Meatus (Me-at-us) Interview

Pieces of information, unstable price for the existing copies of their only LP (from 1$ to 150$), unusual music style and Wayne Knupp as one of the band members - because of these factors, Me-at-us became kind of a cult, but this cult was almost forgotten for a while. The Band`s name wasn`t widely circulated, they got no followers and they are still unique phenomenon of the US extreme music scene. This brief interview is a tribute for the enthusiasm of these great guys, who were interested to shine a light on some details of their band`s history.

It's hardly possible to find any info on your band over the internet. Please, tell us how it all began. 

Meatus was formed in August 1995.  I was in a death metal band with Wayne Knupp called Exhaulted Evil in 1994, and we played a few house parties.  A mutual friend came to one of these parties and brought Sean and Erik with him.  A few months later the band broke up, and Wayne started hanging out with Sean, Erik and Nelson who were trying to form a band.  They were originally wanted to do more of an industrial metal project but that changed after I started jamming with them.  Erik and I had more of a traditional metal background (Iron Maiden, Priest, Slayer, etc...)  Whereas Sean and Nelson were much more into more experimental underground bands.  Wayne was into everything but death metal was always number one.  With such a wide variety of musical tastes it was the perfect match to create a very unique band.

Urban Desolation Collective Interview

In 2003 TAOP started Urban Desolation Collective. Tell us more about it: as far as I know, despite the name, bands in UDC aren’t united by their love to the urban culture.

I can’t really remember what was going through our heads when we came up with the idea for UDC; I suppose in the absence of any sort of musical scene at the time - regionally or nationally – that we felt we could relate to, we decided to construct our own, creating an umbrella term for projects that we were involved in, including some of our friends. There wasn’t really a concrete way of stating who was part of the UDC and who wasn’t, the whole structure never really crystallised. Nowadays our situation has changed; the whole idea of the UDC isn’t relevant to us in the same way, it’s just a convenient way of being able to discuss a number of different projects in one space, like this interview!

You’re correct that the name UDC isn’t a matter of shared aesthetic or vision; the idea was to unite the different projects based on where the members came from, i.e. the weathered urban landscapes of Teesside and the North East of England. How that location related to each project is a matter for conjecture, though most it must be said we about offering a psychological escape or relief from the place.

The Axis of Perdition Interview

Exceptional on the black metal scene, The Axis Of Perdition is one of the most interesting British bands in the genre founded in 2000s. Multilevelled albums, huge amount of influences reflected in their sound and their own audio-visual world - all these rised our questions and to answer, here is Michael Blenkarn, member of this duo.

Please tell us about the beginning of The Axis of Perdition. As far as I know initially it was a duo creating media of different types: stories, drawings, etc.

The formation of TAOP involved quite a few disparate threads of our interests coming together, and I think the actual gestation of the band took up at least the first eighteen months of its existence in name. And even six months before we created the band, we had been making guitar-based dark ambient drones as Pulsefear, which is where the modern concept of the band (i.e. the nightmare world depicted by the music from “Physical Illucinations…” onwards) originated. However, at the time we didn’t realize that TAOP would take over this concept from Pulsefear.

The first TAOP recording, the “Corridors” demo, was written by me (Michael) at a point where I felt I had reached a dead end with the black/death metal band (Minethorn) that I was in with Brooke. I wrote the demo as an experiment without any clear goal in mind, and invited Brooke to do the vocals and bass (though due to my poor mixing skills, the latter is effectively inaudible on the recording). We both recorded the electronic elements together, again out of a simple desire to experiment and do something different than from any real plan. The demo itself is a fairly straightforward piece of dissonant black metal (and I would say, perhaps the only item in our discography that can be called black metal) which attempts somewhat crudely to weld the epic wall-of-noise approach of Emperor and the hostile dissonance of Craft, topped off with surreal horror and sci-fi influenced lyrics.

At the time we were also avid players of the Call of Cthulhu paper RPG, and had developed the Pulsefear concept as a playable world for that, accompanied by some rather clunky short fiction. Again, it wasn’t clear to us until TAOP had existed for a few months that the music we were creating and this world we were using in our RPG could work well together.