Pyrkagion Visit Gomorrah on Debut EP (Interview + Early Stream)

Pyrkagion were born in 2019 from an unusual combination of Bell Witch bassist/vocalist Dylan Desmond, Hissing bassist/vocalist Zach Wise and ex-Human Effluence drummer Brennan Butler. Though each member of the trio hails from quite different edges of the extreme music galaxy, at least as far as the aforementioned projects are concerned, they’ve come together on debut EP The Katechon and the Unending Fire to create two cavernous compositions that explore divine judgment and religious fanaticism through the medium of black metal.

The EP took shape over several years. In taking their time assembling the project (with some help from the pandemic), Pyrkagion have crafted a singular version of black metal that makes nimble use of genre tools such as raw production without bogging down in pastiche. This is an unsparing EP in terms of sonic approach. However, there are still enough moments of melody amid the vicious vocals and guitars, and Butler’s drumming throughout is superb, serving as a guide rope from squalls of noise to mid-tempo riffs.

Take the EP’s back half, “The Unending Fire”—drawing on a narrative of divine retribution, the song spends just over 14 minutes wending its way through thorny passages of guitar and drums into caverns of jutting riffs. Rather than backtracking through its earlier motifs, “The Unending Fire” carries the listener deeper into the abyss. Though Wise and Desmond primarily focus on guitar duties, Pyrkagion hardly neglect bass. “The Unending Fire” contains some of the EP’s biggest expanses of low-end sound.

The overall picture is one of carefully balanced duality between noise and order, “smeared” guitar and chthonic drums, harsh vocals and washes of noise, the sacred and the profane. Pyrkagion use black metal techniques to great effect, though one gets the sense they could’ve managed equally well with squalid death metal—This isn’t meant as a demerit, but rather a testament to this three-piece’s combined talent.

The Katechon and the Unending Fire is 25 minutes of black metal that, while firmly rooted in the genre, stands tall as its own edifice. Check out an early listen of the EP below, and read on for an interview with the band’s guitarist/bassist Wise. Spoiler: this isn’t the last we’ll hear of Pyrkagion.

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This is quite a bit different from your other projects. How’d Pyrkagion come to be?

As much as I’d like to say it was some kind of divine revelation, it was really just that Dylan and I had been hanging out through work for a while, and talking black metal always seemed to happen. We shared bands and ideas with each other. At the same time, as bassists, we had a shared desire to play and compose for guitar, and kept talking about wanting to collaborate on something.

At one point we ended up seeing Gevurah (the Canadian black metal band) perform live in Seattle, and the intensity of their performance and composition made us realize this was something that we wanted to strive to attain, and were potentially capable of tapping into with enough discipline. At the same time, Brennan and I had been in contact on and off for a while after other bands we were in had toured together, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to collaborate on something new for everyone. From there, we composed the material and passed it around, adding and altering elements until it felt right.

The band coalesced in 2019—How did the pandemic affect your work? Did you feel like forced time off changed the sound of this record, or did it just delay its release?

I think it both helped and hindered the material—These songs had very long gestations due to their complex nature and my own obsessive compositional tendencies. They underwent multiple major revisions during the time we found ourselves with, and they’re certainly better off for it, but at the same time it was difficult to actually functionally record them during the pandemic, so there was a bit of unfortunate delay there. But there is a good amount of additional material that was written during that time and will hopefully not take another four years to see the light of day.

“Katechon” seems to allude to the end times. What concepts underpin this release?

Everything I’ve been involved with (Hissing especially) has lyrically remained secular, and I felt like this was a good opportunity to delve into the religious. Pyrkagion is thematically centered around a fire element (unsurprising if you translate the name, which means “conflagration”) and much of this material and some forthcoming material was inspired by an evocative painting of Sodom and Gomorrah by Lucas van Leyden—the idea of merciless divine judgment, sinners in the hands of an angry god, etc. The eschatological elements you’re referring to are thematically tied to this. It’s a fascinating perspective to write from. This particular record cycles around the dual themes of absolute judgment and absolute freedom, and the extremes of the fraught relationship between man and divinity. The two songs are written from the perspective of different characters, one of whom is a servant of God who condemns the rest of mankind for their shortcomings, and one of whom declares himself the only living God and creates a dionysian nightmare on Earth. (These are) different kinds of fanaticism, but linked through the unity and transformation offered by a monotheistic divinity. Note that I personally have no religious opinions one way or the other that I care to mention publicly; I just found these to be interesting characters and ideas to inhabit for this music.

Black metal has gone in lots of different directions in recent years, with bands exploring more genre fusion and melody. What sounds in black metal did you feel were “lay(ing) dormant,” and how did you weave those into this EP?

I think this refers to a certain freedom and disinterest in self-awareness that we found in a lot of the European bands we referenced in these songs—bands that exist in their own little worlds and just do whatever the hell they feel like rather than side-eyeing their peers to make sure they’re staying in the right lines. It’s just boring.

American black metal tends to have a conservativeness that results in either a lot of the same thing we’ve heard, or neurotically going off the deep end in the other direction, pursuing genre fusion for the sake of it. That stuff has no soul to me; it just felt like a funny idea someone had and decided to see through.

For this material, we drew from Naglfar, Secrets of the Moon, Dødheimsgard, etc.—bands who do whatever the hell they want but still have a rich understanding of the spirit of black metal even if the practice is more exploratory. We have things like the synth and bass break in “Red Rays” that serve as extensions of the ideas present in the song even though they’re shifting gears a bit.

What was the process of pivoting from bass to guitar like for you? It sounds like there’s a full rhythm section here, so was this more of a process of trading off?

There’s a mental shift required. The songs were built as rudimentary skeletons with just one guitar track and drums, and then the bass would usually be added after the fact, which was new for me. I play the majority of the rhythm guitar on the recording, as well as all of the bass, and Dylan handled most of the guitar leads (although we do trade off occasionally).

The Katechon and the Unending Fire is wrapped in big, cavernous production—how’d this sound come together after recording?

Everything was self-recorded, but we owe the polish on the sound to Dylan Haseltine (Suffering Hour), who mixed the record. Regarding the previous question about elements dormant in black metal, we specifically requested a full, low-end heavy mix that smeared some of the guitar elements together while retaining massive and clear drum sound. We wanted it to feel like it was swallowing you whole, rather than the traditional clear Darkthrone highs-focused black metal sound you hear on so many records. Nothing against that style; it was just a personal aesthetic preference for these songs.

What’s next for Pyrkagion? Will you be playing these songs live anytime soon?

I’m not ruling out live shows, but it has to feel right. The sound is too big for just the three of us to pull off live, so there’d have to be some things we’d have to figure out, and I’m more focused on completing the two-plus upcoming releases for the project, so that if we do play live, there’s more material to pull from.

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The Katechon and the Unending Fire releases August 18th via Cestrum Nocturnum Recordings.