Boris live at Boston, MA’s Paradise Rock Club
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Over the past two decades, Boris have established themselves as one of the most prolific and adventurous bands in heavy music. The Japanese trio’s expansive discography engages with just about every conceivable iteration and combination of drone, doom, sludge, post-rock and noise rock, with left turns into everything from shoegaze and dream pop to a string of collaborations with Merzbow, the closest thing to a mainstream noise musician that exists. While the band has racked up a number of classic releases tied to particular facets of their sound (Flood, their ambitious drone masterpiece and Heavy Rocks, their finest hour as a full-throttle stoner metal band), 2005’s Pink stands out as Boris’ best summative work.
From the gorgeously plaintive opener “Farewell” to the title track’s earworm riffing and the wall of drone that concludes “Just Abandoned Myself,” Pink finds Boris at the peak of their many powers. The disc of unreleased outtakes accompanying this June’s reissue of the record demonstrates the kind of zone the band was in at the time, functioning more as a legitimate companion LP than a one-listen curiosity. In support of the new deluxe edition, and in celebration of the album’s tenth anniversary, the band has embarked on a tour performing Pink in its entirety. In typical Boris fashion, however, that concept isn’t as straightforward in execution as it might sound.
Perhaps to mark the significance of the occasion, the band chose particularly distinguished tour-mates for this run of shows: Washington’s Earth. Today, Dylan Carlson’s long-running project resembles something of a psychedelic folk-tinged post-rock band – a long way removed from its origins as a pioneering, Boris-influencing drone-doom outfit – but that rendered the trio no less complementary to the evening’s headliners. Performing as a two-guitar and drums lineup (with matching cowboy hats), Carlson, longtime drummer Adriennne Davies and newcomer Brett Netson (of indie rock mainstays Built to Spill) offered a measured, hypnotic set. Netson, who guested on 2014’s excellent Primitive and Deadly, came armed with an elaborate pedal array and added color to Carlson’s towering riffs and Davies’ impressively thunderous one-woman rhythm section. As a fitting lead-in for their hosts, Earth’s set closed on its heaviest note with a reach back to 1996’s Pentastar for “High Command”.
For Boris’ headlining set, the band emerged enshrouded in fog and, naturally, pink light. But rather than the opening notes of “Farewell,” “Boris kicked off a reworked Pink with “Blackout”. In an appropriate move for a band whose releases often exist in multiple contrasting versions with different track lists (Pink itself has at least four, counting June’s reissue), the trio took liberties in reordering the record’s original song sequencing and seamlessly working in a number of those recently unearthed outtakes. The result was a well-paced set subverting the standard practice of the album anniversary show, but still hitting its requisite marks.
The one-two of “Pink” and “Woman on the Screen” that followed “Blackout”’s brooding opening sent a packed Paradise crowd into a frenzy, and that level of energy was clearly appreciated by the band. Wild-eyed drummer Atsuo is always one to engage and incite an audience, but guitarists Wata and Takeshi also came across less stoic than usual. As for the songs themselves, the group sounded immense, nailing the setlist staples, deep cuts and “new” songs with effortless confidence. True to their reputation, Boris played loud. The droning climax of “Just Abandoned Myself” reached Sunn O)))-esque levels of low-frequency immersion that threatened to consume us all before “Farewell” brought things full-circle in closing the main set. An encore of the night’s only non-Pink cuts rounded things out nicely, ending an evening that commemorated one of Boris’ defining works in enthusiastically deafening fashion.
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Prophecy Fest set times (win tix!) ++ join the IO email list, catch Alcest on tour
PROPHECY FEST US @ KNITTING FACTORY BROOKLYN Friday - 11/2You can buy one and two day passes at Prophecy's site (and nowhere else). Every attendee will also get a double CD compilation showcasing the label's roster. Those who get in before 8PM will also get a tote bag. WE ALSO HAVE A PAIR OF TWO-DAY PASSES YOU CAN WIN. Enter your info below to enter, and to automatically be added to the new Invisible Oranges email list (which you can also just join without entering too). Meanwhile, Prophecy Fest is the last stop on a North American tour for Alcest, which begins in Montreal and also includes a Halloween show in Chicago and Baltimore's Days of Darkness fest, the great MDF spin-off now in its second year. Here are all the dates: You can also catch Novembers Doom in their home state of Chicago as part of Forever Deaf Fest in December. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85c-P9hbmBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0oQ7ZOKTls7-7:30 || Völur 8-8:30 || Xasthur 9-9:30 || Kayo Dot 10-10:45 || So Hideous 11:15-End || Novembers DoomSO HIDEOUS CANCELLED. UPDATED FRIDAY TIMES: 7:45-8:30 || Völur 8:50-9:35 || Xasthur - acoustic/unplugged 10-10:45 || Kayo Dot 11:15-End || Novembers Doom Saturday - 11/3 7-7:30 || 1476 8-8:30 || Year of the Cobra 9-9:30 || Crowhurst 10-10:45 || Eye Of Nix (playing Black Somnia in full) 11:15-End || Alcest (playing Kodama plus a “best-of” set)
Post-Punk for Metalheads: Unmaker’s Debut “Firmament”
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Metal is not a closed circle. Its borders, like those of any genre, are porous. Influences from all over the world glide in, and musicians with a hint of wanderlust find their way out just as frequently. You can hear those wanderers out in the wider world of music if you know what to listen for. Every metalhead has their tells, and hearing them in a unexpected context can be like reading the hobo code on the side of a door, or performing a secret handshake in a room full of strangers. Some genres (let’s call them "metal-adjacent") are easier for metalheads to slip into than others. This is how Jim Reed of Occultist and Aaron Mitchell of Crater and Slowing found themselves in Unmaker, a hard-edged post-punk band gearing up to release their debut album Firmament on October 19th. You can stream Firmament in its entirety below....
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Firmament is by no means a metal album, but what it shares with the genre is disaffection. Instead of translating that feeling to anger or aggression, Unmaker use the sounds of goth rock and post-punk to evoke dread and uncertainty. The tension behind the band’s playing never cracks open into an explosion but simmers right at the breaking point. A great deal of this tension comes from Rick Olson's work with synths. Though he rarely makes it to the record’s surface, Olson's ambience combined with Reed’s sharp and insistent guitar playing give Firmament a sense of creeping paranoia. Adding to the uncertainty is the band’s deftness with moving suddenly from major keys, typically happy, and minor keys, typically sad, without settling in either mode. While you're listening, check out our interview with Jim Reed about the record below:...
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Compared to your other projects, Unmaker leans heavily into the sounds of post-punk and goth rock. Was this the intention of the project from the beginning, and if so what drew you to those sounds? Having some of those elements was definitely intentional. The band germinated from conversations I had with Aaron (the vocalist) while hanging out, listening to records and cutting up together. We were both playing in extreme metal or punk/metal bands at the time (still do) -- which we love but we also wanted to explore other sonic territories through playing and writing that neither of us had ventured through before. Both of us have always been all over the map in regards to personal taste in what we listen to. One of the things that we found appealing about drawing from certain areas within the well of post-punk/early goth sounds is the utilization of coldness and warmth coupled with texture and space -- it’s a different kind of heaviness that feels freeing to wield. In addition, early punk, krautrock, electronica, 1970s rock and movie scores are also just as big of influences on what we’re doing. What did you want to accomplish creatively with this project that you were unable to do in a more conventional heavy metal or punk style? We wanted to play music with contrasting melodies, texture, dynamics with atmosphere and then just keep pushing wherever it goes creatively. This is of course not to insinuate that those elements don’t exist in punk or heavy metal as genres -- they of course do. It’s just no one really wanted to incorporate those approaches in a way that made sense in our respective bands that we were doing at the time so we created a new outlet. More so we just want to challenge ourselves in a different manner and be our own “sonic island” so to speak. How does your experience playing heavier styles of music inform your approach to Unmaker? The things I’ve learned from playing in heavy bands has definitely helped a lot but I’ve had to unlearn some habits too. For me, the importance of riffs are still carried over and a sense of menace undulating around the structures is still there. One thing I’ve had to learn differently is when playing quietly and cleaner -- I'd better nail every note spot on every time. Mistakes and flubs are way more apparent in quiet moments with cleaner tones and have less “character” to me. A lot of distortion with a song that goes by super fast kind of gives you a bit of a less noticeable leeway for slip-ups. It’s definitely challenged me and made me a better player doing this band that has in turn enhanced my writing of heavy/fast jams. Before recording this record, you played the songs live a great deal. How did road testing the material affect the recording process, and what did you learn about the songs from this experience? We learned a great deal regarding our chemistry as people playing together plus our quirks when traveling- that was important for everyone and it did result in some lineup shifts but it has all been for the better. I think that taking the time allowed us to solidify many things in regards to being better friends in and out of the band plus it translating properly live coupled with better songs. Early on we definitely made a lot of changes to the songs based upon how we felt about them after the fact live. It also helped ensure that by the time we entered the recording phase that we were a seasoned, tight band. The songs were essentially recorded live with synth, piano, vocals and guitar overdubs added later. Working with Rick Olson at The Ward, who produced the record, was very helpful because his input was initially more from an outside looking in perspective, he eventually crossed that wall and played synth on some tracks. Currently we’ve been writing at quite a clip and the process is feeling very streamlined. What is the emotional takeaway that you want listeners to have after listening to Firmament? Emotions are of course a really subjective thing with art and music. I really don’t put expectations out there as far as any specific takeaway that I want when creating songs. With that said any reaction is a valid takeaway and that’s what I’d prefer -- people having whatever reaction that arises naturally from their interpretation of the material. But it would be cool if Firmament gets someone through a shitty day or that it inspires someone to adventure in a way they've never adventured before....
Preorder Firmament here....
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Maximum Hardcore: Erosion Unveil Their “Maximum Suffering” Album
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The report of Hydra Head's death has been a (slight) exaggeration. In 2012, founder Aaron Turner stated the label would no longer release new material but continue to distribute previous works. Last year, Oxbow’s phenomenal Thin Black Duke finally found its way into the world via Hydra Head, and Turner mentioned he might be open to more releases on a "case-by-case basis." Enter Vancouver five-piece Erosion and their volatile brand of take-no-prisoner, world-crushing, crusty grind. Boasting three-fourths of Vancouver hardcore vets Baptists and Jamie Hooper (aka "the harsh vox dude from 3 Inches of Blood") on vocals, Erosion sound unlike any of the members’ other bands and quickly set a savage precedent for anyone trying their hand at the d-beat game. Their upcoming full-length Maximum Suffering has a flow, but it’s more akin to Frankenstein falling down an endless flight of concrete stairs than anything else. Check out an exclusive full stream below....
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From the opening title track into “Everything Is Fucked," there’s more nihilism than all the Germans at a Lebowski Fest combined, courtesy of ugly riff flurries and Hooper’s unhinged, angry bellow. Song titles like “Need For Death,” “Human Error,” and “We Have Failed Us” add to the negativistic vibe that permeates the album, from the lurching powerviolence passages all the way through the incessant breakneck grindcore that hits like wave after wave of bricks to the face. Of course, those seeking out the kind of furious noise that Erosion is steeped in tend to find beauty in the decay; there’s no shortage of that here. Maximum Suffering is an incredibly musical album, with guitarists Nick Yacyshyn and Rick O’Dell (Tobeatic, Hard Feelings) dialing in razor-sharp tones and deftly blending their tracks so the guitar frequently sounds as if it’s one monstrous force. Danny Marshall (drums) is a d-beat beast, and Andrew Drury (bass) lays down a sludgy, death metal-tinged base for Yacyshyn and O’Dell to jump off into the deep end. Hooper goes deep and stays there, channeling Oscar Garcia and Scott Carlson through a zombie-lung filter. There are brief moments of melody and groove -- “The Crone” and its noise-rock leanings chief among them -- but Maximum Suffering mostly aims for… well, it’s right there in the title. And by all accounts, Erosion hits those marks with a vengeance....
Maximum Suffering releases on Friday via Hydra Head Records....
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Upcoming Metal Releases 10/14/2018-10/20/2018
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Here are the new metal releases for the weeks of October 14 – October 20, 2018. Release dates are formatted according to proposed North American scheduling, if available. Expect to see the bulk of these records on shelves or distros on the coming Fridays unless otherwise noted or if labels and artists get impatient. Blurbs and designations are based on whether or not I have a lot to say about it. See something we missed? Goofs? Let us know in the comments. Plus, as always, feel free to post your own shopping lists. Happy digging. As a little bit of a challenge, include your own opinion about anything you want to add. Make me want to listen to it! Please note: this is a review column and is not speculative. Any announced albums without preview material will not be covered. Additionally, any surprise releases which are uploaded or released after this column is published will be excluded....
ANTICIPATED RELEASES
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Outre-Tombe - Nécrovortex | Temple of Mystery | Death Metal | Canada There was a long time where I was burned out on "new old school death metal," but Outre-Tombe fixed that, if at least making them a special circumstance. What makes old school death metal so special was the attention to atmosphere, which a lot of these young bands seem to either miss or dole out entirely too much of their creativity into the creation of which. Outre-Tombe exists in the magical new precipice of balance, an art which was once thought lost. Gorod - Aethra | Overpowered | Technical Death Metal | France As slickly technical and stylish as ever, French tech-death legends Gorod are back with their sixth full-length. The point where this band could even produce a "bad" tech-death album has come and gone, i.e. they're as reliable as ever. But is it any different? There's a whole new pseudo-psychedelic vibe going on with Aethra, to which the band's technicality actually plays well. Structurally, though, these are pretty straight-up tech-death songs, and maybe Gorod didn't set out to completely upend their sound (maybe like Irreversible Mechanism did). I like listening to this kind of tech-death, but not all the time -- maybe I'm asking Aethra to be more atmospheric, which is potentially unfair.-- Andrew Rothmund
https://youtu.be/_aifeqTfHxk Antiverse - Under the Regolith | Seeing Red | Technical Death/Thrash Metal | United States Pissed, extremely aggressive death/thrash metal (did I mention aggressive?) from current members of Inexorum and former members of Threadbare....
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OF NOTE
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Moss Upon the Skull - In Vengeful Reverence | I, Voidhanger Records | Technical Death Metal | Belgium It's nice to see death metal releases from I, Voidhanger -- and Moss Upon the Skull's In Vengeful Reverence is a stunning exemplar of their trademark dark, cacophonous style. Definitely influenced by mainstays like Gorguts, this band applies their own ultra-technical layer of creativity to the mix. Their new album is nearly tech-death, but without all of that genre's aesthetic baggage, save for the definitive old-school lean (especially the vocals) which does round out the package out nicely. This style of death metal usually isn't my particular jam, but in this case, it works as a blend of old and new.-- Andrew Rothmund
Esoctrilihum - Inhüma | I, Voidhanger Records | Black Metal | France Wasn't there an Esoctrilihum album just a few months ago? This solo artist is a fountain of strange and unique black metal. Inhüma is as furious as it is suffocating and near-psychedelic. Internal Bleeding - Corrupting Influence | Unique Leader | Brutal Death Metal | United States The masters and earliest originators of the most ignorant of slam death metal return after the tragic, heroic passing of their former drummer Bill Tolley. Sallying forth, Internal Bleeding continues to make insanely brutal, horrendously disgusting music. Erosion - Maximum Suffering | Hydra Head | Sludge Metal/Crust/Death Metal | United States The ultimate fuzzy, D-beating metal. Check back in a few days to hear the whole thing....
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I’m Listening to Death Metal #2: Atheist’s “Unquestionable Presence”
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I’ve spent the last seven years, off and on, attempting to put into words what precisely I see in death metal and why it means so much to me. This column is my latest and so far best attempt to enunciate the value of death metal to me, artistically, aesthetically, and emotionally. The following are a set of guided stories loosely centered on certain records and the various relations to them, both inside and outside myself and the record themselves. I'm Listening to Death Metal #1: Opeth...
By 2005, I was well-entrenched within the metal world. I was 16 -- a junior in high school -- that magical time period where you have enough scratch money available that you can lavish yourself with video games and films and books and records, if you so choose. I was a rambunctious kid, but most of my mischief those days was of the free sort; I grew up in Spotsylvania, which was a semi-rural county of Virginia then, having little but Civil War battlefields, long winding roads, and a few clusters of serious commercial development. Most teenage antics involved taking drugs and more or less fucking around in the woods. I was sober then, dealing with a household rattled by addiction both of my father and my brother, and in passing through that I swore off substances, at least for a while. The intensity of those childhood years, with absentee parents either flying off to pursue career instead of family, my father being a delinquent incoherent drunk, the never-ending conflict between him and my brother which would in doing suck up so much of my mother’s attention that I was left alone, and the physical and emotional abuse I suffered in that space, left me angry, terribly, terribly angry, and wanting to hurt something like I had been hurt. I was decent enough then not to victimize others; instead it was the standard refuge of angry young white boys, with “edgy” jokes I’d hate to leave my mouth now and a lot of fistfights with friends to blow off steam. Art-wise, I’d tried out punk and hardcore, and I found that I liked a great deal of it, but it never seemed to fully reach that sense of rot and malice I knew had been put inside of me (and that, thankfully, years later, proper therapy would drain out). I’d been bitten by the death metal bug already. Opeth was that first taste, or at least first real taste, and from there it accelerated. Like many who were young teenagers in the 2000s, I had my nu-metal phase, but the parallel worlds of progressive music and extreme music drew me out. No description of metal fandom in that era, especially young metal fandom, can be complete without at least briefly mentioning the seismic shift when Mastodon arrived on the scene. “March of the Fire Ants” still functions as a brutal, technical death metal pummeler, one of a level of heaviness they’d never again even shoot for. The progressive/psychedelic thrash of Leviathan, which was released as my father was dying for the first time in a hospital, bleeding from a wound in his gut gained after an attempt to drain the abdominal fluid from his cirrhosis was botched, was a pitch black bullet to my brain. Ahab’s mad death-struggle against the perfect evil of God-via-white whale was replicated in my fledgling atheism in the face of seemingly insurmountable and deeply chaotic punishment me and my family had passed through. My father, miraculously, would live, but that throttling to darker and more feral music had begun in earnest. I followed from Mastodon to sludge metal more broadly, and from sludge it was not a great leap to finally fully return to Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel and the like. It felt like donning an old coat; the scouring, the bestiality, the willingness to consensual cruelty and hyperbolic violence fit some vile thing that lurched and writhed and crawled within me, something I hated but had to get out and knew no other escape. I hated pop-punk when I was younger; it never touched that place in me that it seemed to in others, something I’ve learned as an adult to be more of an epigenetic fluke in development of taste that any broader or more objectively grounded fact of the quality of the work. I needed something hateful. I needed something evil. I needed something that would beat the shit out of me the way the shit was beaten out of me at home, long-sleeve black t-shirts worn to school to cover blacker bruises and then, eventually, short-sleeve black t-shirts to flaunt them. I needed death metal. And then Relapse Records, a label I had become familiar with due to their work with Mastodon and High on Fire, reissued all three of Atheist’s records....
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Atheist is a death metal band out of Florida, the most benevolent home of the genre in the United States. They were formed in 1984 and, like a lot of bands of the genre formed that early, drew from a lot of wells beyond death metal as we know it. This is partly because of a historical factoid that gets omitted sometimes, especially in contemporary discussion of these genres; within the 1980s, as metal as we know it (as opposed to, say, the heavier, headier hard rock of groups like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple) was on the rise, there was only mild separation by crowd. While we can look back and pluck out the bands, both underground and popular, that we find particular affinity to, issues like general lack of radio play aside from very specific time slots and almost no representation on channels like MTV meant that those who wanted metal were more or less exposed to a very wide swath of it all of the time. There was no viable way to indulge in the rising South American bands that were bending thrash toward death and black metal ends without also hearing about Quiet Riot, no way to follow the demo tapes of Tom G. Warrior in his youth without hearing Hanoi Rocks. And while fans certainly had feelings about which bands were good or bad, there was a broader mixing pot of stylistic reference than is sometimes reflected in journalism. Atheist is a key example of that. Given their relatively early founding in 1984 (before we consider death metal proper to have broken) they draw more from thrash metal than you might expect, especially given that their recording debut came out in 1990. By that time, death metal as we know it was well underway; Atheist’s sound, then, might come across as an anachronism to modern listeners, trying to square release date to what they hear on the record. This is parallax, however; the band passed through multiple names and released several demos between their formation and the recording of their debut record, Piece of Time, in 1988, and the tapes had decent circulation among the scene. That plus their location within Florida meant that, while by no means economic juggernauts, they were at least well-connected and known within the scene. Like almost every metal band of the 1980s, Atheist also did not go untouched by progressive metal. Progressive rock mostly filtered into heavy metal through those 1970s hard rock and heavy metal bands that laid foundational roots for the metal of the 1980s. Groups like Rainbow, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden are the closest to the metal canon that 1980s groups would draw from, and all of them were largely influenced by the progressive rock movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Likewise, experimental movements in underground music were thrusting other outsider groups like the nervier end of new wave, Frank Zappa’s more abstract moments and even more popular groups like Marillion into the limelight again, offering a renewed contact for young bands to aesthetically have at their disposal. Atheist certainly took note of this, even if only via groups like Fates Warning, Queensryche and Watchtower; even on their earliest demos, you can hear riffs that zig and zag in lightning motion, a lightning fast trebly and rounded bass tone whipping alongside the guitars, and drumming that feels like Gar Samuelson was fed speed instead of heroin that day. In fact, the biggest comparison point not only of their early demos but also of their first full length Piece of Time is perhaps Megadeth fed through a death metal grinder. Mustaine’s legendary sense of punk-scoured progressive thrash metal, full of knotted arrangements and tricky guitar patterns, repeats in the early work of Atheist, abetted by bass playing that could technically keep up with the wild proggy arcs of thrash guitar. In fact there are only two explicitly death metal things about those early recordings. First is the production, which in giving a roughness to the proceedings offered in part the concept of making that roughness deliberate in both tone and playing. Second is the vocals, which were too feral and unhinged for thrash but still keeping more in line with Chuck Schuldiner’s higher-range screaming, which itself rode the genealogical boundary between thrash and its child genre death metal. While all members of Atheist were excited to dive deeper and deeper into this arms race of technicality, one who swept up thrash by the late 80s and pushed nearly every band into dropping 8-minute multi-part odd-time suites (including Anthrax, the notoriously more happy-go-lucky group of the thrash movement),was bassist Roger Patterson. He was in many ways like the Cliff Burton or Alex Webster of the group, a bass player who not only looked up to Jaco Pastorius, lord among bassists even then, but also sought to achieve the same kind of notability as the guitar players at his side. Guitar players who want to improve their playing had decades of virtuosos of varying kinds even in the mid- to late-1980s, and metal in specific went through a boom in the immediate post-Van Halen years. This is, in many ways, one of the largest ways that often go unmentioned in movements like glam metal became a major influence to even underground metal, with that space offering a platform for dozens of virtuoso guitar players who in turn could get guitar instruction material into the hands of young players. Meanwhile, bassists have always been on the shorter end of the stick, especially in the rock and metal worlds, and even more so in the time period. There are notable greats, certainly, but it’s also notable itself that almost every great metal bassist of the 1980s has a keen interest in progressive rock. It was largely those bassists that provided a model for virtuosic development in the bass while still serving the function of bass within a rock context, and in turn listening to those bassists indirectly pushed a lot of bassists like Steve Harris, Cliff Burton and Roger Patterson to push their fellow bandmates into more progressive waters in regards to arrangement and general riff writing. Add to that jazz and fusion, the perennial domain of young serious players of guitar and bass, and we begin to see the assemblage of the key components that Atheist sought to append to their playing. Piece of Time certainly sounded like a death/thrash record made by players who had heard a Return to Forever record in their time. The pieces are competent, and it is easy to see why that record caused interest in them to briefly swell. Most notably, the guitars, bass and drums seem not to bob along in straight time like the cliche of metal bands, nor did they indulge in bluesy syncopation like some groups; instead, they had a microrhythmic thrust, a slight swing that seemed to recall samba, bossa nova, or perhaps jazz. This was tight and rich in the string instruments but perhaps most wild and loose-limbed in Steve Flynn’s drumming. He punched, stretched and pulled the beat; but not much, not yet. That would come later. Piece of Time is a good record, but it is also clearly a compilation of the best songs of their demo period, tunes that worked well live, and a few to fill out the remaining space, which is to say that it does not have the greatest structural integrity in the world. Still, debut records for many are an extension of demo years, acting as a sampler of things to come. For Atheist, this was certainly true. It was their second album that would display them at full strength. I was walking through a Best Buy about 15 minutes from my house in an area of Spotsylvania called Central Park, which touts itself to be the largest outdoor mall in America. It turns out “largest outdoor mall” is a remarkably difficult metric to actually pin down, what with vacancies, revenue, and even just the amorphous boundaries of shopping malls and mere attendant strips. This Best Buy was, by my high school years, one of the only places in Spotsylvania that still sold records. There had been a long-lived independent record store called The Blue Dog downtown, fed largely by the nearby Mary-Washington College student body. It was the place where, about a decade earlier, my brother and I went in with our pooled allowance and purchased Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness on release day. It had been put out of business, like so many things, by the combination of the downturn in the economy and the rise of downloading, two things which made college students, its primary purchasing body, more likely to stay in dorms torrenting new records rather than driving out to pick them up on release day. I certainly downloaded more than my fair share of music but also bought as much as I could with whatever money I had. And I loved browsing records specifically because of how it could put me in front of music I might not otherwise have ever known existed. But the lack of proper record stores left someone like me with very few options. The Borders in town was run by a middle aged white dude who kept it stocked with progressive rock both contemporary and classic, as well as plenty of jazz records, so that became my haunt when hunting for such albums, complicated by the tempting presence of shelves and shelves of books. Best Buy, with its rows and rows of shelves in the music section (which in 2005 took up the entire back of the store, and even included separate sections for both concert DVDs and special boxed sets) and its distribution arrangements with several labels, became my go-to for heavy metal. It was browsing in that same Best Buy that I found my first High on Fire record, discovered Baroness during the release of Red Album, and picked up my From the Vault two-fer King Diamond set of both Them and Conspiracy. There was an FYE and a Sam Goody in the mall that had their own metal sections, and while both carried fairly obscure death and black metal records, they also charged nearly 40 dollars for some of them, which mathed out to 3 Best Buy metal records. Trips with me to bookstores were a massive pain to my family. I would, after misunderstanding an encouragement from my mom about thoroughness, start at the top far left of the very first bookshelf in the store and work my way through book by book, slowly easingfrom the shelves all that seemed interesting to me one by one. Eventually, I curated my total stack, from which I would carve out the bottom tier of books until I arrived at a selection that would fit my budget. This process would sometimes take up to four hours, and being a young boy with at-the-time undiagnosed autism, I was sometimes, to be polite, exceptionally stubborn and upset with the notion of speeding up, truncating or altering this process in any way. I guaranteed every single time I left the bookstore that I had exactly what I wanted most, and had gotten the greatest quantity of items I possibly could, leaving me with absolutely no regrets. I simply was unaware of the emotional toll this would sometimes take on my father (who eventually stopped accompanying me on such trips) and my brother (who eventually demanded to be driven back home by my mother mid-trip when he finished, a process that literally not once took more time than my extremely thorough vetting process). My mother, to her credit, found it charming, and we often spent (and still spend) a lot of time bonding among bookshelves. By my teen years, this process had begun to include music stores. I would find the first shelf of the Pop/Rock section, always the largest, and start with the very first record in the very first row, flipping through item by item, row by row, shelf by shelf, until I had indexed the entire section. After that, I would go to Jazz, then New Age, then R&B/Hip-Hop, on and on and on. it is a shock to me, in retrospect, that people would willingly accompany me and stay and talk with me the entire time. My girlfriend at the time eventually stopped coming with me on such trips if she couldn’t guarantee a place to sit or a cafe to grab a coffee and read a bit. She let me call her on the phone to Google different groups or records I found to check their review scores on various sites that I trust. I was… an immense pain in the ass. But it helped me get through a lot of records in those formative years, and over time I became exceptionally sensitive to new stock entering the new store, and even began my now-lifelong habit of marking new album release dates and scanning new releases for gems I might otherwise never have heard of. It was by this extreme and deliberate method that allowed me, one day, to walk into the Best Buy on new release day. Stock for most record stores in 2005 would arrive on Mondays to be inventoried and then arrayed on the shelves sometime between Monday evening and Tuesday morning. This new stock included not only new records released that year, but new reissues. Relapse was riding a wave at the time of reissues. Unbeknownst to me, the combination of downloading and Mastodon’s rise was also generating a massive interest in the back catalogue of metal that had, for all of the 90s and most of the 2000s, gone without reissue, relying on the diminishing circulation of stock from the late 80s and early 90s. One of these groups was Atheist. A group which, by the gods of language and order, started with the letter A, and as such was very near the beginning of my two-hour item-by-item index of new stock ( a process cut in half by the sheer number of times I frequented that store, knowing at a glance which shelves hadn’t been touched since my last visit.) There had been an aborted attempt to remaster and re-release the Atheist catalogue in 2002. I thank my lucky stars that, after the reissuing of Piece of Time, this process was aborted by the band, who was reportedly unhappy with a number of issues with the re-releases, from payout to sonic quality. Had the records been released then and not on that auspicious day in 2005 which left multiple copies of all three Atheist records sitting in an overstuffed row on that shelf, I may never have discovered the end of technical and progressive death metal I came to love most. There was a sticker pressed against the shrink wrap of each album. One touted THE LEGENDARY DEBUT, another exclaimed THE FINAL ALBUM OF THE ORIGINAL LINEUP and the last simply said THE CLOSE TO PROGRESSIVE/DEATH METAL’S FINEST or something like that. A quick Google search on one of the terminals they had in the Best Buy showed it was their entire discography, which summed up to a grand total of about $35. I picked up all three. I probably bumped it up to 50, my standard haul amount if it was a sub-100+ kind of day, with a Broken Social Scene record or something like that. It was 2005 after all....
https://youtu.be/rCcC3AQgKOQ...
I only have one sibling, a brother three years older than me, and for the vast body of my childhood he was my primary abuser. Familial abuse is one of the most underreported kinds of abuse, especially when it occurs to children. I’m not an expert, merely a survivor; but I can say with certainty that the methods of silence and control a family can exert on a child, sheerly through the terror of not losing custody, can be powerful and overwhelming, especially when you are the youngest. At first, it was coded cries for help; eventually, this collapsed into open displays, where I embraced the body-devouring nihilism of knowing that no one was going to help me. I wanted to wear my wounds and flaunt them to people, to make them feel awful. This was not a mature or fair or decent response, but I was a teenager grappling with abuse in a home wracked with addiction and a father who seemed some days to be on the very precipice of death, and I didn’t know how to cope. It was not by miracles of god or the great providential purview of heaven that these wrongs were one day redressed in full and my family and I came to reconciliation, but by love and tremendous effort on both of our parts. But in 2005, that effort had not yet begun, and I was raw and skinless. When my brother moved out, heading to Texas with his wife with whom he’d eloped at the age of 19 to finally push himself to get a degree and get on with his life instead of sitting at home doing drugs, drinking and abusing me without my parents so much as lifting a finger to stop him, his room was left empty. It was in my sickness that I sought to colonize that space, to transform it from a cavern of terror and blood to one of my sole pleasure. I wielded the depth of my wounds to my parents, who acquiesced in their witness and allowed me to dress the room with an old loveseat, my computer desk and personal computer, my PS2 with TV, and several bookshelves for my growing number of books and CDs and games. The room was always hot, terribly hot, due to an issue with the venting prohibiting it from getting any kind of air conditioning and the construction of the house causing it to catch excess heat. With the door closed and window drawn, which was always, in those dark-painted walls I ensconced myself in the cavern of my teenage solitude and grief, beginning what would be a decade-long process of disassembling myself fully before remaking myself into a better man. Abuse, both emotional and physical, especially when you have a neurodivergence like autism and a mental illness like bipolar, can put some very sour thoughts in your head, and often with little in the way of adequate force to check and correct them. I was a crooked boy who would, for a time, grow into a crooked man; but now was the hour of my great disassembly. I would get home from school, say hello to my dad, and then promptly make my way to my cave. My father had given me a decent sound system for the computer as a gift. He was perhaps my most obviously problematic parent, but it was also through the bareness of his wounds that I was able to build a more equitable companionship with him. It was in that overly hot room that, sick with the flu and laying back on the loveseat, I listened to the album stream of Blood Mountain by Mastodon for the first time and was dragged into psychedelic nightmares in my fever. And so too it was where I ripped the Atheist records to my external hard drive full of records in lossless format, set it to playback in my overly-adjusted EQed player, turned up my sound system, and listened. Piece of Time passed by relatively uneventfully. It was to me then and still is to me now a good record, but no more. There are quality songs on it, and excellent performances, and the importance of debuts and demos to understanding the shape of a group and the arc of their history can’t really be overstated. But as a record, it felt somewhat underwhelming. And that’s when I heard Unquestionable Presence and fell in love....
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On Unquestionable Presence, not only did the sonic template shift more firmly toward death metal, but jazz fusion and Latin music began to really be prominent in the compositions. Opener “Mother Man”, metallic guitar tones aside, opens like a Latin dance tune, all percussion parts flattened to a singular drummer’s hands and feet, forming a tight dance with the rich and full bass, which received better production and presence than most death metal records prior. By the mid-point of the verse, the death metal chug and atmospherics take hold, the sole remnant being Flynn’s drumming, which is a bit too manic and ahead of the beat to be properly funky. It marries both the microrhythmic impulses of extreme metal and punk which tends to favor behind ahead of the beat and jazz and Latin music which often favor behind a touch behind it. You can hear in that first song, as it moves through its 1001 individual sections and riffs, the seeds of so many death metal bands both technical/progressive and not, being laid to soil. And then, at 3:25, a break: a full-on Latin groove between bassist Tony Choy and drummer Flynn, disrupted only by a brief major key NWOBHM-inspired chugging riff, before collapsing back into that groove. “Mother Man” would go on to feature in almost every live show Atheist played from the release of this record on, and it’s not hard to see why. Their debut Piece of Time was a fine record, but clearly a compilation of ideas learned along the way, presented more as a glorified demo reel to prospective listeners. Unquestionable Presence, then, was their first real album in a sense, and its opener so too would function as the mission statement of the band. Choosing a song like “Mother Man”, which never settles the question of whether they are a death metal, progressive rock, or jazz band but certainly finally strikes out the notion that they are a thrash band, feels proper. The song slides effortlessly back and forth, dialing up and down the amounts of progressive metal, jazz, and death metal in a manner that feels both deeply organic and enthralling. This was released in 1990, before tech death would acquire the bad name it sometimes has, with overly processed triggered drums and songs that pass like riff salad without a clear apprehension of how they will emotionally impact the listener. Atheist began their life as quality songwriters, which is still apparent here; they just learned a few new tricks along the way to spruce up the general forms they already knew were compelling. Imagine my shock then when, as this masterclass of death metal passed, it was followed by what would become perhaps my favorite death metal tune of all time, the title track “Unquestionable Presence”. The vocal performance snaps and snarls. Kelly Shaefer sounds more like a rabid animal, ranting and growling and shrieking, than a proper vocalist, like if James Hetfield was trapped in the wilderness alone for 30 days without food or water. The song absolutely rips through its progressions, arcing quick from furious finger-twisting unisons that still lean enough on traditional death metal melodic structures to sound evil and menacing rather than merely physically difficult, sections with long held guitar chords singing like discordant crystals in some malicious earthen well hidden deep within the earth, and then… that chorus. The chorus of “Unquestionable Presence” is instrumental, relying on a jaw-dropping riff that feels punky, primal, and destructive. Most engaging to me, as a young metal drummer trapped in a city of pop-punk players, was the absolutely insane rhythm underpinning it, a stomach-churning 7+7+10+10/8 repeating rhythm that flipped the subdivisions of those beats measure to measure and repetition to repetition. I was about as big of a nerd about these things then as I was now, and so I busted out some graph paper (ever a rhythmic notationist’s best friend) and began charting the rhythm out. It was effectively a manual piano roll, an easy-to-read drum annotation method I’d picked up for breaking down especially tricky passages that neither came to mind/hand easily nor were especially legible when written in proper sheet music form. But being compelled to write out a tricky part to learn its inner workings and slight rhythmic pushes and pulls isn’t interesting to a layperson, and I know that; what was and still is compelling about this rhythm is, like any well-performed odd-timepiece, it sounded good. And not just good: manic, primal, on the verge of falling apart but never quite collapsings. Those shifting subdivisions weren’t just a feat of technical wizardry; they were meant and successfully managed to keep me off balance for the duration of its play, barrelling with a loose and punky sense of rattling downhill inertia while still being an absolute feat to actually pull off. It felt to me, a young metalhead and musician, like the perfect musical passage, one that married listenability with unnerving atmospheric emotional touches, technicality with a punky looseness, inhuman ability with deeply human lived-in playing. It was and still is for me the passage I point to when I talk about technical and progressive death metal, and even progressive metal and death metal on their own. It is, in all manners, perfect. The rest of the album follows in kind. I don’t wish to summarize it like this in an attempt to diminish the power of the remaining tracks, but space and time are limited and so a thorough discussion of each song doesn’t feel especially necessary. Those two opening tracks, “Mother Man” and “Unquestionable Presence”, prime the listener for what follows as both a showcase of technical ability and progressive arrangements, each song featuring a mind-boggling number of riffs and progressions, which also being a feral and immediate death metal record. That, I think, is perhaps the greatest gift Atheist had as players. They didn’t use progressive arrangements or technical passages to dazzle the listener; they were used to produce a mood, an affect, one they pursued rigorously through their various songs, sometimes leaning more toward death metal such as on “Your Life’s Retribution” and sometimes more on exalting progressive metal such as on “An Incarnation’s Dream”. Unquestionable Presence is as varied as their debut, some songs feeling feral and others psychedelic, some like jazz and some like death metal. They never really fully blend and marry the sounds together across the record, instead sliding back and forth across them uneasily, like a skittering insect across a surface of water. But it is this lack of resolved musical direction that lends the material as a set such a supernatural level of power. There is a reason that this album has featured so heavily in setlists since their reunion. This is the eruptive moment of the group, the record where their identity as a group was set. It is a mirror to My Arms, Your Hearse in that manner, another record where a group seemed to finally close in on the sound that would dominate their productive output for years to come....
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Atheist would go on to follow Unquestionable Presence with Elements. It was recorded after a brief break, declining commercial interest in the band as well as internal conflicts causing the members to briefly move on to other pastures before the record label came calling for the final album on their contract. Despite these harried beginnings (and poor promotion for the record at the time of its release), Elements stands next to its sibling as another masterclass record. In almost every way, it is the better of Unquestionable Presence; the playing tighter, the jazz jazzier, the prog both spacier and more psychedelic. And yet, despite being a wondrous and beloved record, it is not the one that sits highest in my heart, nor so in the hearts of most of the fanbase. The reasons for this are not easily explicated. The best I can arrive at is, again, that sense of eruption. The two records are conjoined in my heart, and when I listen to one I almost always listen to the other shortly after. But it was the cover of Unquestionable Presence that swam up into my heart when I thought of the psychedelic fringes of death metal, where my own interior madness with my bipolar disorder, PTSD, and autism collide. It was Unquestionable Presence that I thought of first when drafting concepts for this column. It was Unquestionable Presence that I played in calculus class in high school when I passed my headphones to the popular girl and lifelong friend who sat behind me, saying, “Check this shit out.” There are intangible hooks that buried this record above the others into my heart, so deep that I can clearly recall the moments I have spent with it over a decade on....
Find an image of the cover, as big as you can get, a wall-filling poster if you can. Dim the lights. Put on headphones, decent ones, with good padding and decent bass presence and mid frequencies. Play the record. And stare at that image, and surrender yourself to the cavern of psychic unbecoming that is death metal, the psychedelic disintegrating journey through your madness and pain to some feral interior spark. And know in that place what fans of death metal know, and when I knew even in that dark well that was once my abuser’s bedroom: there is a joy in this animal rage and psychic violence, something beyond mere happiness or sadness, some indefatigable spirit that thrashes and writhes and snarls with a bright euphoric eye and a rapturous laugh of ecstasy.-Langdon Hickman
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Dornenreich’s Wondrous Weirdness
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At the crux of expressionism and Romanticism, there is Dornenreich. Undulating somewhere between black metal, neofolk, ambiance, progressive rock, Romanticism and Expressionism, Eviga's unique sense of creativity has fueled his brainchild for a period of time which spans more than two decades. Following an evolution which moves from more traditional black metal to the pinnacle of the gilded style which only can be created by Eviga, Dornenreich is truly one of a kind. Reveling in what he calls "wondrous weirdness," Eviga is one to cast expectation to the wind, preferring to follow his inner voice into the world of strange madness, resulting in what could either be the most blasting of melodic black metal or tense, whispering neofolk. Each step down Dornenreich's path is one of uncertainty, with the only static element being the project's own masterful creator. In a new interview, we capture a rare glimpse into the mind of Eviga. Much like his ephemeral music, he appeared just as quickly as he left, leaving the conversation in stasis. As it turns out, more material happened to be in the works and his mind had to go elsewhere. Always creating, never stopping. In the meantime, enjoy an unfinished conversation with this master of whimsy....
The Schwellenklänge discography vinyl box set can be preordered from Prophecy Productions now....
https://youtu.be/DNFpx185zKo...
Over its more than two decades of existence, Dornenreich has remained singular, possessing its own sound in the face of black metal's increasingly strict definition. Looking back, what fueled your decision to make such unique music so early on? What continues that drive? Actually, this highly individual and unlimited approach of expression apart from the overall mysterious appeal is what drew my attention to black metal in the beginning. In my perception almost every band from Norway's and Austria's scene, which are the two countries I dived into primarily, appeared to define their very own sound back then (including instrumentation in many cases...). Combined with my interest in expressionistic literature and its immensely individual use of language this -- to me -- black-metal-imminent individuality let me make first rough tracks through the wilderness of my inner world. And because of the fact that Dornenreich -- to this very day -- is all about exploring and consciously internalizing the essence of existence I have always trusted in the artistic intuition Dornenreich's core has always relied on. It is interesting that you cite expressionism, as I noticed there was a big shift toward that when Valñes left the band a little over ten years ago -- more specifically a change from the romanticism which defined Dornenreich's first decade to the more expressionistic sound we hear today -- though he is still heard on the transitioning Durch den Traum in 2006. Though this ties in with a turn in the band's concept, was there any other driving force which led to this sound change? Personally, I think that especially Her von welken Nächten already marked one peak when it comes to the expressionism in Dornenreich concerning both music as well as lyrics. A further peak in my perception was reached on In Luft geritzt with regard to lyrics, whereas Hexenwind, Durch den Traum, Flammentriebe, and Freiheit had it all. That is, the natural romantic as well as the expressionist colors… So, all in all, I don’t think that there actually are two different decades concerning our main musical or lyrical elements and as I see things this, let’s say a certain unpredictability just points out how much Dornenreich relies on a vital approach and on intuition. To sum it up from a general perspective: I am quite sure that hardly anybody expected the ferociously intense metal album that Flammentriebe was after the purely acoustic In Luft geritzt… and I guess hardly anybody saw Freiheit coming after Flammentriebe… and, back in the days, surely nobody imagined an album like Hexenwind after Her von welken Nächten......
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Do you feel Dornenreich's timeline is defined by that outward unpredictability? This unpredictability is a result of the intuitive approach everything in Dornenreich relies on. Basically, I experience the creative process this way: on my guitar I dream but that’s no escapist dreaming, no "dreaming away from something," no, it rather is the opposite as it opens my heart and connects me with everything in a new - and perhaps even deeper - way and it makes a vision enter my perception which then "materializes" by and by. So, in the end, one might say that I "dream forth" instead of "dream away"... And when it comes to writing lyrics after an album I usually need a longer timeframe, often years, during which I don’t write anything and even don’t think of writing something down apart from some brief notions that occasionally pop up in my mind. However, I usually know the title of the next album at the time an album is released. And so I just live, I try to evolve as a human being and I just gather impressions, make experiences… But then at a certain point I can feel that it is about time to express myself and to bring all the new experiences and perceptions into a poetic shape by means of writing lyrics. And whenever I reach this point I just sit down and write the basic lyrics within few days. I had wondered if the lyric writing process was arduous, especially with all the word-play involved in your emphasis and enunciation. What kind of process do you follow when looking into how your lyrics and poetry can be manipulated to have multiple meanings? I don’t experience all that to be arduous, really. It comes to me naturally while I am diving into the music more and more. Usually, I just have to sit down and fall silent and then I start to listen to a song over and over again until the pictorial character, the emotional immediacy and the musical "gestures" our music consists of connect with both my mind and my heart. Certainly, I put conscious effort into some of the linguistic nuances and details in a further attempt, but the core of all the lyrics just shows itself within my mind rather effortlessly. What led to this use of language ambiguity and wordplay? How does this fit into the overall Dornenreich aesthetic/story? My love for language and poetry which I discovered at a rather early age. Since my earliest adolescence I have always been fascinated with the possibilities and even with the possible limits of verbal communication -- and communication in general, that is, for instance the different aspects and possibilities of music when it comes to communication of emotional and often non-verbal contents and nuances of meaning. Eventually, numerous areas and levels of life -- and the exploration of life is what Dornenreich is about substantially -- seem to be paradox and therefore I consider it to be very truth -- and powerful to incorporate ambiguous verbal expression now and again. What does the Dornenreich project mean at that substantial, core level? As I perceive it personally Dornenreich makes the human individual live through certain crucial experiences and it confronts the human individual with nature and mystery of life in a pure and disarming way -- and it does so in spite of the fact that all takes place in the fields of aesthetic exaltation, primarily. It simply invites moments of great awareness and honesty, which have the power and impact to shape and change a lot within the sphere of a person. So, as far as I am able experience it Dornenreich is an exceedingly conscious celebration and artistic realization of the wondrous weirdness it is to be alive, the wondrous weirdness it is to be here at all....
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"Wondrous Weirdness" is a perfectly succinct way of describing the Dornenreich experience. For music as beautiful and haunting as it is, there is this inherent strangeness and surrealism to it. I think about various passages across your discography which manage to balance tension and beauty in a larger, stranger suspension of reality. Is this weirdness inherent to your style or something on which you place extra concentration? Yes, it is inherent to Dornerneich or, better put, to the source we try to gather at when dreaming on our instruments. It is a part -- or even the vital heart -- of our intuitive approach and it never fails to enchant us just because it comes without any extra effort. So, there is some kind of magic depth revealing itself continuously that keeps everything very vital and exciting (even) for ourselves. Does the black metal style make the most sense with regard to your intuitive emotional/dreaming approach? In my perception black metal as a genre offers the most varied possibilities, for there are no limits in structure, arrangement, and instrumentation. The atmosphere is crucial, the vision, the spirit. In my eyes and perception, the 'black metal style' as you put it is the most 'open' and 'wide' 'style' I can think of, and therefore I consider it to be truly inspiring. For at least the last ten years I have always composed on acoustic guitars exclusively in order to keep my approach as pure and natural as possible. During the further elaboration of songs and albums we then spend a lot of time on exploring different instrumentations or arrangements we want to go with. Howsoever, Dornenreich is all about deeper vibes, about soulful spheres in the end. So consequently we, for instance, have songs like "Reime faucht der Märchensarg", "Jagd", "Erst deine Träne löscht den Brand" or even the main Hexenwind-songs that we play live in two totally different ways -- that is, metallic and acoustic. Both ways work, and they do so because of the spiritual dimension our expression has and offers. The deeper vibes certainly go beyond chosen genres and instrumental performance as well -- I am always taken aback by your vocal presence across the Dornenreich discography. Considering your range (shrieks, howls, whispers, moans, hushed singing, and more), how are these different techniques and sounds composed, sometimes in juxtaposition, with the music? Actually -- and I am sorry to be so repetitive here (haha) -- it's all about intuition again; and, I mean, of course it is, given the fact that the vocals are the most personal area of sonic human expression. Apart from the fact that I should be more keen on applying apt techniques I just like to keep my approach pure -- also and especially -- when it comes to the vocals and I try to maintain this intuitive approach even if that means that sometimes I tend to harm my vocal chords temporarily. So, usually, there is barely any voice left after a tour or a longer recording session and, without any doubt, that's because of the mix of screaming, whispering and talking to people for hours after the shows… So, I just go with the feelings, the inner pictures and the energy the music and the live-situation create within me, the vision demands from me. Besides, I am a cineaste and radio-play-adorer, that is, I truly love well developed and nuanced voices, which is something that really shows in Anigzia which is another project I am involved in as a singer or -- let's say -- vocal performer…...
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Though intuition is obviously what comes naturally, have you ever tried to challenge it? That is to say, have you tried to throw you own ideas of conventionality "out the window" and approach from a new perspective? After quite some time of letting this question seep in, I dare to state I have often "challenged it" via changing main instruments within the compositional process and through enriching the intuitive core with continuous reflection of what artistic expression is all about in my perception and via continuous reflection of what I deeply want to communicate by means of artistic expression; and all that is clearly underlined by our multifaceted discography and our unpredictable decisions in general. So, I would say that even this very important core of intuition is embedded in a pure and always present thoughtful as well as spiritual awareness that never could be described as conventional. What does music mean to you? To me, music -- in its most comprising shape -- has the potential to the most intense channel of multilayered human communication. For instance, it can mean a vital gesture or even an actual touch including both connecting or dissolving transformations of energy and consciousness.... and I know this reads like esoteric hyper-trash but -- hand on heart -- on a certain level, music truly resonates with me that way. So it's more of a metaphysical thing to you? I really don't have to super elevate things, and I am able to enjoy the elegant power of, let's say, Pantera, or even the winking horror of let's say the Misfits, just for the sake of this energetic or sing-along listening pleasure. But when we sit down and start to reflect things I admit right away that, in my personal perception, there are many layers of musical expression and ideas of what music can effectuate or simply mean to somebody. As music, in some respects, is invisible art that might trigger physical reaction such as goosebumps, it connects visible and invisible spheres. So, as I perceive things there doubtlessly are metaphysical, transcending aspects and when one looks even deeper one might perceive or see further aspects (as I pointed out in my last answer referring to what music means to me)....
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Interview: Völur Bassist Lucas Gadke
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Through a unique blend of drums, violin, and an oscillating electric/upright bass, Völur provides a big and bold interpretation of doom metal from behind their hooded cloaks. Hailing from seemingly unlikely Toronto, the trio forgoes fetishizing of Norse myth in favor of taking general musical inspiration from their name’s clairvoyant character. An omnivore of mythology more broadly, bassist Lucas Gadke has become adept at translating his vision of futuristic doom by meditating on our universal commonalities with the past. With the antiquity of string instruments in tow, he plans on taking the show on the road in late October, with the first U.S. Prophecy Fest in Brooklyn serving as a major stop. Already veterans of Prophecy Fest Germany, Völur will be joining the ranks of Alcest, Eye of Nix, and many more. To learn more about what we can expect to see on stage and the story of how they got there, Gadke takes a time out from playing with his New Orleans-style jazz band to share his thoughts....
We’re stoked that Völur will be playing Prophecy Fest this November. Have you guys gotten to tour much or have you been playing mostly local shows? We did a run through the U.S. earlier this year in March and we teamed up with another Prophecy band called 1476. We went down south to Texas and then we were going to go back up through the Midwest. Unfortunately, halfway through the tour, our violinist, Laura, and I were leaning on a balcony at a place we had rented for the night in Lafayette and it gave way. I ended up falling 10 feet and breaking three of my ribs. We ended up playing one more show but deciding it wasn’t really possible to do a full tour on three broken ribs, so we went home. This upcoming tour is kind of a redemption for some of the places we weren’t able to play. I’m sorry to hear about the injury, although that does sound like something that would happen in Louisiana. [Editor's Note: Jenna used to live there.] The funny thing is we were driving down the highway and I was remarking ‘god, there are so many signs for personal injury lawyers around here.’ I think I found out why. So Völur has a bit of an eclectic lineup in terms of its combination of metal and orchestral instrumentation. Is it something that happened coincidentally in that you all knew each other and those were all instruments you guys happened to play, or is it something that you actively sought out? What we play in Völur are just our main instruments. Laura and I actually met in jazz school in Toronto. We became friends a little bit later when we started doing work for singer/songwriters in the folk world. There was one particular singer/songwriter who I won’t name who take us through some strange trips through northern Ontario. In the car, Laura and I started bonding over our love of heavy music, so we started playing the heaviest things we could to tick off this old folky we were driving around with. That kind of turned into coming up with ideas when we had down time and imagining what [Völur] would sound like. I’d be playing the double bass and she’d be playing the violin and we improvised counterpoint pieces that we would get some creepy sounds out of. It really happened organically. When we decided to start the band, an interesting part of writing was being conscientious of who was playing what and in what range because you don’t have the guitar, which is the perfect instrument for heavy metal. It fills the sound out and you get to do solos and stuff, so if you take that away, you have to be a bit more thorough with how you arrange things. What started as coincidental became intentional as the project went on. When your style of instrumentation comes together, it definitely evokes a strong other-worldly vibe. When you’re playing live or even in the studio, where does your mind go? I think the real trick is to actually stay grounded and not float off and try to be in another plane. When we’re playing, the best performances are kind of right there in the moment of the music. If you’re playing a really loud heavy part, you’re very washed over by the sound, but at the same time you’re very conscious of what you’re doing and listening very intently. Through that you reach an other-worldliness. It involves intense concentration....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOnLkazXcCY...
What was your journey like with learning the double bass? I started playing music at 12 or 13, like a lot of kids. My parents made me take piano lessons when I was younger and then I started to learn how to play the guitar and the bass. Initially I was more interested in learning folk music and things like that. I had two older brothers who were into all sorts of music, so for me the world was kind of an open book – you could listen to whatever and enjoy whatever you want. Slowly, well, I don’t know how slow it was, but I started getting into stranger things like Avant Garde Classical music and weird heavy metal. When I decided as a teenager that I was going to be a professional musician and decided to go to school for it, I bumped it up to this jazz school ethos, which is very concentrated in bebop and learning these kinds of American standard songs and the jazz repertoire. I think some people would get kind of turned after a while, but I think it teaches you some discipline. You get freedom, but it’s sort of this focused, intentional freedom. Cut to the thematic end of things -- how did your interest in mythology develop? My interest started when my dad brought me up to read Tolkien. I think that’s a common thing for a lot of people who get into mythology. They start reading The Hobbit and then later on The Lord of the Rings, which is quite accessible. If you go back and read about its process you start reading about the Norse myths and things like that. So, I started checking those out. When I found the Icelandic sagas, I was completely captivated. I read as many as I could get my hands on. That’s kind of where my interest was drawn -- stories that are familiar, yet completely unfamiliar at the same time. It’s 1,000 years ago and there are themes and beings you can recognize, but there are also strange and magical elements. At the heart of it, [myth] is just people living out their lives. Ancient literature can tend to focus on kings or people you can’t really identify with, but if you’re just reading about a farmer who’s trying to live his life the best he can, that really resonates – but there also might be a witch who puts a curse on him. I found it to be endlessly fascinating. That’s what really drew me in. The picture of the world is clear, but it’s also through a kind of haze. You can put your own ideas in it and filter it through your own influences, so there’s a lot of imagination you can use to fill incomplete pictures, which is where the music element comes in. The music that I play is what I feel when I read these kinds of old legends. Who is the character of the Völur? The word völur means a group of women -- usually witches --who can see into the future. It’s a reference also to fate. It’s a reminder that with music, there’s almost this trance-inducing dance that allows you to see the future. The music itself is a strange thing that plays with time and cause and effect. That’s kind of how I see it -- a trance, but also the notion that music is a temporal art form that can be done, re-done, and changed a million times. Art gets written down and changes with time, and the future that can be seen with it is different. I might be getting a little too esoteric… What’s the process of bringing this experience to life? Is it ever difficult to translate, especially when you might be working with venues who don’t necessarily know how to mix more orchestral performances, or has it been fairly seamless? I think at the beginning it was very difficult playing local metal shows. Sometimes we’d play with grindcore bands, which I love. I love playing those shows. My desire to incorporate more dynamic shifts in the music -- like getting really soft and then really loud -- would sometimes be squashed be people cheering or screaming and all that kind of stuff. I think if you can try to bring people in at first, musically, you can set the tone that this is going to be a listening experience. You don’t want to start with something big and thrashy; you want to start with something hypnotic and ease in. At shows where we’re not playing as well as I think that we could, people tend to speak when the volume gets quiet and that throws it off. But if we’re in fine form and playing hard then you can really draw people in. It becomes a really nice experience when people are actively listening for a cue for applause as opposed to just kind of applauding whenever the volume goes down....
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The March and the Stream: Skepticism Revisits The Re-Mixed “Stormcrowfleet”
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When it comes to funeral metal, funeral doom, or whatever the genre ontology dictates, there are the titans. There are the Thergothons, the Esoterics, but, more importantly, there is Skepticism. Make no mistake, Skepticism is funeral music first and a metal band second. They always have been, stubbornly raising a somber, blazer-clad fist toward the sky in opposition to metal's self-indulgent speed and clarity of message. Skepticism marches toward an end, playing their own marche funebre at a slowing pace. As their career grows, so does their abstraction, their evolution exceedingly asymptotal as the end of the conceptual draws nearer. But every abstract idea starts with its opposite: an actual idea. A semblance of clarity. This birth, for Skepticism, was their masterpiece. They carry their 1995 album Stormcrowfleet with them in every step they take, every note they play, and every lengthy pause in which they drink the silence. Then a full five-piece band (the canonical Matti, Eero, Jani, and Lasse with session member J. Korpihete on bass -- the last time they would have an actual bassist), Skepticism's music was that of deliberation, emotion, and beauty. This was the painfully slow, breathtakingly beautiful music of ache and hope, a dichotomy the band finds befitting of their music. No matter the agonic nature of their own funeral music, Skepticism was meant to be seen as a vision of beauty, an artistic whole which fills cathedrals and hearts alike. A then rare example of organ-driven metal, an idea held by then-former guitarist Eero Pöyry, Skepticism's own music lurches on in solemnity and grace. In an interview, Pöyry reflects on Skepticism's early days, looks on through their discography, and contemplates the band's existence as a whole....
The remixed and remastered Stormcrowfleet will be released October 26th on Svart Records....
https://youtu.be/1_gmtSQ3wcc...
I know you've been thinking about Stormcrowfleet for a while at this point since there is the full remix and remaster coming out. Yeah! The album is coming up on… how many years next year? Twenty… four? Is it really? I'm doing the math in my head right now. It came out in '95, so the 25th anniversary is in 2020. Wow. Does it feel like it's approaching this milestone at all? It still feels very fresh when I listen to it. Well… it's been with us all the time. We've been paying all but one of those songs in gigs all these years. It doesn't feel old to us somehow. Some of the first songs we wrote seem to stick well compared to later material. Time really passes fast. When you say 23 or 24 years, it doesn't feel that long. It seems like this first album is the definitive for Skepticism's sound. There are albums that follow which hone in on different aspects of what you achieved, but Stormcrowfleet feels like the grand statement. Isn't that what normally happens with bands? The debut album is where you channel all your thoughts and ideas from your early career, you know? I think that happened with us. To take it from there, it was kind of more refined -- the idea we had there. I would say that. Some of the later albums where we take our ideas much further, the foundation of our ideas on Stormcrowfleet is still there. Also, I think of how those sounds came to be… in our early 20s or teenage years, we just wrote the songs and rehearsed day in and day out. The spirit crystallized in those songs, which is why I think they stick so well. That element of time definitely plays into the album, especially considering how ambitiously slow it was. Obviously there were other albums in the "funeral doom" style at the time (bands like Thergothon and so on) who also played with time, but this seemed to be very different, almost religious feeling, the most striking element being your organ playing. Was this cathedral-like, monastic atmosphere something you set out to do? What happened back in the day was we first released the Towards My End 7" EP. After that "classic" setup (two guitars, bass, drums, and vocals), which was how most bands were set up, we came to think of what we should actually sound like. The defining moment was when I switched from guitars to keyboards. At that time we were thinking what the sound should be. Keyboards were quite new in metal at that time. Many bands were either using them as background, almost like an effect, and others were using it like a second solo guitar, using keyboard solos and all that. Neither of those felt like ours. I kind of thought what a keyboard player in a metal band like this should be like. It should be like the organist in a church. In that lineup, the organ became much like what the second guitar would have been. The way to position it in the sound was church organ-like. Thinking through all the things you should do and not do…I started taking it in the organist direction instead of soloist direction, so I got the church organ foot pedals and played (and still do) sitting down, using the pedals as well. I eventually got a second keyboard, as well. It's pretty much a church organ setup in a metal band as well. As real pipe organs are not very portable [laughs], the only way to do that is with electronic instruments. I position myself as a church organ player in a metal band. Our drummer followed suit and started playing with felt mallets instead of drumsticks and played with different drum sets. Currently, he has a gong bass drum and large toms. We went over what the full sound the band should be and ended up with us four -- keyboards, guitars, drums, and vocals -- and made them into a somewhat funeral band in metal form. It took us a couple years -- we recorded the demo tape after the first release, which set up the sound for the next release. Then with Stormcrowfleet we refined it further. When thinking of the songs on Stormcrowfleet, we had written some of them before without keyboards in the band and had even played them live before I had switched to keyboards. For example, "The Everdarkgreen" had been completely written beforehand, then adapted for keyboards later....
https://youtu.be/52I5n1W6hxE...
Sure, there was "The Everdarkgreen," "Pouring," and "Rising of the Flames" were reused after that tape. Yes, yes! Also "Sign of a Storm" we wrote with keyboards, and I still remember the first time we played the opening riff and thought "well, this truly works." By the time we wrote that song, we had already known there would be an album and this would be the opening track. When did you decide Stormcrowfleet needed or was going to be remixed? Was this something the band set out to do? Was it something the label had asked? We had been thinking of releasing the albums on vinyl all along. We had the master tapes for Stormcrowfleet ready. I remembered earlier this year that we had bought the tapes in case we ever needed them. If we didn't use them now, when would we? So it was basically a decision in the band originally to release the album on vinyl. The mastering of the original mix isn't the best possible for vinyl, but we wanted to see if we could use the original tapes. It took some research to find a good studio who could process the tapes in the best possible way, but we also had to check and see if the tapes even worked anymore. After checking all those out and talking with Svart, they were positive about it all along, it was just about practicality. The major thing is I like the original mix, but when I found out the tapes were working and we could do a remix with the kind of equipment which existed in the '90s (but we didn't have access to), I was curious to see what would happen. Svart made it happen, so here we are. While it retains that original spirit, there is a different character when listening through. It's like hearing it all over for the first time again. How did it feel hearing these songs with the new mix with this added depth? The whole thing took a week -- it was kind of a time capsule for myself. I spent the whole week in the studio. Getting the old tracks, playing and kind of going through them -- what was playing in which track and how. It took me back to those days in which we wrote and recorded those songs. It was a really interesting trip in itself. I was finding stuff on the album which I didn't remember anymore. For example, the clearest example is the intro of "The Gallant Crow". We did record it but for some odd reason scrubbed it from the original mix. We didn't even remember it was there until we heard it on the tapes. Then again, another thing was there are many… not surprises, but many places which reminded me of how much we had thought about those songs and how to perform them. For example, our drummer played his cymbals in many different intensities in each song. On The Gallant Crow, the whole band plays softer than in The Sign of a Storm, for example. Hearing all that again and getting into the mood where these young men are doing the best they can do with songs that are really important to them in the studio -- it was really amazing for me. I think we spent about two weeks recording the album itself. It was our first time doing an album, traveling to record it. We had a clear vision of what to do, but not such a clear idea on the technical side of how to do it. It shows in many places there. The perspective a couple of decades after that is really interesting. The process brought back a lot of those ideas and thoughts we had back in the day. So your older material is finding new ways to influence you once more in the way you compose music, or is it a nice memory? [laughs] Well…I will say there are things we will bring with us from those old tapes but I've learned to appreciate what we did back in the day better by hearing each individual tracks. We listened to the entire album with J. Korpihete, who was our session bassist at the time and did lots of photography for us. He said that hearing this makes him appreciate these "young men" doing this with all this passion back in the day. That's really cool, especially for something so… I guess the word would be "despondent" -- this funeral music. It's interesting to hear it have such a positive memory influence on people. It's interesting how music can do this -- something so sad making people feel so good. Yeah! That's a key thing for me. For me, playing music of slow pace is an aesthetic choice for me. It isn't about being sad; it's an aesthetic choice. Music like this is beautiful to me. I recall in that documentary "The Stream" which was released earlier this year, you referred to the organ as something which is a source of joy and sorrow, and you found beauty in that. Exactly, it is all the aforementioned aesthetic. You might also remember that last thing I said being in the documentary, as well [laughs]. The beauty of music itself is something difficult to describe outside of the intent of aesthetic because everyone takes it differently. I am sure there are some people will listen to Skepticism and be totally taken aback by how slow and sad it is, but there are people like you and me who listen to it for the beauty. That's what makes albums like Stormcrowfleet (and the rest of your music) so timeless. You clearly see that in our live shows. The way people receive the music in the audience is quite different from each other. Everyone has their own way of understanding and feeling it. There is no right way. That's also related to how our lyrics are written. They tend to say as little as possible so you can understand and feel them in your own way. There is no statement as such in it. It's intentionally left open in that sense. It's a deep approach considering how young you all were when you were creating this early music. You don't really hera a lot of teeenagers --at least here in the United States -- approaching music with that level of abstraction in hopes of interpretation. Thinking back, one of the great things was that when you are young, you are really impassioned, but also inexperienced and a little naive. You make choices which when you are older, experienced, and more rational you wouldn't really make. When you are young, you are extreme, and that's really good. It shows in many ways and many styles of music. It's good. That's why I like the comment from J., referring to those "young men," one of whom was himself. It's all so interesting. With revisiting this music, there is this "bonus track," the outtro. Though it was initially part of "The Everdarkgreen", you separated it. Was it meant to be its own chapter? The idea is that the album itself is a whole. To close the whole, the album needs a "stamp." We thought if you listen through the whole album, it closes the loop. We thought of things a lot on a conceptual level and thought it needed that. Just separating that element to say: this is where it ends? Yes. That never occurred to me. I've listened through the album so many times that seeing and understanding that outtro as its own chapter offers more of a finality. It feeds more into the concept of Skepticism as funeral music instead of an offshoot of doom metal. When I think of funeral metal as it is, there are other bands who are slower and heavier, but that wasn't our goal. We were trying to do something whole and whole sounding. We've been quite stubborn all the time -- our drummer has never played music written by anyone else. He's been playing all his life, but only songs he or his band has written. We have also in many ways never tried to do anything anyone else has done. People think they are more unique than they are, but we truly try to create something of our own and think from our own perspective. You hear that in our sound -- the whole concept of the band. Absolutely -- there is nothing which sounds like Skepticism other than Skepticism itself. That stubbornness pays off over time, especially, with each album being its own statement on these abstract feelings, thoughts on existence. The only word I can think of is unique. That's how we want to do it. When you think of things from a rational point of view, doing things like these are not commercially viable. I'm not saying it would be better if we weren't stubborn, but it's always how we wanted to do it. We aren't extreme as in burning churches, but we are extreme in that we want to do our own thing and go wherever it takes us. There aren't many bands who hold to a philosophy or credo quite like that. Considering Skepticism has been around for almost thirty years, it's special to see that kind of inner pull still moving the band now. Yeah. What happened in the early days was the drummer and guitarist formed the band and wanted to find people they thought would stick around and could work with. Not in an ambitious sense but the kind of people you can create music with long-term. They succeeded and we've stayed alive all these years. It's definitely been a consistent lineup -- must take a special kind of interpersonal relationship to keep that going. It does, and the interesting thing is we've never explicitly agreed on this being "the thing." We just keep doing our thing ad see what happens, sustaining the band along the way. Everyone agreed on that even if we didn't speak it out loud. Everyone was happy with the way we create music in the long run. We keep going and don't let anything stop us. Had we been more commercially minded in the early days, we might have had goals we didn't reach and just stopped. Even as young men we thought we'd be doing this for life and that's what happened. I'm really happy about that, because many things in life come and go, and so far the band for me has been the one sustaining thing in life. It's a good thing. How do you feel the music pulling you now as opposed to when you were a young man making these early albums. Do you feel that same sort of sustenance, or has it evolved into a different kind? There are same things and there are different things. I told you of the first time we played "Sign of a Storm" at a practice, I still remember how I felt. "This thing really works," and it worked on the album. That thing still happens with some songs as we write them. On the latest album, we have the March Incomplete, and when we played that for the first time I knew it was the kind of music I wanted to create now. However, as a young man, I wanted the lyrics to say more or make some vague statement in themselves. There was more to say. The older I get, the less I want to say in the lyrics. That's different, in a sense. The less you want to say as in abstraction? I look at Ordeal and see more words but fewer statements, as opposed to Stormcrowfleet where you very specifically outline a place. Are you looking to be more mysterious? Yeah, if not mysterious then at least leave more room for the listened to fill the holes themselves and get the feel of the song as they want as opposed to what we meant. And, of course, if you look at Farmakon, they are definitely the shortest and more minimal, but you're right about Ordeal. I want to say less as in there are no statements or agenda we would like to push through. We want our lyrics to move in a similar way to our music. We present a framework without telling you what it is about. Abstraction is a part of it and also kind of… thinking of lyrics as a part of the composition in a way you receive it. Like a complete artistic work where you were to look at it and make your own decision instead of reading a dissertation on it. Yes! Or kind of when you think of political punk music or hardcore, right? There are statements like "we think this thing is wrong in the world" or "here are thoughts for you."...
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It seems more personal that way. The "emotional nudity" where you have someone's actual thoughts instead of their thoughts on their thoughts. Even describing the actual thoughts doesn't even happen much in our lyrics. As few concrete things as possible. That is how I like it. I think that is important, especially with the way you say what drives Skepticism and has driven the band all these years. This credo is a great statement among all this specific music being made. I remembered a thing! Back in the day, I used to write a lot of things to myself and to the band. I wrote a letter to myself as an adult. I guess I am one now and I do have that letter in the basement. I need to remember which box it is in, but I would like to know what 20 year old me has to say to adult me. That's cool! I hope you find it, because that seems like an interesting read as more of an adult than you were when you were 20. The interesting thing would be whether the young man had something to say like what is right in life or what is wrong. Like I've already said, looking back and seeing what we did, I do appreciate it. Even if we do things differently now, the drive and extremeness in our thoughts back in the day were good. Now that this first album is being reborn, have you thought about next steps? I know something is always in the works, but I also know you take your time. We have been writing the new album since Ordeal and after Ordeal we played the most live shows than we have ever played. We have been slowly writing after that and have more than half the new album done. There is still more than a year before the release, but it is coming and that's how we do it. We take our time. What has been keeping the band alive all these years is we never stop. Regardless of whether there will be live shows soon or if there is any knowledge of a new album: we keep writing, keep creating all the time. This is something we've explicitly discussed. We will keep creating and once we have six songs done, there will be an album, regardless if someone will release it or not....
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