1. Let´s talk about your beginning as a musician. Can you tell us about some of the early bands that captivated you and then provided the impetus to pick up an instrument and play?
I first heard Cinderella, Helloween and WASP on a compilation tape a friend made for me when I was 12. That was the late '80s and I instantly fell in love with metal. But it was the start of a search, because I desperately needed distortion, screaming, and as little melody as possible. Over the next few years my huge influences were Metallica, Nirvana (no one had poetic lyrics like Kurt Cobain, and the music was very dark), and then Hellhammer: I got Demon Entrails from a record store that was closing down its metal section, and the guy who sold it to me told me it would change my life. It did. It's perfect, untouchable.
2. How did you end up deciding to make a one-man project instead a full line-up band?
Just the need to make music. If I met someone who cared about black metal the way I do and wanted to band together, I'd go for it, but you don't meet many people who are that into it. I just really want to make this music, it matters to me. The idea of a band doesn't matter to me as much as the idea of the music existing.
3. Your first release as a band was a three-song EP. Tell us about the recording sessions ? Any specific challenges, surprises, or obstacles to get through?
It all happened in short bursts. I'd take the dogs for a walk and come up with the music in my head, sing it to the trees, come home and record it. (I recorded everything through an iRig using digital instruments in Logic that I tweaked to get the right sound; I don't have money spare for a decent amp so digital instruments are a good option.) Then I'd go out into the forest and scream the vocals into my phone, come home, take the recording to the computer and run it through a digital filter I made, and add the vocals to the songs. Not a complex process. Well, except for getting the drums programmed, which took a while. Basically the only recording challenge is satisfying the need for the music to exist. Once it feels right, I'll share it and move on to the next album. Probably mixing was the biggest challenge because I had no idea what I was doing. I learned the basics and gave it a shot.
4. One of the most impressive things about “Weeping” is how well you’ve paced the album, meaning there is a good balance between the raw black, and heavy, doom atmospheric passages. Was this done on purpose?
Thank you, I'm glad it worked for you. It's definitely intentional: I wanted to use the pacing and sensibilities of doom but with a very dry, black metal heart. Most doom is quite lush, really — it's a damp, dark forest kind of music — but New Mexico where I live has these huge, dry pine forests that I find really doom-laden. You know, you go into the forest being on the lookout for mountain lions, rattlesnakes, bears... The mountain lion is a big influence on my life, they live in the forest here and it's really their territory we're in, not the other way around. I think that also goes for natural forces: fire, flood, wind. A flash flood, which is the subject of "Apache Pass," is a doom-laden event. I almost got caught by a flash flood last year — I accidentally drove into a brutal storm — and that deeply influenced the music on Weeping, as did the wildfires here last summer. Black metal has an intrinsic dryness to it, it's supposed to be suffocating, and I wanted to carry that dryness into doom. You can maybe hear the tension between black and doom metal in the last movement of "Of The Righteous Sufferer," where there's a drumming pattern that wants to move into blast beats, but the song won't let it get there, it's held back by this dry, metallic drone in the background that ends up looming over the song. I like that drone, it's like a carrion bird circling overhead, waiting for the song to die.
5. What are the most challenging aspects when writing a song and how do you go about the approach?
The challenge for me is in making the music become a living thing in itself, so it joins with the body of whoever is listening to it. I don't care about taking the listener on a journey, or whatever. That's not the point of black metal. The point is more physical than that: you're trying to summon up a living thing and share it. And that thing has to earn its right to keep existing, you can't just summon it up and sit back and feel good about yourself. A black metal song has to earn its existence. I guess Damhnait is all about trying to make that happen until there's nothing left to summon.
6. The lyrics seems quite important for the band and your expression, how do you look upon the importance of the lyrics?
They are, and all but one were poems first. The exception is "Apache Pass" which is a kind of chant because it needed to be lighter lyrically as the music breaks apart into noise. "Of The Righteous Sufferer," for instance, is adapted from translations of a Babylonian poem of righteous despair, similar to the Book of Job in the Christian tradition. I feel the same way about the lyrics as about the songs: the lyrics have to be living things, they have to stand up by themselves. I'm describing poetry there, too, or at least my perception of poetry, that a poem is a living thing that has its own body, stands up by itself, has its own way of moving in the world.
7. There is a opposite mood related to both Ep titles, one is called Laughter and the other is entitled “Weeping” and this is even reflected on the face od the individual who appears on the frontcover. Could you please go deeper into this subject.
The covers are from a piece of art I saw at a consignment store, called "Laughter and Weeping." They're such grotesque faces to me, and it's fascinating to think that someone worked so hard to create a work of art that's so grotesque. I love that impulse. And this consignment store is like a very fancy thrift store, so I can see this piece of art hanging in some mansion in Santa Fe, these horrible faces on the wall. That makes me smile.
8. As a musician, how mandatory is the process of coming up with new ideas or incorporating new influences?
I don't think anything's mandatory in music. That's the joy of it, you get to escape the rules. Choose a key signature, explore it, move with it, defy it, push back against it. Especially in metal: make distortion your focus, it's a rare joy. Genres have built-in expectations to help people categorize what you're making, but all that comes after the thing is made. Make what comes out of you, then categorize it strictly for practicality's sake. And don't bore yourself. If you're bored by what you make, stop immediately and make something else.
9. What do you attempt to capture, express or communicate through your music? Or… is this even the goal of music? Is music communication or decoration? What is the goal of your art?
I make music to share living intensities. That's the best way I can think to put it. Black metal is a generous kind of music, it is made of profound human intensities and it's meant to be shared. The goal is to feel intensely, to summon a form of that feeling with sound, and to share it. If sharing is a kind of communication, then communication would be the impulse behind that goal.
10. Where did you record your both EPs and how did you achieve the sound you did? Was it to your satisfaction? Would you do anything differently next time?
I didn't have money for a studio or any gear (every time I get ready to buy an amp something goes wrong and all my money goes into paying bills), so I recorded both EPs in my kitchen with an iRig and customized instruments in Logic, except the drums which are just the stock Heavy drum sounds in Logic. I programmed the drums manually. So it's all digital, which depending on your point of view is either irrelevant, or a pact with the devil. I'd love to experiment with non-digital recording someday, but there's no point in sitting around waiting to have the right gear before you record. Just make music. Gear-wise, I have an Ibanez AZES which is a terrific affordable guitar, and I play it with a felt pick. I usually tune to open-C. You can hear the effect of the downtuned string with the felt pick in "Of The Righteous Sufferer": the main riff has a glissando that comes from the physical motion of the strings as they bounce back and reverberate, especially the low frequencies. The felt pick helps because it dampens brightness. I also use the blunter corners of the pick to make the sound less specific. I don't have much use for bright, precise tones. So the sound itself is what I was after, but my mixing isn't the best. I'd love to have someone mix it for me and get a better overall sound.
11. Everyone has their own ideas on what black metal means so I was interested in your opinion what does black metal stand for?
I think overall black metal questions individuality, questions the cult of the individual that is fundamental to a capitalist society. That might sound strange since black metal has so many one-person bands, but those bands exist to make music exist, not to be individuals. The majority of black metal one-person bands hide their faces, or change their faces with corpse paint — faces are distorted, you can't clearly locate the individuals. When the individual becomes more significant than the music, I think that can create some musical confusion because you're working harder to impress yourself on others. The individual doesn't matter to black metal; the body doesn't matter, the body is a conduit for intensities. In creating black metal, musically speaking, musicians summon some kind of extreme distortion of individuality, and the music bears witness to this distortion.
12. Do you find anything valuable in human society? What about individual humans?
It seems to me that we're still living in an idea of society that is essentially fear-based. Can we ever move beyond that? Society is still an idea held together by fear and punishment, in particular in the specter of empire: I grew up in Australia and the specter of empire was definitely present. The British Empire is/was an idea held together by fear, and I don't see that we've moved much beyond reacting to fear in different ways. It's interesting that in New Mexico the police don't have much money, it's quite a poor state, so there's not much of a police presence in general, and it does feel freer here, somehow more humane. When I lived in California, where the police have all the money in the world, fear of punishment was more present. I am a person for whom police presence signals the arrival of punishment, not safety.
On the other hand, ordinary people everywhere are usually lovely, but they're also usually alienated by society — by this machine, capitalist society, that obsessively produces alienation. Social alienation is probably the most common human experience at present, and that's only valuable if you're trying to exploit it to produce profit.
13. What would it really take for human beings to change or do you think we are incapable of such?
Usually revolution, right? But who has the energy for physical revolution any more? Consumer capitalism has exhausted us; we can't revolt, we need to go to work.
14. What are your experiences with promoting Damhnait so far in today’s digital environment?
I don't know what I'm doing as regards promotion. I figure I'll learn enough eventually, and in the meantime I'll keep making the music I want to make, release it, and either it gets listened to or I become much too old to care. Either way, making the music is what matters to me.
15. What have you been listening to lately? Any new and upcoming bands that might have caught your attention?
I love Dusk Cult's second album, Night Sky Revelations — Dusk Cult are an Australian band, Elliott from Be'lakor and Ben from Rainshadow making terrific black metal together.
I also think Maȟpíya Lúta's Wowahwala is incredible album that shows another side of USBM that resonates with me.
And Aavet: Black Ambient Sessions 2013–2022 by Ruohtta. Beautiful music.
One more: Alghol over in Maine, whose second album Night Eternal comes out this week.
16. And now we have finally come to the end of this interview, do you have some important words for our readers?
If you want to make music, just make it. People tell me they would play more if they were better at guitar (or whatever instrument), but being better doesn't matter. You're already good enough. If you're worried no-one will listen to what you record, send it to me and I'll listen to it — see, you've got one listener already!
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