Interview: Nuclear Cath (Leather N’ Spikes)

I laughed when I saw the editor of Leather N’ Spikes magazine described somewhere as “metal hottie Nuklear Cath.” She’s a lot more than that: she runs one of the magazines which meets metal ideal in spirit and aesthetic, which idolizes the stuff with potential and doesn’t notice the bands that normal people seem to like. Those people who can’t step outside of their own heads and into the world of metal which supercedes the norm will hate it, but to the rest of us it’s a form of journalism unique to metal itself. After a busy day of piling up the corpses of her victims near a temporarily memorial area, Nuklear Cath was good enough to grant us an interview on the eve of the launch of the new Leather’n’Spikes website.

When you reference the container “metal music” in your head, do you think first of a concept or of sounds?

It’s a hard question, I would say it is in a way a concept, it’s about something, the subjects are always related to the same things, which makes what metal music is. Or each band has its own concept within the metal concept?!

Your zine has been long known for its amazing picture layouts.How do you research the visual components to articles?

My goal is always to translate the band’s music into something visual. So I try to respect styles. If a band uses certain fonts in their booklets and promotion, I will use them to layout the interview. Same for the pictures, the kind of drawings, the kind of atmosphere (the band can be extremely serious or sarcastic, into pagan subjects and nature or into nuclear war). So I try to respect the whole concept on each band featured.

How long have you been listening to metal? What did you enjoy hearing before that? Is this a consequence of musical education (self and/or formal) or a process that converged on that growth as well?

There have always been music in the house, I was not a fan of anything but I was initiated to music (rock, mainly) and slowly I started to search for a genre that would suit my endless need for heavy music. It ended up being metal, and then I “studied” the 20 years of metal that had passed before me. I might have been born too late, but I’ve done my homework!

In many ways, your writing appears to obliterate the line between ideology and lifestyle by suggesting a viewpoint where life takes on artlike, and nihilistic, qualities. What enabled you to reach such a view, if it is at all correct?

I didn’t “reach” that view I think, it’s just how I am, or maybe the one idea of an old pile of rare metal vinyls, tenth generation tapes, jean jackets with patches, empty beer bottles on the dirty floor of a rehearsal room and loud music simply leads us to that point. But it isn’t completely nihilistic, or then what would it give for me to do all this, to make that fanzine, to write letters, to spread flyers, it would be pointless. I give myself goals and challenges.

What do you think of the writings of Antonin Artaud? Georges Bataille? Theodor Adorno? Friedrich Nietzsche? Jacques Lyotard?

If this is about philosophy, I don’t read a lot, I don’t take the time to do it. One of my favorite, if not my favorite philosopher remains Nietzsche. The rest you named I haven’t studied.

What do you think is the conceptual link between death and art in the symbolic vocabulary of humanity, even subconscious thoughts?

Maybe both are mysteries. Or they provoke the same kind of fascination. Or they are both abstract things, or concepts in themselves. Or both can provoke the same deep feelings, either of fear, terror, panic or pleasure in a way. Or maybe death is a form of art, expressed with the body and usually not voluntarily. It’s hard to tell what push people to link those two things.

Are you aware of any circumstances under which humans reach a state of free and autonomous thought? Does this occur to all, or to some?

Maybe in their dreams, or when they create. I think both can be related together: you try to reach a certain state where you a free from all the other people’s influences and judgment and you create without any boundaries, moral limitations. Freedom in inspiration and creativity. That’s all I can see right now.

The visual constructions used to anchor the layout of each page in the zine is eccentric and striking. When you conceive of a page, do your thoughts begin with symbols or a shape filling a space?

I never really stopped and thought about that. I think I always already have a very clear idea on how the pages will be, how big the logo will be, what graphics I will use and what kind of feeling it will have. I just then reproduce what I have in mind.

Periodically the zine features a photo involving yourself and bare flesh that causes blood pressure increases across the globe. Do you see sexuality as a tool, for war or art, or do you have a depoliticized view of sexual iconography?

Yeah, maybe sex is art. Unfortunately too many people took advantage of it, so I got bored. But I do use myself for ‘artistic purposes’ and experimentation / creation, in photography for example, or experimental movies. As for blood pressure increases, it’s their problem, hehehe…

When you interview bands, how do you mentally prepare for the interaction?

I think it’s part of the game to expect surprises, violent reactions, insults, totally different answers that I had expected, or yes, sometimes deceptions. That’s the thrill – you work hard on researching on the band and trying to make your questions in the most original way possible, and you wait to see what kind of answers and ideas they will bring up! That’s why all the interviews are different and interesting; people put their personality in them! My concept of the interview is to do like if I was meeting the band in person, in the world of their music (even if it’s snail mail interview). Some bands embarked in the game, it was really cool.

What publications do you read, metal or other?

I like underground extreme metal fanzines, I also read a few comic books because I’m working on one, and I read mags and books related to my work (graphic design, illustration or desing in general). Almost no novels or anything like that, no time anymore.

Which do you consider to be the most important bands from Canada at this time? And Québec, over the history of metal?

OK from Québec I would say Voivod, Soothsayer, Yog-Sothot, Vensor… I should have mentioned brutal death metal bands, but it has been too exploited here. From Canada – Blasphemy, Voor, Infernal Majesty, Slaughter, Razor, Disciples of Power and maybe a few more I can’t think of at this moment!

Some characterize the metal movement “as a whole” in terms that describe its cathartic nature for angry youth, while others see it as a revolution against the social for youth who later, metalhead or no, carry these ideas into society. Still others see metal as an endorsement for hedonism, relativism and a good time. Among these how does your own judgment fall?

Well I tend to only think for myself and not analyzing the impact on the society and how it is perceived by it. So it’s hard to tell. Sometimes a metal genre will start as a rebellion but then go into an independent genre not fighting anymore for a cause but just producing music. Music can be done just for a specific purpose – fighting against a religion, a race, a trend – and then end up giving birth to bands who aren’t fighting but simply being influenced by the musical side.

If you could interview any musician in history, who would it be?

Lemmy! But I wouldn’t know what to say.

Can you list five bands that you feel contributed the most to black metal as an evolving genre?

Well the first that come to mind is (old) Mayhem. Also Venom with all their satanic imagery, Bathory, Hellhammer and… well Sarcofago, Blasphemy, Beherit, aarrgh it’s going over five…

“Image” has a bad name to many in the underground, yet visual presentation of concept is an important piece to any communication. What are your views on this?

There are contradictions in this scene and I think that’s why in the first place metal became sportsuits, short hair, baggy pants and white socks and that’s why a guy like Euronymous got sick of that and tried to get back the real metal look – spikes, patches, leather, long hair, black band tshirts etc… It is important to have a metal image, but the contradiction is in the fact that ‘poseurs’ (whoever you consider them to be) will try to look the most metal possible – so then image is more important than their dedication. Same for corpsepaint, it’s starting to be too much revisited, without any meaning anymore. So what I say is, the dedication comes first but the image should have a certain importance as well, as long as there is a reason remaining behind that.

You manage to extract the ironic humor underlying many of even the most extreme human outlooks. Do you see this humor as inherent characteristic to the process of self-actualization?

I just think that there is a kind of humor that have its place in this nuclear metal scene – and it’s sarcasm, black humor. The result is sometimes violent reactions, or people don’t understand, or they take themselves so seriously that even the smallest smile is forbidden.

Many of us consider Texas to be a separate nation from the Judeo Christian States of America (JCSA). Do you consider Québec a separate country from Canada as a whole? What does America appear to be, from your national and political perspective?

Yes Québec is a completely different country, another world. I don’t feel being part of Canada too much, just like most of the people here. 2 languages = 2 cultures, 2 ways of thinking, 2 different people. America? That is from the Southern countries to the North Pole right? If you were talking about USA, well I think this country is taking too much place here and in the world unfortunately.

What is your ideal solution to human overpopulation?

Hehehe I don’t know, or else I don’t dare saying it.

Hypothetically, you are given a corporation to run with funding from an alien government to initiate world destruction plans. How would you approach this real world scenario?

Well I would approach it in a highly creative way. No problems for the funds, right? Well then let’s have fun. I’m working on a comic book with a story a little bit related to that, so all I’ll do is re-create the devastated landscapes and junkie people of my story, and then draw them as models for my comic book. And maybe make a movie. Ah, my own story come true, what an honor!

Some define art as the end product, others define it as the communicative process between artist and audience. Which do you think is closer to the truth?

And if there is no truth in this world? My own truth is, art is like alchemy. You work on it very hard, and your skills get developed, but you evolve as well besides that, in your mind, as a person. Whatever people might think, even though they don’t like what you do, you know that what you do is ok, and people being shocked by your art might be a good sign.

Are you of any mystical belief?

You mean occultism, satanism and things like that? Yes, I do have my own thoughts about it.

If so, does your mystical belief involve entities and processes beyond this world, or within it?

I don’t really know. It’s something very complicated.

What importance do you place upon the conceptual process in the artist before making work, including ideological, mystical and philosophical beliefs? (when I say philosophical here, I mean the existential and valuative processes of cognition)

The artist puts himself into his art, even though he might be trying not to. His art is his blood. So it reflects his mind, personal thoughts and beliefs. It is nothing objective. Someone looking at the artwork of an artist will therefore look into this artist’s mind and personal life.

If going into combat under idealized circumstances, from which era would your weapons come? (are you a medievalist, or a modernist? regarding weaponry)

I’m not as fascinated as some people I know, but it seems war and battle was an art in the ancient times. The weapons of those eras – dark age and medieval – are definitely nice pieces of art, and the honor and the idea of dedicating your life to war is quite different from today’s red-button pushing countries. Fighting man to man, with or even without weapons, in honor, is something that seemed quite more appealing. And the different weapons, some sacred, with runes carved, some unique and rare, forged by those people themselves…

Are there any generalized opinions you have of metal journalism, and where other zines differ from Leather N’ Spikes?

We all have our own ways of making a fanzine. I might think that my ways are the best, criticizing others for doing this and not doing that, but anyway that makes a diversity in the fanzine world; but the editor needs to be serious and dedicated, and to make ‘information’ is first priority.

If you had to pick a metaphor for the individual in modern society, would you choose “the castaway” or “the fortuneteller” – and why? Do you see the individual as important, philosophically or politically, and what is your opinion of democracy?

It’s a tough question. I don’t know if ‘the individual’ is important, it should unless it starts building McDonald’s and churches and gives away Pepsi bottles and make propaganda for the arrival of Jesus or something. In general the individual should have the right to say what he wants to say but some people often should shut up. As for the metaphor, hard to tell. I don’t really think about it.

Is cruelty essential to humanity?

I think people tend to deny that side of their being, I don’t know if it is essential but it is remaining there as a manifestation of what we are – not always cruel but every once in a while (or more for certain people!) with a tendency to that.

Leather N’ Spikes has garnered praise from across the underground. Do you consider metal to be a “sub-culture” to mainstream or “alternative” or “counter-” culture?

A counter-culture is against the mainstream I guess, so it should be called this way I think. But there are some bands playing a trendy style or an ordinary style but they don’t have any success so they remain “underground” – as they aren’t against the mainstream I would not put them in the counter-culture category at all.

Most people deny that they are beasts. Is this really true?

I would say yes, they deny their own human nature of being animals and having instincts and an animal nature, which includes other animals as daily food, sex, violence and certain primitive instincts etc. A nice example of something against the human nature is catholicism.

How do you, as every thinking individual must, conceptualize your own death?

I kind of saw it when I was younger and it was terrible, so I’m trying to avoid that kind of death. Now I just don’t think about how I will die, but how I want to live instead.

Some thinkers reduce philosophy to a conflict between the eschatological and the existential. Is this logical, in your opinion, and if so, on which side does your greatest sympathy stand?

Philosophy, just like politics, is not something I care for as much as I care for art, for example. There are people that are better than me for this.

If I left anything out, or there is something of useful clarification you wish to state, please say what is needed here.

OK well back to the zine, I just re-designed the whole website (with a huge art section, excerpts, reviews etc!!) which should be online by the end of August. It will be announced on my old website, see address below. Around the same time, issue #7 will be out with Blasphemy, Summoning, Desaster, Destruction, Crucifier, Grand Belial’s Key, Canadian Assault zine, Goatvomit, Abominator, Canadian scene report 1982-1993, etc. Write for prices, info, wholesale prices etc!!
Still available are #4 (4$US), #5 (4$US) and #6 (5$US), check out the contents and excerpts of each issue on the website.s
Ask for the wholesale prices and don’t hesitate to write or send promos!!

Catherine Lachance
35 Brousseau
Loretteville QC
G2A 2R2 CANADA
catherinel@globetrotter.net

So monstrous a mode of valuation stands inscribed in the history of mankind not as an exception and curiosity, but as one of the most widespread and enduring of all phenomena. Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusions that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant, and offensive creatures filled with a profound disgust at themselves, the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possbily can out of pleasure in inflicting pain — which is probably their only pleasure.

– F.W. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

No Comments

Ithaca, NY seizes Alex Perialas’ studio

Contacts: Alex Perialas, Pyramid Sound Andy Adelewitz, PR consultant
Phone: 607.273.3931 Phone: 607.257.0455
Email: alex@pyramidsoundstudios.com Email: andy@adelewitz.com

Pyramid Sound, Where Timbaland, David Gray, Anthrax and Others Recorded, At Risk From City

Bridge Construction Supporters Organize Protests, Petitions To Save Successful Ithaca Recording Studio

ITHACA, N.Y., June 21, 2012 — The future of a world-class recording studio that has hosted recording sessions by David Gray, Anthrax, Ginuwine, Aaliyah, Bad Religion, Missy Elliott, Joe Bonnamassa, producers including Timbaland and Tom Dowd, Pulitzer Prize winning composer Steven Stucky, classical pianist Malcolm Bilson, and many others is under threat due to the City of Ithaca’s poor planning of a bridge rebuilding project directly outside the studio walls.

Pyramid Sound, the studio operated for nearly four decades by producer/engineer Alex Perialas in downtown Ithaca, New York, has been unjustly condemned as of Tuesday, June 19, resulting in the devastating loss of a very successful business, and the potential destruction of its facility as the bridge construction gets underway.
After two years of asking for details of the construction plans and how they would affect his property, and being put off by then-mayor Carolyn Peterson and superintendent of public works Bill Gray, Perialas finally got an answer about when the project would commence when workers posted signs outside his studio warning the public that the street would close in two weeks. And as of yesterday, both the studio the separate storage garage next door, which Perialas also owns, have been posted by the city, after repeated promises from the
building department commissioner that they would not be; and no one, including Perialas, is allowed in.

Additionally, the building department employee who posted the building yesterday informed Perialas that the city had found his building condemnable two years ago, in the early planning stages of the bridge reconstruction. Perialas was unaware that an external inspection of his property had happened, and was never informed of the finding, leading to at least the appearance that he was deliberately kept in the dark until it was too late to mitigate problems with his facility, allowing the city to save money by condemning his property rather than compensating him under eminent domain or amending the unnecessarily aggressive construction
plans.

It marks the latest, and most grievous, in a series of bad-faith dealings with Perialas by the City of Ithaca. The story begins in 2004, when construction of a municipal parking garage across Clinton Street from Pyramid began. Seismic vibrations from that project resulted in cracks in the walls of the garage and studio buildings,
causing some damage. He complained to the city at the time, but was unable to see the fight through because he was simultaneously caring for his ailing father.

In May of this year, after being stonewalled by city officials for two months, Perialas received a report from a third-party structural engineer hired by the construction contractor in May. The report found the storage garage, which was closest to the bridge construction, to be in poor condition, and the external walls of the studio building itself to be in poor-but-stable condition; the method of pile driving that would be used on the bridge project would likely cause the nearest garage wall to collapse, representing a danger to occupants and the public. However, this report came two weeks after the bridge project was started, leaving Perialas with no
time to repair or reinforce his buildings. Yet the City of Ithaca has offered Perialas no meaningful compensation or assistance, and has refused to delay the project or issue a change order instructing the contractor to use an alternate, less aggressive method of pile driving that would not represent so great a threat to this thriving business.

After several meetings with new mayor Svante Myrick, Perialas was finally offered just $20,000 from the city to help cover the cost of reinforcing the garage wall. But that offer came just a day before drilling to prepare holes for the pile driving was scheduled to begin — too little, too late. And it came with the unacceptable
condition that Perialas indemnify the city against any further damages to his property caused by the bridge project.

Now that the buildings have been posted, Perialas is left with a slew of recording and mixing commitments that he’s unable to complete, as well as millions of dollars’ worth of sensitive equipment that he’s unable to check on or maintain. For example, the studio’s mixing board could overheat easily if the facility’s air
conditioning system were to fail, potentially causing a catastrophic fire; but with the building condemned, no one is able to monitor the studio’s climate conditions.

Perialas makes it clear that he’s not opposed to the bridge project in general, merely the way it’s been planned and executed without any timely consultation with him, despite his many inquiries over the last two years.

“There’s no doubt that this work is needed,” Perialas told the local weekly newspaper The Ithaca Times last week. “My concern is how it’s been handled. Normally when you do a project of this nature, you work with the property owner to deal with loss of business or interruption of business. You deal with them to talk about how
you’re going to shore the building if there’s going to be an issue, and none of that’s happened. The only thing that’s happened is that I’ve had to raise my voice, unfortunately, which I don’t really want to do. I’m not anti this project. I’m anti-the planning of this project.”

Perialas and his team have received vocal support from hundreds of local musicians and music fans who are horrified by the prospect of this historic local institution being shuttered, especially under such heartless circumstances. Two Facebook pages organized by supporters in order to protest the city’s disrespect and inaction have attracted more than 1,300 members between them, and led to the organization of a protest last week at the mayor’s parking space outside City Hall.
And an online petition urging Myrick to “do all in his power to ensure Pyramid Studio be fairly compensated for any and all lost business and possible relocation costs due to this bridge construction project” has received more than 600 signatures and counting.

In addition to signing the petition, supporters of Pyramid Studios (and of the rights of responsible business owners in general) are urged to contact City of Ithaca officials including mayor Svante Myrick (607.274.6501, svante@myrickforithaca.com), superintendent of public works Bill Gray (607.274.6527, email his executive assistant Kathy Gehring at kgehring@cityofithaca.org), building department
commissioner Phyllis Radke (607.274.6508, pradke@cityofithaca.org) and city attorney Aaron Lavine (607.274.6504, attorney@cityofithaca.org) to courteously express their support for the survival of Pyramid as both a local institution of international renown, and a successful local business deserving of respectful, good
faith negotiation, and fair compensation for damaged property and lost business.

More information in recent local media coverage:
WENY-TV (ABC affiliate in Elmira, NY)
http://blip.tv/wenytv/battle-on-the-bridge-6214476
The Ithaca Times (weekly):
http://www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/article_00af9f6e-b4e6-11e1-bd5b-0019bb2963f4.html
YNN (local TV news):
http://centralny.ynn.com/content/top_stories/588030/future-uncertain-for-pyramid-sound-studios/

ALEX PERIALAS / PYRAMID SOUND SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY
Pop/Hip Hop/R&B//Rock/Blues
Year Album Artist Role
1984 Live at the Inferno Raven Engineer
1985 Speak English or Die S.O.D. Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1986 Slow Train Savoy Brown Engineer, Mixing
1987 Legacy Testament Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1987 Power Chords, Vol. 1 Various Artists Producer
1988 New Order Testament Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1988 State of Euphoria Anthrax Associate Producer, Engineer
1989 Practice What You Preach Testament Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1990 When The Storm Comes Down Flotsam & Jetsam Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1991 Deeper Into the Vault Various Artists Music Coordinator
1992 Foul Taste of Freedom Pro-Pain Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1992 Live at Budokan S.O.D. Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1993 I Hear Black Overkill Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1993 Substance & Soul Last Tribe Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1995 Belladonna Joey Belladonna Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1995 Concept Sam Rivers Mastering
1995 Under Pressure Such a Surge Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1996 Ginuwine…The Bachelor Ginuwine Engineer, Assembly
1996 Sell, Sell, Sell David Gray recorded at Pyramid
1996 Metal of Honor T.T. Quick Producer, Engineer
1996 Oz Factor Unwritten Law Engineer
1997 Signs of Chaos: Best of Testament Testament Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1998 No Substance Bad Religion Producer, Engineer
1998 Step Beyond Without Warning Producer, Engineer, Mixing
1998 Wrong Side of Memphis Johnny Dowd Re-mastering
1999 Ginuwine The Bachelor (Bonus CD) Ginuwine Engineer, Assembly
1999 Pictures from Life’s Other Side Johnny Dowd Mastering
2000 Bronx Casket Co. The Bronx Casket Co. Mixing
2000 Looking Up Cooter Mastering
2000 New Day Yesterday Joe Bonamassa Producer, Engineer, Mixing
2000 Phubar Phungusamungus Mastering
2000 Positive Friction Donna the Buffalo Mastering
2000 Red Is the Color Sunny Weather Mastering
2000 This Day John Brown’s Body Engineer
2001 Best of 2001 Edition (Master Series) Pro-Pain Producer, Engineer, Mixing
2001 Faust Original Soundtrack Producer
2001 Hillside Airstrip 10 Foot Ganja Plant Mastering
2001 Legends of the Nar Dead Cat Bounce Mastering
2001 Temporary Shelter Johnny Dowd Engineer, Mastering, Mixing
2002 Allophone Addison Groove Project Mastering
2002 EP Sunny Weather Engineer, Mastering, Mixing
2002 Into the Unknown Double Irie Mastering
2002 Live From the American Ballroom Donna the Buffalo Engineer, Mastering, Mixing
2002 Pawnbroker’s Wife Johnny Dowd Mastering
2002 Punk Rock Songs: The Epic Years Bad Religion Producer
2002 Sing Desire Jennie Stearns Engineer, Mastering, Mixing
2003 At First Sight Pete Pidgeon Mastering
2003 Farewell The Dent Producer, Engineer, Mixing
2003 Wait Til Spring Donna the Buffalo/Jim Lauderdale Engineer
2004 Bigga Than It Really Is GFE Engineer, Mixing
2004 Home Speaks To the Wandering Dead Cat Bounce Mastering
2004 Radioman Dwight Ritcher Mastering
2005 Life’s a Ride Donna the Buffalo Producer, Engineer, Mixing
2006 Each New Day Sim Redmond Band Mastering
2006 In Flight Radio In Flight Radio Producer, Engineer, Mixing
2007 W.O.A. Full Metal Juke Box, Vol.2 Various Artists Producer
2007 Conch moe. Engineer
2007 Again We Bleed God Size Hate Mixing, Mastering
2007 Heavy Metal [Box Set] Various Artists Producer
2007 Burning at the Speed of Light Thrasher Mixing, Engineer
2007 Heavy Metal Box [Rhino] Various Artists Producer
2007 Standing the Test of Time Attacker Producer
2008 Drunkard’s Masterpiece Johnny Dowd Mastering
2008 Ginuwine…The Bachelor/100% Ginuwine Engineer, Assembly
2008 Until the Ocean The Horse Flies Engineer
2008 Room in These Skies Sim Redmond Band Mastering
2008 Aneinu! Hasidic Orthodox Music Moshe Berlin Mastering, Re-mastering,
Editing
2009 Machines of Grace Machines of Grace Engineer
2009 Infidel At War Producer, Engineer
2010 Bitten by the Beast David “Rock” Feinstein Mixing
2011 I Put My Tongue On Window Boy with a Fish Overdub Engineer
2012 Performing The Score Malcolm Bilson/Liz Field Engineer, Mixer, Post Production supervisor
2012 No Regrets Johnny Dowd Mixing, Mastering
2012 The Blind Spots The Blind Spots Producer, Engineer, Mixing
2012 Late Last Summer Dick &Judy Hyman Engineer, Mixing, Mastering consultant
Classical
Year Album Artist Role
1976 Like A Duck to Water Mother Mallard’s Portable Digital Mastering
1983 Anatidae David Borden’s Mother Mallard Producer, Engineer
1997-2006 Selected live performances and recording sessions for Cornell Glee Club and
Female Chorus Engineer, Mixing, Mastering
1997 Echos From the Walls Cornell Glee Club Engineer, Editing, Mixing, Mastering
1999 1970-1973 Mother Mallard’s Portable Producer
2001 High Rise Xak Bjerken Engineer, Mixing, Mastering
2002 Liberación Amy Glicklich Recorded, Engineer, Mixing,
Mastering
2004 In Shadow, In Light: Music of Steve Stucky Ensemble X Engineer,
Editing, Mixing, Mastering
2005 Judith Weir: The Consolations of Scholarship Ensemble X
Engineer, Editing, Mixing, Mastering
2007 Midnight Prayer Joel Rubin Digital Editing, Mixing, Digital
Mastering
2007 Under The Bluest Sky David Parks Engineer, Mixing, Mastering
2011 The St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic Engineer, Mastering
2011 Horn Muse CD Gail Williams Engineer
Television Credits
Year Show Channel/Institution Role
1999 Swiftwater Rescue Discovery Pictures Engineer, Mixing
1999 Wildlife Legacy Turner Original Productions/National Wildlife Federation Engineer, Mixing
1999 Wild City Turner Original Productions/National Wildlife Federation Engineer, Mixing
1999 The Legends Series Turner Broadcasting Engineer, Mixing
2000 Detonators: Sheer Force BBC Engineer, Mixing
2001 True Colors Learning Channel Engineer, Mixing
2005 The Cultivated Life: Thomas Jefferson & Wine Madison Film, Inc. Engineer
Film Credits/DVD
Year Film Producer/Company Role
1998 A Stranger In the Kingdom Kingdom County Productions Engineer, Mixing
2002 The Year That Trembled Kingdom County Productions Engineer, Mixing
2012 Performing The Score Malcolm Bilson /Liz Field Engineer, Mixer, Post Production
supervisor
Live Recordings
2000 – present:
Adam Day, Amy Glicklich, Atomic Forces, Aurelio Martinez, Avett Brothers, Bad Dog, Dalfa Toujours, Ballake Sissoko, Bamboleo, Ben Suchy, Big Leg Emma, Black Castle, Blackfire, Bobbie Henrie & the Goners, Boubacar Traore, Boy With A Fish, Bubba George, Buvas, Calico Moon, Campbell Brothers, Cary Fridley, Cherish the Ladies, Christina Ortega, Cletus & the Burners, Crow Greenspun, Cypher:Dissident, Cyro Baptista & Beat the Donkey, D’Gary, December Wind, Donna the Buffalo, John Anderson, John Brown’s Body, John Specker, Johnny Donegan, Johnny Dowd, Jones Benally&American Indian Dance Troupe, Joules Graves, J-San & the Analogue Sons, Kanenhio Singers, Kathy Ziegler, Keith Franks & the Soileau Zydeco Band, Kekele, Kusun Ensemble, Life, Little Egypt, Lonesome Sisters, Los Lobos, Los Pochos, Lunasa, Mamadou Diabate, Mary Lorson & Saint Low, Mecca Bodega, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Miche Fambro, Minnies, Moochers, Moontee Sinquah, Musafir, Nedy Arevalo, Oculus, Old Crow Medicine Show, Squirrels, Paso Fino, Patty Loveless, Perfect Thyroid, Plastic Nebraska, Preston Frank & His Zydeco Family Band, Project Matsana, Ramatou Diakate, Randy Whitt & the Grits, Red Hots,
Red Stick Ramblers, Revision, Rickie Lee Jones, Ritsu Katsumata, Rockridge Brothers, Rodney’s Nigh, Rokia Traore, Ronnie Bowman and the Committee Rusted Roof, Samite, Scotty Campbell & Zydeco Experiment, Shane & Diana, Sillanpaa Family, Sim Redmon Band, Slo-Mo, Snake Oil Medicine Show, Solas, Son de Madero, Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys, Sujata Sidhu, Sunny Weather, Susana Baca, The Believers, The Blue Rags, The Burren, The Buvas, The Campbell Brothers, The Del McCoury Band, The Duhks, The Fierce Guys, The Flying Clouds, The Hix, The Horse Flies, The Lonesome Sisters, The
Mahotella Queens, The Meditations, The Overtakers, The Red Hots, The Splendors, The Super Rail Band, The Sutras, The Thins, Thomas Mapfumo, Thousands of One, Ti Ti Chickapea, Tonemah, Trevor MacDonald, Walter Mouton & the Scott Playboys, Wingnut, Yo Mama’s Big Fat Booty, Zydeco Experiment.

# # #

http://www.pyramidsoundstudios.com/
Contacts:
Alex Perialas, Pyramid Sound
Phone: 607.273.3931
Email: alex@pyramidsoundstudios.com
Andy Adelewitz, PR consultant
Phone: 607.257.0455
Email: andy@adelewitz.com

Original source.

No Comments

Beherit renews black metal with “Celebrate the Dead”

After a new genre establishes itself, bands try to stand out by either mixing other genres into their music or to expand upon the original idea, increasing its complexity and depth.

Beherit launches itself into this conflict first with the triumphant Engram, which connected the generations of black metal in a concept album that paid tribute to the past while evolving it into a new form, and now with the fertile landscape of ideas Celebrate the Dead.

This vinyl release contains two songs, a version of “Demon Advance” which is mostly faithful to the version on Engram. Some areas have less distortion, and the overall sound is a bit more raw and offhand, which gives this track a slightly different atmosphere.

“Celebrate the Dead” is another story. This lengthy (16:18) track shows Beherit experimenting with a fusion between ambient music, electro-acoustic, black metal and classical forms. Like most artists of statute, the composers behind Beherit know how to separate aesthetics (surface) from composition (structure and melody). As a result, while this track is a blueprint for an ambient or dubstep song played as if it were a metal one, it reaches for the greater objective of finding a mutual language among these music types.

While popular music (pop, rock, rap, blues, jazz, disco) songs vary wildly on the surface they rely on very similar underlying structures. These structures are based on cycles, or the back-and-forth between a verse and a chorus with a few detours to keep it interesting. The purpose of music in these genres is to equalize song structure so that surface traits, like using a flute or recording underwater, stand out and become interesting.

In narrative music (metal, classical, some ambient, electronica and electro-acoustic acts) the surfaces tend to be similar across songs and albums, but underlying song structure changes to fit the topic of each song. Riffs expand upon the context of previous riffs and force re-interpretation of both, expanding the storyline just as how each new clue in a mystery changes the direction of the book.

These are more like poems than cyclic sonic wallpaper or droning consistency; in fact what makes them great is that they’re inconsistent and based on change, not maintenance of a moment. This fits with the purpose of these genres, which is to show a change in character through the course of a journey or experience, so that the starting point is different from the end, and the people involved have a new strength or vision. They emphasize the difference between the start of a journey and its end, but also the many different types of journeys.

“Celebrate the Dead” shows Beherit deciding how to integrate these two types. It wants the ritual power of black metal and its own vision of occult dubstep or electro-acoustic ceremonial music, but with the ambient version comes a dose of the cyclic and layered that excludes the narrative. Beherit tries to keep the sense of the unique journey which is inherent to black metal, and enwrap it in the layered ambient approach, and as a result produces music that is every bit as much ritual as early black metal.

The song migrates through three major movements, in which pairs of riffs transfer potential energy between each other as layers of drums, vocals, samples and keyboards are applied to build an intense tapestry of hanging sound, complete with sonic breaks and metal-style interludes. The result is a deepening experience but in its non-linearity it loses the epic power of metal’s ability to tell a tale, which is what Beherit changed with their music for the Engram LP. On that album, the narrative wins out and the layering circular style is brought in slowly.

This is rough listening. In part because this is a demo of the laptop-and-guitar type, which means that it’s not so much an organic sound as a pastiche of recorded and generated sounds. However, what will throw most people off are the vocals which are fragile and yet shamanistic, in what music reviewers call “accessible” but is more likely an experiment in the deliberately immature, unformed and intellectually curious sound that diverse musicians such as Roky Erickson and Absurd have made popular. These are the anti-slick, and while hipster pop has ruined “accessible,” their child-like honesty gives them a weight that no polished vocal could achieve.

What is most impressive about this release is that it is a pathway to future development for metal. The best of the genre, like the first Enslaved album or the longer Burzum works, tended toward a type of ambient music that used guitars but did not fall into the loop-pattern of popular music, instead preferring the epic storytelling of metal and classical. Black metal backed down from the challenge offered by albums like Hvis Lyset Tar Oss and instead became a plaything, a hybrid of either indie-rock (“post-black-metal”) or a darker form of punk (“black crust”,”war metal”).

Beherit turned black metal back toward a sensible path with Engram, which cited forms and styles from the past (some in tribute to Venom and Bathory, from the sound of them) but worked those into a concept album that ended in the meditative “Demon Advance.” To include the ambitious “Celebrate the Dead” in the same album might have made it lopsided, but in this sample track we see a possibility of metal guitars and dynamic acoustics existing in a narrative style.

This release will not make it past the enthusiasts and diehards who are curious about what the most fertile minds in black metal are thinking for the future. This is a shame, as all metal musicians should study this work to find a pathway out of the current rock-style slump that grips metal, and also to find a new inspiration for connection to the ancient ways of both metal and music from time immemorial.

3 Comments

Interview: Jon Konrath (writer)

What does it mean for you, to be a writer? Do you consider yourself in this position?

It’s a tough call – I mean, I put the profession of writer on my tax return, and that’s what I do for a living. But I think a lot of people expect a writer to be something different, some kind of Stephen King character, or a celebrity that publishes millions of books and appears on Charlie Rose and stuff. I’m far from that, because I really avoid the classes and readings and events – I’m not interested in the business of publishing or books, and I find most writers to be far too aggressive and egotistical. Most of my coworkers don’t even know that I write books. My parents don’t even know I write books. Writing in this day and age is considered strange, but I see it as a necessary evil.

What has been different about writing your second book than the writing of the first?

Summer Rain, my first book, was very linear. It was based on reality, and it followed an outline that I carefully managed. There were things that completely didn’t happen, but much of it could have occured during your typical summer on campus in 1992.

Rumored to Exist, on the other hand, is completely random. It’s the literary equivalent of Kentucky Fried Movie, a bunch of pieces put together to form feeling, terror and energy rather than emotion. It involves a lot more research, reading stuff to get ideas for bits and pieces. And a lot more stuff comes to me spontaneously, and ends up on scraps of paper and backs of envelopes before it is developed further. It’s not about character development and fleshing out a huge outline like Summer Rain. It’s a lot more the way I like to write, and it’s closer to my voice. But it’s much harder to do. The two are very different.

Both of your books have been print-on-demand, and you’ve been doing web-based writing for over a decade. Do you use these technologies to avoid conventional publishers, or do they have other advantages?

iUniverse and print-on-demand happened at the perfect time, just as I finished a draft of Summer Rain and really wanted to print a few hundred copies for fans and maybe to sell online. I looked at printing companies that could do 500 or 1000 books for several thousand dollars, and didn’t have any way to put that much into a book. And I was certain publishers weren’t going to even answer my mail if I sent them a thousand-page coming-of-age tale set in Indiana. Then I found iUniverse, and within six months, had this first novel sitting on my shelf and sitting on Amazon and other stores ready for purchase.

PoD is really analogous to the web’s model of letting anyone publish. When I first did zines online, I was able to avoid dealing with jerkoffs at Hit Parader or Metal Edge and write my own reviews for anyone to see. Later, I wrote fiction, and did a literary zine called Air in the Paragraph Line without dealing with any of the pretentious people that usually run small literary journals. Print-on-demand let me take the same style of writing and move it to paper without dealing with the logistical problems of storing a bunch of paper copies, going to the post office every day, cashing rubber checks for $3, and so on.

With Rumored, the decision for iUniverse was a tough one, because I really wanted to find a publisher. But I know a lot of former publishers here in New York that are begging for spare change, and nobody’s doing anything adventurous now that the entire economy is collapsing. And I didn’t want to deal with a bunch of agents or publishers that would look down their nose at a book that advocated sex with sheep and spends page after page talking about the Satanic anti-Christian holocaust or whatever. Also, I just wanted it DONE, and in paper. So it’s out now, and I’m sure it will sell less copies, but it’s out and I didn’t have to deal with anybody to print it.

Do you do any graphical or layout design besides what’s on the book? if so, which do you think will be more important as a stressed aspect of any new design, during the next two decades: perspective, color contrast, impact fonts or religious icons?

I do a limited amount of web page work, and I do some layout stuff for my day job, but it’s not my specialty. I’ve also been experimenting with some fake porn stuff lately, putting people’s heads on naked people’s bodies – I think this is one of the most underrated art forms out there.

I think perspective has the most subliminal impact on any layout, at least the ratio of everything in the layout. The golden ratio has always been a strange constant in nature and in classic art, and it’s amazing that you can still see it in most modern movies. I had an old roommate doing a thesis on the films of Stanley Kubrick and the use of the golden number in how he framed his shots and arranged some stuff during editing. I thought it was total bullshit, and then he brought me to The Shining in a big-screen movie theatre, and every fucking shot was perfectly framed that way. I did a lot of reading about film a few years back and I realized that every aspect of film editing has to do with this – make a plane come into a shot one way and it’s beautiful, but the other way is threatening. I think the way people are drawn to a web page, to a subway ad – it’s the biggest aspect of anything.

Color contrast – that’s a fad. In a few years, it will be something else. My mom used to be an interior decorator, and used to go to these big conventions and they would basically say “this will be the next color”. One year, she came home and told us that small appliances and electronics would be coming out in pastel colors, and I thought she was smoking crack. Next Christmas, every store was selling pink jamboxes and baby blue telephones. Much later, we had the iMac and all of the clear plastic, clear color stuff. Who knows what will be next.

It’s weird that you say religious icons, because I don’t see them in ads much, but then think of what icons have replaced religious ones in our culture: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, AOL, Britney Spears, MTV. You see Pepsi billboards more than you’d see large crosses in towns a hundred years ago. The Nike swoosh is probably more recognizable than the crucifix. And there are billboards with just that swoosh. Not a picture of the shoe, not a description of how much it costs or what its value is over other shoes. Just the fucking swoosh, and maybe a slogan that sounds more like a self-help mantra. I’ve never created any layout that has to do with that, but seeing as I spend a lot of time on the subway, I see it constantly.

When you describe the writing of Summer Rain, is this close to the William S Burroughs cutup technique, or that of oral literature? How similar do you suppose this process is to the means by which death metal bands compose technical masterpieces by collecting riffs and shaping them recombinantly into narrative?

It’s funny you should mention that, because I’ve been talking to Ray Miller (creator of Metal Curse zine and the death metal band Adversary) about how he should start writing a book. He worked for years in an indie record store, and every shift there was some strange, weird story. It could be like that book High Fidelity, but much more underground or strange. And in talking to him about how to get started, I mentioned the analogy of a death metal band creating an album. Instead of starting at page one and telling the story, sometimes it’s helpful to write these “riffs” and collect them, and later put them in place, like how you’d write songs. Rumored to Exist happened very much like that. So did Summer Rain, but it’s much less apparent because it’s a linear story. Rumored prospered from this lack of concentration on my part. It also made things much more difficult to edit.

And from what I’ve heard, that’s how Burroughs got Naked Lunch together, as opposed to the Kerouac straight-narrative, typing on rolls of paper approach, which would drive me nuts.

Do you find that being a writer makes you more prone to socialize, or more paranoid?

I wouldn’t say I’m paranoid, but I’m not a social diva, either. I’ve generally kept to myself, partially because I spend a lot of my time chained to the computer, but also because there aren’t many social outlets for writers that aren’t swimming with writers that have severe ego problems. I don’t like classes or workshops because I usually end up getting in fistfights with diva writers who think they are the next Michael Crichton or something. That said, New York is a decent place to be as a writer, especially if you work the corporate office environment. I know a lot of people who are aspiring actors, or long-time musicians, or occasional standup comedians, or wannabe screenwriters, or part-time directors, or something. So there can sometimes be some support from these people, so that’s cool. But most of the time, I socialize and don’t talk about the book, because I don’t want to be like those Amway people, always trying to push their product on everyone.

When you sit down to write, do you have an outline in front of you or in your head? how much of your work is improvisational? how many times do you edit and, what intoxicants are required to begin the editing process?

It depends on the book, of course. My first one, Summer Rain, was very outlined and regimented – I had to plan out with a calendar what would happen and I vaguely followed what really happened to me that year. But Rumored was more like playing with legos, because of the nonlinear format. At first, I simply wrote bits and pieces that gelled into segments. Later, I had a lot of trouble balancing this out – some things were a line long, others were the size of a short story. So I had to do a certain amount of planning on paper to balance things, move things around, and give the whole thing a feeling of continuity.

Most of Rumored was born from ideas I’d get anywhere – while in the shower, while reading a book, a web page, watching a movie. I wrote ideas, phrases, bits of dialog on scraps of paper, notepads, spiral notebooks, and in a slush file in emacs. Bits and pieces got moved around, and improv had a large amount to do with how to place those ideas and actually turn them into readable pieces of text. My best writing was when an idea came to mind and had enough inertia to pull out a very energetic piece without much thought. When I had a good night, it was much more like channeling than actual writing.

Of course, this left a very fucked up and uneven manuscript that required a lot of editing. And edits actually rewrote the entire book several times over. There were seven major versions of the book, with each one comprising of sometimes more than a dozen paper edits. Even with this, I know there are still mistakes in there. But the other problem with a book like this is that it’s hard to say when it’s done. I can’t just say, “the good guy beat the bad guy and got the princess, so I guess it’s done.” It took a lot of work just to put the fucking thing down and concede that it wouldn’t get any better.

As far as substances, the drug for this trip was caffiene, with some ephedrine thrown in for good measure. Anything else would slow me down or change the tone. I still don’t see how Bukowski or Hemingway or whoever could load up on booze and write. And I’m not into any other drugs. I even quit caffeiene during the final editing of the book, and it made the work in the last stretch twice as hard.

Who are your favorite postmodern writers?

I’ve always thought the phrase “postmodern” was too vague and gimmicky in categorizing writers, kindof like how “open standard” in the computer world doesn’t really describe anything. But I guess Mark Leyner would be at the top of the heap, and Raymond Federman. I’ve read a lot of Burroughs, although I like the story of his life more than I like his actual work. Naked Lunch is a landmark book, but I’d rather read interviews with WSB where he’s rambling on about Mayans and Yage and Control and everything else. His theories are incredible, and I wish I could live a life a percent as interesting as his.

Do you believe that postmodernism – the concept of linear rationality being dead and supplanted with the world of subconscious imagery – in literature has place, or is merely a deviation soon to be forgotten by history?

I think it has more of a place than people realize, now that everyone’s using the web, and that’s the biggest mess of nonlinear shit out there. It’s only a matter of time before people write good nonlinear books of pieces of imagery cataloged by link instead of linear pages, and people will be able to parse it perfectly. I don’t think that the human mind thinks in a straghtforward way, and it’s just a limitation of technology that presents literature in a straightforward way. If they ever start injecting works of art into peoples’ brains like a drug, the linear story will be the one that is forgotten by history.

Some people claim to remember stories and ideas visually, like William Gibson’s concept of cyberspace, but others describe a non- linear structural memory. Is this because events, actions, objects have internal mechanisms that describe their function in a unified external reality, or because of our tendency to associate ideas with other ideas for the purposes of contexting?

The original concept of Rumored to Exist was that each section would be a part of a person’s brain or memory, and at that time, I did a lot of reading and research on human memory to see if this was true or if I was just making it up. And human memory isn’t linear, it is organized chronologically or in neat pieces like an MP3 library or something. It’s easy to see when you look at stroke victims, and how they selectively remember things, but because other organic parts of their brain were destroyed, other parts are gone. So after a stroke, you might not remember how to speak, or butter a piece of bread, or operate a microwave oven. And it’s sometimes possible for these people to re-learn these skills using free memory in other parts of the brain. That makes me think the mind is more like a hard drive with a bunch of loose inodes and a file allocation table, and the importance or relevance of different things determines how well that information is kept. That’s why you can’t remember the songs a band played at a show, but you remember the way the beer tasted.

To answer your question, I think this is a feature and limitation of our organic brain. I think the way we group disparate parts and pieces of our external reality into events and stories and nightmares and memories is how the software works for this hardware.

But it was a particularly unlucky star for the Italian painters of genius in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that, in the narrow sphere to which they were arbitrarily referred for the choice of subjects, they had to resort to miserable wretches of every kind. For the New Testament, as regards its historical part, is almost more unfavourable to painting than is the Old, and the subsequent history of martyrs and doctors of the Church is a very unfortunate subject. Yet we have to distinguish very carefully between those pictures whose subject is the historical or mythological one of Judaism and Christianity, and those in which the real, i.e., the ethical, spirit of Christianity is revealed for perception by the presentation of persons full of this spirit. These presentations are in fact the highest and most admirable achievements of the art of painting, and only the greatest masters of this art succeeded in producing them, in particular Raphael and Correggio, the latter especially in his earlier pictures. Paintings of this kind are really not to be numbered among the historical, for often they do not depict any event or action, but are mere groups of saints with the Saviour himself, often still as a child with his mother, angels, and so on. In their countenances, especially in their eyes, we see the expression, the reflection, of the most perfect knowledge, that knowledge namely which is not directed to particular things, but which has fully grasped the Ideas, and hence the whole inner nature of the world and of life. This knowledge in them, reacting on the will, does not, like that other knowledge, furnish motives for the will, but on the contrary has become a quieter of all willing. From this has resulted perfect resignation, which is the innermost spirit of Christianity as of Indian wisdom, the giving up of all willing, turning back, abolition of the will and with it of the whole inner being of this world, and hence salvation. Therefore, those eternally praiseworthy masters of art expressed the highest wisdom perceptibly in their works. Here is the summit of all art that has followed the will in its adequate objectivity, namely in the Ideas, through all the grades, from the lowest where it is affected, and its nature is unfolded, by causes, then where it is similarly affected by stimuli, and finally by motives. And now art ends by presenting the free self-abolition of the will through the one great quieter that dawns on it from the most perfect keowledge of its own nature.

– Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

If there is an afterlife, what do you think it would be?

I don’t think there is an afterlife, so I try not to speculate about it. I think the afterlife is the carrot on a stick that leads the religious to do really stupid things and waste their lives. People should stop thinking they are one of the chosen few that will go on to a better place and actually do something with their lives that will make this world a better place.

Are you following the growing penetration of drugs into American society? From where do you think this originates? What is the significance of drugs – altered perception – in the time after perception was considered inherently faulty?

Let me hijack this question and answer it in a different order. First, drugs are omnipresent in American society because any highly industrialized nation doesn’t utilize its population efficiently. Back in the old days, people spent all of their cycles hunting game, planting gardens, making quilts, raising babies, building log cabins, and tending fires because they had to, to survive. There wasn’t much leisure time, and it was used by religion. There was little free will – you either hauled water from the well a mile away, or you died. Humanity doesn’t always have things easy now, but it’s not hard to get an easy job at McDonalds or a factory, pay your rent, never break a sweat, and have 128 of your 168 hours a week free to your own devices.

Now some people use that time in a cool way. They go to school, they create cool web pages, they climb mountains, they work on their car. But many people don’t know what to do with their time. They feel a need to belong, this tribal instinct. They watch sports, they drink beer, they become xenophobic, they develop ulcers, they try to keep up with the Jonses. Most of the ailments of the late 20th century have to do with people who have too much free time on their hands, from corporate corruption to gangs to religion. This isn’t a new theory; even though he is legally considered criminally insane, this is the logic the Unabomber was laying down.

Okay, so you have this straight man’s culture, where you’re expected to buy into the white picket fence thing, and have kids, and buy a sports utility vehicle and play golf. And more and more people think this is a crock of shit. And they get high. They find out that controlled substances make them forget about this void in life. And it might even make then enter a new subculture with other stoners, where these rules don’t exist.

I’m not a drug user, except for the occasional beer with friends, so I don’t know if I really buy either side of it. I’m not the kind of person to hang onto either extreme and consider it right, so I’d rather sit in the middle, or not even participate. I write about drugs a lot, though, because this culture interests me. It’s something that hasn’t been touched in a creative way, something to be explored.

I thought Naked Lunch was pretty creative, but the reams of drug fiction following were mostly social irresponsibility pornography. If you were going to write with drugs as your topic, what might you create?

I think the best way to write about drugs would be to have them an integral part of the story, but not be in the forefront. Drugs are just a chemical; any real story is about humanity, and any compelling story about drugs would have to describe the human condition in a compelling way. Drugs are usually used in a plotline as an evil, or an excuse. Like, a guy robs a bank because he’s on drugs. Occasionally, someone writes about drugs as a catalyst, a conduit to action, like in most crime films where mobsters have a shitload of cocaine and that temporarly reverses things so they are on the heavy side of the law, and there’s no way the cops could win. Think about movies like The French Connection, where these guys with a fuckload of heroin were above the law. That’s about as far as most books and movies really go with it.

I think Hunter S. Thompson did some great work beyond Burroughs in this area, but I also think if he wasn’t taking a drug store full of junk when he was in Las Vegas, he would have written a book just as entertaining as Fear and Loathing. But it’s a book about excesses, and the writing and the search for humanity is what makes it for me.

Do you see writing in this time period as democratic, or elitist?

It’s probably more elitist. Most writing in this country is actually the production of “media” by “media figures” who are pop stars known for their name instead of their craft. It’s nice that technologies like Print on Demand and the Internet are making it easier for anyone with skill to create art, but I don’t see much of a community surrounding this. I’m hoping we’re at a crossroads where the truly intelligent will realize that writing for fame and fortune is futile, and it’s better to write for yourself and put it out there, even if only a dozen people see it on the web or in a zine or whatever. And then those intelligent will congeal and find each others’ work and form an unstoppable movement of real work, rather than the imitation writing that marketers present to us in book stores.

This seems to be the same problem faced by aging death metal bands however. At some point, having a day job to write books or death metal music reviews all night becomes tedious, and one wishes to be supported by the primary labor of life, writing. How does this fit into ideological niche marketing as you describe?

It doesn’t fit, and that’s the catch. You can’t support yourself selling twelve copies of your work a year. And there are other forms of support, like grants or communes, or scholarships, or universities, but they all dilute you into something else just as much as a day job. Like, I went to an art museum once, and there was an exhibit that was a bunch of hay and horse shit on a floor, and a bunch of Macintosh computers showing bitmapped animated pictures of Planet of the Apes. Was that art? I’m not sure. But the grant application that paid for all of that hay and shit was probably incredible art. And if you want to do that all day, and you are good at it, that’s great. But it probably means you aren’t producing art like you originally wanted.

When did you first decide to be a writer? If a role model, what qualified that person as insurmountable by their world?

I’ve always been able to write to a certain extent, but I got more involved with computers as a kid, and during school, so I always thought that was my destiny. I thought I had a book in me, but I was more concerned with learning how to hack and program. I eventually hit a wall in my formal CS training, around the time I also got dumped by this girl I was dating. I was going through a serious “what should I do with my life” phase, and didn’t entirely know what I wanted to do. I’d been working on a few Death Metal zines and I enjoyed the journalism and writing, but didn’t know if I could become a “serious” writer.

So the writers that got me started were guys who were not pretentious, and made it look easy. I liked the spoken word of Henry Rollins, and it got me into writing in a journal every day, and observing things around me. Charles Bukowski made me look at autobiographical fiction and consider it easy. So did Henry Miller, but Bukowski’s work had a certain sense of truth to it, and showed me that it wasn’t what you were writing about as much as how you wrote it. That got me started on short stories, and eventually Summer Rain.

Should writers stay celibate?

Not really, or at least not by choice. Granted, it’s hard to write on a daily basis and maintain any kind of relationship. I can’t write as well when I take off Friday and Saturday to spend time with a girlfriend or cruise around looking for one. Those are the days I write most, so my stretches of not getting any also tend to be when my writing volume increases. But interacting with people is – well, it’s not essential to writing, but it helps.

This seems to me why ancient religions and cultures recommended a studied celibacy for men. It seems that one workaround to this would be a more anti-social culture, where fewer people attempt the emotional interdependency that works well to glue society together like plywood, in which a relationship offered briefer, more passionate encounters with a significant other living in a close but separate location.

Do you see there being any humor in that being hard makes it hard to write?

There are a lot of strange catch-22s in our society like this. For example, most people that teach acting are not good actors, because if they were, they’d be getting parts, not teaching. If you’re teaching any practical field, like business, you can’t be working in that field, unless you are doing a half-ass, part-time consulting job or whatever. Very few people can pull it off, but many don’t, so it makes you wonder how the hell people figure this stuff out.

Writing is the same because writing involves translation of the human element into word. And to be a specialist in the human experience, you’re going to date people and be married, and go to parties, and have a family, and travel all over, and do all of this stuff. But if you did all of this, you wouldn’t be able to write! And I always wonder if my writing would be better or worse if I was hidden away at my ranch in Colorado all year around, where the nearest living person is ten miles away. I also wonder what would happen if I simply went full-tilt wife-hunting and gave up everything to get married and settle down. I wonder if I did that if I would ever write again.

On the other hand, it’s no coincidence that when I’m not in a relationship and I want to be in one, I tend to write more vividly about the situation. Summer Rain was started after a horrible breakup back in college, one that probably wasn’t that horrible at all, but I just couldn’t kick it. That kind of pain gives you motivation to do more, so I can ultimately appreciate the cruel irony of the whole thing.

How do you feel about Christian presence in American politics?

It’s sickening. There’s supposed to be a freedom of religion, and a freedom FROM religion, but look at any piece of American money and tell me that this is nothing except a joke. Christians funnel serious money into American politics, and this won’t change. I wish someone would get in the primaries to have some visibility, and then just get up during a speech and say “If you believe in God, go FUCK yourself.” Until then, we have politicians pandering to these idiots. It’s scary stuff

Do you think psychology as a science is unduly influenced by Judeo-Christian values?

It depends on the brand of psychology. When a lot of people go to a shrink after they get dumped or someone dies or whatever, they usually get this fast-track band-aid treatment that involves spilling out your problems and reassuring you that it will be better, but not actually offering any “reprogramming” or heavy understanding of what possible psycho-somatic issues could be causing your problems. That dovetails nicely with the christian belief that if you have problems, you just pray to Jesus and it will all be better. Both are simply a distraction, and that works for a lot of people, but I’m the kind of guy who wants to know what the hell is really going on. I mean, as a kid, every toy I was given was taken apart as soon as I learned where to dig up a phillips screwdriver. So when I was in high school, college, and I wanted to go to a shrink and really pull apart my head and find what was defective and either comment it out or replace it with a new subroutine, I was always running into these shake-and-bake therapists that just wanted me to tell them what was wrong in sixteen one-hour sessions, maybe give me some pills, and it was better. And it wasn’t!

There’s a smaller, but more focused area of psychology that focuses on finding the basis of problems, realizing that your actions and reactions shape the way you see the world and eventually how well you work with it. This is called NLP, and it’s more analogous to debugging a computer program than praying to Jesus, which is why it’s interested me. It’s also more expensive, harder to find, and takes a much longer time to work through, which is why I’m currently not working on it.

What do you think in the same context as Christian political presence about Muslims? About Jews?

There’s less of a Jewish presence in politics, although you see it here in New York. If anything, it’s refreshing to go from Indiana, which is 107% fundamentalist Christian, to New York City, where there are enough Jews that a fundie probably couldn’t run for office without some flak. I don’t even know much about the Muslim influence, and I’m not up on the Middle East, so I’ll leave it at that.

According to the doctrines of Buddhism, the world came into being as the result of some inexplicable disturbance in the heavenly calm of Nirvana, that blessed state obtained by expiation, which had endured so long a time – the change taking place by a kind of fatality. This explanation must be understood as having at bottom some moral bearing; although it is illustrated by an exactly parallel theory in the domain of physical science, which places the origin of the sun in a primitive streak of mist, formed one knows not how. Subsequently, by a series of moral errors, the world became gradually worse and worse – true of the physical orders as well – until it assumed the dismal aspect it wears today. Excellent! The Greeks looked upon the world and the gods as the work of an inscrutable necessity. A passable explanation: we may be content with it until we can get a better. Again, Ormuzd and Ahriman are rival powers, continually at war. This is not bad. But that a God like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and woe, out of sheer caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have clapped his hands in praise of his own work, and declared everything to be very good – this will not do at all! In its explanation of the origin of the world, Judaism is inferior to any other form of religious doctrine professed by a civilized nation; and it is quite in keeping with this that it is the only one which presents no trace whatever of any belief in the immortality of the soul.

– Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Sufferings of the World

It seems to me the only difference between fundamentalist Christians and Jews is that Judaism is a materialistic religion with a racial xenophobia, while Christianity is a pseudo-idealist religion with a xenophobia of abstract orthodoxy. In many ways, that last phrase could describe what happened to European intellectualism, with a few bright exceptions, after Christianity arrived. What are your thoughts on these provocations?

I don’t know. To me, I see the main difference is that Christianity has sought to grow by being a very inclusionary religon. That means if you aren’t Christian, you can always be saved and sign on the dotted line and give us money and all will be well. That’s why if you sat in a bus station in Indianapolis on the average Tuesday, someone is going to try to convert you to Christianity about every twenty minutes. And that’s why Christianity is such a basic, dumbed- down religion, with very little orthodoxy. There aren’t a lot of rules to learn or classes to take (unless you’re Catholic) and you can even get an illustrated kiddie bible to read if the King James is too tough for you. Everyone’s invited, and that’s why their numbers grow.

On the other hand, I see Judaism as a very exclusionary religion. Jewish singles are taught to date only partners who are also Jewish. It’s very hard to convert to Judaism. It’s all protected by a very complicated and orthodox system of language, rules, calendar, holiday, diet, and everything else. But that means it’s kept pure.

I think both methods are inherently wrong, though. Any religion stresses that its members are the chosen one, and that other people are pieces of shit. Otherwise, religion would be universal, and individual churches wouldn’t have a way to make money anymore.

Which would you kick out of bed more quickly, Janet Reno or Keanu Reeves?

I think if you had an amateur porn of yourself fucking Janet Reno, it would be pretty much the ultimate party conversation item. And you know I’d go for the ass, as a little Waco retribution.

Speaking of Waco, what is the function of government?

Good question. I’m far more socialist than liberitarian in that I think the government should provide the functions that a free market economy can’t or won’t provide. In the old model, that’s stuff like roads and healthcare, retirement and men on the moon. There’s also protection and enforcement, from jails to armies. You could argue that any of these things could be done better by private companies, but corporations might not want to do them if there’s no bottom line for them. If a company is paid a billion dollars to build a one billion dollar university, they don’t have any motivation to do it, unless the company is a Christian-run shell corporation that wants to ram religion down the students’ throats, or unless Microsoft wants to build the school and brainwash the kids into using their crap. That’s why in theory a government would get involved – to make sure the alterior motives are decided by the people instead of some marketers.

In my perfect world, peoples’ greed and stupidity wouldn’t come in the way of advancement of society, and government projects like space exploration, computing, scientific research, and healthcare would actually be progressing instead of just being a sick joke. The problem is that people are too greedy, and want to know what’s in it for them. We haven’t found the cure to cancer because the top research scientists are figuring out how to make Sports Utility Vehicles even bigger, because that’s where the money is.

Does this imply that all governmental systems share common functions of both socialist and capitalist behavior? Would it be possible play with words and call socialism “social behavior” governmental theory, and call capitalism simply “competitive behavior” theory? One is implicit centralization; the other abstract. In this view, it might be possible that capitalism is closer to the anti-democratic social ideals I have interpreted from some of your statements above. If competitive rather than capitalism were seen as an American value, how do you think our social outlook might change? Would there be a blurring between the “public fiction” and “private truth” of various economic, social, governmental enterprises?

Socialist socieites also work for a collective goal by the nature of social behavior, but libertarian societies expand social behavior to include as a basic value an indifference to collectivism. Is this true in your view?

It’s true, and I think it’s an inherent flaw of most libertarian systems. For one, I think collectivism is a basic human instinct – one that can be unlearned and avoided – but it’s normal, and something the sheep out there understand. Also, I don’t think everyone can be the center of their universe; I mean, I can’t cook well, I can’t run a nuclear reactor, I don’t want to be the one to clean my septic tank, and I have to rely on doctors, lawyers, grocers, farmers, and many others to survive. A system of collectivism is supposed to provide a method to have those people help each other, while benefitting the most from it. I’m not saying our current system works, but only so many people can vanish from society and hide out in Idaho with their guns and dogs before things fall apart.

Do you believe in conspiracies?

Hell yeah. But I find the myth of conspiracies far more interesting than the conspiracies themselves. I’m writing about them a lot in Rumored, in a very playful and mocking sort of way. I don’t necessarily believe in aliens or whatever, but the Area 51 shit is great. Every society has its own myths and mytholgies, and centuries from now, people are going to be studying the X-Files like we now study Thor and Zeus.

I do seriously believe in a lot of government conspiracy. I seriously think the CIA has its hands in many evil plans, and I know billions of tax dollars go toward creating craft like Aurora, the next-generation hypersonic spy plane. I think a lot of the UFO sightings out there are probably Lockheed test craft operating at night. I know if I would’ve seen a stealth fighter in 1977, I would’ve thought the Martians were coming, too.

Jon Konrath on Death Metal

I know you’ve been a big metal and death metal listener for years. What are you hearing these days?

I actually listen to more stuff in the “prog-metal” genre these days, like Dream Theater, Fates Warning, Queensryche, Joe Satriani, etc. When I put on an “old” CD, it’s more likely going to be an old-old band like Saxon, Judas Priest, Mercyful Fate, SOD, or Anthrax. When I do have some 90s-era Death going, it’s usually Dismember, Macabre, Carcass, or Entombed.

Pick five of the most important metal bands in history and give a brief rundown on each one and why it necessarily fits into the history of metal music.

Metallica – Kill Em All: Although the band later became butt-pirates, this album was practically an anthem to millions of metalheads, and acted like a gateway drug for virtually everyone that went out and started a band or got involved with heavier metal.


Motorhead – No Remorse: With their wide appeal and universal mythology, Motorhead became almost a meta-band that everyone respected as the loudest, rawest, and coolest. It’s hard to pick just one of their albums, so I chose their ubiquitous double-album compilation, filled with a little bit of everything from their early career.

 

Queensryche – Operation : Mindcrime: This obscure group of Seattle prog-rockers put their mark on the world with what’s possibly the best concept album ever.

 

 

Entombed – Left Hand Path: This immaculate work filled with unprecedented heaviness but yet an incredible depth and complexity was the high water mark for the early 1990s Swedish Death Metal genre, and in my opinion, was never topped.

 

Slayer – Reign in Blood: Although their earlier work was just as impressive, this album defined how fast metal would be played for years, and also got Slayer kicked off of Sony.

 

Do you consume any mainstream media?

I meet a lot of people in New York who either think they are bohemian or think they are upper-class and say “Oh, I don’t have a TV” or “I don’t watch movies” or whatever. In general, I find that these people are more fake and uninteresting than the people I know who spend their Saturday on the couch with a beer watching NASCAR. I’ve found that a lot of people that purposely don’t watch TV are still living a fantasyland existance, even without the sitcoms and John Hughes films. They’re still told what to do, and they still obey. It’s not a coincidence they all go to the Hamptons or all pierce their eyebrow or all dye their hair the same way. It doesn’t make them any better than me.

I admit, I do watch TV and I do go to movies and I buy DVDs and play video games. I don’t have cable TV, and I have pretty much given up on newspapers and magazines, although I might flip through whatever’s in the doctor’s waiting room. I enjoy it, but I don’t let it run my life. I think there’s a difference between watching TV and believing in it. If you believe in TV, the ads will lower your self esteem, and make you think you’re a loser because you can’t own a new Oldsmobile or land a chick like one in a Revlon ad or beer commercial. And when your esteem is low, you’re hit with the food ads – 50 grams of cheese fat stuffed in a pizza crust, a bunch of sugar and desserts, and high-fat snack chips that will make everyone happy. It’s no wonder America is obese these days. But I don’t think you need to buy into this to enjoy TV, and I think there are movies that are good entertainment, and just that. It’s just important to remember not to compromise your own life because what you see on TV is neat.

How controlled do you believe the US media to be?

Everyone should read Ben Bagdikian or the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) stuff, or at least listen to Jello Biafra rant about it. Pretty much everything we read or hear is controlled by a couple of huge corporations. And many smaller outlets for news and information become available, like the internet, but as the big companies get bigger, it seems like less and less people get involved with underground sources. And most people don’t believe stuff on the internet, because it’s diluted by so much shit. I mean, there are some great web sites out there with conspiracy theories, investigative reporting, and stuff like Slashdot, tech news, but there’s so much spam and make.money.fast and urban legends, that it’s hard to believe anything you read anymore. But to answer the question, yes the US media is controlled. And being controlled by big money is worse than being controlled by the government, like it was in old Communist countries. Because you can overthrow a government or vote out a leader, but you have no recourse against GE or Newscorp. You could stop buying their stuff or watching their shows, but that won’t hurt them much – many more sheep will continue to keep them in business.

But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first free-thinker and emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

– Mikhail A. Bakunin

It seems to me that evolution is a nihilistic thing, meaning it has no morals or concerns for outcomes. Thus when a society is built that values competitiveness at the expense of social logic, and you get the most fascist possible outcomes disguised as the most empowering, convenient, financially beneficial to the individual. Is this a virus humanity will shake? Is there any way out of the big money media control mess?

I think the real question to ask is, “will this virus kill itself?” Enron and WorldCom both died; this week I heard QWEST said they “accidentally” underreported a bajillion dollars of profits, and Ziff- Davis might file Chapter 11 this week. It’s not good news to our economy that these companies are falling, but it’s a demonstration that even the biggest corporations will eventually fail.

Do you think civilization often hides ugly truths behind social behavior?

I’m not sure what you’re getting at – does civilization hide truths with behavior? I think so, but it also has the ability to modify society so that the lies become the truth. That’s part of religion – a while ago, half of the kids born wouldn’t live to see their first birthday. So the churches told people to fuck like bunnies, so they’d have more customers. Now, almost all kids survive, so the world is overcrowded. And we certainly look away from problems and are drawn to others, but that’s more of a problem with capitalism. Everybody talks about school vouchers and keeping porn off the Internet this election, but nobody really gives a fuck about their kids. They never talk to them and treat them like animals. It’s all very silly.

My question might be phrased thus: does civilization have a public justification for a hidden agenda, although not necessarily an articulated and conspiratorial one, which disguises some “private” and/or unpleasant truths?

Just a stab in the dark on this: the human is the only animal that has an inherent double-standard to its nature. I mean, dogs shit on the ground, they fuck each other whenever the need arises, they dig through garbage, and they don’t think twice. But humans are more sophisticated, so there’s this whole obvious-but-secret life to everyone. Everyone has sex (well, I haven’t lately, but that’s another topic) but there is a strong taboo about sex. The same with bodily functions and death and sin and a bunch of other things. Now, I’m not saying we should all run around naked and shit in the streets. But what I am saying is maybe the human mind has this unconscious desire to have these double standards, these things that keep everything running that nobody talks about. Because if you live in an ultra-rich environment, you don’t clean your toilets. You don’t even talk about them; you pay someone else to do it. That sets up this strange double-standard, and that breeds similar things in business and politics, in the guise that it makes us “more sophisticated.”

What do you think makes us greedy, evolutionary mechanism out of control or social conditioning? Or is it possible that the former would naturally check itself eventually, but the later “justifies” it somehow to our symbolic and rational mind?

There’s a lot of social conditioning in our world that we don’t even see. There may be a primal base of darwinism, but the virus of advertizing and marketing tells us we are not complete unless we own a car with leather seats and 7-speaker CD sound system, and it puts off a huge spiral of related stuff. I also think when you don’t get the big things, you overindulge in the small. So when you see that TV commercial of a happy family and you are alone, and then the next commercial comes on and it’s for the new Pizza Hut Pizza with ten pounds of heart-clogging cheese per slice, you pick up the phone and order the pizza and eat the whole fucking thing. There’s this combination of greed and a desire for more mixed with a despiration to fill your life with something, and it’s injected into you pretty much from birth.

It is one of my theories that Christianity isolates the individual by forcing the individual into moral self-comparison with the holy deity, “God.” This causes people to think strictly in terms of their own prospects, and to lose sense of social hierarchy and collective goals. Where do you see this as converging with your own beliefs?

I would agree, although I don’t know if I would call it self- comparison as much as fear of failure. God is like a parent figure, more than a parent because he’s all-knowing, and people don’t want to disappoint their parent, especially if they will get an ass-beating over it. The strange thing is, in a theoretical sense, that would mean people would do unto others, create communities, and help the needy. But I think when you have the Christianity mixed with the unchecked greed, you get this horrible mutation of Christianity that most people in the USA preach, the kind where they think everyone is going to hell but them, but they are also really shitty to others.

Sometimes it seems as if humanity has justified this expansion using warmed-over Renaissance feeling coupled with a Christian ethos of dominating nature (which is “evil”). Do you think there’s any truth to this?

Oh, sure. Corporate branding is a billion-dollar industry, and they grab onto any emotion then can find. The Christian thing is a popular one, but throw in the “it’s for the children” and “it will make people like you”, and you’ve got a good start.

Most American kids feel neglected in the areas that are most intangible, such as time spent, value in the family unit, and that ephemeral “love,” for the third or fourth generation now. Is this a product of industrial society? Did people once treat their kids with more care, and have a collective interest in childrearing as near the top of their hierarchy of demands from a civilization?

It’s tough to say, especially now that single-parent families have been a regular way of life for over 30 years now. I think our industrial society makes it harder for parents to spend time with their children, but I also think people want immediate results, so they aren’t willing to invest time in childrearing. I mean, everyone *thinks* they do, but so many parents rush their kids into Ritalin or other drugs, and they also think they can buy parenting. I grew up in a somewhat affluent suburb where good parenting meant buying your kids the right clothes and buying them a car in high school. It’s much more than a material thing, and not many people realize that. But, I do know some people that are very good with their kids and they still work long hours at shitty jobs but are able to make it work, so not all hope is lost.

Do supermodels shit?

If they do eat at all, I’m certain they just puke it back up, but maybe some of them are addicted to laxatives. The whole thing scares me – I work in Manhattan and I’m amazed at the overabundance of phenomenally skinny women. I mean, everyone I see is six feet tall and 110 pounds, and I know that going to the gym for 5 hours a day doesn’t do that. Either they are coke fiends, or completely anorexic, or both. I’m not too into that, so it freaks me out more than anything else.

Why does death metal seem politically relevant to the end of the 20th century, to you?

Okay, so you’ve got mainstream music, however you define that. And if you’re not a sheep, and you feel a need to be different, you follow another path. In the past, that might have been punk rock, or hardcore rap, or metal, or electronic music. Well, in the interest of marketing, all of these things have been crossbred and watered down and turned into viable commercial product. So depending on what part of the country you live in, mainstream music is now either “alternative” punk music, or “R&B” rap music, or “Electronica” disco- type dance music.

So the true underground is Death Metal. And every effort to market this has failed, because if you remove the gore and the raw power and the Satanism, you’re left with something remarkably stupid that won’t market to the average record-buying sheep, and won’t have enough balls to interest metalheads. Because Sony and BMG can’t sell it or get MTV to play it, they ignore it, and the essential culture of Death Metal survives. It survives because of tape traders (and now MP3 traders) and small distros selling 20 copies of a CD and zines and fans. It means that only selling 1000 copies of an album is considered wildly successful, but it also means that album is going to be evil and aggressive and memorable and pure energy. It means that bands get to dictate what goes on an album, and gets to write songs that are sick or intelligent or protestful or Satanic or whatever. In a sense, it is a far more pure element of democracy, because it isn’t subverted by money. And it’s a form of socialism, at least in the sense that the community keeps itself afloat. You can’t just go to the average Musicland and buy good Death Metal; it’s your job to seek out this stuff by getting on the web or reading zines or talking to others.

But aside from my rambling, the importance of this politically is that the Death Metal community isn’t supported by a government, and it isn’t run by a corporation. And it doesn’t have a massively widespread impact on society, but it’s an interesting pocket of culture that sustains itself. And those things interest me, because if I could find them outside of music – if I could find a community similar to this that would feed me or clothe me or shelter me in exchange for the work I put in, it would be an interesting political experiment.

If you could say one thing to Jesus Christ, what would that be?

I’d probably tell him I was sorry for what his followers did with his message. I don’t believe in God – I’m an Atheist – but I do believe that a man named Jesus Christ walked the earth 2000 years ago, and I believe his followers wrote a book and started a church. I’m guessing the water-to-wine, rose-from-the-dead-on-the-third-day stuff is probably metaphorical, but I do think he was a charismatic man who had some ideas and told them to many people. And in the most basic of senses, Christianity has some good tenets – don’t fuck with people, don’t lie, be honest, do unto others, and so on. I’m probably far more Christian in that sense than most so-called religious people out there. But unfortunately, all of this was distorted over time, and turned into a profitable business, and a powerful tool of government. And I’m sure that if big J walked the Earth today, he’d be pretty pissed at how his vision was warped into what it is today. I’d also ask him his opinion of The Last Temptation of Christ, since I think it’s a pretty cool film.

When Christianity came into being, the craving for suicide was immense—and Christianity turned it into a lever of its power. It allowed only two kinds of suicide, dressed them up with the highest dignity and the highest hopes, and forbade all others in a terrifying manner. Only martyrdom and the ascetic’s slow destruction of his body were permitted.

What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.

– F.W. Nietzsche, The Gay Science

I’m certain of the possibility of UFOs, and the probability of their existence, but I fear the “UFO community” because of its continual anonymity, broad claims and paucity of consistent evidence except for the generalized existence of flying metallic objects on planet earth. To me, it seems that any government is going to hide most of its budget to work on secret evil shit to do to other people, in case one’s role suddenly becomes being the recipient of the “unto you.” What sort of stuff do you think’s brewing now? Do you give any credence to conspiracy theories about AIDS or the West Nile virus, or do you think these are simply a consequence of commercial exploitation of deep forest areas (thus bringing previously undiscovered satanic microbes to the public eye)?

I predict that the threats will all be real things, but the reactions by the government is fucked up. Take the West Nile virus here in New York City. It’s a real virus, mosquitos are a real problem, but most of the people that would die from it are old and half-dead anyway. So the best reaction would have been a good public awareness campaign about mosquitos, along with patrols that cleaned out cesspools and whatnot.

Instead, Guiliani sprayed this incredibly evil chemical all over the place. They were not supposed to spray it on food, but videos came out later with them spraying it right on open fruit stands, and I’d bet anything that the food was sold later to unsuspecting people.

A lot of bad shit could happen in the near future, and it’s not a conspiracy theory. Think about Gulf War syndrome, smallpox, or e coli – that Fast Food Nation book told unspeakable horrors about how understaffed and inconsequential the USDA is about meat inspections, and now there’s a beef recall going on in Colorado as we speak. And remember last fall when everyone and their brother was finding Anthrax in the US mails? None of these are conspiracies like saying that the CIA invented AIDS. (Although I think the CIA made crack cocaine popular,) but the government’s piss-poor reaction to these problems are veiled in mystery.

If your options were an eternal existence for human populations or total destruction of earth, including all humans, which would you pick?

I’m going to read a bit too much into this to support an answer. I think, given the rate of human growth, that it would not be possible for an eternal existence on our one small planet, at least given our current technological infrastructure. Many people (Greenpeace et al) think that in order to sidestep this, we need to avoid using the Earth as a natural resource, or at least avoid destroying it. But a minority of people think that the solution is to create a larger infrastructure – hydrogen cars, solar power, fusion power, synthetic nutrients instead of laborious farming and inefficient slaughterhouses. And people themselves have problems that prevent an eternal lifespan – medicine can only do so much, and you’d need genetic engineering orders of magnitude better, to essentially slow or stop aging and repair genetic disorders. And eventually, you’d run out of room – you’d need to move to other planets, other moons, spacestations to support the population. And you’d need to slow down the growth of population, too.

This all sounds great to me, but I think population has lost faith in the idea of space exploration. Even with people living full-time in the ISS, there’s no public interest in taking the next step. A few people on the internet, like the Artemis project, and people who have been reading Kim Stanley Robinson for too long (like me) want to see someone win the X-Prize and put private space travel on the map, but too many people are more interested in the new Britney Spears video. There are also too many serious issues, mostly related to obsolete tenets of religion, that prevent any scientific progress on ideas like cloning, stem cell treatment, genetics, population control, longevity enhancement, or anything else. Of course, as Bill Hicks pointed out and as I found while reading a Gideon’s Bible in a Las Vegas hotel room a few weeks ago (I’m not a fan of the work, except as an interesting fictional treatise, and sometimes to throw back at people to prove a point) but in the bible, Adam and Eve were supposed to live forever. They were supposed to never produce. They were supposed to live a utopian paradise and they fucked it all up. Now, this is just a fairy tale, but I see nothing wrong with pursuing this in the future, in creating our own garden of eden.

Could one construe all of civilization except for its pure pragmatics as a death realization avoidance cult?

It’s more than a death realization avoidance cult; you need to add to that all of the building empire people do, like having kids and buying crap they don’t need in order to have the most, even after they die.

Jon Konrath
www.rumored.com

No Comments

Interview: Vidar Vaaer (Ildjarn)

We caught up with Ildjarn via email to discuss the sudden release of earlier works, “Son of the Northstar” on Fullmoon Records, and the impetus behind his unusual art form. Taking black metal a step closer to the ambient, Ildjarn has with his self-titled unit and project Sort Vokter shaped metal into an atmospheric, spontaneous and subtly structured art form.

Do you see art as having a goal, or being pure aesthetics? Some would argue that art deliberately communicates an idea(s) or changes the listener through experience, where others claim that art is an experience unrelated to the thoughts and beliefs of the artists?

Well, I don’t know about art, and I don’t give a shit about art no matter what it is. I’m just doing what comes natural, and I’ve never thought about it as art. The things I do are for me, I’ve never done music for no one but me. Still, I think it’s satisfying to know that the truly dedicated out there find something in what I do.

What to you is most inspiring in nature?

To take a walk in the mountains, especially the highlands called Hardanger highlands, Norway (of course).

Do you see anything natural about human society, including its technology?

I try to mingle as little as possible with people and society in general. I find more pleasure in entering my own world.

Do you find it amazing that you seem to have discovered an infinite source of small patterns in your art form?

As I said, about art, others have to decide if what I do is art. About your question, I’m not sure what you mean…

When people say, “does art emulate life, or life emulate art,” do they mean life as human life, or natural life? If so, how could trees/birds/etc. emulate art unless there was a preexisting commonality between art and natural life?

I don’t have a fuckin’ idea.

On the Sort Vokter album Folkloric Necro Metal there is a statement about the drug THC. What does this drug mean to you, and how do you see drug use as fitting in with your beliefs?

I never use drugs, actually I never touch alcohol either. I want my senses to experience things in a natural way. I was the only one on the album not using drugs during the recording process.

You briefly played bass for Emperor; what do you see as the differences in approach between your art and that of Emperor?

Emperor have to make a lot of compromises, being a band, whereas I don’t have to. I’m my own master, I do what I feel like, and I never ask anyone if they like it. If I like it myself, that’s enough. Also, my music is more improvised at times, being the only one in the making of the music.

While many artists consider improvisation a key to perfection of idea, in your case it seems as if perfection is not the goal as much as setting a glimpse of man + nature into music. Do you think there is any truth to this statement?

If you had to name recent bands from the metal or ambient genres that had impressed you, could you list any? If so, what are they?

I really like Biosphere from Norway, it’s the ultimate ambient feeling. I think there’s a lot of crap bands these days, and I really wouldn’t know which ones to mention.

What seems amazing about Biosphere is the way that radically different, small parts are woven together to produce a feeling of immersion that to me most “sounds like” connections between ideas across time. Do any of these concepts influence your music?

I don’t know. It’s hard for me to tell, because I just do what comes natural. It may be that I’ve been influenced, but I wouldn’t know.

Some people view violence as inherently evil. as a naturalist, what do you feel is the role of violence?

It’s natural in nature. It’s not evil in my eyes. Evil is beyond all this, something only one can know oneself. If you stab someone for no reason and laughs about it afterwards, you’re not necessarily evil. You might have had a bad childhood or whatever. As for myself, I despise my own race. I don’tsee this as evil, I just don’t think humans are worthy of living. When I take a walk up in the mountains, I always hope I won’t meet someone. Animals, on the other hand, have my total respect and admiration.

There is a hypothesis that the earth is a living organism, called by some “Gaia.” In this hypothesis creatures are cells in a much larger interactive life form which regulates itself and develops for some reason known only to it. If you were/are a believer in this theory, what would be the role of humans in Gaia?

This is so far from my beliefs that I don’t know how to answer this one.

Let us admit to ourselves, without trying to be considerate, how every higher culture on earth so far has begun. Human beings whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more peaceful races, perhaps traders or cattle raisers, or upon mellow old cultures whose last vitality was even then flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit and corruption. In the beginning, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their predominance did not lie mainly in physical strength but in strength of the soul–they were more whole human beings (which also means, at every level, “more whole beasts”).

– F.W. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

In death metal and black metal, there is a heritage of both fantasy (metal) and pragmatic, hard-hitting politics of an anarchistic nature (hardcore). Do you feel this is true? If so, where do your beliefs influence your music in terms of these two extremes?

I don’t think these combine. As for my own music, my intention is to capture the feelings I have, call it evil or whatever, and in order to do this the music has to be capable of doing this.

What was the impetus for you to switch to keyboards on Landscapes, and what prompted the unusual decision to forego harmonic depth for a trueness to the form you established with guitars?

I’ve had these overwhelming feelings towards Norwegian nature for many years, so I just had to record some stuff. The two discs are composed and recorded during two nights only, and it’s 90% improvised. The feelings expressed here are a bit different from that of my metal releases, but also some of my metal tunes, I think, capture some of the same feelings, even though they’re expressed differently.

In your process of creation, what is the seed of the songwriting process? In other words, what is the first piece of any song around which you build the rest?

I’ve usually had the song inside my head, and then I first record the drums.

It’s very difficult to record the guitars first, because then you don’t have the same feeling of rhythm. All my stuff is recorded on a 4-tracker, so it was tricky to get the mike in the right place, but I don’t think that my music could have been made in a studio. I have to be alone when I make my music. I’ve also done all engineering and production myself. The 4-tracker is now destroyed, so I can never make any more Ildjarn music. The sound would not be the one I’m after.

Ancient Hindu mythos used the Age of Kali (a goddess of death, destruction, absorption) to characterize an age of great instability and apocalyptic outcome. How far away do you think the Age of Kali is?

It’s coming very soon, and I’ll welcome it with all my heart.

Are you familiar with Godflesh – Streetcleaner? It seems to have some similar aspirations in songwriting, and some stuff that is vestigial from the former generation of metal.

I can’t really compare my stuff with other bands. I don’t care about other bands, so I’m not capable of doing a comparison.

Nidhogg listened a lot to Industrial many years ago, and he had all Godflesh recordings. I discovered some elements of aggression in them, but I don’t think I’ve been influenced by them. I was at a concert in Kristiansand, Norway, many years ago, Godflesh being the headliner. Nidhogg, of course, had to drag me along. Actually I was bored the whole time. I’ve never liked gigs, they just don’t give me that feeling I get when listening to music all by myself.

In the newspapers today, in America, the following snippet of text appeared in an article entitled “survey finds few in U.S. understand science.” What do you think is the intent of this article?

The scientific validity of astrology — the belief that an alignment of the planets can affect events on Earth — is rejected by 60 percent of Americans, as is the idea that some numbers are lucky while others are not. But 43 percent say they still read the astrology charts at least occasionally in the newspaper.

Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed believe in the theory of global warming, that the planet is being heated by an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Of those surveyed, 86 percent said global warming is a serious or “somewhat serious” problem. (Source)

I think people are too stupid and ignorant to really understand this topic.

Who is your favorite world leader from all of history? Would you ever aspire to a leadership role?

Leaders appear just because people are so weak, stupid and follow in each other’s footsteps. I’m my own leader, in my own world. I don’t have any interest in leading anyone.

Your misanthropy is legendary. What is it about humans that makes them detestable in contrast to ideologically silent plants and animals?

Humans are weak, always have to act contrary to what they really want, and they have also destroyed an entire planet. In short, they don’t live in allegiance with themselves and I will always hate my own race.

What do you think of vegetarians and recycling? Some say they are sell-outs for picking intermediate steps when much more radical action is required.

I’m a vegan myself. I became vegan when I was 17, I’m now 30. I never touch anything with milk in it, meat, fish, whatever. I respect animals, and consider them worthy of life. Humans, on the other hand… I think my misanthropy is to a large extent a result of the disrespect towards animals seen among filth of the human race. Still, of course I hate them for other reasons as well. I’m not one of those who hate just because of a bad childhood. I had the perfect childhood, being very often on my own, exploring. I also had many friends being a child, but at some time I realized that friendship actually doesn’t exist. Sure, you can respect someone, but friendship? I don’t think so. About recycling, I’m careful about littering, but it’s just because of the animals. I actually don’t care about the planet, animals are in hell, anyway. I confess that I’m a bit confused as to how I should explain this. Anyway, I follow my conscience, which is my guiding star through life and, eventually, death.

If you could change one aspect of your artistic career, what would it be?

I never regret anything. What’s done is done, it’s a part of the process. I’ve also never progressed in any way with my music, I think, and that’s important in it. The feelings have always been the same.

Do you think there is a “purpose,” or ongoing overall goal, to the process of life?

We’ll have to wait and see. Hopefully I’ll be dead in a few years time (5 years, tops), and I really look forward to it. Although I find great pleasure in observing nature, I welcome death even more.

Are there any theories or mythos of the creation of the universe to which you subscribe?

No, I have my own thoughts. Too fuckin’ weird to mention, too extensive. (I’m afraid I’ll get “mouse disease” from this interview.)

I have seen statements attributed to you which say, in effect, that you record on a whim with a portable recorder. Is this still true? Do you have any plans for further musical releases?

This is described above. I used the same 4-tracker that was used for the Emperor demo, but I arranged the sound differently. I will make no new music, but I feel that some of my songs are redundant, so I’ll maybe release an album with what I regard as my best songs.

What is the history behind the Son of the Northstar CD that full moon productions is selling as a full-length?

It was intended to be released 6-7 years ago. I actually sent the guys a DAT with a couple of songs to be released as a 7″ EP. I didn’t know anything about this until a week ago. In the writing moment I actually don’t have any copy myself. It’s a possibility that Fullmoon will release the CD I mentioned above.

What aspects of the metal underground would you change, if possible, and how would you change them?

I know only of a very few people dedicated to the underground, so I don’t know.

Scientists believe they have identified an “expansive force” which separates galaxies from one another with ever-increasing speed, as a counterpart to the gravity which is drawing the universe toward compaction. Does it seem natural that such a dualistic force would exist?

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a burst of light from an exploding star located much farther from Earth than any previously seen – a supernova blast in the early Universe that is casting light on a mystery of truly cosmic scale. This stellar explosion is extraordinary not only because of its tremendous distance — 10 billion light-years from our planet — but also because it greatly bolsters the case for the existence of a mysterious form of “dark energy” pervading the cosmos. (Source)

We would never know. It’s only after death that we’ll know the true meaning, if any.

Which thinkers, writers, artists and musicians have most influenced your learning?

Musicwise, I’ve listened to black metal since 1983, but I don’t know how much it has influenced me. I don’t care about thinkers, writers etc. I don’t need them.

If you could become a state of mind for eternity, which state of mind would it be?

My biggest fear is to live for eternity, either in mind or as something else.

Who was “Nidhogg” of the Ildjarn-Nidhogg split? By reputation, it is someone from the industrial/ambient band Dagda Mor (apologies for incorrect spelling); how did you meet this person and using what principles did you achieve collaboration?

We’ve known each other for 13 years, through music and ideas. It’s not the same Nidhogg as the one you mentioned, that’s just a bad copy.

Will those who appreciate your music be hearing more from Ildjarn, Sort Vokter or your other side projects? If so, please let us know by names which ones are to be ongoing.

The only thing would be the “Hardanger highlands” CD; it’s already recorded, but we haven’t thought of releasing it yet. It was finished in 1997, and it actually took us 3 years to do it. It’s kind of like “Landscapes”, only at least 10 times better.

This sounds amazing. I liked Landscapes and found its moments of intensity to be revealing of something spirited in existence itself. Can I ask who “we” are? Is this less improvised? Does improvisation bring out ideas hidden within the subconscious, or does it force them to be created through lack of time? It seems like a natural method to use stress to induce variation.

“We” are me and Nidhogg. The recording is one hour, and it took a lot of mental energy to do it. It’s not improvised at all. The compositions are exactly that; compositions, whereas “Landscapes” was more or less improvised during two nights. As I’ve said, being two in the process of making music, there have to be some compromises, and we’ve done all of them. The result, however, we both find pleasing, although some people may believe Ildjarn has become a fuckin pussy, after hearing it. What’s important in this respect is to understand that it’s all about nature. And I admit, I’m totally engulfed in Norwegian nature. It’s a hymn to this grand nature, and the music has nothing to do with love in the ordinary sense. We plan to release it before I enter the kingdom of death, but we don’t know exactly when.

For reviews of Ildjarn’s music, please check here.

But it is the will of the individual that sets in motion the whole mechanism, in that it urges the intellect, in accordance with the interest, i.e., the man’s individual aims, to produce for its present representations those closely related thereto logically, analogically or by proximity in space and time. But here the will’s activity is so direct that we often are not clearly conscious thereof. It is so rapid that at times we are not even conscious of the occasions for a representation that is thus brought about. Here it seems as though something quite unconnected with anything else has entered our consciousness. That this, however, cannot occur, is, as I have said, precisely the root of the principle of sufficient reason, and has been discussed more fully in the above-quoted chapted of my chief work. Every picture or image that is suddenly presented to our imagination, also every judgement that does not follow its previously existing ground or reason, must be produced by an act of will which has a motive, although such motive is often not perceived because it is insignificant, and the act of will is frequently not noticed because its fulfilment is so easy that this and the wish are simultaneous.

– Arthur Schopenhauer, The Fourfold Root

8 Comments

Agruss – Morok

Metal has become an aggregate of everything that went before it, and everything that threatens to destroy it.

Agruss’ new release Morok shows us the worst of both this amalgamation and the influences it has received from mainstream nu-metal, which itself is like a rap/hard rock fusion with no relation to metal.

Mixing equal parts indie rock, progressive-ish rock, black metal and post-hardcore, this CD is great if you just read the ingredients. If you analyze how they’re put together, you see that this is not only unrewarding to a metalhead, but artistically worthless. It has no direction. It’s not composed like metal, where radically different riffs fit together to make a dynamic story, but like rock, where radically different riffs provide distraction from the emptiness. The entire idea of even mixing all these influences and coming up with something good is a complete write-off. That’s like taking all the ingredients in your refrigerator and combining them, claiming you’ve made “super-food.”

The nu-metal influence comes from the necessary use of binary dynamics when making such carnival music. These riffs are so diverse with no relation to each other except key that the only thing that can be done is to sort them into two categories, “hard” and “soft,” and play those off each other. The result is a lot of wandering riff, then screaming and blasting, and then more proggy stuff to lighten the mood. It’s more of a mix tape than a CD.

It’s amazing how a lack of common sense can convert such potential into garbage. These guys are accomplished musicians and they have some good ideas. But like burying intelligent statements in a rant about eating feces, the indie-metal aggregate approach isn’t working for them or any alert listeners of this music.

1 Comment

The Chasm “Procreation of the Inner Temple” re-released

VIC RECORDS has signed a license deal with the longest running and most respected Death Metal act from Mexico THE CHASM and LUXINFRAMUNDIS PRODUCTIONS for the European releases of the reissue of their legendary Procreation of the Inner Temple debut album from 1994.

The CD will also include their complete 1993 demo, rare pics and extensive liner notes from Olivier ‘Zoltar’ Badin. In addition, VIC RECORDS will release a new exclusive repressing on digipak of their very well received and most recent album Farseeing the Paranormal Abysm, which was originally released on a limited edition by LUXINFRAMUNDIS PRODUCTIONS in 2009 and mainly available in North America and sold out for close to 2 years.

VIC RECORDS will also release the second album of Mexico’s most underrated occult killer act SHUB NIGGURATH! Their second full length album A Deadly Call from the Stars comes also as an exclusive limited edition digipak. Previously released on THE CHASM’s front man Daniel Corchado’s own label Lux Inframundis Productions in 2011, it was limited to 500 copies, and sold out in 5 months.

The cooperation between LUXINFRAMUNDIS PRODUCTIONS and VIC RECORDS will also lead to the release of the second solo album by THE CHASM’s vocalist / guitar player / composer Daniel Corchado: MAGNUM ITINER INETRIUS, this new album will be conformed of 12 compositions of epic 60+ minutes of atmospheric, experimental yet dark and melodic instrumental metal!

Finally some words from THE CHASM founder and front man Daniel Corchado (ex-CENOTAPH (Mex) and ex-INCANTATION):

“I’m proud to announce and confirm the license/cooperation deal we have signed with long time The Chasm believer Roel and his label Vic Records (responsible for releasing early classics by bands such as Hammerfall, Katatonia, Crystal Age, October Tide…) for the new limited pressings of Farseeing the Paranormal Abysm, Procreation of the inner temple and Shub Niggurath’s A Deadly call from the Stars, this new venture was mostly planned and materialized with the European supporters in mind, based in the Netherlands, with the network and distribution VIC posses, this releases will available in a more practical and easy way for those believers looking to add this albums to their collections. In related news, the new Magnum Itiner Interius album will be released in Europe by Vic Records as well, Luxinframundis will be in charge of the American edition of this epic instrumental caravan.

Chicago, May 2012.”

For more information and ordering, contact VIC RECORDS.

No Comments

Mortem (Peru) / Perversion (US) tour

Peruvian ripping occult death metal Mortem is teaming up with US band Perversion (from bullet-riddled Detroit) for a short tour of the east coast. Prepare your altars!

  • August 3rd – Silver Spring, MD @ Caracol Bar – 609 Sligo Ave – Silver Spring, MD 20910
    w/ Perversion (Detroit, MI), Ashencult (Philadelphia, PA) & Inverted Trifixion (Gaithersburg, MD) – Just outside of DC!
  • August 4rd – Brooklyn, NY @ TBA w/ Perversion (more info coming up this week)
  • August 5th – Chicago, IL @ TBA w/ Perversion (more info coming up later this week)

1 Comment

Deceased – Luck of the Corpse

Horror Pain Gore Death Productions has reissued the classic debut album from Deceased “Luck Of The Corpse” on CD format. This version includes restored artwork, remastered audio as well as rare bonus tracks. Below is the official description:

True Death Metal from the grave… raw, ugly and proper! Haunting corpses with shrieks of underrated sickness, Luck Of The Corpse is a prime example of just how Death Metal the 80’s could get. Despite it’s release in 1991 as the first band signed to Relapse Records, Deceased’s debut album reanimates tracks primarily written & demoed throughout ’85-’89 and easily stands ground with Possessed, Necrovore, early Death, and demo-era Morbid Angel. This is the album that forged Deceased as one of America’s pioneering, legendary underground bands… a classic debut that still holds up 20+ years later! Features restored artwork taken from the film Black Sabbath, remastered audio and includes the unreleased 1990 Raw Demo plus a never before heard version of Feasting On Skulls recorded in 1998. Up The Tombstones!!!!!!

For wholesale information please email wholesale@horrorpaingoredeath.tk

You can order your copy for only $10 including shipping from Horror Pain Gore Productions.

No Comments

Interview: Thorous (Deteriorate)

Deteriorate (Pennsylvania, USA) got their start as a band solidly and unmistakenly death metal of the violent American variety. Their debut Rotting in Hell, one of the premier domestic outputs of the infamous JL America label, broke little ground, but nonetheless manages to get spins from old-timers who have long appreciated its compact composition and caustic delivery. Not long after this sleeper semi-classic the band abandoned their death metal pursuits in favor of a faster, more melodic and hybridized style in line with the rising popularity of the European black metal of the day.

Interview from Heidenlarm e-zine #1.

Deteriorate Rotting in Hell came out near the end of the death metal boom, right before black metal became predominant in the eyes of many listeners. What was it like at that time to contemplate the styles in which you could compose?

Personally I was seriously into black metal since the begining…in fact if you noticed the change in styles between “Rotting in Hell” and “Gather the nebbish/The Senectuous Entrance” you can see my influences shining through out the whole cd; I wrote nearly half of the music on “Gather/Senectuous” around 1994…I was so saturated with old black/death metal like Venom, Bathory, Eestruction, Voivod, Slayer, Sodom, Kreator that it just flowed naturally in any riffs I would be writing…I mean I saw Kreator’s first US tour[I believe] at City Gardens in Trenton NJ with Voivod I think it was “Pleasure to Kill/Killing Technology” tour – this fucking show was so fucking brutal, I was blown the fuck away, it still to this day had to have been the most influential moment in my life, as I watched them play flawlessly I said to myself that’s what I want to do and I’m going to do whatever it takes to get there…so I played everyday for years until I was 17 formed my first band it was called “randomdraw” a hardcore/metal band we sounded like cromags vs rage against the machine…anyway after a few years of other bands and stuff I joined Deteriorate which is a long story in itself!…so my goal with them was to take it to the next level get so into the music and just fucking go apeshit and I think it all worked out perfectly…..

It seems to me that death metal has always had two opposing sides, one of which emphasizes fast tremolo picking and relatively few emphatic pauses, while the other side uses muffled strumming and a morse code of pausing and pounding to spell out its riffs. What made you gravitate toward the faster metal side?

When I started playing guitar in ’82 I thought that metal had a missing element that hardcore bands seemed to emphasize on “speed”. So I started playing as fast as I could thinking that it would make me more talented as a player…so I would write these riffs and put them together with my younger brother Justin and we would play these blazing fast songs full of ‘squeals’ and violent solos like Slayer or Cryptic Slaughter…but after some time speed wasn’t good enough so I added into my style harmony&melody…I wanted something different say warmer tones, so I got into Malmsteen alot and Voivod, Black Sabbath, Ozzy, Motley Crue, Iron Maiden, Celtic Frost ‘morbid tales'[my favorite guitar sound ever], Exodus, Violence, Metallica, Megadeth, Bathory, Anvil Bitch, Dominance, Faith or Fear, Flotsam and Jetsam, Death & tons more…I started going to 2 to 3 shows a week it was so intense there were lines down the street; as I saw these bands perform in the early mid 80’s I was blown away it was so intense my world had become near perfect! At the same time I was extremely jealous, I thought to myself why can’t I do that? There was one reason why —drummers—there is such a shortage of quality drummers that could do blaast beats or grind or doublebass let alone afford a decent kit…I was so into technical metal that it made it even harder to find someone.

There were fewer people involved with death and black metal in that time, unlike the current scenario. What do you think are the differences in a musician’s experience between the two?

Nowadays its more open to all; the styles combined, there are a thousand times more muscicians that are dying to play…equipment is far more affordable and more directed towards metal hard rock players…the nu-metal styles are bringing more people to wards heavier music especially women! I always thought that if you could get women into your band then men would follow hence bringing your numbers at the door up at the club you’re playing…

What to you makes a series of chords and rhythms a “riff”?

I’m always looking for something different or catchy or “hook” riffs…riffs that make you say “hell yeah that rips” and your hair stands up on your whole body…or like in the 80s the introduction of the word “mosh”or “not” where anthrax introduced to me the true pit styles I actually went nuts at every show we all our own style of moshing or dancing,or the dive kings, we tried every kind of dive you could think of it was a contest to us to see how long you could stay on stage or how long you could wave ride…it was the best years of my life it was so fresh new different and the normal people didn’t even notice any of these bands we were such a minority back then, I was always saying in school that Metallica will be the biggest band ever and 10 years later I was damn near right…I was the only kid in my juniore high with an earring and a denim jacket with death metal patches all over it…

Fo you compose by riff assembly, or is there a pattern into which riffs fit first?

Actually I have an odd style of writing I usually number the riffs along with names for each part and write it all down,so if I forget I have notes…in Deteriorate I played bass but I wrote the riffs on my 7string and brought my guitar to practice where I showed them the riffs…my newer bands I play guitar and sing on almost everything…I write all the music and vocals and let my drummer mike trush write the drum parts…I usually write all the music in my head at work and then go home and play my ass off…

Many of your songs on Rotting in Hell preserved a casual but intense atmosphere of using little introduction and tearing into the material on hand immediately. Was this a reaction to the riff-salad-heavy metal songs of the time, which often took half of the song just to get cooking?

Actually I didn’t play anything on “Rotting,” although I was in the band months before the recording sessions, I was asked to play on “Rotting” but it didn’t feel right playing songs on a disc that I had no part in writing so I declined…if you asked me about “Gather/Senectuous” I would have to say they were flowing and melodic…
lyrically, the band also played at least two sides, having some “gore” topics and a fair number that could have been interpreted as more gothic, romantic or moribund.

What inspired the lyric writing on this album?

As far as “Gather the Nebbish,” I sang 3 songs and wrote a major part of the music, my lyrics were directed towards my hatred towards a society that hates people like me…I would first get into a raging pissed off mood then write the music then the lyrics would just kind of “bleed” to me,you know what I mean?..I went in the studio and basically freaked out in the vocal booth screaming my heart out jumping around like a fucking lunatic,..in fact 2 of the songs I sang on “Gather” came about on the spot, I did the vocals on one take not even rehearsing them once: Evaporated Battleground/Ode to a Mortal” my good friend Trevor Schaible donated those 2 sets of lyrics and I took them in the studio and ad libbed the songs it just so happened they came out pretty good in my opinion total chaos!!

After Rotting in Hell, Deteriorate took a break. What happened during this time?

We went through some member changes and more of my writing came into effect, we really spent a lot of time rehearsing doing shows and getting more professional about ourselves and we said to ourselves what can we do to make this band better and more brutal and so we did just that…

After this break you released, The Senectuous Entrance, which in my view is two albums put together — one that could be described as Emperor-style gothic black metal, and another that was more heavy metal/punkish. What brought about this dichotomy?

I basically came into the band with alot of the ideas already to go, I brought to the band my musical background and it took over I guess…I never really heard any of the newer black/death metal bands, which bothered me when people said we are a rip of of Norweigan bands, its totally not the truth, I was doing this type of music inthe early 80s I was playing the 3rds minor this dissonant that you name it ..if you notice “Rotting” has none of the harmonies and minor chords, I brought that to the band and we took off with it, I was in bands prior to that which had similiar traits…

Your songs convey as much energy as any other band out there. How do you do it?

I tend to think to myself if I was in the crowd or a listener what would I want to hear and I do it…energy is the first priority nowadays in my band “Treading on Divine” I do simpler arrangements but it works for me, there is more flowing riffs and catchy hooks…

The band has been around since 1991. How do you think metal, or death metal, has changed over the course of that time?

All the genres have improved with the times…certain bands keep their styles others evolve into something different I think both scenarios work,it gives fans an oppurtunity to hear something new therefore creating another rip in the timeline for a new genre..

How has Deteriorate as a band integrated those changes into its music?

Currently Deteriorate is rehearsing for a new release in the future but Mike Trush and myself are quite busy so it takes some time to get it together…other members are in Krypton or not doing music at all…

Your songs are convoluted in the logic that produces continuity between their riffs, enough that they must be heard through once fully before being interpreted. How do you think the awareness of this process in the listener affects how you compose?

It gives me a flowing feel to it, I can sit and bob my head continuosly from start to finish, I can only assume that our fans or listeners do the same thing…it has that warm feeling about it…the 5 unreleased songs have a brutal chaotic war type sound to it, but we still incorporated the Deteriorate flow and sound to it…

When you are composing a song and have two directions in which it can go, how do you select which one should prevail?

It was always a band vote or else we would just open jam and if it went in some new direction that sounded cool we would work with it…it’s truly important to find muscicians that you can openly do unplanned jams ,its usually where you find a truly nwew and original riff,where as when you are at home there is no drums or band influence there to strengthen the song or give you a nod or an added riff between another riff….

You seem to be a non-political band, as far as lyrics are concerned. Do you have any political or social change views that you keep to yourself, or are you detached from the entire process of politics and ideology?

Personally I try to incorporate politics or truth in my lyrics, these topics enrage me making my songs come out even more chaotic, I try to let the lyrics influence my choice of riffs after the song is written of course, the lyrics might change a part into something different or brutal…

The USA may be about to wage holy war on Iraq and the Middle East. Is this a metal topic to discuss?

Yes and no…I feel it’s all a front to keep americans intrested in the politics of this country…the president has to do something to keep his people supporting him…with all the things like snipers, Iraq, WTC and racism, he can shift the peoples attention away from starting a war with Iraq, he made everybody shift their attention from Iraq to the snyper atacks, getting everyone pissed off, so now the people are hungry for some desruction somewhere other than here, and to make it work even better the one snipers last name was Muhammad…it worked, he’s got the ok to wage a war on Iraq, I’m not surprised and I do support this war…these people need a leader that has enough brains not fuck with the most powerful country in the world, us!!!

Do you think that music conveys values based upon what positive beliefs are affirmed in the music, even in simply its sound which resembles facets of the outside world?

It does…music has been the center of attention since the beginning of its creation…it can take you out of reality or define reality and it seems that both work very well…I mean people take a cd put it in then something happens, almost chemically in their brain and it feels good,others feel bad or angry or something, its amazing how this works…I always thought that you could totally control or program people of all ages through certain notes played in precise actions in the brain, when I hear certain notes a feel it all over my body its really quite remarkable [I hope this made some sense to you, I think I understand what I just said hahaha]

Is it possible to be a musician without sharing some of your views through music?

Definitely… I’m really into Burzum, Varg does an excellent job at creating a soundscape, it’s total headphone music, which is one of my favorite ways of listening, Varg uses his feelings and beliefs through beautiful music, but yet you can still understand his anger and pains…Mortiis does similar work but his feelings tend to be fantasy like or dungeons and dragons theme music, both are excellent…

You’re now working on new material with a band called Treading on Divine. This title seems to have more metaphysical implications than the gore-metal-ish idea of Deteriorate. What is different about the music and outlook of Treading on Divine as compared to Deterioriate?

“Treading on Divine” is a project that I started around 98 right around the breakup of Deteriorate myself and joe gorski were fed up with the scene in Philly so we moved to south florida and started playing…he was on drums and I played and sang..eventually we grabbed my brother [who is the best guitarist I’ve ever seen] and Conrad Eddings on bass…we had 3 songs and so it was born…down the road we fell into the party scene down there 3 of us worked in nightclubs so if we weren’t working we were partying thus the band suffered…I had also another band with the samme members except Chris Dino plyed drums that was called ‘twitch’ it was really good stuff….so eventually we after 2 years parted ways I moved back north and started the band with other people, Thorous-lead guitar, Mike Trush-drums, Chris Berwind-bass and Alex Davis-guitar….we rehearsed about a year and 2 of the members didn’t progress so I let them go, now it’s myself, Trush and filling in on bass Jason Hildebrandt from Funeral Mask, Cemetary Earth, Hazarax…we’re ready to record a EP..full length soon the title is “thy only god”..the difference between Deteriorate and treading is I write all the music and arrangements, they’re more flowing and basic riffs…it has black, grind,melody,harmonies,thrash,death styles…in Deteriorate the riffs were all voted on whether I liked it or not so alot of good riffs got trashed, since I saved these riffs and used them now,so some of these songs are quite old…we do one song called “Viral Gore” which is from 1988; some are from 89, these are more thrashy,…the “Treading” songs have “hooks” that make you say hell yeah! As far as the lyrics “Treading on Divine” is based upon my hatred towards authority, I don’t like being told what to do, ever! Not by anyone including my girlfriends….this is the topic I have been griping about forever…i get political on some sogs others are about my nonreligon attitude…being my own god and all that…

What bands are you listening to now?

Voivod-Deathrow-DBC-Burzum-Devil Doll-Elend-Marilyn Manson-Ozzy/Sabbath-Golden Dawn-Entombed-Dismember-Fantomas-Mr. Bungle-Thorns-Abruptum-Mayhem-Behemoth-Venom-Destruction-Kreator-Sodom -Vond-Ulver-old W.A.S.P.-Metallica-Megadeth-Slayer-Darkthrone-Mercyful Fate-Celtic Frost-Belphegor-Tartaros-Tomahawk-Jimmy Rodgers-Sabbat-Immolation-Exodus-Emperor-Autopsy-Laibach-Bloodstorm-Se rvants of Hate-Funeral Mask-LiveSufferDie-Ministry-Christian Death-Violence-Anthrax-Forbidden-Abigor… I could go on forever!

It appears the downturn in the US and world economies has affected metal. Are you able to find a label at this point in time? Are you going to self-release this upcoming album?

Actually Philadelphia has so many labels here…I am talking with a few labels none that I want to name just yet but I have made mistakes with labels in the past and I don’t want to lose money and touring again. When I first joined Deteriorate we had tons of touring offers, some with morbidangel for 40 dates but our drummer had a custody battle going on so he couldn’t do the tours, eventually that was why we replaced him with Darkwoods, Rich was a great drummer though…

How do you think the internet has changed music, from your first album in 1993 to your second in 1996, and now to the current time?

The internet is excellent for underground bands like us to get exposure…it’s amazing how much stuff is out there…I can always find something interesting on the web….

Do you think most metallers have a common general direction of their ideology, or is there no unity in thought in the scene?

I honestly think everybody is different anymore, I always hear different opinions about every topic…,sure theres unity but not really where i’m at…i live in a city that has everybody thinking differently I don’t know why…theres always bands that are jealous of others or pissed offf that they’re opening for a band that they think sucks,i’ve been dealing with this shit since 89…we used to get every tour package that came through philly no matter who was headlining the tour we always got the top slot on the bill…this made all the local bands hate us instead of supporting us which would come back to them in the end…i think nowadays its different theres more unity in the scene…back in the 90s we could’ve all stuck together and the philly scene would’ve been the next tampa bay thing,instead when the cell block closed the bands dissapated,noone astuck to gether and bands broke up, its a shame because we really had some good bands in our scene,to tell you the truth most of those bands are like invisible because I haven’t seen many of those muscians again….

After the rise of nu-metal and bands like Slipknot, does metal any longer have the “coming in from the outfield” strangeness and dramatic impact that it once had?

I feel that this is the metal years all over again, history is repeating itself but in a grander way…a majority of people today appreciate metal and hard rock, its not that uncommon anymore,you hear metal on the radio everyday…we have such a wide variety of bands to chose from along with a generation of people that grew up om metal ranging from 10 to 40 years old….most like something heavy if not ozzy/sabath then metallica or godsmack or something…to me this is positive for the scene…
why metal? it’s not an easy artform, there’s no money and most people seem to hate it or disparage it. why do you keep going? (this is not a criticism, hopefully obviously, since i’m still in this after as many years too!)

I can’t stop! I love it the heavier it is the better….then again everybody will probably hate me for this but I like Marilyn Manson alot…his music is super creative, its full of hate, evil, and other postive shit that just makes him an icon for heavy mainstream music he’s actually helping the world get into heavy music which opens the doors for bands like mine,he has the flow we were talking about earlier, I am open minded to some degree….I like stuff from almost every genre doesn’t mean its good for everybody else, but it’s good to me and I don’t care what anybody thinks….who cares what I listen to anyway you know? To each his own….theres a litttle bit of everyting in bands today it means that awider range of audiences will buy into heavier music…[i hope]…

If you could tour with two or three bands from anywhere and anytime in metal, who would it be?

Voivod!!!!!!!Slayer!!!Morbid Angel!!!

Where do you think metal will go next?

Its going to get even bigger, I know I want more of it and I’m not going anywhere but more angrier then before…I have more anger in me than ever before and I need bands to fuel my fire!!!

Jazz, ambient, industrial, and punk: all of them exist as separate genres, niches if you will, from the mainstream as does metal. But somehow jazz and ambient get more respect and never quite fully are able to integrate with the mainstream of radio music. Do you think this is due to increased technicality, radically unpopular song structures, ability of audience to appreciate complexity, or other factors? Do you think this same distancing from mainstream radio music could help metal?

Maybe the jazz thing is of the other half of society that doesn’t listen to rock or metal or mainstream music…it could be an older generation or possibly the trained muscicians of the world are more appreciated…I know I’ve never had a lesson in my life but it still kept me busy and somewhat talented…

It used to be there were tons of zines, and people mailing stickers and dubbed cassettes all over the world. Metalheads today trade web links and mp3s, and there are now thousands of websites each offering small fragments of information. Where is this weak(er), and what’s next after this? Do you think metal will consolidate its information?

it can only get better,the more publicity for my style of music the better…

Do you believe humanity is about to blow itself into vapor?

Not really its pretty much the way its always been to me, bullshit, politicians, religon it’s all always there its just a matter of what you buy into…

What has changed about the songwriting process for Treading on Divine that is separate from how Deteriorate worked in both incarnations?

Actually not much maybe different tempos or not so much blast and grind beats…I have been working on more catchier riffs that have a more grooving sound to them its still in the black/death metal vein…

Who’s in the band now?

Thorous[guitar/vox] Mike Trush[drums/vox/bass]

Are you going to repress Rotting in Hell and The Senectuous Entrance?

Actually we have the original recording of “Rotting in Hell” which was recorded at an entirely different rcording studio…the vox are even more brutal..we are going to release it soon with the original cover that was deemed to satanic for our onr guitar player….

Where do you hope to be in ten years?

hopefully touring the world and playing brutal music forever!!!!!!!

What do you do outside of metal, as individuals, and who is in the band?

I have my historic renovations business…I do old world/european style stonework and replications. I’m planning to do a house in Spain this spring, its my other passion in life!!

Any final additions?

Its cool to know that there’s people out there still into Deteriorate and the old school metal bands…I appreciate any people who would like a copy of unreleased material and videos…send me tapes and postage to: thorous—-170 smithtown rd. pipersville,PA 18947 Keep the metal world alive! Don’t give up playing your instruments,follow your dreams, I had dreams when I started playingt and so many came true, if I can do it anyone can do it! Keep trying your best,sing your heart out! Play all day and night! Make a difference, speak your mind! Don’t take any shit from anyone! Don’t let anyone push you around, you’re only as powerful as you believe you are! Keep metal alive! Kick some ass! – And support the local bands in your area, without people like you local bands will fade away, go to as many shows as you can, and buy as much merchandise as you can, it will come back to you in some way! Thanks for giving me the chance to vent SRP! – thorous…treading on divine….

The natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society. All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consideration in comparison to this. No fancied equality, no agrarian regulations in their utmost extent, could remove the pressure of it even for a single century. And it appears, therefore, to be decisive against the possible existence of a society, all the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and families.

Consequently, if the premises are just, the argument is conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind.

– Thomas Malthus, Population: The First Essay (1798)

No Comments
Classic reviews:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z