Briton Rites Occulte Fantastique

Heavy Metal Everlasting: An Interview with Howie Bentley of Cauldron Born and Briton Rites


As we talked about with Mike Scalzi the other week, the 1990s were a low point in the history of heavy metal. It was nearly dead, with only isolated bands still playing it in the United States, most of them unaware of anyone else doing it. One of the most-decimated styles was the musically impressive and instrumentally complex side of United States Power Metal (for more info, see this great guide written by a good friend), which crested in the 1980s with bands like Helstar, Apocrypha, and Fates Warning and then died soon thereafter. Another was the rocking, ancient doom pioneered by bands like Witchfinder General in England, which was soon to be supplanted by years of development in the genre that didn’t always leave room for the old greats that toed the line between rollicking heavy metal and early Black Sabbath.

Nothing that is dead may ever die, and heavy metal lifer Howie Bentley was not willing to let the sounds that he loved vanish. With a duo of killer bands, Cauldron Born and Briton Rites, Howie has built his own legend within the underground scene with a catalog that, though sparse, goes back all the way to 1993 and continues all the way to today without a second of false metal or bad music in his discography. With a focus on sounds that are obscure and difficult to pull off, Howie has used his chops to preserve a legacy of metal mayhem that without him would be, if not lost, then nearly entombed.

The beginning of Howie’s story as is known by most people starts with Cauldron Born, which formed in 1994 and immediately put out the Swords, Sorcery and Science demo, a hyper-technical beast that even as the band’s first release established firmly the identity that the band carries to this very day. Aggressively shreddy but also memorable and catchy, early Cauldron Born (and a pre-Cauldron Born demo under Howie’s name) was collected together on the appropriately-named God of Metal compilation that came out on Underground Symphony in 1998.

Underground Symphony also put out the band’s first album, Born of the Cauldron, which remains highly praised in the heavy metal community as one of the finest records in its style. Cauldron Born’s second, …and Rome Shall Fall, came out in 2002, and then the band broke up, to the dismay of fans of shred everywhere.

Though Cauldron Born was for the time finished, Howie was not, and soon another love letter to the obscure traditions of Howie’s youth would be born: Briton Rites. Perhaps even better loved in some sectors of the underground community than Cauldron Born, Briton Rites’ staunch dedication to horror and doom turned into a debut album,For Mircalla, in 2010 that is lauded as a modern classic by many in the stalwart doom metal community. As with Cauldron Born, Briton Rites was not to last, and broke up around the same time that Cauldron Born came back with a single EP, Sword and Sorcery Heavy Metal. Both bands dissolved shortly after.

Music is Howie’s sword, and as has been the case in the past, the dissolution of both bands proved to be temporary. Briton Rites reformed last year and put out a stunning second album, Occulte Fantastique, again pairing with vocalist Phil Swanson and drummer Corbin King alongside the bassist from the last iteration of the band, John Leeson. The new album is everything that the first one was and its voyage through ancient horror doom proves as timeless as it was on For Mircalla. Social media indicates that Cauldron Born has also been revived and that new material is on the way. With the glorious comeback of Occulte Fantastique finally here and more Cauldron Born on the horizon, Invisible Oranges decided to sit down with Howie to talk about both bands, present, past, and future.

To start off, thanks for doing this long feature with Invisible Oranges about your music. Now, you came back last year with the second Briton Rites album, your first in 10 years. What made it the right time to get back together and start doing music again?

Well, I had a number of things happen, the biggest thing being in 2012 we were getting ready to record a Briton Rites album. I had most of the stuff written then. My wife had been sick for a while and she went to the hospital and she was diagnosed with cancer. Some things changed and music sort of took a back seat for a while. She fought the cancer for a couple years and she died in 2014. So, I was getting right back around to doing the music eventually, and then my mom called me and my dad had died.

Those were the two big things. I just didn’t really feel like playing music for a while. I really wanted to get away from it. At the time I was asked to contribute some stories for a couple anthologies and I started writing fiction. It was a really good catharsis and I was getting into that. I just needed a break, and I owned some property in rural Kentucky, so I left North Georgia and moved out here to the middle of nowhere and just concentrated on writing for a while. I wanted to get away from everything and everybody.

I was missing music more and more as time went on, and I decided, well, I already have that Briton Rites album written and demoed, so I should record that. And we did.

The new Briton Rites album was then entirely the music that was demoed out in 2012?

It was demoed out, yes. Most of it was demoed out then. I might have written a couple of songs after, but I had written most of it then.

My condolences for your losses, I’m really sorry to hear about that. That’s a great reason to take a break.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Do you feel like spending that time diving into writing fiction has influenced your approach to lyrics?

I don’t really think so, not to my knowledge. Not on a conscious level, anyway.

Is there anything the other way around? When you started writing fiction, did you ever look to the stuff you were writing in Briton Rites or other musical projects when you were sitting down to write a short story?

Well, I was writing sword and sorcery and weird fiction, and that kinda stuff, and I think that’s what in some ways made me want to go back and do some more Cauldron Born music. Briton Rites is more a gothic horror, occult type band, and Cauldron Born is more sword and sorcery, inspired by the likes of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Karl Edward Wagner, guys who write that kind of stuff about barbarians and wizards. I think being in that mindset got me thinking about Cauldron Born and wanting to get back into that.

Do you think you would have started writing again for Cauldron Born without first working on the last Briton Rites album?

I think I would have. Briton Rites was a step to get back into Cauldron Born. Briton Rites came about because I damaged my hand back in 2005. Initially, I had disbanded Cauldron Born, I think in 2002, or 2003, and I didn’t play music for a few years. I decided in 2005 that I was going to get Cauldron Born back together and I started practicing like a maniac. Now, I always taught guitar lessons, I would teach upwards of 60 guitar lessons a week sometimes, but that wasn’t really keeping my chops up for playing stuff like Cauldron Born because that was more technical kind of picking in some of the guitar solos and riffs..

I decided I was going to get them back overnight. The things I tell my students not to do all the time, I foolishly did. I would sit there with a metronome and practice for six hours straight, and I blew my right hand out. I’d been having hand problems for over 20 years, even before that, but I damaged my right hand and couldn’t play for another while. When I finally got back into playing, I thought I needed to slow down a little bit and do something easier, and at the same time, it wasn’t really a conscious thing but I was listening to some Witchfinder General and that got me back into early Black Sabbath. I also read Carmilla around that time by Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, a gothic novella about a pretty vampire lady who preys on young girls.

All these things sort of converged, and inspired me to start Briton Rites. Briton Rites was supposed to be a thing I was going to do for one or two albums to help get me back to Cauldron Born while I built back my playing. Here again I’d quit music and was all out of it and everything. I did another Briton Rites album, and now I’m back into playing and have worked on my chops to get back into Cauldron Born yet again.

For Briton Rites, you were coming in with an album written when you finally came back to music. For the upcoming Cauldron Born album that’s being recorded in coming months, has that all been new material or are there any older songs?

There were sketches for older songs, and some of these riffs are older. I got into metal in 1981, and some of these riffs I’m using I wrote when I was a teenager. I still have loads of riffs. That being said I wrote a lot of the material in the last year or so as well, so it’s sort of a mixture. It’s about half and half.

Do you ever go back and pull ideas from some of the earliest recorded Cauldron Born demos? I know that you re-recorded a couple songs outright from the earlier demo material for Born of the Cauldron.

Not really, but let me tell you what’s going on with Cauldron Born. There are going to be two albums, at least, coming out this year. One I am re-recording the songs from the …and Rome Shall Fall sessions. It’s going to be a new album with our new vocalist, Matthew Knight, and so we re-recorded that stuff. That’s going to come out this year.

The brand new Cauldron Born that nobody’s heard is going to follow that and come out after that. I may also reissue Sword and Sorcery Heavy Metal, which was the EP that we released in 2014. We recorded it before that but it just got released on Iron On Iron in 2014. There’s going to be at least two, maybe three, Cauldron Born releases this year.

Is that all going to be through your own label?

Yes.

So you’ve stated when we’ve talked in the past a distaste for working with other labels externally again, and a preference for keeping things in house. Why’s that?

Either way I’m going to have to invest a lot of money into the projects. It might as well be all on me to make it all back and potentially make some profit so I can continue doing this, to invest in future releases. It’s hard to do. Being on a label is pretty much just seat of your pants. I think it’s financially a wiser decision for me to do it that way.

Would that be for all Cauldron Born and Briton Rites material, or would you be open to a re-releases of obscurities you wouldn’t otherwise re-release?

Maybe like a compilation. I would at least discuss it with the label and see what all would be involved with the money, though I hate to say it. It really does matter. I don’t expect to get rich playing heavy metal music, that’s foolish, but I want to at least have some money coming in to continue doing what I’ve started up doing again and keep it rolling.

For Cauldron Born, the most recent larger reissues that were done were done around ten years ago on vinyl, and for Briton Rites, High Roller Records did the first album on vinyl. How were those experiences?

They were good. High Roller gave me a chunk of money for the Briton Rites album and they gave me 50 copies of the vinyl. At the time I wasn’t able to move those very well in North America, and of course that’s where most of my sales are going to go because they’re so expensive to ship. Iron on Iron didn’t give me any money, they gave me 100 copies of the album or something like that, and it also took a long time to move that stuff.

The CDs always moved better for me. I think a lot of that is the niche I appeal to. It’s more the power metal, you know, the USPM crowd, and I think a lot of those guys are big on CD whereas a lot of the newer fans into things like doom are more into vinyl. Things have changed I’m sure since then but it wasn’t that great of an experience as far as me moving the vinyl myself.

Do you have any particular format when you buy music?

CDs.

I assume that influences how you approach releasing your own music?

It does. I think CD is better for me because I can make a really long album and it’ll all fit on the CD, but if I try to press it to vinyl you get more problems there with the length, having to cut songs, and it’s something I’m looking at now. I haven’t reissued that second Briton Rites album on vinyl and I want to do that, but I’m going to have to cut a song or do a double LP, which is going to run into more money than I can make back. Those are all factors.

I’m not opposed to vinyl. I don’t want to sound like I’m anti-vinyl. I like vinyl, and I bought vinyl when I first started with music in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Then I moved to cassette, because it was easier to stack them all up and whatnot, it was more convenient, you could listen to them in the car, and then CD came along. I thought CD was really awesome. Metal albums tend to be on the longish side, because you have long songs. If you put very many of them on there you have a long album. I think the CD format was made for metal.

Coming back into Briton Rites, you largely retained the same lineup, but moving forward with Cauldron Born you have some new members and stuff changing. What was responsible for the shifts, or lack of shifts, in the lineups?

For Briton Rites, at one time we had the idea that we would play live, and we were rehearsing to do the album. We decided to get the album done and then talk about the live gigs. At the time I had to have a band to play live, and of course on the first album I played bass. I’m a pretty good guitar player and a pretty good bass player, but I can’t be in two places at once, so I got one of my students, John Leeson, to play bass. We were rehearsing with the drummer who recorded with us, Greg Haa, who used to be in The Lord Weird Slough Feg. He played on a couple of Briton Rites demo songs and on the Cauldron Born EP so we were going to have a live band.

John already knew all the bass lines, so when I decided to record the album, instead of it being more work for me to record I kept John and had him do the bass. Greg and I are still friends but we hadn’t talked in some time and he had stuff going on and didn’t have the time to deal with it, so I got the drummer back from the first album, Corbin King. He’s a good friend and was one of my guitar students back when he was a teenager in Atlanta. He plays a number of instruments, including drums, and has a studio so he can lay down the drums in his own studio. It’s a matter of convenience for a lot of it.

As far as Cauldron Born we were rehearsing at the time too and I was going to use the same guys because the guys from Cauldron Born had moved on. The bass player lives in Texas, and the drummer lives in Florida, so I had the idea that I’d use the same drummer and bass player from Briton Rites but we needed to add a guitar player. One of the best guitarists in the Atlanta area is Alex Parra, who also engineers my albums, so I added him as a guitar player with the thought of playing live. He did a couple of solo parts on the Sword and Sorcery Heavy Metal EP when we recorded that.

For the singer situation, Matthew Knight and I had been friends for years. I think we started corresponding back in the MySpace days and he’s had that band, Eternal Winter, all this time. He and I wrote a book together, and he’s really into the sword and sorcery vibe too. Great singer, he has a classic metal kind of look, and he’s into the same things so I went ahead and thought he’d be the perfect guy. He even mentioned to me that if I was going to look for a new Cauldron Born singer he wanted to audition. He did a couple demo recordings of songs that we did for …And Rome Shall Fall and they were awesome, so we got him.

You mentioned a couple of times bringing back in members for Briton Rites out of convenience so that you wouldn’t have to record as many instruments. Does that have anything to do with why you don’t just do vocals for the band yourself? It’s pretty obvious from the one song you sang on for the first record that you could do it yourself if you wanted to.

Well, initially, I was going to sing all those songs on For Mircalla, and a friend of mine who must not have had much confidence in me doing it told me about Phil Swanson. He said, you need to hear this guy, he’s on this Hour of Thirteen album, check him out, he might be the ticket there for what you’re doing. I listened to him and really liked him and of course I already had the lyrics and vocal arrangements, and sent the stuff to him.

He didn’t do my vocal arrangements. He has a very different approach than mine and did his own vocal arrangements. They were different than what I did, but I liked it, and I ended up with Phil Swanson. One song was so long that Phil said he didn’t know what to do, on “Karnstein Castle.” I was like, well, you’re doing the rest of the songs, is it cool if I get someone to guest on that song? He said sure, whatever. I contacted Messiah from Candlemass, my favorite singer from Candlemass, and sent him a song. He said it was really cool but he was doing his own band and didn’t have time to do it, and I decided to do it myself since I was already going to do it anyway.

I ended up doing that. I’m not the biggest fan of my own voice. Some people like that song, and I appreciate the fact that they do, but I like Phil singing with Briton Rites much better than myself.

You said that you already had the lyrics written for For Mircalla before bringing Phil in, which is why he sang those, but you also wrote the lyrics on the second album.

Right. Well, I made an offer to Phil, and I’m like, look, I still want to write lyrics, but how about we split it? Because I really like Phil as a lyricist, and coming from me for what it’s worth that’s a compliment because I don’t like most lyricistics. I really enjoy Phil’s lyrics, but he was like, “No, you can tell, it’s uneven when you do that, why don’t you just write them all?” What he proposed was that I send him the songs with the music, and he put down these phonetic vocal arrangements, and he was like, “I’ll send these back to you, and you just write the lyrics to my phonetic arrangements, and then send me back a guide vocal.”

I did that, and that’s how we did the writing for Occulte Fantastique .

Had you ever done anything like that before?

I had not. With Cauldron Born, I always wrote the vocal arrangements, or at least the main vocal melodies, and the music and the lyrics, and I’d done everything. It was a little different working with Phil. Phil’s a different kind of singer, he’s not a Cauldron Born type singer. He has his own thing going on which to me is a really special style. I was perfectly happy doing that because I trusted his judgement in what he would do.

How have your influences changed, if at all, since the last iteration of Cauldron Born?

They haven’t changed that much. As far as influencing the music of Cauldron Born I think what influence is there is still rooted in things I was listening to when I was in music school and shortly out of music school- the metal I was listening to, and some other things as well. Stuff like early Fates Warning, the Shrapnel Records stuff like Cacophony and neoclassical guitarists, and music school got me appreciating some of the more dissonant classical music like Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”, Bartók, even Schoenberg, which was atonal stuff. I was also really into Allan Holdsworth, and I still am.

I don’t think there was anything new that influenced me. I got into heavy metal in 1981 when I heard Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz, and I was really impressed with Rhandy Rhoads, and the classical influence that he put into his playing. I got interested in that, and started listening to classical music too. I read about all of his influences, all of the other guitar players, and on the metal side, getting into that got me into Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. Those were huge influences.

These guys are all into United States Power Metal now. All these bands back in the ‘80s, there’s this sort of revisionism, but people think that there were bands that weren’t influenced by them. If you were listening to heavy metal back in the ‘80s, those were the bands you were listening to. Manilla Road, Omen, all these cult bands now, they were listening to those bands in the ‘80s.

The cornerstones to me of metal are Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and my other favorite band that was really important was Venom. Other guys will say Motörhead, but to me Motorhead was a heavy sleaze rock band, but Venom had some serious metal tunes, like “Countess Bathory”, “Black Metal,” so many different things. They influenced so many subgenres of metal. Thrash, ground zero for black metal, even death metal.

Do you listen to any of that more extreme stuff yourself?

I do. In recent years I’ve gotten more into extreme metal. Some black metal, I’m not real big on a lot of it, but of course death metal. I first became aware of death metal in 1990 or 1991. I heard Morbid Angel’s “Immortal Rites”, saw a video for it on television, and thought that it was so different than anything else that was out. I really enjoyed that first album, Altars of Madness, and some of the other bands like Death.

I went to some of the shows, and you know, my roots are in traditional metal and hard rock. I came to heavy metal through hard rock, stuff like KISS, and Ted Nugent, and AC/DC in the late ‘70s because that’s what we heard over here on this side of the Atlantic. For me at least, I didn’t hear these British bands til ‘81. I’m more of a leather pants kind of guy. At the shows these death metal bands would play and I’d see these kids in baggy pants and Doc Martins and stuff. I’d go to these shows and think that I like the music but this isn’t really my audience, and decided to stick with traditional metal and see if I could carry on the tradition instead of doing what everyone else was doing and jumping ship to play like Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse and whatever. I still like to listen to that kind of stuff, though.

Was it difficult playing heavy metal during those dark years in the ‘90s when it was so much less popular?

Yes, definitely. I think that the main thing too, and you’d have had to be there to see this, but the whole grunge thing and the alternative thing. These labels overnight seemingly threw these bands that played hard rock and heavy metal under the bus and said, “ It’s your turn now,” and bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and whoever were coming in, which I could not relate to in the slightest. I’m not into any of the stuff that’s going on, so I said, “I’m going to stick to the heavy metal stuff and see where it goes.” Everyone else was going, “Why don’t you move on to greener pastures!

We even rehearsed in this warehouse. The guy who owned it didn’t want us rehearsing there because we weren’t conforming, like, “this is the new trend, why are you still playing that old music, get with the times!” He more or less kicked us out of the rehearsal warehouse even though I was paying for a room there. He also owned a club at the end of the plaza, and it was out of the question that we’d ever play there. He didn’t even want us rehearsing.

There was this almost hatred toward heavy metal back then. It was a bad word. If you did play heavy metal you called yourself something else. There were bands like Alice in Chains or Soundgarden that did play heavier music but you weren’t allowed to call it heavy metal or anything like that, you had to call it hard music. MTV would make fun of heavy metal, ridicule people, like you guys are living in the past. It was very political as far as the music industry. They didn’t want it to exist anymore.

Were you aware of any other active heavy metal bands that were compatriots at the time?

Not until around the time I did the Swords, Sorcery, and Science demo in 1994, which was the first Cauldron Born demo. I was on my way back from booking a gig in Gainesville, Georgia, and I stopped at Tower Records. You can’t pass Tower Records without stopping, so I went in and was looking around and a magazine cover caught my eye. It had a sort of amateur look to it and had King Diamond on the cover, and I thought, “A magazine with King Diamond, these days?”

It was a fanzine called Sentinel of Steel, and this guy from New Jersey named Denis Gulbey started putting it out. He somehow got distribution and got his magazine into Tower Records, it had an address and phone number, and I contacted him. Prior to Swords, Sorcery, and Science I had done a demo called Beyond the Shade Gates under my own name. I borrowed a drummer from one band and a singer from another band. I played guitar and bass, and wrote all the music as usual. It was like pre-Cauldron Born stuff. I sent him both demos and he just wrote these great reviews, and he was staying in touch with me.

When he wrote those reviews all these guys started writing me from Europe, and said they wanted to get my demo. I think there was a price already in there and they were sending money to me to order demos, and I was selling them already by the box in Japan, so it kind of caught on then and we had a fanbase. It wasn’t here, but it was somewhere!

Did having that fanbase help at all with maintaining an enthusiasm in the band?

It did somewhat. The problem was singers. Singers would come and go, and usually guys who could sing really well…well, not to be ugly, but they’re usually opportunists, and they’re going to go wherever they think the money and chicks and drugs are. We had none of that going on and it was hard to keep together, but you know, the bass player and drummer stuck with me and we kept it going for a while. It was really hard, though without a singer, and nobody was singing that stuff anymore. It’d be two or three years to replace a singer sometimes.

Do you find now that your experience is different these days when you put out or even tease new material than it was in, say, 2002?

I don’t think it’s that different. I think because of the internet there are more people interested. Very cool thing, a lot of young people, even here in the United States, are very interested in heavy metal and they weren’t back then. I think we have the internet to thank for that. Also, the mainstream music business is in its death throes, so we have that to thank as well because we don’t have someone keeping the gate going, “ Okay, this is outdated, for the next five years we’re going to have this kind of music. There’s not a barrier between people making this music and people who want to hear it like there once was, and that’s a great thing.

When would you say that you first became aware of how the music industry had changed, and that the internet had made music more accessible?

I would say probably the last ten or fifteen years, really. There was a problem there, as you know, with the internet and it was a double-edged sword. Piracy was just rampant. It was just an attitude- “I’ve got a fast connection, everything should be free for me!” But I think there’s some younger people now that pay for music that they like to support it, which is a good thing for me because it helps me do another one and reinvest in another recording. For a while though the internet was kind of a problem to a degree.

You mentioned that some of the first awareness that you had that heavy metal was still going was finding a fanzine. Do you feel like the internet has made that kind of thing less common or hurt anything at all that zines have been sort of supplanted by the internet, or does it not matter?

I think things are devalued to a degree because there’s so much of it. Anyone can have a website now. Back then, you had to invest money into these fanzines. I’m sure it was more time consuming. Of course, websites are too, to maintain a website, but there’s just so much of it out there now that it’s overwhelming, whereas back then I saw that magazine with King Diamond on it and it was a really special thing. Now you want to read about King Diamond you can read endlessly on the internet about whatever he’s doing.

I don’t know. There’s good and bad.

Tell me about coming up with the cover art concept for Occulte Fantastique.

I didn’t come up with that. When I find a piece that really makes an impression on me, I usually buy the piece of artwork, and one of my favorite occult artists is Néstor Ávalos, who is a Mexican artist. He does just fantastic work and I’d collected some of his stuff. He’s mailed me some originals here, which I have hanging on my wall, and I saw him post that piece and I was very impressed with it. I decided to buy that, even though at the time I was on the fence about doing the Briton Rites album and recording the stuff I’d written ten years ago, but I was like, “I’ll either use that for a Briton Rites album cover or a horror novel that I’ll write,” and I bought the piece. I just held onto it, and it was perfect for the songs, so it ended up being the album cover.

Now that your chops are back up to the point where you can play Cauldron Born material again should we expect to hear anything else from Briton Rites?

I’m hoping to eventually do some more Briton Rites. That’s going to depend on the singer, Phil. Like I said, to me Phil Swanson is a really special vocalist and I don’t at this point in time see doing another Briton Rites album unless he wants to be a part of it. The last time I talked to Phil I don’t think he was doing much as far as music. We’ll have to see. I won’t say it won’t happen but right now my focus is on Cauldron Born and getting as much Cauldron Born stuff written and recorded as I can.

Do you plan on taking Cauldron Born to the stage again at some point?

Not at this point because I really painted myself into a corner, truth be told, when I moved out to the middle of nowhere. I live way out in the mountains in Kentucky and I’m away from everybody. Of course Alex, the other guitarist, is in Atlanta and he doesn’t have a problem bringing his mobile studio up here to record, but the problem is rehearsing. It takes so much rehearsal just for one gig. You’re a musician, you know this! The people there enjoying the show don’t know how many countless hours have gone into the 45 minutes you’re on the stage there- which they shouldn’t, it’s nothing to them, but there’s just so much time that’s spent on it, and all the other guys live somewhere else. The bass player lives in Texas, the drummer’s in Florida, and the vocalist is in Maryland, so we’re just scattered all over the States. Most of us are in the Southeastern United States except the singer, but it’s just almost impossible at this point for me to think about playing live.

You don’t want to do the Metallica thing and all fly together and rehearse for a couple of days in person and do your show that way?

Well sure, yeah! [Laughs] Soon as I find out who’s going to pay for that I’ll be on that! [Laughs]

That’s fair! So, when can we expect to hear some of that new Cauldron Born material?

This year for sure. We are mixing the re-recorded songs from 2001/2002 right now. The album cover artwork is done already, the layout is done, I just need to send it to the duplication plant. We’re just waiting on the mix to come in. That should be out within the next couple of months, and hopefully the brand new Cauldron Born stuff will be out by late summer.

..

Cauldron Born and Briton Rites releases, merch, and more can be found at Echoes of Crom Records.