record? Could I make my process easier, more fun, more interesting for me so that I'm excited every day that I go into the studio to make it instead of feeling like, here we go again? And you know what, it turned out that I really loved how it came out, I liked the results of the experiment.

Reminds me of something Trent Reznor said, he was talking about the Nine Inch Nails live album and was saying, sometimes there's a weird hiss, or a note that doesn't sound perfect, and that can be the right thing or it can be the wrong thing: it's about deciding what to address.

Totally.

Alongside the artistic momentum and change that’s embodied in Prosaic you’ve said the songs are more slice of life in their narratives, touching on mundanity, repetition and labour, in turn steering the narrative of the album away from your personal philosophy and history. Did that feel liberating as a creator? Did it feel like hey, I can go anywhere now?

Yeah, totally. It’s just time to think about and talk about other stuff. And that I've come to naturally. You don't want to make the same record over and over again. And that plays into a few different areas like the approach to the production we just talked about, but also the lyrics and the themes. Am I going to talk about being an ex Christian for the rest of my life? I mean, no, I've made peace with that, and I've come to a good place, one of healing and growth and acceptance. And at least right now in my life, I don't need to talk about that. So it felt good to talk about something else, to talk about a few different things, not like one singular concept. I can construe a singular concept about the record in hindsight now, but at the time, it was like this song’s about time and our conception of time, this song’s about feeling like the grass is always greener, but that that's an illusion. And being in the present moment, this song's about, you know, depression. So, yeah, it was freeing not to feel like my identity as a person or as an artist is limited to just talking about God and atheism, and things like that.

Mizmor has been a touring band for a while now, but people have this strong association between the act and with you personally, reinforced by the fact that you’re writing, producing, performing, and creating records in isolation. But then in total contrast to the image of the lone metal wanderer, it seems like collaboration and friendship are really important to your ongoing work–how crucial is it to have both independent work, and then these big collaborations with Thou, Andrew Black etc. in your creative life?

It's really important, I definitely need the solo endeavor first and foremost, because if I was only in a band, or a collaborative project, I would go a little crazy. I need to have one outlet that doesn't get changed and that other opinions and edits aren't introduced into, for me to feel okay. I’ve been that way since I was a kid. It's how I process my thoughts and my feelings, it's like a journal, and over the ages, it just became metal and became Mizmor, but it's been many other things in the past.

So if I have that, then I feel like I can collaborate with other artists and not feel like I have to get my way, and be more open to seeing how things can evolve naturally by combining ideas, because I already have this thing scratching this other itch for me. And in taking Mizmor from the studio, the live band is really important. For the experience of the audience, it's really powerful to have all the instruments played live in front of you. The people that are my live band are really, really close friends of mine that I've been playing music with for between ten and 20 years, so we have this wonderful friendship and personal dynamic, but we also have this musical chemistry that takes a really long time to build up that's full of subtleties, nuances and idiosyncrasies. And I think that's really important, and I think the audience can feel that. It's great to just be able to do this serious, intense, extreme thing, but you're with all your friends and the second you're done performing, you're back to just making jokes and being there for each other. So it balances it out a lot and it keeps it positive, which I think is really important as well.

I think ultimately, I make this music because I have to for me, but I also have gotten to the point with the project that I do feel like I'm making it for other people as well. Because I've learned over the years that it's important to other people, and they resonate with it; that gives me a way bigger sense of purpose than just being a hermit, only making music for me, which is a really isolating and ultimately self centered practice. I really like approaching it in the sense that it can be helpful to other people - they want to gather in the same room and hear the sound waves and have a cathartic experience and connect with the lyrics. And it becomes bigger than just me, and my thoughts and feelings and whatnot. And so between that and the band it becomes so much more special, My process will always start with just me, and then eventually it ripples out and includes other people, I think both are important stages of artistic development.

It makes a lot of sense to want to come offstage and be surrounded by your friends and have fun and celebrate what you've done, especially after something so intense.

Yeah, totally. I mean, ultimately, life is completely absurd. And pain is part of that. And so is silliness. So, I kind of think they go hand in hand in a weird way, you know?

Metal is inherently silly and better for it! So Mizmor was never conceived in your mind as something that you could do live by yourself, and explore how those arrangements would work?

Not with the music that I'm currently writing, I think it needs to be performed with a full band. If I ever got to a place where I wanted to write a record that actually sounded like just a person playing an instrument and singing, for example, then I would probably be able to do that by myself live. But I don't want to be playing guitar and screaming with drum tracks. And I don't want to be playing drums screaming with guitar tracks, it's just not as interesting to watch. The live performance thing with these types of compositions and arrangements, I think both for the performers and the audience, it takes that full band chemistry and synergy to get everyone vibing and sharing in the experience.

On collaborations for a second, I was wondering how fun/difficult it was to keep Myopia a secret, and then to perform the album essentially on the day that it was announced?

It was difficult! That approach to releasing it was not my idea [laughs]. I like to have fun with peeling back the layers and teasing things and building some anticipation, not just for supporters out there, but for me, I think that's fun. It's also fun to drop a big surprise like that, but it was hard for me, because I was just so excited that I just wanted people to start knowing about it. Having said that, it certainly made some waves and was a lot of fun. That's why you collaborate, to do things you wouldn't normally do.

Prosaic is your first record on a new label, how has that impacted the workflow of its creation, and happens post release?

Chris [Bruni] at Profound Lore has been incredibly easy to work with, and is very responsive, things just move really quickly and effortlessly between him and I. I changed labels for a few different reasons, but one of them was to reach new people and a larger amount of people. And I think we've done that a little bit already, I'm really excited to see more of the after effects of that post release.

So there's another collaboration that's come around with this album, and that’s with the video for "No Place To Arrive." How did you end up working with Emma [Ruth-Rundle] on that piece, what’s your shared history?

Emma is actually my sister-in-law, I'm married to her sister. And we have been good friends for, I don't know, nine or ten years now. Over the course of that time, every once in a while, we’ve been a part of each other's work, and helped each other out with things. And so the idea came about to make this video. Zev Deans the director is a friend of mine, he had done the animated video for “Wit's End” a couple of years ago, and he sent me a message saying hey, me and a crew member, and some gear are coincidentally going to be in Portland for a few days, we’re between projects, and we have time off that we want to fill, do you want to make a music video for like, a reasonable budget? And I was like, Shit, yeah! So I made some phone calls and figured out the budget and how we were going to do it. And then I needed a concept and a story kind of quickly, and I had a rough idea but I didn't know if it could fill 10 minutes and be interesting, so that's when I called Emma because she has made a few music videos that are really, really awesome. And this is more like her world that I'm just not as familiar with, I actually never really saw myself making a live action music video for this project. So she helped me make sure it was cool and interesting. She spent a session or two with me brainstorming and organising a shot list and that kind of stuff. And then I developed that more with Zev, and then we all met up outside of Salem, Oregon, and she was only able to come for a few hours of the first day to make sure that it was achieving what we had talked about, and to meet the dudes.

The song is about staying in the present moment and not being distracted, keeping coming back to the task of making the fire, trying not to be distracted by really surreal stuff, so there’s this tension in there between the real and the surreal, you know, fiction, and fantasy and real life. It sounded perfect, so we jumped at doing that treatment.

How did the prompt generation part of creation work? It’s a hot subject at the moment.

That part is still a mystery to me, because I was not involved in that whatsoever. But they did such a beautiful job of putting it into the video, and having it look like it's blended, you know, with, I mean, there's one section that’s purely animated, but for the most part, it's blended with the live action shots. And it just looks so cool.

Given the success that you've had working out of your home studio for a number of albums now, has it led to any kind of wild experiments in creation, anything unexpected or distinctly un-Mizmor?

You know, the one thing that I've added to my process over the last couple of years that's kind of un-Mizmor is using tape machines here and there, which is something I got from my friend and collaborator Andrew Black, because he makes ambient music and almost everything he does has tape in it of some form. After we made our collab together, I realised how wonderful something like an acoustic guitar sounds when it's on a shitty micro cassette and sounds all wobbly and blown out and unlike it's coming out of a radio in terms of like the EQ. So that kind of changed my approach because I do a fair amount of acoustic or clean guitar, sparse sections, peppered in throughout the songs. And it's kind of nice sometimes to be like yeah, that's sounds a little boring, I guess what if it sounded a little old and fucked up and not just like a regular guitar? So that in combination with having produced a couple of other artists’ albums, kind of put me into this headspace of asking myself is that done? Is that interesting enough? Sometimes that takes going too far, and then pulling it back. That's too crazy and indulgent. You know, let's find the limit, and then we dial it back. But I think it took collaborating with other artists and occupying a producer engineer role for a couple other projects to change how I approached my own music, and not just be like I wrote the songs, I recorded them and now it's done. Now I can put on this other hat and ask a few other questions in search of different tones, and not call it done right away because we got the performance, which at first felt un-Mizmor-ish because I had typically said you press record, you get the take and that's it, like true cult raw black metal - If you try too hard, then it's too polished. It's all in the evolution I suppose.

There’s still some time before release, what do you want people to have in mind when they hear the album?

I guess I'm not necessarily nervous about the reception. But to me, it's very different. And I hope people like it. I suppose whether they do or don't, it doesn't matter in a sense, it's too late, the record’s done. You know, when you do something different, you just hope that people are along for the ride with you as an artist, and they'll go with you where you go. Without too much kicking and screaming.

...

Prosaic is out now via Profound Lore Records, and can be purchased here.

---

Here are the new (and recent) metal releases for July 30th through August 5th. Releases reflect proposed North American scheduling, if available. Expect to see most of these albums on shelves or distros on Fridays. See something we missed or have any thoughts? Let us know in the comments. Plus, as always, feel free to post your own shopping lists. Happy digging. Send us your promos (streaming links preferred) to: [email protected]. Do not send us promo material via social media.

---

Upcoming Releases

An Autumn for Crippled Children -- Closure | Prosthetic Records | Post-Black Metal + Shoegaze | Netherlands Wielding stirring strings and tearful guitar leads against a rough-edged backdrop of surly blackened post-metal, An Autumn for Crippled Children's latest album does what they do best: make you feel sad, but in a good way.

--Ted Nubel

...

Tumulation -- Haunted Funeral Creations | Hammerheart Records | Death Metal + Doom Meal | United States (California) The members of Conjureth, who released one of the year's best death metal albums back in January, formed a side group to release some of the smokiest and thickest death metal they can conjure, trading their technicality for an approach that must've been unearthed from a crypt.

--Colin Dempsey

...

Dun Ringill -- 150 - Where The Old Gods Play Act 1 | The Sign Records | Doom Metal | Sweden The folky doom metal of Dun Ringill rides on Tomas Eriksson's shoulders, whose vocal performance elevates them to a new plane. They're propulsive and compelling in their own right, but Eriksson teeters on the verge of excess in a way that's downright fun.

--Colin Dempsey

...

Besta -- Terra Em Desapego | Lifeforce Records | Grindcore + Death Metal | Portugal Grindcore bands rarely push themselves with lengthy tracks, but Besta make a strong case for why more of them should. They know when to keep their feet on the pedal across their 5+ minute songs and when to sink their teeth into a groove, sliding from grindcore to death metal with ease. It's not progressive metal by any means, but it's exhilarating to hear Besta push the genre's stereotypical track structures.

--Colin Dempsey

...

Rabbit -- Bardo | Independent | Grindcore | United States (New York) Brooklyn's Rabbit dropped Bardo like a ton of bricks last Friday. This grind-adjacent hardcore mini-album consists of five succinct tracks that rope in death metal gristle and punk fury. Try "Tail Wags Dog" for a particularly gruesome cross-section of Rabbit. Bilious and loud, Bardo shows a band busting down genre walls for maximum devastation.

--Colin Williams

...

Crypta -- Shades of Sorrow | Napalm Records | Death Metal | Brazil While Crypta have always had intense heavy metal prowess, the one criticism I've had about the band in the past is that they don't necessarily have their own niche or unique take on the classic death metal sound to make them stand out. Now they have upped the level considerably with this record, which has a focused and steady vibe, more so than past releases. There's still a lot of Morbid Angel worship and old school flavor, but with a spin that is decidedly their own.

--Addison Herron-Wheeler

...

Drune -- Drown | Independent | Doom + Stoner + Drone Metal | United States With its members disparate in locale but united in grievous riffage, Drune's new EP summons a torrent of elemental doom into our realm.

--Ted Nubel

...

Djinn and Miskatonic -- Paleo | Independent | Doom Metal | India Paleo finds a hypnotizing groove in the arms of utterly obliterating drum tones, overbearing guitar, and vocals intoned with otherworldly mysticism. It's a slow-moving stampede with plenty of punch to hammer its riffs home.

--Ted Nubel

...

Thumos -- Musica Universalis | Independent | Progressive Doom + Post-Metal | United States Historical aesthetic notwithstanding, Thumos approaches post-metal with an unusually forward-thinking angle - intermingling everything from drum loops to blast beats in service of instrumental jams that focus heavily on captivating hooks. Lest it seem too progressive, everything is just a little fuzzy and lo-fi, which feeds back excellently into the feeling of ancient science that surrounds this record.

--Ted Nubel

...

Eminentia Tenebris -- Rise of a New Kingdom | Antiq Records | Atmospheric Black Metal | France Rise of a New Kingdom cultivates a very specific atmosphere, blending frosty black metal with warm, yet majestic melodies. Excellent, nostalgic black metal.

--Ted Nubel

...

Ancient Torment / Haxen -- The Howling Gale | Eternal Death | Black Metal | United States (Rhode Island) The forthcoming split between Providence acts Ancient Torment and Haxen is proof that New England's haunted history can serve as fertile soil for classic black metal. While Ancient Torment dip their toes more into Quebec-style ornateness, Haxen hews more closely to Finnish filth as they delve into American arcana. Haxen have been honing their craft for 23 years, while relative newcomers Ancient Torment are somewhat newer and just added vocalist Tabarnak last year. Both make a case for Rhode Island's shores as a place worth watching for fresh blasphemous black metal.

--Colin Williams

...

Dynma Lotva -- The Land under the Black Wings: Blood (Зямля Пад Чорнымі Крыламі: Кроў) | Prophecy Productions | Post-Metal + Doom Metal + Black Metal | Belarus Dymna Lotva's third album dashes away military fetishizations and heroic combat tales for a grounded and affecting take on how war affects citizens. It contains samples of screaming children and pulls from both doom metal and depressive black metal, so yes, it's as dour as it sounds.

--Colin Dempsey

...

image

---

Here are the new (and recent) metal releases for July 30th through August 5th. Releases reflect proposed North American scheduling, if available. Expect to see most of these albums on shelves or distros on Fridays. See something we missed or have any thoughts? Let us know in the comments. Plus, as always, feel free to post your own shopping lists. Happy digging. Send us your promos (streaming links preferred) to: [email protected]. Do not send us promo material via social media.

---

Upcoming Releases

An Autumn for Crippled Children -- Closure | Prosthetic Records | Post-Black Metal + Shoegaze | Netherlands Wielding stirring strings and tearful guitar leads against a rough-edged backdrop of surly blackened post-metal, An Autumn for Crippled Children's latest album does what they do best: make you feel sad, but in a good way.

--Ted Nubel

...

Tumulation -- Haunted Funeral Creations | Hammerheart Records | Death Metal + Doom Meal | United States (California) The members of Conjureth, who released one of the year's best death metal albums back in January, formed a side group to release some of the smokiest and thickest death metal they can conjure, trading their technicality for an approach that must've been unearthed from a crypt.

--Colin Dempsey

...

Dun Ringill -- 150 - Where The Old Gods Play Act 1 | The Sign Records | Doom Metal | Sweden The folky doom metal of Dun Ringill rides on Tomas Eriksson's shoulders, whose vocal performance elevates them to a new plane. They're propulsive and compelling in their own right, but Eriksson teeters on the verge of excess in a way that's downright fun.

--Colin Dempsey

...

Besta -- Terra Em Desapego | Lifeforce Records | Grindcore + Death Metal | Portugal Grindcore bands rarely push themselves with lengthy tracks, but Besta make a strong case for why more of them should. They know when to keep their feet on the pedal across their 5+ minute songs and when to sink their teeth into a groove, sliding from grindcore to death metal with ease. It's not progressive metal by any means, but it's exhilarating to hear Besta push the genre's stereotypical track structures.

--Colin Dempsey

...

Rabbit -- Bardo | Independent | Grindcore | United States (New York) Brooklyn's Rabbit dropped Bardo like a ton of bricks last Friday. This grind-adjacent hardcore mini-album consists of five succinct tracks that rope in death metal gristle and punk fury. Try "Tail Wags Dog" for a particularly gruesome cross-section of Rabbit. Bilious and loud, Bardo shows a band busting down genre walls for maximum devastation.

--Colin Williams

...

Crypta -- Shades of Sorrow | Napalm Records | Death Metal | Brazil While Crypta have always had intense heavy metal prowess, the one criticism I've had about the band in the past is that they don't necessarily have their own niche or unique take on the classic death metal sound to make them stand out. Now they have upped the level considerably with this record, which has a focused and steady vibe, more so than past releases. There's still a lot of Morbid Angel worship and old school flavor, but with a spin that is decidedly their own.

--Addison Herron-Wheeler

...

Drune -- Drown | Independent | Doom + Stoner + Drone Metal | United States With its members disparate in locale but united in grievous riffage, Drune's new EP summons a torrent of elemental doom into our realm.

--Ted Nubel

...

Djinn and Miskatonic -- Paleo | Independent | Doom Metal | India Paleo finds a hypnotizing groove in the arms of utterly obliterating drum tones, overbearing guitar, and vocals intoned with otherworldly mysticism. It's a slow-moving stampede with plenty of punch to hammer its riffs home.

--Ted Nubel

...

Thumos -- Musica Universalis | Independent | Progressive Doom + Post-Metal | United States Historical aesthetic notwithstanding, Thumos approaches post-metal with an unusually forward-thinking angle - intermingling everything from drum loops to blast beats in service of instrumental jams that focus heavily on captivating hooks. Lest it seem too progressive, everything is just a little fuzzy and lo-fi, which feeds back excellently into the feeling of ancient science that surrounds this record.

--Ted Nubel

...

Eminentia Tenebris -- Rise of a New Kingdom | Antiq Records | Atmospheric Black Metal | France Rise of a New Kingdom cultivates a very specific atmosphere, blending frosty black metal with warm, yet majestic melodies. Excellent, nostalgic black metal.

--Ted Nubel

...

Ancient Torment / Haxen -- The Howling Gale | Eternal Death | Black Metal | United States (Rhode Island) The forthcoming split between Providence acts Ancient Torment and Haxen is proof that New England's haunted history can serve as fertile soil for classic black metal. While Ancient Torment dip their toes more into Quebec-style ornateness, Haxen hews more closely to Finnish filth as they delve into American arcana. Haxen have been honing their craft for 23 years, while relative newcomers Ancient Torment are somewhat newer and just added vocalist Tabarnak last year. Both make a case for Rhode Island's shores as a place worth watching for fresh blasphemous black metal.

--Colin Williams

...

Dynma Lotva -- The Land under the Black Wings: Blood (Зямля Пад Чорнымі Крыламі: Кроў) | Prophecy Productions | Post-Metal + Doom Metal + Black Metal | Belarus Dymna Lotva's third album dashes away military fetishizations and heroic combat tales for a grounded and affecting take on how war affects citizens. It contains samples of screaming children and pulls from both doom metal and depressive black metal, so yes, it's as dour as it sounds.

--Colin Dempsey

...

image

---

Here are the new (and recent) metal releases for July 30th through August 5th. Releases reflect proposed North American scheduling, if available. Expect to see most of these albums on shelves or distros on Fridays. See something we missed or have any thoughts? Let us know in the comments. Plus, as always, feel free to post your own shopping lists. Happy digging. Send us your promos (streaming links preferred) to: [email protected]. Do not send us promo material via social media.

---

Upcoming Releases

An Autumn for Crippled Children -- Closure | Prosthetic Records | Post-Black Metal + Shoegaze | Netherlands Wielding stirring strings and tearful guitar leads against a rough-edged backdrop of surly blackened post-metal, An Autumn for Crippled Children's latest album does what they do best: make you feel sad, but in a good way.

--Ted Nubel

...

Tumulation -- Haunted Funeral Creations | Hammerheart Records | Death Metal + Doom Meal | United States (California) The members of Conjureth, who released one of the year's best death metal albums back in January, formed a side group to release some of the smokiest and thickest death metal they can conjure, trading their technicality for an approach that must've been unearthed from a crypt.

--Colin Dempsey

...

Dun Ringill -- 150 - Where The Old Gods Play Act 1 | The Sign Records | Doom Metal | Sweden The folky doom metal of Dun Ringill rides on Tomas Eriksson's shoulders, whose vocal performance elevates them to a new plane. They're propulsive and compelling in their own right, but Eriksson teeters on the verge of excess in a way that's downright fun.

--Colin Dempsey

...

Besta -- Terra Em Desapego | Lifeforce Records | Grindcore + Death Metal | Portugal Grindcore bands rarely push themselves with lengthy tracks, but Besta make a strong case for why more of them should. They know when to keep their feet on the pedal across their 5+ minute songs and when to sink their teeth into a groove, sliding from grindcore to death metal with ease. It's not progressive metal by any means, but it's exhilarating to hear Besta push the genre's stereotypical track structures.

--Colin Dempsey

...

Rabbit -- Bardo | Independent | Grindcore | United States (New York) Brooklyn's Rabbit dropped Bardo like a ton of bricks last Friday. This grind-adjacent hardcore mini-album consists of five succinct tracks that rope in death metal gristle and punk fury. Try "Tail Wags Dog" for a particularly gruesome cross-section of Rabbit. Bilious and loud, Bardo shows a band busting down genre walls for maximum devastation.

--Colin Williams

...

Crypta -- Shades of Sorrow | Napalm Records | Death Metal | Brazil While Crypta have always had intense heavy metal prowess, the one criticism I've had about the band in the past is that they don't necessarily have their own niche or unique take on the classic death metal sound to make them stand out. Now they have upped the level considerably with this record, which has a focused and steady vibe, more so than past releases. There's still a lot of Morbid Angel worship and old school flavor, but with a spin that is decidedly their own.

--Addison Herron-Wheeler

...

Drune -- Drown | Independent | Doom + Stoner + Drone Metal | United States With its members disparate in locale but united in grievous riffage, Drune's new EP summons a torrent of elemental doom into our realm.

--Ted Nubel

...

Djinn and Miskatonic -- Paleo | Independent | Doom Metal | India Paleo finds a hypnotizing groove in the arms of utterly obliterating drum tones, overbearing guitar, and vocals intoned with otherworldly mysticism. It's a slow-moving stampede with plenty of punch to hammer its riffs home.

--Ted Nubel

...

Thumos -- Musica Universalis | Independent | Progressive Doom + Post-Metal | United States Historical aesthetic notwithstanding, Thumos approaches post-metal with an unusually forward-thinking angle - intermingling everything from drum loops to blast beats in service of instrumental jams that focus heavily on captivating hooks. Lest it seem too progressive, everything is just a little fuzzy and lo-fi, which feeds back excellently into the feeling of ancient science that surrounds this record.

--Ted Nubel

...

Eminentia Tenebris -- Rise of a New Kingdom | Antiq Records | Atmospheric Black Metal | France Rise of a New Kingdom cultivates a very specific atmosphere, blending frosty black metal with warm, yet majestic melodies. Excellent, nostalgic black metal.

--Ted Nubel

...

Ancient Torment / Haxen -- The Howling Gale | Eternal Death | Black Metal | United States (Rhode Island) The forthcoming split between Providence acts Ancient Torment and Haxen is proof that New England's haunted history can serve as fertile soil for classic black metal. While Ancient Torment dip their toes more into Quebec-style ornateness, Haxen hews more closely to Finnish filth as they delve into American arcana. Haxen have been honing their craft for 23 years, while relative newcomers Ancient Torment are somewhat newer and just added vocalist Tabarnak last year. Both make a case for Rhode Island's shores as a place worth watching for fresh blasphemous black metal.

--Colin Williams

...

Dynma Lotva -- The Land under the Black Wings: Blood (Зямля Пад Чорнымі Крыламі: Кроў) | Prophecy Productions | Post-Metal + Doom Metal + Black Metal | Belarus Dymna Lotva's third album dashes away military fetishizations and heroic combat tales for a grounded and affecting take on how war affects citizens. It contains samples of screaming children and pulls from both doom metal and depressive black metal, so yes, it's as dour as it sounds.

--Colin Dempsey

...

---

Here are the new (and recent) metal releases for July 30th through August 5th. Releases reflect proposed North American scheduling, if available. Expect to see most of these albums on shelves or distros on Fridays. See something we missed or have any thoughts? Let us know in the comments. Plus, as always, feel free to post your own shopping lists. Happy digging. Send us your promos (streaming links preferred) to: [email protected]. Do not send us promo material via social media.

---

Upcoming Releases

An Autumn for Crippled Children -- Closure | Prosthetic Records | Post-Black Metal + Shoegaze | Netherlands Wielding stirring strings and tearful guitar leads against a rough-edged backdrop of surly blackened post-metal, An Autumn for Crippled Children's latest album does what they do best: make you feel sad, but in a good way.

--Ted Nubel

...

Tumulation -- Haunted Funeral Creations | Hammerheart Records | Death Metal + Doom Meal | United States (California) The members of Conjureth, who released one of the year's best death metal albums back in January, formed a side group to release some of the smokiest and thickest death metal they can conjure, trading their technicality for an approach that must've been unearthed from a crypt.

--Colin Dempsey

...

Dun Ringill -- 150 - Where The Old Gods Play Act 1 | The Sign Records | Doom Metal | Sweden The folky doom metal of Dun Ringill rides on Tomas Eriksson's shoulders, whose vocal performance elevates them to a new plane. They're propulsive and compelling in their own right, but Eriksson teeters on the verge of excess in a way that's downright fun.

--Colin Dempsey

...

Besta -- Terra Em Desapego | Lifeforce Records | Grindcore + Death Metal | Portugal Grindcore bands rarely push themselves with lengthy tracks, but Besta make a strong case for why more of them should. They know when to keep their feet on the pedal across their 5+ minute songs and when to sink their teeth into a groove, sliding from grindcore to death metal with ease. It's not progressive metal by any means, but it's exhilarating to hear Besta push the genre's stereotypical track structures.

--Colin Dempsey

...

Rabbit -- Bardo | Independent | Grindcore | United States (New York) Brooklyn's Rabbit dropped Bardo like a ton of bricks last Friday. This grind-adjacent hardcore mini-album consists of five succinct tracks that rope in death metal gristle and punk fury. Try "Tail Wags Dog" for a particularly gruesome cross-section of Rabbit. Bilious and loud, Bardo shows a band busting down genre walls for maximum devastation.

--Colin Williams

...

Crypta -- Shades of Sorrow | Napalm Records | Death Metal | Brazil While Crypta have always had intense heavy metal prowess, the one criticism I've had about the band in the past is that they don't necessarily have their own niche or unique take on the classic death metal sound to make them stand out. Now they have upped the level considerably with this record, which has a focused and steady vibe, more so than past releases. There's still a lot of Morbid Angel worship and old school flavor, but with a spin that is decidedly their own.

--Addison Herron-Wheeler

...

Drune -- Drown | Independent | Doom + Stoner + Drone Metal | United States With its members disparate in locale but united in grievous riffage, Drune's new EP summons a torrent of elemental doom into our realm.

--Ted Nubel

...

Djinn and Miskatonic -- Paleo | Independent | Doom Metal | India Paleo finds a hypnotizing groove in the arms of utterly obliterating drum tones, overbearing guitar, and vocals intoned with otherworldly mysticism. It's a slow-moving stampede with plenty of punch to hammer its riffs home.

--Ted Nubel

...

Thumos -- Musica Universalis | Independent | Progressive Doom + Post-Metal | United States Historical aesthetic notwithstanding, Thumos approaches post-metal with an unusually forward-thinking angle - intermingling everything from drum loops to blast beats in service of instrumental jams that focus heavily on captivating hooks. Lest it seem too progressive, everything is just a little fuzzy and lo-fi, which feeds back excellently into the feeling of ancient science that surrounds this record.

--Ted Nubel

...

Eminentia Tenebris -- Rise of a New Kingdom | Antiq Records | Atmospheric Black Metal | France Rise of a New Kingdom cultivates a very specific atmosphere, blending frosty black metal with warm, yet majestic melodies. Excellent, nostalgic black metal.

--Ted Nubel

...

Ancient Torment / Haxen -- The Howling Gale | Eternal Death | Black Metal | United States (Rhode Island) The forthcoming split between Providence acts Ancient Torment and Haxen is proof that New England's haunted history can serve as fertile soil for classic black metal. While Ancient Torment dip their toes more into Quebec-style ornateness, Haxen hews more closely to Finnish filth as they delve into American arcana. Haxen have been honing their craft for 23 years, while relative newcomers Ancient Torment are somewhat newer and just added vocalist Tabarnak last year. Both make a case for Rhode Island's shores as a place worth watching for fresh blasphemous black metal.

--Colin Williams

...

Dynma Lotva -- The Land under the Black Wings: Blood (Зямля Пад Чорнымі Крыламі: Кроў) | Prophecy Productions | Post-Metal + Doom Metal + Black Metal | Belarus Dymna Lotva's third album dashes away military fetishizations and heroic combat tales for a grounded and affecting take on how war affects citizens. It contains samples of screaming children and pulls from both doom metal and depressive black metal, so yes, it's as dour as it sounds.

--Colin Dempsey

...

 

---

We don’t often think of extreme metal as a celebratory creation. The term “cathartic” is frequently used to refer to music as caustic and icy as Calligram’s. However, the London band have no interest in using their unique brand of extremity to give shape to feelings of pain or anguish. This is jet-black metal expressed as revelry amidst chaos, a celebration of the cold unpredictability of existence. Their latest album, Position | Momentum is the five-piece’s most elaborate and complete vision of their distinct worldview. Calligram, whose members hail from Brazil, Italy, France, and the U.K., have crafted a record defined by open-minded curiosity and grand ambition. These eight tracks are an expansion of their musical language, incorporating stretches of tense calm that make the sharp brutality all the more impactful, as well as their thematic focus, with lyrics inspired by quantum mechanics and 20th-century formalist theory. We spoke to Matteo Rizzardo (vocals) and Ardo Cotones (drums) about Calligram’s formation, their progression as musicians and the new album’s heady themes.

...

...

I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times, but given your different backgrounds, how did you come together in London? Matteo: Ardo had a band in 2011, and Tim was playing with them. They eventually disbanded. We then all met via an advert on Gumtree. We’ve had the same lineup since 2016, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. Ardo: Because we were all from such different backgrounds, the only way to do something so specific was to use the internet. It took us a while to find the people we wanted to play with, and we spent some time experimenting. Then around the time Smittens (Calligram bassist) joined, that was when we started to feel like we were a proper band and were playing the right shows. Do you remember your first show where you thought, “OK, this is the type of show we want to be playing?” Ardo: Yeah we played a few where we came home frustrated. We didn’t really like the bands, and the people watching us didn’t like us either. But then we played a show in The Unicorn in London with Ithaca and Svalbard. It was the kind of gig we would attend, and that was the one where we realized that this was the scene we wanted to belong to. At that time, did you have a vision of what you wanted Calligram to be? Matteo: We didn’t have any idea. We just wanted to sound as fast as possible. We don’t have any references; we just try not to make music that entertains us. strong> Ardo: We don’t have rules of what we want to sound like, but we do know what we don’t want to sound like. Whenever we write something that sounds a bit familiar, we look at each other and shake our heads and go off in a different direction. We have an unwritten rule that if something sounds too much like something else, we go elsewhere.I think it translates; you wouldn’t be able to pin you down within any style or subgenre. Ardo:A pet hate of mine is that we get put in the”blackened hardcore” box. I don’t like the “hardcore” bit at all. Matteo, you speak excellent English, but perform your lyrics in Italian. Is it easier for you to express your emotions in your native language? Matteo:A couple of albums ago, we did an album where only one track was in Italian. We thought it gave the band a deeper sense of personality, but we also realized that it worked better in terms of vocal flow. When I write, it does help in terms of emotional depth and speed of writing. But it’s mostly about the flow.

...

[caption id="attachment_54492" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Photo Credit: Andy Ford[/caption]

...

Before we get into the details of the album, can you talk a bit about working with producer Russ Russell (Napalm Death, At The Gates)? Ardo: We were listening to the last Napalm Death album a lot in practice, and I thought because we’d written the most brutal stuff we’ve ever written, I’d send him a message. He then sent us a really encouraging message back. Our budget was tight, but we made it work. From the second we got to the studio, it was like we’d known each other for a long time. We instantly became mates and felt like we could be ourselves completely. As people, we can be really silly and intense in how we take the piss out of each other, and Russ was just laughing along with it. This album feels like a step forward for you guys. Do you feel like you’ve progressed as musicians? Ardo: Definitely. We really pushed ourselves to push stuff we couldn’t play. I’d never played blast beats so fast. We just kept pushing, practicing, and learning more. Whenever we defaulted to our comfort zone, we said, “No let’s not go there and try this instead.” It’s as much of an evolution as we could achieve. Matteo: We talked before about rules. Maybe if there’s one rule we follow is that we have to push forward. We always try to make something that’s harder and more interesting than before. We wanted it to be more darker, heavier, and more fucked up in terms of structuring. We’ll never write the same album twice. The songs on this one seem to breathe a lot more, particularly “Ostranenie.” What does that title mean, by the way? Matteo: It means “defamiliarization.” It’s not Italian; it’s Russian. It’s from a Russian philosophical movement from last century. It’s about aiming for the loss of habit. Everything you try becomes a habit, and then it becomes boring and you lose the passion for it. Defamiliarization is the aim of reaching towards the point where everything feels new. Wow. We’ll come back to the themes shortly. I mentioned that track because it’s got that quiet stretch with the trumpet; it feels so unlike anything you’ve done before. Ardo: In the writing of the album, whenever we brought things down and made them slower, we wanted to then bring them back even heavier. We wanted to give things time and let them breathe. The listener then falls into the trap and is hit even harder by the brutality. This notion of unpredictability brings me to a question I’ve been very excited to ask. Matteo, tell me about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Matteo: (Laughs) So roughly, the album title refers to how, in quantum physics, when you study a particle, you can never really know its position or momentum. Behind this is the idea that completion is impossible. In life, you try to reach and aim for things but can never get to the root of them. You aim for everything, but existence is all part of this process. We are bound to never be complete. I wrote the lyrics in a few days and realized that this was the thread. It’s about chaos and death, but not in a negative way. It’s a study or a celebration. Instead of moaning that life is shit and nothing makes sense we can embrace it. In the press release you say, “This is not about catharsis; this is not therapy.” Can you unpack that? Matteo: Yeah, going back to when I was young, I used to read interviews with musicians saying that making music helped them heal. What struck me was that they treated music as a tool. I see it the other way around. Talking personally, you can’t make music or any form of art if you feel shit. For me, it requires being in a good place mentally. I want to know how they do it! If anything, I feel like I’m a tool of the music. I agree that the myth of the tortured artist is hugely overblown. Matteo: Absolutely. The whole, “You can feel my pain in this music” thing—Fuck that. No one wants to hear anything about people not feeling great. Life is already painful enough. I’ve got enough of my own thoughts about pain.

...

Position | Momentum is out now on Prosthetic Records.

 

---

We don’t often think of extreme metal as a celebratory creation. The term “cathartic” is frequently used to refer to music as caustic and icy as Calligram’s. However, the London band have no interest in using their unique brand of extremity to give shape to feelings of pain or anguish. This is jet-black metal expressed as revelry amidst chaos, a celebration of the cold unpredictability of existence. Their latest album, Position | Momentum is the five-piece’s most elaborate and complete vision of their distinct worldview. Calligram, whose members hail from Brazil, Italy, France, and the U.K., have crafted a record defined by open-minded curiosity and grand ambition. These eight tracks are an expansion of their musical language, incorporating stretches of tense calm that make the sharp brutality all the more impactful, as well as their thematic focus, with lyrics inspired by quantum mechanics and 20th-century formalist theory. We spoke to Matteo Rizzardo (vocals) and Ardo Cotones (drums) about Calligram’s formation, their progression as musicians and the new album’s heady themes.

...

...

I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times, but given your different backgrounds, how did you come together in London? Matteo: Ardo had a band in 2011, and Tim was playing with them. They eventually disbanded. We then all met via an advert on Gumtree. We’ve had the same lineup since 2016, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. Ardo: Because we were all from such different backgrounds, the only way to do something so specific was to use the internet. It took us a while to find the people we wanted to play with, and we spent some time experimenting. Then around the time Smittens (Calligram bassist) joined, that was when we started to feel like we were a proper band and were playing the right shows. Do you remember your first show where you thought, “OK, this is the type of show we want to be playing?” Ardo: Yeah we played a few where we came home frustrated. We didn’t really like the bands, and the people watching us didn’t like us either. But then we played a show in The Unicorn in London with Ithaca and Svalbard. It was the kind of gig we would attend, and that was the one where we realized that this was the scene we wanted to belong to. At that time, did you have a vision of what you wanted Calligram to be? Matteo: We didn’t have any idea. We just wanted to sound as fast as possible. We don’t have any references; we just try not to make music that entertains us. strong> Ardo: We don’t have rules of what we want to sound like, but we do know what we don’t want to sound like. Whenever we write something that sounds a bit familiar, we look at each other and shake our heads and go off in a different direction. We have an unwritten rule that if something sounds too much like something else, we go elsewhere.I think it translates; you wouldn’t be able to pin you down within any style or subgenre. Ardo:A pet hate of mine is that we get put in the”blackened hardcore” box. I don’t like the “hardcore” bit at all. Matteo, you speak excellent English, but perform your lyrics in Italian. Is it easier for you to express your emotions in your native language? Matteo:A couple of albums ago, we did an album where only one track was in Italian. We thought it gave the band a deeper sense of personality, but we also realized that it worked better in terms of vocal flow. When I write, it does help in terms of emotional depth and speed of writing. But it’s mostly about the flow.

...

[caption id="attachment_54492" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Photo Credit: Andy Ford[/caption]

...

Before we get into the details of the album, can you talk a bit about working with producer Russ Russell (Napalm Death, At The Gates)? Ardo: We were listening to the last Napalm Death album a lot in practice, and I thought because we’d written the most brutal stuff we’ve ever written, I’d send him a message. He then sent us a really encouraging message back. Our budget was tight, but we made it work. From the second we got to the studio, it was like we’d known each other for a long time. We instantly became mates and felt like we could be ourselves completely. As people, we can be really silly and intense in how we take the piss out of each other, and Russ was just laughing along with it. This album feels like a step forward for you guys. Do you feel like you’ve progressed as musicians? Ardo: Definitely. We really pushed ourselves to push stuff we couldn’t play. I’d never played blast beats so fast. We just kept pushing, practicing, and learning more. Whenever we defaulted to our comfort zone, we said, “No let’s not go there and try this instead.” It’s as much of an evolution as we could achieve. Matteo: We talked before about rules. Maybe if there’s one rule we follow is that we have to push forward. We always try to make something that’s harder and more interesting than before. We wanted it to be more darker, heavier, and more fucked up in terms of structuring. We’ll never write the same album twice. The songs on this one seem to breathe a lot more, particularly “Ostranenie.” What does that title mean, by the way? Matteo: It means “defamiliarization.” It’s not Italian; it’s Russian. It’s from a Russian philosophical movement from last century. It’s about aiming for the loss of habit. Everything you try becomes a habit, and then it becomes boring and you lose the passion for it. Defamiliarization is the aim of reaching towards the point where everything feels new. Wow. We’ll come back to the themes shortly. I mentioned that track because it’s got that quiet stretch with the trumpet; it feels so unlike anything you’ve done before. Ardo: In the writing of the album, whenever we brought things down and made them slower, we wanted to then bring them back even heavier. We wanted to give things time and let them breathe. The listener then falls into the trap and is hit even harder by the brutality. This notion of unpredictability brings me to a question I’ve been very excited to ask. Matteo, tell me about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Matteo: (Laughs) So roughly, the album title refers to how, in quantum physics, when you study a particle, you can never really know its position or momentum. Behind this is the idea that completion is impossible. In life, you try to reach and aim for things but can never get to the root of them. You aim for everything, but existence is all part of this process. We are bound to never be complete. I wrote the lyrics in a few days and realized that this was the thread. It’s about chaos and death, but not in a negative way. It’s a study or a celebration. Instead of moaning that life is shit and nothing makes sense we can embrace it. In the press release you say, “This is not about catharsis; this is not therapy.” Can you unpack that? Matteo: Yeah, going back to when I was young, I used to read interviews with musicians saying that making music helped them heal. What struck me was that they treated music as a tool. I see it the other way around. Talking personally, you can’t make music or any form of art if you feel shit. For me, it requires being in a good place mentally. I want to know how they do it! If anything, I feel like I’m a tool of the music. I agree that the myth of the tortured artist is hugely overblown. Matteo: Absolutely. The whole, “You can feel my pain in this music” thing—Fuck that. No one wants to hear anything about people not feeling great. Life is already painful enough. I’ve got enough of my own thoughts about pain.

...

Position | Momentum is out now on Prosthetic Records.

 

---

We don’t often think of extreme metal as a celebratory creation. The term “cathartic” is frequently used to refer to music as caustic and icy as Calligram’s. However, the London band have no interest in using their unique brand of extremity to give shape to feelings of pain or anguish. This is jet-black metal expressed as revelry amidst chaos, a celebration of the cold unpredictability of existence. Their latest album, Position | Momentum is the five-piece’s most elaborate and complete vision of their distinct worldview. Calligram, whose members hail from Brazil, Italy, France, and the U.K., have crafted a record defined by open-minded curiosity and grand ambition. These eight tracks are an expansion of their musical language, incorporating stretches of tense calm that make the sharp brutality all the more impactful, as well as their thematic focus, with lyrics inspired by quantum mechanics and 20th-century formalist theory. We spoke to Matteo Rizzardo (vocals) and Ardo Cotones (drums) about Calligram’s formation, their progression as musicians and the new album’s heady themes.

...

...

I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times, but given your different backgrounds, how did you come together in London? Matteo: Ardo had a band in 2011, and Tim was playing with them. They eventually disbanded. We then all met via an advert on Gumtree. We’ve had the same lineup since 2016, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. Ardo: Because we were all from such different backgrounds, the only way to do something so specific was to use the internet. It took us a while to find the people we wanted to play with, and we spent some time experimenting. Then around the time Smittens (Calligram bassist) joined, that was when we started to feel like we were a proper band and were playing the right shows. Do you remember your first show where you thought, “OK, this is the type of show we want to be playing?” Ardo: Yeah we played a few where we came home frustrated. We didn’t really like the bands, and the people watching us didn’t like us either. But then we played a show in The Unicorn in London with Ithaca and Svalbard. It was the kind of gig we would attend, and that was the one where we realized that this was the scene we wanted to belong to. At that time, did you have a vision of what you wanted Calligram to be? Matteo: We didn’t have any idea. We just wanted to sound as fast as possible. We don’t have any references; we just try not to make music that entertains us. strong> Ardo: We don’t have rules of what we want to sound like, but we do know what we don’t want to sound like. Whenever we write something that sounds a bit familiar, we look at each other and shake our heads and go off in a different direction. We have an unwritten rule that if something sounds too much like something else, we go elsewhere.I think it translates; you wouldn’t be able to pin you down within any style or subgenre. Ardo:A pet hate of mine is that we get put in the”blackened hardcore” box. I don’t like the “hardcore” bit at all. Matteo, you speak excellent English, but perform your lyrics in Italian. Is it easier for you to express your emotions in your native language? Matteo:A couple of albums ago, we did an album where only one track was in Italian. We thought it gave the band a deeper sense of personality, but we also realized that it worked better in terms of vocal flow. When I write, it does help in terms of emotional depth and speed of writing. But it’s mostly about the flow.

...

[caption id="attachment_54492" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Photo Credit: Andy Ford[/caption]

...

Before we get into the details of the album, can you talk a bit about working with producer Russ Russell (Napalm Death, At The Gates)? Ardo: We were listening to the last Napalm Death album a lot in practice, and I thought because we’d written the most brutal stuff we’ve ever written, I’d send him a message. He then sent us a really encouraging message back. Our budget was tight, but we made it work. From the second we got to the studio, it was like we’d known each other for a long time. We instantly became mates and felt like we could be ourselves completely. As people, we can be really silly and intense in how we take the piss out of each other, and Russ was just laughing along with it. This album feels like a step forward for you guys. Do you feel like you’ve progressed as musicians? Ardo: Definitely. We really pushed ourselves to push stuff we couldn’t play. I’d never played blast beats so fast. We just kept pushing, practicing, and learning more. Whenever we defaulted to our comfort zone, we said, “No let’s not go there and try this instead.” It’s as much of an evolution as we could achieve. Matteo: We talked before about rules. Maybe if there’s one rule we follow is that we have to push forward. We always try to make something that’s harder and more interesting than before. We wanted it to be more darker, heavier, and more fucked up in terms of structuring. We’ll never write the same album twice. The songs on this one seem to breathe a lot more, particularly “Ostranenie.” What does that title mean, by the way? Matteo: It means “defamiliarization.” It’s not Italian; it’s Russian. It’s from a Russian philosophical movement from last century. It’s about aiming for the loss of habit. Everything you try becomes a habit, and then it becomes boring and you lose the passion for it. Defamiliarization is the aim of reaching towards the point where everything feels new. Wow. We’ll come back to the themes shortly. I mentioned that track because it’s got that quiet stretch with the trumpet; it feels so unlike anything you’ve done before. Ardo: In the writing of the album, whenever we brought things down and made them slower, we wanted to then bring them back even heavier. We wanted to give things time and let them breathe. The listener then falls into the trap and is hit even harder by the brutality. This notion of unpredictability brings me to a question I’ve been very excited to ask. Matteo, tell me about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Matteo: (Laughs) So roughly, the album title refers to how, in quantum physics, when you study a particle, you can never really know its position or momentum. Behind this is the idea that completion is impossible. In life, you try to reach and aim for things but can never get to the root of them. You aim for everything, but existence is all part of this process. We are bound to never be complete. I wrote the lyrics in a few days and realized that this was the thread. It’s about chaos and death, but not in a negative way. It’s a study or a celebration. Instead of moaning that life is shit and nothing makes sense we can embrace it. In the press release you say, “This is not about catharsis; this is not therapy.” Can you unpack that? Matteo: Yeah, going back to when I was young, I used to read interviews with musicians saying that making music helped them heal. What struck me was that they treated music as a tool. I see it the other way around. Talking personally, you can’t make music or any form of art if you feel shit. For me, it requires being in a good place mentally. I want to know how they do it! If anything, I feel like I’m a tool of the music. I agree that the myth of the tortured artist is hugely overblown. Matteo: Absolutely. The whole, “You can feel my pain in this music” thing—Fuck that. No one wants to hear anything about people not feeling great. Life is already painful enough. I’ve got enough of my own thoughts about pain.

...

Position | Momentum is out now on Prosthetic Records.

 

---

We don’t often think of extreme metal as a celebratory creation. The term “cathartic” is frequently used to refer to music as caustic and icy as Calligram’s. However, the London band have no interest in using their unique brand of extremity to give shape to feelings of pain or anguish. This is jet-black metal expressed as revelry amidst chaos, a celebration of the cold unpredictability of existence. Their latest album, Position | Momentum is the five-piece’s most elaborate and complete vision of their distinct worldview. Calligram, whose members hail from Brazil, Italy, France, and the U.K., have crafted a record defined by open-minded curiosity and grand ambition. These eight tracks are an expansion of their musical language, incorporating stretches of tense calm that make the sharp brutality all the more impactful, as well as their thematic focus, with lyrics inspired by quantum mechanics and 20th-century formalist theory. We spoke to Matteo Rizzardo (vocals) and Ardo Cotones (drums) about Calligram’s formation, their progression as musicians and the new album’s heady themes.

...

...

I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times, but given your different backgrounds, how did you come together in London? Matteo: Ardo had a band in 2011, and Tim was playing with them. They eventually disbanded. We then all met via an advert on Gumtree. We’ve had the same lineup since 2016, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. Ardo: Because we were all from such different backgrounds, the only way to do something so specific was to use the internet. It took us a while to find the people we wanted to play with, and we spent some time experimenting. Then around the time Smittens (Calligram bassist) joined, that was when we started to feel like we were a proper band and were playing the right shows. Do you remember your first show where you thought, “OK, this is the type of show we want to be playing?” Ardo: Yeah we played a few where we came home frustrated. We didn’t really like the bands, and the people watching us didn’t like us either. But then we played a show in The Unicorn in London with Ithaca and Svalbard. It was the kind of gig we would attend, and that was the one where we realized that this was the scene we wanted to belong to. At that time, did you have a vision of what you wanted Calligram to be? Matteo: We didn’t have any idea. We just wanted to sound as fast as possible. We don’t have any references; we just try not to make music that entertains us. strong> Ardo: We don’t have rules of what we want to sound like, but we do know what we don’t want to sound like. Whenever we write something that sounds a bit familiar, we look at each other and shake our heads and go off in a different direction. We have an unwritten rule that if something sounds too much like something else, we go elsewhere.I think it translates; you wouldn’t be able to pin you down within any style or subgenre. Ardo:A pet hate of mine is that we get put in the”blackened hardcore” box. I don’t like the “hardcore” bit at all. Matteo, you speak excellent English, but perform your lyrics in Italian. Is it easier for you to express your emotions in your native language? Matteo:A couple of albums ago, we did an album where only one track was in Italian. We thought it gave the band a deeper sense of personality, but we also realized that it worked better in terms of vocal flow. When I write, it does help in terms of emotional depth and speed of writing. But it’s mostly about the flow.

...

[caption id="attachment_54492" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Photo Credit: Andy Ford[/caption]

...

Before we get into the details of the album, can you talk a bit about working with producer Russ Russell (Napalm Death, At The Gates)? Ardo: We were listening to the last Napalm Death album a lot in practice, and I thought because we’d written the most brutal stuff we’ve ever written, I’d send him a message. He then sent us a really encouraging message back. Our budget was tight, but we made it work. From the second we got to the studio, it was like we’d known each other for a long time. We instantly became mates and felt like we could be ourselves completely. As people, we can be really silly and intense in how we take the piss out of each other, and Russ was just laughing along with it. This album feels like a step forward for you guys. Do you feel like you’ve progressed as musicians? Ardo: Definitely. We really pushed ourselves to push stuff we couldn’t play. I’d never played blast beats so fast. We just kept pushing, practicing, and learning more. Whenever we defaulted to our comfort zone, we said, “No let’s not go there and try this instead.” It’s as much of an evolution as we could achieve. Matteo: We talked before about rules. Maybe if there’s one rule we follow is that we have to push forward. We always try to make something that’s harder and more interesting than before. We wanted it to be more darker, heavier, and more fucked up in terms of structuring. We’ll never write the same album twice. The songs on this one seem to breathe a lot more, particularly “Ostranenie.” What does that title mean, by the way? Matteo: It means “defamiliarization.” It’s not Italian; it’s Russian. It’s from a Russian philosophical movement from last century. It’s about aiming for the loss of habit. Everything you try becomes a habit, and then it becomes boring and you lose the passion for it. Defamiliarization is the aim of reaching towards the point where everything feels new. Wow. We’ll come back to the themes shortly. I mentioned that track because it’s got that quiet stretch with the trumpet; it feels so unlike anything you’ve done before. Ardo: In the writing of the album, whenever we brought things down and made them slower, we wanted to then bring them back even heavier. We wanted to give things time and let them breathe. The listener then falls into the trap and is hit even harder by the brutality. This notion of unpredictability brings me to a question I’ve been very excited to ask. Matteo, tell me about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Matteo: (Laughs) So roughly, the album title refers to how, in quantum physics, when you study a particle, you can never really know its position or momentum. Behind this is the idea that completion is impossible. In life, you try to reach and aim for things but can never get to the root of them. You aim for everything, but existence is all part of this process. We are bound to never be complete. I wrote the lyrics in a few days and realized that this was the thread. It’s about chaos and death, but not in a negative way. It’s a study or a celebration. Instead of moaning that life is shit and nothing makes sense we can embrace it. In the press release you say, “This is not about catharsis; this is not therapy.” Can you unpack that? Matteo: Yeah, going back to when I was young, I used to read interviews with musicians saying that making music helped them heal. What struck me was that they treated music as a tool. I see it the other way around. Talking personally, you can’t make music or any form of art if you feel shit. For me, it requires being in a good place mentally. I want to know how they do it! If anything, I feel like I’m a tool of the music. I agree that the myth of the tortured artist is hugely overblown. Matteo: Absolutely. The whole, “You can feel my pain in this music” thing—Fuck that. No one wants to hear anything about people not feeling great. Life is already painful enough. I’ve got enough of my own thoughts about pain.

...

Position | Momentum is out now on Prosthetic Records.

---

We don’t often think of extreme metal as a celebratory creation. The term “cathartic” is frequently used to refer to music as caustic and icy as Calligram’s. However, the London band have no interest in using their unique brand of extremity to give shape to feelings of pain or anguish. This is jet-black metal expressed as revelry amidst chaos, a celebration of the cold unpredictability of existence. Their latest album, Position | Momentum is the five-piece’s most elaborate and complete vision of their distinct worldview. Calligram, whose members hail from Brazil, Italy, France, and the U.K., have crafted a record defined by open-minded curiosity and grand ambition. These eight tracks are an expansion of their musical language, incorporating stretches of tense calm that make the sharp brutality all the more impactful, as well as their thematic focus, with lyrics inspired by quantum mechanics and 20th-century formalist theory. We spoke to Matteo Rizzardo (vocals) and Ardo Cotones (drums) about Calligram’s formation, their progression as musicians and the new album’s heady themes.

...

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I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times, but given your different backgrounds, how did you come together in London? Matteo: Ardo had a band in 2011, and Tim was playing with them. They eventually disbanded. We then all met via an advert on Gumtree. We’ve had the same lineup since 2016, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. Ardo: Because we were all from such different backgrounds, the only way to do something so specific was to use the internet. It took us a while to find the people we wanted to play with, and we spent some time experimenting. Then around the time Smittens (Calligram bassist) joined, that was when we started to feel like we were a proper band and were playing the right shows. Do you remember your first show where you thought, “OK, this is the type of show we want to be playing?” Ardo: Yeah we played a few where we came home frustrated. We didn’t really like the bands, and the people watching us didn’t like us either. But then we played a show in The Unicorn in London with Ithaca and Svalbard. It was the kind of gig we would attend, and that was the one where we realized that this was the scene we wanted to belong to. At that time, did you have a vision of what you wanted Calligram to be? Matteo: We didn’t have any idea. We just wanted to sound as fast as possible. We don’t have any references; we just try not to make music that entertains us. strong> Ardo: We don’t have rules of what we want to sound like, but we do know what we don’t want to sound like. Whenever we write something that sounds a bit familiar, we look at each other and shake our heads and go off in a different direction. We have an unwritten rule that if something sounds too much like something else, we go elsewhere.I think it translates; you wouldn’t be able to pin you down within any style or subgenre. Ardo:A pet hate of mine is that we get put in the”blackened hardcore” box. I don’t like the “hardcore” bit at all. Matteo, you speak excellent English, but perform your lyrics in Italian. Is it easier for you to express your emotions in your native language? Matteo:A couple of albums ago, we did an album where only one track was in Italian. We thought it gave the band a deeper sense of personality, but we also realized that it worked better in terms of vocal flow. When I write, it does help in terms of emotional depth and speed of writing. But it’s mostly about the flow.

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[caption id="attachment_54492" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Photo Credit: Andy Ford[/caption]

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Before we get into the details of the album, can you talk a bit about working with producer Russ Russell (Napalm Death, At The Gates)? Ardo: We were listening to the last Napalm Death album a lot in practice, and I thought because we’d written the most brutal stuff we’ve ever written, I’d send him a message. He then sent us a really encouraging message back. Our budget was tight, but we made it work. From the second we got to the studio, it was like we’d known each other for a long time. We instantly became mates and felt like we could be ourselves completely. As people, we can be really silly and intense in how we take the piss out of each other, and Russ was just laughing along with it. This album feels like a step forward for you guys. Do you feel like you’ve progressed as musicians? Ardo: Definitely. We really pushed ourselves to push stuff we couldn’t play. I’d never played blast beats so fast. We just kept pushing, practicing, and learning more. Whenever we defaulted to our comfort zone, we said, “No let’s not go there and try this instead.” It’s as much of an evolution as we could achieve. Matteo: We talked before about rules. Maybe if there’s one rule we follow is that we have to push forward. We always try to make something that’s harder and more interesting than before. We wanted it to be more darker, heavier, and more fucked up in terms of structuring. We’ll never write the same album twice. The songs on this one seem to breathe a lot more, particularly “Ostranenie.” What does that title mean, by the way? Matteo: It means “defamiliarization.” It’s not Italian; it’s Russian. It’s from a Russian philosophical movement from last century. It’s about aiming for the loss of habit. Everything you try becomes a habit, and then it becomes boring and you lose the passion for it. Defamiliarization is the aim of reaching towards the point where everything feels new. Wow. We’ll come back to the themes shortly. I mentioned that track because it’s got that quiet stretch with the trumpet; it feels so unlike anything you’ve done before. Ardo: In the writing of the album, whenever we brought things down and made them slower, we wanted to then bring them back even heavier. We wanted to give things time and let them breathe. The listener then falls into the trap and is hit even harder by the brutality. This notion of unpredictability brings me to a question I’ve been very excited to ask. Matteo, tell me about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Matteo: (Laughs) So roughly, the album title refers to how, in quantum physics, when you study a particle, you can never really know its position or momentum. Behind this is the idea that completion is impossible. In life, you try to reach and aim for things but can never get to the root of them. You aim for everything, but existence is all part of this process. We are bound to never be complete. I wrote the lyrics in a few days and realized that this was the thread. It’s about chaos and death, but not in a negative way. It’s a study or a celebration. Instead of moaning that life is shit and nothing makes sense we can embrace it. In the press release you say, “This is not about catharsis; this is not therapy.” Can you unpack that? Matteo: Yeah, going back to when I was young, I used to read interviews with musicians saying that making music helped them heal. What struck me was that they treated music as a tool. I see it the other way around. Talking personally, you can’t make music or any form of art if you feel shit. For me, it requires being in a good place mentally. I want to know how they do it! If anything, I feel like I’m a tool of the music. I agree that the myth of the tortured artist is hugely overblown. Matteo: Absolutely. The whole, “You can feel my pain in this music” thing—Fuck that. No one wants to hear anything about people not feeling great. Life is already painful enough. I’ve got enough of my own thoughts about pain.

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Position | Momentum is out now on Prosthetic Records.

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We don’t often think of extreme metal as a celebratory creation. The term “cathartic” is frequently used to refer to music as caustic and icy as Calligram’s. However, the London band have no interest in using their unique brand of extremity to give shape to feelings of pain or anguish. This is jet-black metal expressed as revelry amidst chaos, a celebration of the cold unpredictability of existence. Their latest album, Position | Momentum is the five-piece’s most elaborate and complete vision of their distinct worldview. Calligram, whose members hail from Brazil, Italy, France, and the U.K., have crafted a record defined by open-minded curiosity and grand ambition. These eight tracks are an expansion of their musical language, incorporating stretches of tense calm that make the sharp brutality all the more impactful, as well as their thematic focus, with lyrics inspired by quantum mechanics and 20th-century formalist theory. We spoke to Matteo Rizzardo (vocals) and Ardo Cotones (drums) about Calligram’s formation, their progression as musicians and the new album’s heady themes.

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I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times, but given your different backgrounds, how did you come together in London? Matteo: Ardo had a band in 2011, and Tim was playing with them. They eventually disbanded. We then all met via an advert on Gumtree. We’ve had the same lineup since 2016, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. Ardo: Because we were all from such different backgrounds, the only way to do something so specific was to use the internet. It took us a while to find the people we wanted to play with, and we spent some time experimenting. Then around the time Smittens (Calligram bassist) joined, that was when we started to feel like we were a proper band and were playing the right shows. Do you remember your first show where you thought, “OK, this is the type of show we want to be playing?” Ardo: Yeah we played a few where we came home frustrated. We didn’t really like the bands, and the people watching us didn’t like us either. But then we played a show in The Unicorn in London with Ithaca and Svalbard. It was the kind of gig we would attend, and that was the one where we realized that this was the scene we wanted to belong to. At that time, did you have a vision of what you wanted Calligram to be? Matteo: We didn’t have any idea. We just wanted to sound as fast as possible. We don’t have any references; we just try not to make music that entertains us. strong> Ardo: We don’t have rules of what we want to sound like, but we do know what we don’t want to sound like. Whenever we write something that sounds a bit familiar, we look at each other and shake our heads and go off in a different direction. We have an unwritten rule that if something sounds too much like something else, we go elsewhere.I think it translates; you wouldn’t be able to pin you down within any style or subgenre. Ardo:A pet hate of mine is that we get put in the”blackened hardcore” box. I don’t like the “hardcore” bit at all. Matteo, you speak excellent English, but perform your lyrics in Italian. Is it easier for you to express your emotions in your native language? Matteo:A couple of albums ago, we did an album where only one track was in Italian. We thought it gave the band a deeper sense of personality, but we also realized that it worked better in terms of vocal flow. When I write, it does help in terms of emotional depth and speed of writing. But it’s mostly about the flow.

...

[caption id="attachment_54492" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Photo Credit: Andy Ford[/caption]

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Before we get into the details of the album, can you talk a bit about working with producer Russ Russell (Napalm Death, At The Gates)? Ardo: We were listening to the last Napalm Death album a lot in practice, and I thought because we’d written the most brutal stuff we’ve ever written, I’d send him a message. He then sent us a really encouraging message back. Our budget was tight, but we made it work. From the second we got to the studio, it was like we’d known each other for a long time. We instantly became mates and felt like we could be ourselves completely. As people, we can be really silly and intense in how we take the piss out of each other, and Russ was just laughing along with it. This album feels like a step forward for you guys. Do you feel like you’ve progressed as musicians? Ardo: Definitely. We really pushed ourselves to push stuff we couldn’t play. I’d never played blast beats so fast. We just kept pushing, practicing, and learning more. Whenever we defaulted to our comfort zone, we said, “No let’s not go there and try this instead.” It’s as much of an evolution as we could achieve. Matteo: We talked before about rules. Maybe if there’s one rule we follow is that we have to push forward. We always try to make something that’s harder and more interesting than before. We wanted it to be more darker, heavier, and more fucked up in terms of structuring. We’ll never write the same album twice. The songs on this one seem to breathe a lot more, particularly “Ostranenie.” What does that title mean, by the way? Matteo: It means “defamiliarization.” It’s not Italian; it’s Russian. It’s from a Russian philosophical movement from last century. It’s about aiming for the loss of habit. Everything you try becomes a habit, and then it becomes boring and you lose the passion for it. Defamiliarization is the aim of reaching towards the point where everything feels new. Wow. We’ll come back to the themes shortly. I mentioned that track because it’s got that quiet stretch with the trumpet; it feels so unlike anything you’ve done before. Ardo: In the writing of the album, whenever we brought things down and made them slower, we wanted to then bring them back even heavier. We wanted to give things time and let them breathe. The listener then falls into the trap and is hit even harder by the brutality. This notion of unpredictability brings me to a question I’ve been very excited to ask. Matteo, tell me about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Matteo: (Laughs) So roughly, the album title refers to how, in quantum physics, when you study a particle, you can never really know its position or momentum. Behind this is the idea that completion is impossible. In life, you try to reach and aim for things but can never get to the root of them. You aim for everything, but existence is all part of this process. We are bound to never be complete. I wrote the lyrics in a few days and realized that this was the thread. It’s about chaos and death, but not in a negative way. It’s a study or a celebration. Instead of moaning that life is shit and nothing makes sense we can embrace it. In the press release you say, “This is not about catharsis; this is not therapy.” Can you unpack that? Matteo: Yeah, going back to when I was young, I used to read interviews with musicians saying that making music helped them heal. What struck me was that they treated music as a tool. I see it the other way around. Talking personally, you can’t make music or any form of art if you feel shit. For me, it requires being in a good place mentally. I want to know how they do it! If anything, I feel like I’m a tool of the music. I agree that the myth of the tortured artist is hugely overblown. Matteo: Absolutely. The whole, “You can feel my pain in this music” thing—Fuck that. No one wants to hear anything about people not feeling great. Life is already painful enough. I’ve got enough of my own thoughts about pain.

...

Position | Momentum is out now on Prosthetic Records.