Aeviterne Toil Over New Grounds (Interview)

Crossing the path of Garett Bussanick, Eric Rizk, Samuel Smith, and Ian Jacyszyn with their respective projects or with the innovative death metal band Aeviterne has so far been a rare event in concert halls—yet it seems that winds are changing.

After a series of successful U.S. shows in support of debut record The Ailing Facade, Aeviterne played for the first time in Europe on September 24 at Amplifest Festival in Portugal. Ahead of that event and over a call, Ian Jacyszyn (drums, production) discussed Aeviterne's intense creative process and the fun challenges in bringing their fervent brand of extremity to a live audience.

–Anne Laure / eluluphoto

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The music, the lyrics, and the artwork of The Ailing Facade all make it a very immersive and cohesive ensemble. Where do you draw your inspiration?

Lyrically, we’ve shared an appreciation for philosophy, e.g. Kant, Schopenhauer, etc.  However, I’m not writing the lyrics myself; Garett is, so I don't want to speak about them on his behalf. I can say, though, that songwriting is all about context for me, and it’s important that the emotion I feel in Garett’s riffs be highlighted and given greater meaning in the finished songs. Often this emotion may be a feeling of loneliness or some sort of existential crisis, which relates back to the lyrical themes and inspirations.

Film is something I'm also personally inspired by, and I enjoy watching movies. I hesitate to say there’s a cinematic quality to Aeviterne's sound, but there's definitely a storytelling component in how the songs are structured. There’s usually an emotional arc, not unlike a film.

Regarding the art: Mark McCoy, who did the album artwork, is one of my good friends, and movies are one of the things we connect over. I feel lucky to have witnessed the evolution of his style and working methods these last 15 years. I find what he is making now to be incredibly cinematic. I couldn't imagine anybody else working on the album, since he has such a gift when it comes to translating the mood of a song into an image.

Visually, I think Aeviterne’s music has a lot of shadows and dark hues in it, and you’re usually not seeing what you think you should be seeing, which is perfectly represented in the cover image Mark made.

You mentioned the songwriting; what comes first in your creative process?

The riff usually comes first. Maybe I'm a traditionalist in this regard, but I believe heavy metal is about the riff—It’s the most important component. A good riff is what excites me most when listening to metal. That said, Garett will initiate the creative process by assembling a rough riff structure and from there we will collaborate and demo extensively.  

What’s your approach to drum composition at that stage?

From the outset of each song, there’s usually some sort of agreed upon idea as to what the rhythmic feel will be. Since our genre framework is death metal, this is usually a blast beat of sorts. However, when it comes to composing the final drum parts, blast beats can be boring: there's not a lot of musical excitement there, aside from the intensity and the aggression. And most of the time, when I hear how most modern bands use them, they don’t even feel intense to me anymore; they’re too obvious. That feeling you get from an early Morbid Angel record—When those blasts hit, you feel them—I don’t find, as often now. They’ve become too much of a staple in the genre and they’re taken for granted.

I try to write drum parts that are melodic. A lot of the drummers that I gravitate towards, in terms of influence, write drum parts as if they are writing riffs on a guitar. You could sing the parts. I think that's what makes the classic metal drummers of the world, like Dave Lombardo or others, so special and iconic; you want to hear their melodies. 

I also like to consider the drum composition in terms of texture. Drums are about more than just rhythm to me; they’re also about the sounds themselves. If you visualize from floor to ceiling, from a bass drum up to the cymbals, you're dealing with the low end to the top end of the frequency spectrum. So, a drum idea could be more than just the sound of a kick drum or a cymbal; it could be another element entirely, and this is where processed sounds and synths are factoring into the composition.

How do you layer these instrumental and more experimental sounds then?

Usually, those ideas start off with traditional instruments, like guitar or drums. We may take a certain idea and sonically process it to bring a new texture into a song. There have even been instances where I have had two drum ideas that I really like, but couldn't physically play simultaneously, so one becomes a processed overdub.

Some of Garett's riffs might see similar experimentation by use of heavy reverb/delay, different distortions, recording techniques, etc. For example, there’s an instrumental track on the album that concludes with this heavily processed acoustic guitar. None of the recorded guitar sounds are direct; it's all ambient sound captured at different distances—like, Garrett played his guitar at one end of a hallway in my apartment, and I recorded the sound at the opposite end of the hall. We then multi-tracked this, each time trying a different distance in mic placement. Once finished recording, we layered those tracks and processed from there. This may seem excessive, but it is done deliberately to create textures that we find more unique and interesting.

We all love early Swans, and what I find so profound about them, especially on those pre-Jarboe records, is that they're using traditional instruments in a way to make sounds that can be difficult to rationalize or replicate. I struggle making sense of how some of those sounds were made, especially as a quintet, quartet, or whatever the group size was at the time.  

An anecdotal question about this very specific song, “The Ailing Facade” - how does a ‘death metal’ band come to drop such a 7-min instrumental song on their record?

Very simple: Metallica. They always had an instrumental on their albums. I didn’t grow up listening to Metallica, but Garett did, and it can be hard to shake the influence a band like that has on you as a kid.  

And when experimenting with the sequencing of the songs on the album, it felt right having an instrumental, followed by a long closer, during the second half. This might be contrary to what people might have expected from us, but I think the patience found on the B-side of the album is a nice contrast to the anxiety of the A-side.  

How does all the compositional and experimental work come together as a record?

This is an interesting question. For me, an album is best conceptualized by hearing the various ideas in different spaces: hearing it in a rehearsal room, hearing it behind a computer in demo form, playing it back in your head, etc. A lot of our creative process is not confined to one specific working method. Conceiving a musical idea in your mind is a very different experience to hearing it in a new and unfamiliar space. So, when we are writing, I might listen to our demos in a variety of spaces, like on the subway or on a walk, a million times in a row, just to kind of get a better sense of what's happening with the raw material.

Once the material sounds redundant to me, I’ll either know that it is finished, or I’ll start hearing new nuances in the music that I didn’t before. This new information usually informs me where to go next, like going back to the rehearsal room to experiment more. It’s a very laborious process creating an entire album this way, and it's not for everyone, but it works for us. Jamming to write songs might work for some bands, but with what we're going for, it's not enough. 

You also mixed the record - were you preempting and anticipating that stage during the creation process, did that influence it somehow?

This is another interesting question because, yes, I think there was an anticipation, but it was more of a subconscious one than it was conscious. It only became conscious through the process of mixing the record.

Since I was so involved in the songwriting and demoing process, it felt important to give myself some distance from the material, so as not to limit its potential. We agreed as a band that I would record the album, but we’d then outsource the mix to another engineer. The hope was that by bringing somebody else in, it’d prevent me, or anyone else in the band, from getting in the way. Having an external voice for the mix could also help fully realize the album into something that maybe we didn't anticipate ourselves.

What we failed to see in this decision is that, despite our best intentions, our vision had become too specific. Trying to bring a third party in at that point was like picking up a novel and reading it from the halfway point. You've missed all these pages before; you only know the hundredth page, and now you're trying to make sense of the information you missed by coming in halfway through. 

We worked with a great mix engineer and did multiple drafts, but it did not work out. Clearly we had an anticipation of how the record was supposed to sound and more importantly, how it was supposed to make us feel. That feeling was missing—It was there in the performances but somehow lost in the mix. That's when the mix became an in-house project. It was a frustrating decision to make at the time, but in hindsight a very necessary one.  

What is laborious in Aeviterne’s terms: Are we talking months… years?

We had worked on The Ailing Facade for a few years, and a few of the songs were already in the process of being written when we released our first EP, which came out late 2018.

Some of the songs just went through many, many revisions. For example: “The Gaunt Sky,” the fifth track on the record, initially had a completely different ending, one that never quite worked, and it took a lot of revision to get to its final version. Or another example would be “Stilled The Hollows’ Way,” the second track of the record. There's this whole kind of dark ambient section with drums, but this was originally composed with high gain guitars. The more we worked to develop the song, the more it felt like these guitars were getting in our way, so through experimentation, we ended up removing them completely. This decision created an open space in the song that excited us and ultimately helped us finish it.

This is again to reinforce that what Aeviterne does is not the kind of thing you can just get in a rehearsal room and bash out. Everything must work in conjunction with everything else. It takes jamming in a room, demoing, writing ideas down as staff notation, etc. It can be obsessive, but it’s how my brain functions when it comes to songwriting; I get tunnel vision and can only focus on that. I would not be surprised if the next record takes another couple of years to get done.

Reflecting on creation, now that these songs have a life of their own, what’s the song you’re the most proud of, and why?

I would pick two songs for opposite reasons. First would be the second track of the record, “Stilled The Hollows’ Sway”, which I referred to earlier. I'm really proud of that track because that was one of the songs that required the most deliberation. That song went through a lot of experimentation, and a lot of toil and frustration on everybody's part. But when I listen to the finished song, what I was referring to before, that emotional landscape, that impact, it all comes through. It might not sound toiled from your perspective as a listener, but behind the scenes, we know how much went into it, and yet the song still lands with me on an emotional level.

Regarding the structure of that song: It’s very linear, which is a quality that I usually don’t really gravitate towards in my own listening. I love repetition in songwriting. I love a lot of 60s rock and roll, and that stuff is super repetitive. Yet, “Stilled The Hollows’ Sway,” despite being fairly linear in composition, still manages to resonate with me.

On the flip side, my second pick would be the third song on the record, “Penitent.”  I mention this song because it was probably one of the easiest songs to write. It was the exact opposite experience to “Stilled The Hollows’ Sway”; it came together naturally but still has no shortage of impact for me.

So is “Still The Hollows’ Sway” the one song you’d recommend to someone that doesn't know your music yet?

I'd say yes because it covers a lot of ground. If you really wanted an idea of what the band was about, that song gives a pretty good overview. There's a lot of what the band is in that song.

After sharing all this about your songwriting, recording and mixing—Would you describe yourselves as perfectionists?

I wouldn't say I, or Garrett, or anybody else in the band, are perfectionists when it comes to the technical side of things. We have more of a gut-feeling approach: When things feel good enough, we move on. We didn’t spend hundreds of hours recording our performances for the album, for example.

It's more in the emotional impact of the music that I tend to become more of a perfectionist, I think, and maybe the rest of the band, too. The best metal, for me, can express something ineffable, something deep. It’s hard to put that into words. It could be in the composition, in the mix, in the way it's visually presented, etc. The performances are important, but there tends not to be a lot of depth in terms of the dynamics of what we're actually playing—It’s all high intensity stuff, so from that perspective it’s pretty easy for the music to be read as an expression of rage.  But there is more to convey, and I want the music to have a deeper impact than just anger, and if that takes years of effort to do, then so be it.

The song structure sounds different between the LP and the 2018 Sireless EP; is it because of this laborious creation process or a different approach with your output between the two records?

I think this speaks more to how I view the separate formats. We already had quite a lot of material prepared when we first started playing live, including the two songs found on Sireless, and felt that it was important to release something, like a demo, to introduce ourselves to the world. Since both songs are very self-contained compositionally and complete unto themselves, releasing them as an EP made sense. Those song structures, to me, suit the physical limitations of the EP format best. And honestly, if we were going to write another EP, it would probably be something akin to Sireless again.

I suppose it is not a common move for bands like us to release seven inches nowadays, so that could speak to what you're talking about regarding the different songwriting approaches. With the The Ailing Facade, since it is a long-playing format, we could expand upon things and work with longer compositions.  

Talking about impact, you’ve all had extensive careers in music so far. How has the audience reception been to Aeviterne, and is it different from your past bands?

To be quite honest with you, we're still trying to figure this out. The critical reception to the record was great, but the nature of what we're doing, in terms of our stylistic approach to death metal, makes it difficult to understand exactly who our audience is. I don’t want to give the impression that there's a deliberate attempt to be different or unique; that’s not the intention of the band, and none of us would ever argue that what we're doing is particularly original. But we are very lucky that the band has gone as far as it has, since our music doesn’t fit neatly into one box.

Music has always been an integral part of my life, even in the early stages. It provided me with a connection that I didn’t get elsewhere, so it’s important for me that other people connect with our music, but I wouldn't say that I, Garett, Eric or Sam are making music for other people. We do it because we enjoy the creative process. Where that ends up landing, in terms of an audience, is out of our control.  

All this ties into what Amplifest represents to me as a festival, with its considered focus on curation. It’s for the rabid music fan, like myself.  The people that I’m noticing gravitating towards Aeviterne are people like that… I hate to use this term, but ‘music nerds’—people who know a lot about music. They can usually see all the through-lines, the thematic connections, between all the disparaging influences. I imagine our appeal as a band will always be kind of niche, simply because such music listeners are the minority.

What kind of exposure did you get so far, which could help you maybe break the silos? 

We're fortunate that Chris Bruni, who runs Profound Lore records, wanted to take the chance on the record. That exposure has certainly helped. There's not exactly a huge line of people trying to help expose the band—I guess that this is just the nature of what the band is and the fact, to your point, that we don't neatly fit into the death metal genre descriptor. 

I think most labels or promoters might not really know how to frame what we are doing. It becomes this conundrum for people involved on the business side, how to sell it.  But for us it’s still worth pursuing and trying to make happen because there are like-minded people out there; they're just in the shadows from what I can tell. It’s not what the metal scene seems to be focused on now, I feel. At least here in the US: raw black metal, war metal or old school death metal shows seem to be generally well attended. I don’t think a band who is a bit more experimental, like Aeviterne, has the same appeal. It feels to me that, right now, the culture is more interested in things that are more direct, musically speaking.

It looks like you have all got your bands touring a bit more in recent years. Has something changed with regards to touring or are you approaching things differently?

My experience with touring is unique in that even though I've been playing music for a long time, I have not toured that much. I’ve done more live performing in the past two years than I’ve done in the past ten years of my life. When I was younger, all I wanted to do was make records. I suppose it’s the record nerd mentality in me: it isn’t real until you make a record. I never really felt the obligation to play live as a result. 

Approaching all this now is different because my view of performing live has evolved. I enjoy it a lot more now than I ever used to. It’s interesting manifesting something into a physical space, where people can immediately interact with it. And you are with them in that moment, which obviously has greater meaning after the isolation period of COVID. 

Bringing Aeviterne to the stage, reproducing it live, has been an interesting challenge. With so many components involved in our music, it can be high-stakes and difficult to replicate in a live setting, but I am having a lot of fun trying to do so.

Honestly, I’m surprised to have seen Aeviterne going on tour. Was it in your plans when you created the band?

When we started the band, there was no intention of doing it live; it was conceived as a studio project. We also had physical distance between us back then since we were not living in the same city. The desire to make music together was still there, though, despite the distance; we each had a mutual respect for each other's past bands, and we really liked spending time together, so making music together made sense. However, as we kind of got deeper and deeper into the process of creating, our plans evolved, and we agreed to try to turn it into a live band.  

I wouldn't say you'll ever hear the entirety of The Ailing Facade performed live because not all of it was written for a live set-up, although I'm sure we could figure out a way to make it work. But we also don't want to turn into a band with eight members—which would be the reality of replicating everything that's on the record live. Therefore, we must be very deliberate in what we choose to play, how it's presented, etc. Translating the album to the live setting has proven challenging, and we’ve gone to painful lengths to try and make it work, but it’s a challenge that I personally enjoy.

You are bringing your live set to Amplifest as a first show in Europe and later this fall, embarking on a longer U.S. tour with Thantifaxath; how do you translate your record into a set for live shows, and how do you prepare for touring?

Again, we have to be choosy in terms of what gets replicated live. A lot of these songs have so many textures and layers that we must decide what gets performed, what gets sampled and what gets omitted, and how to omit it without feeling an absence. When we're performing live, there are only five components: two guitars, a bass, drums, and a sampler. That's all we have at our disposal, and trying to make it all work requires creativity. A lot of experimentation goes into the live orchestration, which might take weeks, if not months. When you see the band live, it's deliberately structured and very considered, not unlike how the record is. 

Drumming wise, it takes a good couple of months of preparation for me to get ready for shows. The drum parts I’ve written don’t feel natural in a lot of ways and they’re not easy to play. I need to practice a lot, at least for a month or two, to build the chops and get the parts into my muscle memory.

As you have now gained experience with the Aeviterne live set-up, do you have more plans for touring?

Aeviterne will be doing some shows with our friends in Thantifaxath and Sunless in October. After that, nothing is planned, so we’ll go back to writing. So far, I’d say we have the genesis of half an album, and we've already begun demoing those ideas. I would not be surprised if, when do we play more shows, people hear new Aeviterne material in the set.  Performing songs that are still in progress, in a live setting, is also another component to our writing process, and I like the idea that people could hear working material at gigs. It creates a unique experience for the audience. There’s something there that you may never see again, you know? 

I'd love for Aeviterne to tour Europe, but the demand will determine when and where. We saw many people in Europe complimenting the album online, but it wasn’t until recently that we had the right infrastructure to play there. We were recently added to the Cruel Machine roster for Europe and Andrea (who also plays in Devoid of Thought) will be helping us do some booking over there. We’d love to get something happening in Europe next year, but it’s still all very much in the early stages of development.

Wishing you the best in your European endeavors, then! You’ll be in the audience at Amplifest? Any shows you have highlighted on the running order?

Yeah definitely. We are flying out a few days early so that we have enough time to rest before our show on Sunday afternoon. I hope to see Sir Richard Bishop and Hexvessel, as they don’t perform often where I live.

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The Ailing Facade released March 18th, 2022 via Profound Lore.