Scythrawl (Ether, Unquintessence, Trails Of Anguish) Inteview (Part II)

Continuation of Scythrawl interview.
28.06.2016

Previous Ether album was released 8 years ago. Why it takes that much time to create a new record for this project? 

That is a good question.
First reason, I am not a musical composer by nature and for that reason, I think my methods are somewhat unorthodox. Ether is and will always be the voice of my profound nature and I let it manifest itself on its own free will. The need to write music started off as abstract melodies in my mind that wanted to get out. They were triggered by various things, dark and beautiful. Whenever I would feel these emotions, they would translate into melodies. These notes would keep playing in my mind for days and they have been following me for years.  Ether is my attempt to render all of these various pieces of primal expression into coherent music. It is my own obsessions laid bare. The only difference now is that I carry around a digital recorder and whenever I feel these bursts of emotion becoming music in my mind, I sing and record what I hear in my head.
Then there is the second reason.
I never really played guitar before Depraved, Repressed, Feelings and I don't intend to become good at it. Not enough free time nowadays and a lot more things to do than sit around for hours practicing some chords and agility. That being said, recording an entire album on guitar was the biggest challenge for me on this album. I used some softwares to help translate this abstract music in actual guitar tabs.
And the last challenge was to find the time to record, arrange and mix all of this in a way that the resulting process would approximate what I was hearing in my head all along.

That explains the gap between the two albums. I cannot rush this process and it is an excruciating and immense amount of time and dedication that can lead a person to madness. People need to understand that a regular band divides the work into many individuals. The main composer(s), each individual band members, a record engineer and a master engineer. All of these jobs are a full time job on their own.  When I played with Nefastüs Diès, I only needed to focus on my drumming, practicing to be able to play the parts I created live. Only that plus my normal life took all the time I had left. Now imagine yourself doing the work of all these people on your own, plus keeping your job and trying to have a social life. It needs a level of sacrifice and discipline similar to what monks must be enduring. It really did changed my perception of perseverance.

Scythrawl (Ether, Unquintessence, Trails Of Anguish) Inteview (Part I)

Hohlraum Archive interview with Scythrawl.
27.11.2011

Your first documented project is Trails of Anguish. It isn’t mentioned too often, so could you tell us about its history?

Trails of anguish took form somewhere in 1998. Our first recorded demo came out in December 1999. Trails was at that time the continuation of another band I was part of at that time: Through Somber sorrowfields.

To make a long story short, Through Somber Sorrowfields was formed back then with some random people I had met through my friends. We we’re all different and nobody  really knew what they wanted to play. It started as a Swedish death metal influenced project. The main composer liked In flames, dark tranquility and At the gates. I was a huge fan of At the gates back then so I decided to join in. I didn’t really enjoy the «happy » vibe on most songs so I took the role of writing lyrics and tried to give more depth to the music with concepts. It didn’t lead to anything we made some local gigs but it was obvious we didn’t had anything strong to bind us together. Easily put this was a « friend’s » band and I wanted something more serious.

Later on some conflicts emerged between me and the other band members. This hate was present and tangible in each rehearsal. I and the guitar player hated each other openly. Then one day they threw me out of the band, the bassist told me that I was too negative and that he felt I was dragging him down towards a bottomless pit, which I probably did at that time. Nevertheless I packed my things up and addressed my long hated enemy guitarist an opportunity to start a real band with a deeper meaning.

Even though we hated each other, we we’re linked musically, so he accepted. Trails of anguish was born on that day… The two last songs he wrote for Through somber sorrowfield we’re rehashed and modified and they became the scythe of engrieved melancholia and Laments of martyred innocence. These two songs marked the beginning and a milestone in my black metal evolution. I then knew what kind of music I really wanted to make.

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.