AEM073 Liturgy

If you are a seri­ous, dis­ci­plined lis­tener of music, black metal might be an as-of-yet unwrit­ten entry in your ency­clo­pe­dic grasp of music and its oft noto­ri­ous sub gen­res. You might view it as elu­sive or even con­tra­dic­tory. Per­haps you find it overly seri­ous, dark, depress­ing, maybe even unin­ten­tion­ally funny and ridicu­lous. But there it is, this entry, unfin­ished and per­haps unfairly ignored. Black metal traces its ori­gin to thrash metal acts like Venom and Bathory but its real his­tory begins in the early 90s in Nor­way where bands like May­hem, Immor­tal, Emperor, and Dark­throne per­fected a raw, low fidelity sound defined by tre­bly gui­tars, con­tin­u­ous pound­ing dou­ble kick drums, tor­tured vocals, and pagan, anti-Christian lyri­cal con­tent. It was a scene that was linked to mur­ders (most notably the mur­der of Mayhem’s Øystein “Eurony­mous” Aarseth at the hands of Varg Vikernes, who still records under the moniker Burzum), the arson of dozens of his­toric Stave churches through­out Nor­way (some at the hands of Varg Vikernes him­self), and sui­cide (most notably by Mayhem’s vocal­ist Per “Dead” Ohlin). Black metal’s “sec­ond wave” was met with a satanic panic of press in Nor­way and all over the globe. Its corpse-painted per­form­ers were seen less as mem­bers of a musi­cal sub genre and more as will­ful par­tic­i­pants in out and out Satanism and far-right pol­i­tics, a reac­tionary cat­e­go­riza­tion that still per­me­ates accounts of black metal’s his­tory and cur­rent iter­a­tions, most notably in Michael Moyinhan’s Lords of Chaos, a book which has been crit­i­cized for fail­ing to dis­pel this cat­e­go­riza­tion and even tac­itly endors­ing this (mis)understanding of the music. Varg Virkenes denied accu­sa­tions of Satanism and insisted this (or maybe his) music was some­thing more prim­i­tivist, a-Christian, and neo-pagan. Yet he aligned him­self with tox­i­cally xeno­pho­bic polit­i­cal view­points, and although he (and the incred­i­bly nascent national social­ist black metal move­ment) oper­ate within an extreme minor­ity of an already obscure genre, the asso­ci­a­tions stick. Darkthrone’s Fen­riz dis­missed any polit­i­cal asso­ci­a­tions what­so­ever, and his jovial, light-hearted demeanor belies Varg’s self-seriousness and the genre’s stereo­typ­i­cally dis­mal atti­tude. What­ever “sec­ond wave” black metal was, it was the ulti­mate enact­ment of what extreme music always mas­quer­aded as and never quite was, it was excess and vio­lence and con­fu­sion. Yet, the­o­log­i­cal and seman­tic argu­ments regard­ing “Satanism” aside, it was absolutely mis­an­thropic, anti-Christian, and deeply nihilistic.

Amer­i­can black metal, if any­thing, fur­ther inter­nal­ized these themes. Though the Norse orig­i­na­tors were bands who weren’t shy of the things bands do—who were per­haps straight­for­wardly debauch­er­ous indi­vid­u­als behind all their cryp­tic pseu­do­nyms, painted faces, and a darker-than-thou ethos—their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts had become one man “hordes,” known only by their pseu­do­nyms. Leviathan’s Wrest and Xasthur’s Malefic are par­tic­u­larly salient exam­ples (not to men­tion asso­ci­ated acts Weak­ling or Lurker of Chal­ice), seem­ing ascetics who shun live per­for­mance, inter­view requests, and any­thing beyond a sus­tain­able base­line of exis­tence, musi­cians who deeply embody black metal’s extreme emo­tional neg­a­tiv­ity. And even among the more pub­lic, performance-based bands—from Washington’s eco-pagan Wolves in the Throne Room to Texas’s eso­teric, some­what tra­di­tion­al­ist Absu—the com­mit­ment to nihilism and “dark­ness” remains. And then there is New York’s Liturgy. Per­haps such a his­tor­i­cal intro­duc­tion is unnec­es­sary, but if it seems over-indulgent let me clar­ify. This musi­cal lin­eage, at least its Euro­pean strain, is some­thing Liturgy, a solo project cum four-piece from Brook­lyn, pays par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to. I think, most of all, it is some­thing they pay par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to because they seek to destroy it, to cre­ate some­thing new with the pieces, to attempt a musi­cal evo­lu­tion. Or, at least, another evo­lu­tion­ary strain.

On Decem­ber 19th of last year, Liturgy’s founder and prin­ci­ple mem­ber Hunter Hunt-Hendrix spoke at a sym­po­sium of black metal the­ory in Brook­lyn enti­tled “Hideous Gno­sis”, his lec­ture on “Tran­scen­den­tal Black Metal” appears in a recently pub­lished book con­tain­ing the essays pre­sented at the sym­po­sium. In a dark bar in Brook­lyn Hunter urged for a black metal of “affir­ma­tion” over “nihilism,” “hyper­tro­phy” over “atro­phy,” and “courage” over “deprav­ity”. In a sense, he asked black metal to be black metal and also its oppo­site. As he tells me, this new iter­a­tion of black metal “should chan­nel and renew the spirit of lib­er­a­tion, and it should con­sume every­thing that’s out there and reter­ri­to­ri­al­ize it on the basis of a vision of apoc­a­lyp­tic ecstasy”. There is an inher­ent open­ness to this approach, and per­haps not a more fit­ting name than Liturgy—this is black metal to be played pub­li­cally in sun­light, in joy­ous almost spir­i­tual ecstasy. It is this in the face of black metal’s inher­ent dark void, per­haps even embrac­ing it, stand­ing above and look­ing inside.

It might all sound entirely con­vo­luted but I swear this imagery makes sense as soon as you hear the music. At any moment Liturgy’s pieces sound like they are going to self destruct, to be sucked back down as sev­ered arms and gui­tar strings and drum sticks into the eter­nal void its pre­de­ces­sors lauded. But before we get there we have Side A, a sub­dued unti­tled track (one of many inter­est­ing near-ambient pieces pep­pered through­out the album) that starts off Liturgy’s debut as a full fledged band, Reni­hi­la­tion, and serves as a pre­lude to its sec­ond track, Side B’s “Pagan Dawn”. Over its brief two minute span a vocal incan­ta­tion slowly builds on itself and antic­i­pates a com­ing storm. This storm is “Pagan Dawn”, with Greg Fox’s fran­tic drum­ming speed­ing up and slow­ing down (a mas­ter­ful blend of tech­ni­cal abil­ity that avoids sound­ing robotic or inau­then­tic) as the har­monies arc and Hunt-Hendrix’s vocals—still the tra­di­tional black­ened howl—are some­how excited, joy­ous, and yearn­ing. This is not a woe­ful yearn­ing, but a yearn­ing for some momen­tary “yes,” a “yes” through grit­ted, grin­ning teeth. Those har­monic moments build into a brief unac­com­pa­nied pro­gres­sion about a minute and half in, announc­ing the return of Fox’s break­neck tempo-shifting rhythms, what Hunt-Hendrix calls the “burst beat”. It is exactly that, a burst, a propul­sive force, an imper­ma­nent accel­er­a­tion away from black metal’s cold dark inte­rior. Liturgy is very frank in its desire to be musi­cally tran­scen­dent, and cog­nizant as well that this tran­scen­dence is “an imma­nently gen­er­ated mirage of tran­scen­dence, like a hori­zon or an asymp­tote”. They struc­ture their songs to be ever-climbing beasts, fast and loud as hell. In the hands of any other group of musi­cians Side B would be called “Pagan Dusk,” a lament, a com­pla­cency with dark­ness and nihilism, a set pound­ing tempo with depres­sive shrieks and despon­dent riffage that might oth­er­wise drone on for ten min­utes. But Liturgy is not any other black metal band. The lat­ter half of “Pagan Dawn” almost recalls this monot­ony as it breaks down into a plod­ding, method­i­cal mid-tempo march, as though walk­ing with black metal of old for a lit­tle while, pla­cat­ing it, chal­leng­ing it. And then Greg Fox launches into yet another ever quick­en­ing burst beat, Bernard Gann and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix build a tow­er­ing har­mony on gui­tars under­writ­ten by bassist Tyler Dusen­bury. It is elat­ing and rich and it resolves and retreats as sud­denly as it began, hav­ing only skimmed the horizon.

A few years ago my obses­sion with black metal began. I was in my dorm room in the mid­dle of the night, forc­ing myself through Ulver’s sem­i­nal Nat­tens Madri­gal. “Hynme VI: Wolf and Pas­sion” kicked in, and its soar­ing open­ing was a revelation—it was sin­cere and affir­ma­tive and fleet­ing, and it died even­tu­ally into dia­met­ric, omi­nous verse. But that open­ing moment was a crys­tal­liza­tion of the idea that extreme metal, and even black metal, is only extreme in its cacoph­ony, and to some extent its pos­tured con­jur­ing of “dark­ness,” some­times a jejune and silly “dark­ness” at that. It was a real­iza­tion that there could be emo­tional nuance in the most extreme metal, that it was seri­ous, that this was a joy­ful seri­ous­ness, that it was art. Liturgy is a re-affirmation of this notion. And maybe, read­ing all this, it still seems ridicu­lous to you. A sym­po­sium on black metal “the­ory”? A band with a dense con­cep­tual under­pin­ning? But again, I am address­ing you: the seri­ous, dis­ci­plined lis­tener of music. And I’d haz­ard to say that you lis­ten to music because its expres­sion of the inef­fa­ble is deeply res­o­nant on a wide spec­trum of emo­tional, intel­lec­tual, and (maybe) spir­i­tual lev­els. It is a medium to trans­mit what mere words or mere images can­not alone express. Black metal has long broad­cast a very par­tic­u­lar expres­sion: deep sor­row and depres­sion, an intel­lec­tual long­ing for a pagan pre-history (and often the “dark­ness” or “evil” that is inten­tion­ally con­jured is con­jured to show us that these emo­tions and con­cepts are only con­no­ta­tive in such ways in the wake of Judeo-Christian tra­di­tion). If any­thing, the emo­tions and this idea of “dark­ness,” silly or not, are things we typ­i­cally try to tuck away and hide, and so it is in a sense a genre that is hid­den and tucked away. What is excit­ing is to see a band attempt to forcibly remove a genre from its cave and expose it mer­ci­lessly to the light, a band who takes its lin­eage seri­ously and decides to actively do some­thing with it, some­thing truly exper­i­men­tal, Amer­i­can, and ulti­mately uplift­ing. Liturgy is tak­ing the sound of black metal’s past and ask­ing it to express some­thing unique and new while still remain­ing sec­u­lar, musi­cally destruc­tive, and chaotic. It’s alchemy, really, an almost con­tra­dic­tory dark positivity.

The fol­low­ing appeared recently in a New York Times arti­cle about the “Hideous Gno­sis” symposium:

Dur­ing a Q. and A. period Mr. Hunt-Hendrix was chal­lenged by Scott Wil­son, a pro­fes­sor from Lan­caster Uni­ver­sity, […] Mr. Wil­son won­dered, skep­ti­cally, if tran­scen­den­tal­ist black metal just boiled down to “all you need is love.”

“I’m not so inter­ested in defend­ing any­thing I say,” Mr. Hunt-Hendrix replied. “I only like to be judged on whether it’s inter­est­ing or not.”

So what­ever your entry on black metal looks like now, it ought to include at least a sen­tence on Liturgy, whether you see them as standard-bearers or vision­ar­ies, noodling hip­sters or seri­ous musi­cians. All they ask of you is what you ought always to be giv­ing as a seri­ous listener—your interest.

Liturgy’s full length album Reni­hi­la­tion is avail­able here from 20 buck spin. An inter­view with guitarist/vocalist Hunter Hunt-Hendrix appears after the jump.

John Ganiard

Read the Ampeater exclu­sive inter­view after the jump!

Side B — Pagan Dawn Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side A — Untitled Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]

Inter­view:

Liturgy started as your own per­sonal project. Where you at all aware of the dis­parate incar­na­tions of U.S. Black Metal, which are alike, if at all, in that they are one man, multi-instrumentalist “hordes” (I’m think­ing of Xas­thur, Leviathan, Wrath of the Weak) I think you’ve men­tioned in some inter­views that you were more inter­ested in sort of the second-wave of black metal (May­hem, Immor­tal, Ulver, etc), what was it that attracted you to these bands? As well, where did your musi­cal inter­est lie out­side of black metal, or per­haps more specif­i­cally, why was it this sort of music you grav­i­tated towards when Liturgy first began?

I’ve never lis­tened to much USBM, with the excep­tion of a few records by Xas­thur or Judas Iscar­iot. Cer­tainly the sec­ond wave in Scan­di­navia was the black metal I first got into (Dark­throne, Ild­jarn, early Emperor), though grad­u­ally my inter­est veered towards con­ti­nen­tal Europe — France and Poland par­tic­u­larly, I think. Some of my favorites: Grav­e­land, Vlad Tepes, Satanic War­mas­ter, Muti­ila­tion, Blut Aus Nord, War­loghe, Haemoth. Around the same time I was also get­ting way into post-romantic clas­si­cal music, which is in a way sim­i­larly cryp­tic and eso­teric because no one cares about it or respects it: Scri­abin, Bruck­ner, Nielsen, Sibelius. I think I began to kind of fuse the two tra­di­tions in my mind — both because there really are cer­tain con­crete musi­cal sim­i­lar­i­ties, but also because there is a sim­i­lar nos­tal­gic, grandiose, eso­teric vibe. Sibelius is the crossover in a way. He was Nor­we­gian, first of all, and his musi­cal style was totally reac­tionary and anti­mod­ern. Even though he was aware of Schoen­berg and Bar­tok etc. he stuck to his Roman­tic vibe almost des­per­ately. Some­how to me Grav­e­land and Sibelius have a sim­i­lar aura. But I was also get­ting into euro-avant-garde stuff, par­tic­u­larly Xenakis, Ligeti, Grisey, Stock­hausen, etc. etc. And for that mat­ter, more than any­thing else, I was study­ing con­ti­nen­tal phi­los­o­phy: Deleuze, Badiou, Hei­deg­ger, Niet­zsche, Schopen­haur. I was in school for phi­los­o­phy at the time that I was devel­op­ing Liturgy, and that was actu­ally my main con­cern. Any­way all of this seemed so far­away and mag­i­cal, and to me black metal, post-romanticism, avant-garde con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music and con­ti­nen­tal phi­los­o­phy seemed deeply con­nected — which maybe in real­ity is isn’t, at least not to the degree that it is in my imag­i­na­tion. I dunno, it’s hard to explain. The music on this side of the Atlantic that I was most down with was minimalism/postminimalism, like Reich, La Monte Young, Charle­magne Pales­tine, up to Glenn Branca, and also My Bloody Valen­tine, though I also lis­tened to a ton of hard­core like Orchid, pg. 99, Cov­erge, City of Cater­pil­lar. But that stuff felt very famil­iar. I guess Liturgy was born of a desire to inject all the Euro­pean cul­ture that seemed so auratic and far­away into the tra­di­tion that I felt more a part of, and link it all to under the umbrella of the sig­ni­fier “Tran­scen­den­tal­ism” asso­ci­ated with Emer­son etc.

How did Bernard, Tyler and Greg get involved with Liturgy? Was it always the plan to expand the project into a fully-formed band? Is there a com­mon affin­ity for extreme metal amongst the band, or is there more of an inter­est in the music at hand?

It wasn’t always the plan to turn Liturgy into a full band, or to even really end up with a rock band nec­es­sar­ily. I was really deep into phi­los­o­phy and com­po­si­tion, and I bet five years ago I might have told you that Liturgy would end up being almost the neg­a­tive image of what it is — that it, it would have been post­min­i­mal­ist com­po­si­tion that was inflected by black metal on the one hand and by Niet­zsche and Wag­ner on the other hand. The “burst beat” con­cept was always of cru­cial impor­tance. After Immor­tal Life, I spent a lot of time try­ing to take it to the next level, work­ing on Xenakis-inspired sto­chas­tic gen­er­a­tors to cre­ate chaotic and fluc­tu­at­ing elec­tronic blast beats using Max/MSP. But I was never quite sat­is­fied with tend­ing in that direc­tion. Partly because I love com­pos­ing har­monies and melodies, and har­mony and melody is pre­cisely what avant-garde com­po­si­tion cuts out. I was in a real cri­sis with this and finally decided to try it in rock band for­mat, even if it wouldn’t be so cere­bral or sophis­ti­cated. Greg, Bernard and Tyler all went to school together and knew one another, though I knew Greg and Bernard inde­pen­dently. Bernard shares my inter­est in clas­si­cal music and he joined the band first. We played one show together as a duo, then Greg came along and brought Tyler with him. It all came together super quickly; it was much less work that what I’d been try­ing to do, and I already had a mil­lion songs. I think every­one in the band likes metal more or less, but prob­a­bly that’s what binds us together the least. I don’t think any­one in the band is like actively seek­ing out new metal to lis­ten to. Our inter­ests are all a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, and they’re all elsewhere.

Also, is Greg mim­ic­k­ing the tempo shifts of the drum machine from the solo Liturgy record­ings? The speed­ing up/slowing down of the per­cus­sion through­out the album is incredible.

Yes, exactly! On Immor­tal Life I’d just mod­u­late the tempo with a knob, but that was just a sketch of the vision I had in mind. The Max/MSP exper­i­ments sounded stu­pid, but work­ing with Greg was imme­di­ately very reward­ing. A live drum­mer can’t accel­er­ate and decel­er­ate with the same con­ti­nu­ity that a machine can, but he can cross thresh­olds from one tempo another; it’s pretty sim­ple but very vis­ceral and sat­is­fy­ing. That’s the essence of the burst beat. Basi­cally we worked out three “tem­pos” or pat­terns really, and he switches between the three at key har­monic moments. And there are cer­tain moments with true accel­er­a­tions, though it doesn’t really work in this con­text to be doing that all the time.

What role did Colin Marston [of Kral­lice and Behold… The Arc­to­pus] have in the record­ing process for Reni­hi­la­tion? How did he get involved in the recording ?

He’s recorded many of my friends’ bands, so he was an obvi­ous go-to for this. It was nice work­ing with him, because he knows all about how to make metal sound heavy in a tra­di­tional way, but also is aware of other kinds of aes­thet­ics, so it was the best of both worlds.

Though Kral­lice and Liturgy are son­i­cally dis­tinct, it is inter­est­ing to see a black metal pres­ence in New York—do you see a sort of com­mu­nity devel­op­ing out of this (I don’t want to sug­gest a “scene” since that word now car­ries a lot of con­no­ta­tions) in the same way there has always been art-influence punk and exper­i­men­tal music in the city? Do you have hopes for what “black metal’ can become out­side of Liturgy?

Yes, I’m very inter­ested in the future of black metal in Amer­ica. I think it should be called Tran­scen­den­tal Black Metal and it should chan­nel and renew the spirit of lib­er­a­tion, and it should con­sume every­thing that’s out there and reter­ri­to­ri­al­ize it on the basis of a vision of apoc­a­lyp­tic ecstasy.

I’m fas­ci­nated by the anti-nihilist/transcendental con­tent of the music. Do you have any literary/philosophical inter­ests that have had an influ­ence on com­po­si­tion? (Pagan Dawn, as a title, reminds me of Nietzsche’s Geneal­ogy of Morals and the idea of the reval­u­a­tion of val­ues, for what­ever reason)

Yes, I have a very deep inter­est in Niet­zsche. Good call. The reval­u­a­tion of val­ues, the “no” to nihilism and the Zarathus­tran affir­ma­tion make up the fun­da­men­tal ker­nel from which the music of Liturgy radi­ates. Black metal has always been Niet­zschean — often pretty explic­itly, but usu­ally it is the vul­gar, fas­cist, racist Nazi read­ing of Niet­zsche; I want to take what’s already there and rein­scribe it on the basis of the more sub­tle, con­tem­po­rary and pro­found Deleuz­ian read­ing of Niet­zsche, which comes down ulti­mately to Affir­ma­tion. Actu­ally I like to think of the old school of “Hyber­borean Black Metal” as occu­py­ing the posi­tion of Nihilism in the Geneal­ogy of Morals… Nihilism is a “No” to the priest, but it pro­duces a soul that is even sicker than that of the Chris­t­ian. The Reni­hil­i­a­tion is the final “No”, the “No” to Nihilism which is Zarathus­tran affir­ma­tion. The last con­nec­tion I’ll make to Niet­zsche is: I take very seri­ously the idea of the exper­i­menter who tries on dif­fer­ent cul­tures and value sys­tems like dif­fer­ent cloaks, and then reval­u­ates them and gen­er­ates an indi­vid­ual culture/system-of-values for him­self. That’s why it’s impor­tant to me for Liturgy to be stand­ing in the void, at this cross­roads between the “black metal kvlt”, “hip­ster cul­ture”, “seri­ous music”, etc. which there’s been some con­tro­versy over. To not accept any herd, to not live inside a cul­tural par­a­digm but to smash dif­fer­ent par­a­digms together and forge some­thing out of the frag­ments.… so that’s not an influ­ence on the com­po­si­tion exactly, but on like the total aes­thetic vision so to speak.

There is an oscil­la­tion on Ren­hi­la­tion between the unti­tled tracks and the per­cus­sion dri­ven, more metal-driven (for lack of a bet­ter term) tracks on the album (and the two we’ve cho­sen for the 7-inch). Is there a con­cep­tual moti­va­tion for this? For instance, the first track’s two min­utes of tran­quil dron­ing vocals tran­si­tions effort­lessly into the sen­sory over­load of blast­beat and gui­tars in “Pagan Dawn”. Is there an intel­lec­tual dichotomy being explored here above a purely musi­cal one?

Well, the unti­tled vocal track devel­ops by adding pro­gres­sively higher par­tials from the over­tone series — the over­tone series of course being a major theme in a lot of the music I’ve been talk­ing about. Maybe start­ing the record off in that way was an effort to sit­u­ate the black metal sounds in that schema. But really more than any­thing, though the con­cern was musi­cal. I thought it would sound great, musi­cally com­pelling on the most intu­itive level, to set up pagan dawn with a pro­gres­sively grow­ing vocal drone.

“Pagan Dawn” has a real sense of urgency to it, even in the bliss­ful tremolo har­mony about a minute and a half in. Urgency runs through­out the album but is most preva­lent I think on that track par­tic­u­larly. I’ve thought of that urgency in terms of the yearn­ing for tran­scen­dence and the sort of real­ity that you seem to be only ever approach­ing it as a per­son, as though tran­scen­dence or spir­i­tual ecstasy is an asymp­tote. Do you feel that the music itself con­tains that tran­scen­den­tal power, or that it is a best rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what that tran­scen­dence could be, that it is merely work towards that idea?

Ha, yes the fig­ure of the asymp­tote looms very large in my imag­i­na­tion actu­ally. The tran­scen­dence in ques­tion is a sort of imma­nently gen­er­ated mirage of tran­scen­dence, like a hori­zon or an asymp­tote. The “Almost…”, the eter­nal “not yet”, the goal that hangs in the sky etc. I think we are touch­ing upon some­thing very fun­da­men­tal to human expe­ri­ence, or at least to my per­sonal expe­ri­ence. Of course this is also known as the Void and as the Gap. I think that Alain Badiou has put together a very excit­ing uni­ver­sal­ized phi­los­o­phy of the Void. One has to lis­ten to it and remain faith­ful to it, and even though there’s noth­ing to reach, nev­er­the­less some­thing changes and new things are born. Some­thing like that. So Liturgy is a trans­mis­sion of an expe­ri­ence of fidelity to the void. I mean the vision that gen­er­ates Liturgy is itself a sort of hori­zonal Tran­scen­den­tal Idea; ulti­mately it does not hang together, it doesn’t cohere, but with enough fidelity it takes on a life of its own…

I’m inter­ested in the lo-fi qual­ity, is there a bal­ance you try to reach with record­ing qual­ity (a point when you’d say “this is too lit­tle fidelity”)? Did new ideas come across now that you have a group of musi­cians who per­haps bring dif­fer­ent qual­i­ties to the table? Any­thing you might like to say about these tracks or in gen­eral (espe­cially to a read­er­ship who prob­a­bly lis­tens to some noise but to whom black metal is some for­eign entity)?

I like a raw sound, but I also want every­thing to be pretty audi­ble. That’s why Colin was good to work with. He under­stands that a raw aes­thetic doesn’t “sound bad” but also was able to pro­duce one with­out sac­ri­fic­ing actual fidelity. The one thing I’ll men­tion about Pagan Dawn specif­i­cally is that the bridge sec­tion with the slower beat is sup­posed to be a sort of blast beat in slow motion. I’m very inter­ested in the way that the mind relates to dif­fer­ent tem­pos — like how a con­tin­u­ous thud at a very fast speed is a whir, but if it goes slow enough your whole body begins to throb and groove with it. That was clearer on the demos, because I just tog­gled the tempo to make it slower. Yes, for the new record we’re doing a lot of work to focus on the ways that my ideas res­onate with the other mem­bers and try­ing to chan­nel that. Bernard is an incred­i­bly vir­tu­osic gui­tar player, so that’s some­thing to work with. Greg and I have pro­duced a live ver­sion of the burst beat that has aspects that are par­tic­u­lar to him, that weren’t antic­i­pated in advance, so we’re try­ing to flesh that out. Tyler’s been show­ing me a bunch of Aka Pygmy chant­ing which we’re going to incor­po­rate into the new record.