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.
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.
