Wolves in the Throne Room 2021

Ash Fox (Boreal) vs. Aaron Weaver (Wolves in the Throne Room): An Artist to Artist Interview


In this artist to artist interview, Ash Fox, a member of Boreal, Starless Domain, and other projects, chats with Wolves in the Throne Room founding member Aaron Weaver.

Years before moving to Olympia, I had caught a Wolves in the Throne Room show at an old tile shop, which used to also be a full-service gas station. I was passing through town on my way up to the San Juan islands when I heard highly muffled blast beats coming through the thick concrete blocks of the Manium. There was no way I wasn’t going to stop to see who was playing. I was there a winter prior to celebrate the longest night with some absolutely astounding acts. That town and that building particularly had left an impression on me that I was never able to shake. After moving to Olympia in 2009, I found myself employed in a way where I was able to interact with a lot of amazing people doing some amazing things. Aaron and I very rarely crossed paths as both of us were pretty involved in our own worlds, although we were fairly aware of what one another were up to musically. It was great to finally have a conversation.

—Ash Fox

[Transcription software states that the call is now being recorded.]

Aaron Weaver: It’ll be transmitted to all the government agencies.

Ash Fox: You know, they’ve probably been doing that for a very long time. Maybe one of them will be inspired to pick up a synthesizer and quit their shitty job.

I mean that’s entirely possible.

I doubt it.

I think that’s entirely possible. They’re regular human beings in some capacity. People get turned on and have their minds blown in unexpected ways.

Yeah, you hear that, government agency? Blow. Your Mind.

Yeah, do it. Turn in. Tune on. Drop out. That’s a phrase that I invented and I’m pushing it. Yeah, I cooked that one up by myself. Just invented it. No one’s ever said it before and I’m looking to push that out there.

Anyways, I got this awesome opportunity to listen to what you all been doing lately and it’s amazing.I have so much to say about this really. You know, the new Wolves album [Primordial Arcana]. You did most of the mastering, right?

We did everything, man. It wasn’t really planned, so we tracked everything at our studio and it was sounding really good. We were really happy with everything we tracked and felt it just needed to be polished up a little bit. We sent it to a well regarded heavy metal mixing engineer and the mix came back and just sounded…like dog shit maybe, might be one way to phrase it. Terrible? It just sounded so bad. I literally got the mix back, and it took a long time to get because it was summer time and Europeans take the entire summer off. I got it back and like I literally heard it and my jaw dropped. I was dumbfounded and wandered around in the woods behind the studio. I sat down next to a stump and was like “what the fuck.” It just was such a disappointment.

So me and Nathan and Kody talked and we were like, “the worst we would do would be better than what we just got from the professional mix guy.” So I took the deep dive. We bought a little bit of gear. Not a ton of stuff, but we just had to buy a few pieces for the mixing side. Some analog stuff. And I just like ground on it for a few months and got it sounding good. I’m super proud of it. I actually really appreciate the professional mix guy’s mix being so bad because it gave me the push to really figure it out on my own.

I have to say that sometimes real problems like that can really push you to do better, because what other choice do you have sometimes? You can’t accept it, no matter what, you can’t accept someone making it not sound good. Is this your first real attempt at mixing and mastering?

Yeah. Well, we didn’t master it. I will say that we sent it off for mastering. I felt like that would’ve been a bridge too far to take that on as well. And, you know, me and Nathan and Kody are so isolated and we recorded and mixed it ourselves over like two years. I felt it was pretty important to have someone else hear it just because we went completely mentally insane. Like we had no way of knowing whether or not anyone else would hear it and, like, be able to discern any music amongst the noise. So we had a pro mastering guy do it. But yeah, absolutely, it was the first metal thing I’ve mixed. I’ve mixed my own electronic stuff and I’ve been studying and practicing and fucking around with it, but this was definitely my initiation. It was hard.

But it sounds awesome. It’s hours of painstaking work. I’ve attempted it myself and just completely not liked what has come out in the past. It’s painful stuff.

Oh yeah, it’s totally painful and it’s so easy to fuck your head up. If it’s just you mixing, which in my case it was. I would sometimes give it to the other two to critique, but I just kinda wanted to be left alone and kinda meditate on it. If you start getting in a mental space of “is this good or is this bad” you’re gonna drive yourself nuts. So it’s gotta be like a thematic, responding to the thematic input of whether it’s going in the right direction or not.

I can only imagine there. Speaking of your electronic music, this is something that has come up in my mind a few times. You have this electronic project that has played a couple times when I was living up in Olympia, and I think for whatever random reason, I think a lot of it was just that you had performed so late, I never got to catch it. What’s going on with that? Do you still do it?

Yeah, I just did a show of live electronics on Beltane, up in Stump Meadow. It was fun.

There was a DJ there that drew a lot of folks? I heard about this.

No, that just happened. This was a few months ago on Beltane. This was me and this wild kind of younger person, kind of like a kind of really wild butoh voodoo performance ritual. She was cool. She was a younger African American lady doing a sort of santeria voodoo sort of shamanic performance. She was cool, she was obviously tapped into some really trippy frequencies. There were maybe twenty people doing this kind of ritual performance. Then I played, then, do you know Casey? He just moved here from the Denver area. He’s kinda in the Blood Incantation, Spectral Voice cult.

I know of him and I’ve been told that I probably know this person and I don’t think that I do, but I know who you’re talking about.

Yeah, he did a set of like banging techno. Some Berghain style techno. It was a good party. Coming out of Covid, people were just ready to go nuts. It was good and it was fun.

I do miss that stuff a lot. Being down here, being so isolated from any scene. I miss that a lot. But yeah that’s cool. What is the name of that project actually? Because I couldn’t find it.

Yeah I don’t think it exists on the internet. It’s called Agarikon.

Yeah, Agarikon, right. I wasn’t looking for a Bandcamp or anything, I was looking for old flyers because I knew you’d appeared on a couple and I thought perhaps one was going to be on the website for the old bar I worked at or something. I couldn’t find it.

I just realized a friend was asking about it, and there actually is a Soundcloud I put up years ago that was from a winter solstice fest that was at the bar I used to work at. It’s actually really cool, I just listened to it yesterday. It’s like this weirdass techno. I’ll send you the link to it.

Yes, please! Please do. Because this has not been just the first time it’s crossed my mind. I’ve thought about this often and it’s like “man, I need to hunt this down somehow.” Yeah, that’d be awesome. You’re still pretty active with that, you’re saying?

Yeah, I mean Wolves in the Throne Room takes most of my energy, but the electronic music is kind of like necessary to balance out. It’s like my laboratory. It’s a space where I can be really chaotic and improvatory and kind of, “first thought/best thought” zen approach. Because, Wolves in the Throne Room, as you might’ve noticed on the new record, is very meticulous and there’s a lot of attention to very specific details. I’m also like a chaos aficionado so the electronic stuff is where I can just be super spontaneous and free with it, but it’s like a good balance.

I hear that, man. That’s what most, well not so much anymore, but in the past all sorts of the electronic music that I’ve been making has been sort of where I learn and master, if I may say so, it gets transferred to some of the metal that I’m making. Like, now that I understand this better, I can apply this to black metal of some sort. It tends to work out. Otherwise, if I’m experimenting with both mediums it turns into some sort of nonsensical sludge. There’s no rhyme or reason to it sometimes. Which, I can really hear that in this new album of yours. It’s done so nicely wrapped up in a way. I’m a pretty big fan of that Celestite album that you put out some years ago. I kinda live for that sort of thing and I would love to see more metal expand into that in a way. Maybe not all metal needs to go there, but some of it, I can see a lot of potential there. But that’s a really fun album, and I feel like this new album bridges those two worlds in a really awesome way. Not to mention I can kinda detect some new agey influences on this new album that got me kind of worked up in a good way. [laughs]

Oh man, yeah, you scratch the surface of Wolves in the Throne Room and you’re gonna find a Mount Shasta crystal cult just right beneath the surface. It’s right there.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, I’m into that though. I get reluctant on using the words ‘new age,’ it’s not a bad word. It’s really good stuff! I don’t think it’s for everybody necessarily, but come on though. You can’t say that Enya was bad or anything.

Dude, Enya’s the fucking master. In terms of being influential and opening people’s minds to sound, she’s the best. Every one of us just think that Enya’s a top five influence on Wolves in the Throne Room. Enya’s right there.

Would you say more so than like, Vangelis or Jean-Michel Jarre?

Definitely Enya. Yeah, you know Vangelis is in there. Celestite, in many ways, is a collaboration between me and Randall Dunn. You know Randall?

I don’t know him but I know of him.

He would push the more Vangelis kind of sound and I think we would push the more Angelo Badalementi and Enya sound, in terms of the non-metal aesthetics.

Absolutely. That’s what I get, personally. I fully get that. Kudos, I mean, that’s some fun stuff. You know, one of the other things that I keep thinking about, kind of related, kind of not. Years ago, and I mean years ago. I think it was your tour with Nommo Ogo, you were doing MIDI triggers on your drums, something I don’t see very often. That’s right, right? I’m not hallucinating that you were triggering synths while drumming, right?

Oh yeah, definitely. Not like doing a trigger for a kick drum sample or something, but yeah using a MIDI trigger to rhythmically trigger a synthesizer. I do that sometimes. And I do that in the studio too, because drums obviously are my primary instrument and I have the most facility on them. So oftentimes I’ll play a synth with the drumset with MIDI triggers with each drum triggering a different note or parameter on the synth.

Right. So, the first time I ever saw that was seeing Fear Factory, which is awesome, but where did you get that? Was it something that just naturally happened?

Yeah, it just made sense. I guess what I was trying to do…I’m trying to think when I started doing that. I guess it was just taking the normal metal concept of triggering kick drums and it occurred to me, like “why does it have to trigger a kick sample, why can’t I trigger anything?” I’m sure there wasn’t even a mic on the drums for Fear Factory when you saw them back in the day. It was probably straight triggers.

Oh, no, they were actually triggering samples, not for their kick drum. What I clearly remember was an industrial clanking sound. I can’t remember the drummer’s name but he had this bar that was sectioned into a few different pieces and they were percussion triggers. Each one hit some industrialized sample of sorts, so it never actually dawned on me that using a MIDI trigger on your kick would achieve some of those really clicky drums that a lot of black and death metal bands use. That makes a lot more sense though as to where it would come from, but my introduction was synthesis or samples. In fact, I’ve even tried to give that a go with this band I had in Olympia, though it wasn’t pulled off nearly as smoothly as I’ve seen other bands do so that was pretty cool. I always appreciate weird stuff like that. You don’t ever see that because it just takes up so much time and thought. And you’ve got to invest a little more into a brain to make that sort of thing happen.

Yeah, it’s more of a set up but it’s worth it. The whole sampling and electronics thing, another inspiration is the way Neurosis does it. Because you know he’s playing all the soundscapes and the samples live. In the studio, they don’t layer things. They don’t layer the drums and guitar and put the samples over the top. They do it all in one take, playing all of the samples as an instrument so they’re creating this live soundscape which I always thought was super inspirational.

It takes a lot of talent to really pull that sort of thing off. I’m hearing a different style, if you will, coming out of Wolves in the Throne Room, and I kinda want to say some of that is due to Kody.

Oh definitely. A hundred percent. Yeah.

Definitely so?

Yeah, I mean he wrote like a third of the riffs on the record. So he’s just fully in there all through it, from the earliest conceptual ideas and figuring out “what are the basic themes of the record” to “what are the aesthetics of the record” through all of the songwriting. Critiquing the mastering, fully in there, which is amazing! We could not have made…I don’t think we could’ve made any record without Kody’s presence. It’s like, me and Nathan basically did Black Cascade by ourselves and did Celestite and Celestial Lineage by ourselves and Thrice Woven was 95% by ourselves. I don’t think we would’ve survived doing another record just the two of us. I think we would have murdered each other. We needed another perspective, a third voice in the room. Because me and Nathan are so diametrically opposed in a lot of ways, in terms of everything. Mostly on process stuff. It’s almost like if there’s a problem to solve, and the problem is “write a good black metal song,” we come at it from opposite directions. We start building a different part of the building. It’s like I want to focus on deciding what color the bathroom’s gonna get painted first and start from there and he wants to work on the patio out front. So having three people, three minds, three different energetic signatures is crucial. I think you hear it in the record. It’s got a different vibe and it’s got a lot of vitality and energy to it because it’s got that freshness and this new spirit that’s now fully integrated.

Definitely. There’s an element of heaviness to it and, if I dare say, sadness to it that just really comes through. There’s always been those elements in old Wolves in the Throne Room stuff, but it’s just a combination of a number of different things that really put it together. I know it’s partly a mixing job, but also the musical influence is…I don’t know, I’m hearing something different. Maybe that’s partly because of Kody being more involved in the music’s creation. I don’t really know, but it’s phenomenal in that way. I haven’t actually gotten enough of listening to this album, which is certainly something to say because, to be quite honest, I don’t listen to a ton of black metal these days. I mean, I do listen to some of it, but it’s really hit and miss with what truly resonates with me these days. After a number of years where all I listened to was strictly black metal, it’s different these days. Being really into synthesis I also look for that sort of stuff, and this hit really well for me.

I appreciate that so much. Yeah, man. I think it’s interesting to analyze it. I think what you’re hearing is the addition of Kody and the subtraction of Randall. On the previous records, Randall was very much a creative contributor. He’s producing the record so he’s controlling at least half of how it actually sounds. We’re doing all the songwriting, obviously, but the person who is producing the record, it’s all filtered through their aesthetic because they’re the ones touching the faders on the console. This is the first record where there are no other artists in the room, it’s just the three of us in the band. I don’t think it’s better or worse. I love all the stuff we did with Randall, but it’s definitely different. And honestly, I’m surprised that I’m not hearing…to my ears it sounds really different. It sounds really different than anything we’ve done, and I think that’s because I’m so hyperfocused on the details. It definitely feels right. This is exactly the record that we should make. I’m super proud of it, you know? It was purely our creation.

And it shows. It captures an essence that had maybe been looked at or envisioned for a while, but this album really executes what you’re going for and just the general feel in what Wolves brings to the table and always has, but this is just a pure essence of what it’s going for. That’s kind of what I live for, because it’s rare for a lot of people to see a band from their beginnings to a certain point like a decade and a half later, or more. I remember seeing a show of you guys in, I keep wanting to say it’s 2004 but I guess it’s more like 2005 judging by the photos I have of that time frame. But I caught you all in the old Manium building when it was still a venue and it was really raw stuff back then, but it just didn’t have that particular atmosphere that everything else suggested it would be. Don’t get me wrong, that old stuff’s phenomenal in its own right, but this is just really executed properly these days.

I really appreciate hearing that. I really value your opinion and that means a lot to hear.

I don’t mean to be a fanboy about the thing, these are just things that have been on my mind over the years of watching stuff happen. But that does kinda bring something else up that I’m wondering. Forgive me for sounding so cliche or asking a cliched couple of questions here but I’m wondering, and you don’t have to answer, by the way, I totally get it—what are you using synth-wise on this new album?

Oh, I’ll spill the beans, I’ve got no problem with that. Oh man, this record. This record is all about the ‘90s romplers. Like that is Nathan’s territory. I’ve always been like “man, that’s a fucking preset” and he’s been like “no, presets, the art is choosing the right preset.” So before the prices skyrocketed he bought pretty much every relevant ‘90s rompler.

Are we talking like Korg M1s or…

I think I tracked but you’ll pretty much hear straight-up Korg M1 presets on the record. Just like the sort of tinkling. You know what I’m talking about.

I do! Right. That particular sound isn’t just a Korg M1 sound either, I believe you can find it on most of those old ‘90s synths like Yamaha did a number of them. I’m pretty sure it’s on the DX7.

Yeah, totally. I love it too. It’s just the circuitry and there’s a certain aesthetic of the Japanese engineers of that time that comes through and I love it. It’s this kinda slick and sleek, it’s like a fucking samurai sword or something. It just cuts. The Korg M1 did and I think the real powerhouse on this record was a JV-1080. Let me get that right, yeah JV-1080, it’s the one with all the cards.

Was that a Roland? I’m not quite picturing it.

Yeah, it’s a Roland. It was the flagship film school synth from those days. It’s just like a glorious three-rack unit. This glowing beast. It’s so nice.

Now I’m picturing it. Okay, I’ve looked at it before. Those old ‘90s synths, they’re pretty typical of classic symphonic black metal. I believe Summoning used some of those Roland synthesizers, and Korgs as well. I love that band. That stuff was oddly a thing that black metal really got into. A lot of it’s been forgotten.

Yeah, sure. It got superseded though. A lot of those guys weren’t doing it because they had a specific aesthetic in mind, it’s just what was available. You know, a modern symphonic black metal band is gonna use a plug-in because that’s available. As you know, we’re attuned to very specific timbres and very subtle things in the sound as we’re layering stuff together. So yeah a lot of rompler stuff. My thing is more samples. We’ve got a policy not to sample any pre-existing music, but we will sample our own field recordings or sometimes we’ll perform our own piece of folk music, or compose a very simple choral piece with a VST or romplers or whatever and then I’ll sample that into an ASR-10, which is my favorite keyboard sampler. I really love the reverb on it and the overall aesthetic of the ASR-10. I’m mostly like an Akai MPC person. My electronic music is all sequenced with MPC 2000XL, which is my favorite sequencer of all time. I dig the kind of crusty Akai crappy sound. For most of the samples that I did on this record, they were on an MPC 1000 which is thin and nasty sounding, but they sit in the mix in just the right spot.

You just really can’t beat those older Akais, those MPCs. They’re not something I’ve really been able to get my hands on and play around with but I’ve seen them used flawlessly for things that just…it makes sense. I know they’ve made some newer MPCs but I feel like I hear them dogged on a lot for whatever reason. They don’t quite match up to the old trusty MPC 1000s or whatever of that ilk.

A big part of it is the sequencers on them. I bought a new one, the MPC Live or whatever. I think they’re just too perfect. I think that they’re basically like a PC, a Windows PC in a box, in terms of the processor. Maybe it’s because I’m a drummer, like MPC 60 and an MPC 3000 and an MPC 2000 as well and maybe an MPC 4000, the groove of the sequencer feels completely different to me. I think that a non-musician would say “you’re fucking nuts,” but if they were dancing to it they’d just feel it thematically.

They would. One of the main differences that I see with this newer hardware is that a lot of it comes with software that you can actually track out your percussion or synthesis of sorts, so it takes away the button-pushing. Like you’re saying, sampling with percussion, so you’re punching those pads or hitting those pads and it creates an actual beat. Whereas you lose some of that true feel when you’re just tracking it on the software that it comes with, so I get that.

Do you ever mess with the Elektron stuff?

That’s always been a hair out of my price range. Well, let me take that back. I went and invested into one drum machine and I had the choice of a few, and yes the Elektron was on the list, but I chose to go with this fucking weird drum machine called the Sonic Potions LXR. It’s a DIY build drum machine, but you can get this piece of hardware from Bastl Instruments out of the Czech Republic and what it does is it takes all of your CC outs and puts them onto all sorts of different knobs so you can change the shape and the tail and everything. It starts off a really small unit but after you expand on it, it becomes a really large and phenomenal unit. A lot of times people refer to it as the “poor man’s Elektron” but I think in a lot of ways the Elektron surpasses what this can do with its sampling capabilities. So no, I haven’t. A lot of people talk highly of those Elektrons and one day I’m going to get myself an Elektron.

I’m gonna dog on Elektron a little bit. I like all of the sampling and things they do, but as far as the sequencer I think they’re really stiff. You know an MPC 2000XL is like the sweet spot. Like an MPC 60 is a little bit too grandpa sounding to me, it’s a bit too flubby in the sequencer and the 2000 XL is right in the middle. It’s funky and it’s got the groove and the soul but it’s still tight. The Elektron stuff, to my ear, is a little bit too robotic. But you can make anything funky if you’re doing it right. Me and Elm were talking about this. He was beefing on Elektron. I tend to agree with him.

Yeah, that guy likes to dog on all sorts of things. [laughs]. He’s not wrong.

No! He’s not wrong. He’s got good ears.

He does. He does. He knows what’s up. I mean, all those cats from Katabatik, they live and breathe it. How different though, is what you use for Wolves with your electronic project?

I keep them pretty separate. I have a set of equipment for each project. So if I’m doing samples and noise for Wolves, I’ll usually build a setup for a specific project and that’ll be the setup. So I did the stuff for this record, I had the MPC 1000 and the ASR-10 all running through this old Ramsa panasonic mixer that sounds really good when you push the preamps. Then I have a bunch of effects on aux-ins so I can take a sample and then play it straight through the mixer and add a cue to it or I can mangle it and record just the reverb-send or the reverb send through the delay or whatever. So it’s super flexible. So the electronic stuff, I like to keep it more simple because I want it to be portable. Doing it live, as you know, just doing it by yourself is like herding cats or whatever. Trying to wrangle the mixer and the drum machine and the synths and the effects at once, so I keep it as pared down as possible. I get super OCD about it. How can I get this down even more and not lose a certain sound that I wanna get?

God, it’s such a tough balance. That’s how it goes though. I got so freaked out when I was playing electronic music live. I’d get freaked out about carrying it around because I’m packing thousands of dollars of gear and thinking “why am I doing this? I’ve just gotta make it a little smaller.” It’s partly why some of the newer hardware that’s come out has been sort of attractive. It is smaller, but again it’s a little too newfangled…that’s not even the right word, you just lose something when you’re not lugging around that fifty pound synthesizer or whatever.

One of our mottos is “you’ve gotta suffer for the tone.”

You do! I mean, one of the last shows I ever played up in Olympia was at the Stump House and I brought everything to play with me at this set. And you know it’s just this field up at the top of a hill. I’m lugging it up that hill and then setting up and it takes a while to set up all of your stuff. I had this table that wasn’t really a sturdy table. All it took was somebody breathing on it and my whole set fell over. All my synths, all my keyboards fell onto the ground.

Oh shit.

Talk about just freaking out. I almost lost it on somebody but it’s not really their fault. It’s just something that happened and it was a pretty big eye opener. Should I be doing this? To this degree of carrying around large amounts of synths everywhere? I don’t know.

It’s a crazy path we’ve chosen. Carrying it around when it’s studio gear. It’s not meant to be on the road, but like you’ve gotta do it if you want the sound to be right.

I mean if all the folks at music fests are willing to drag their gear out into the dirt, why shouldn’t I, right?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, because I’ve heard that maybe some music fests will happen this year. And if it did, I would pop out there. I put together a sort of dirt-rave rig. I’ve got two MPC 2000XLs and one’s kinda trashed so I’d bring that one. I bought a cheap Yamaha mixer for like a hundred bucks and it actually sounds really good. Then I’ve got an…I’m a big fan of new Behringer synths, like the K2 I’ve got one of those. I’ve got an MS20 which is like my main synth and it’s what I’ve learned on. It’s my favorite synth. And to my ears the K2 is a little different but just as good in its own way and you can buy a used one for like two hundred bucks.

Absolutely. I used to dog on Behringer all the time until they started coming out with those synth replicates that they’ve been doing and now I’m like “okay, you know those are actually pretty cool.” Some of them sound not half-bad. In fact, I thought I read about Behringer making their own version of Octatrack. That might be something I’d invest in.

That’d be wild.

It would be wild and they’re always affordable.

They are affordable. It seems like they’re doing some kind of evil thing. There’s some ethics in terms of like, copying a Model D. Like, Moog is still making minimoogs in their astral factory so to completely rip off a circuit design while a synth is still being made. It’s hard to say.

I hear that, yeah. Absolutely, but dang sometimes a poor musician’s gotta bite the bullet and support that, you know? But not always. Sometimes you get lucky and find something for a good price and that works too.

Yeah, for sure. Or get something that’s weird and offbeat and gives you a unique sound, or takes you places other people haven’t. Who wants to hear another project with a 909 and, whatever, a 303, and maybe some 106 pads on top? [laughs]

Yeah, I mean it’s not something I’ll seek out but if it happens to occur at the right time and I’m in the right headspace, yeah I’ll get down on that 909. [laughs]

Oh yeah, I will too. I just don’t want to necessarily make it myself.

Oh I understand. I understand. Cool. Well, I have got to get back to work here. I hate to break this up, but I have only allowed myself close to an hour, I’ve got to hop back to that here so I’m gonna wrap it up with you. Again, this new album is awesome and I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. It might’ve actually been our first real conversation.

I think so. We’ve always been like friends in passing but now I want to hang out more.

Seriously. You know when I get my life back together a bit I’m gonna make some rounds to Olympia. It’s my number one destination because I miss people so sorely. Not just with what’s been going on with the pandemic and stuff, but also just being so far away from everybody it takes two to three hours just off the road to get to me, so we don’t ever really see anybody. So yeah, we should definitely kick it one of these days.

Loved talking to you, thanks for making it happen. Super fun to talk about gear and stuff. I don’t get to do that very often.

Same here, I usually bore people to death when I start talking about that so it’s like “oh yeah gear time, I get to talk about stuff I know about.” It’s awesome so I definitely appreciate it too.

Primordial Arcana releases August 20th via Relapse Records. Grab it on translucent gold with brown, oxblood and olive green splatter vinyl.