Interview: Averse Sefira

Photo by Vic "thor da" Viking Interview by Cosmo Lee

Averse Sefira are perhaps America's most potent practitioners of black metal. Their name roughly means "opposing angel"; it comes from the concept of the sephirot in the Kabbalah. This Austin, TX trio, composed of bassist Wrath Sathariel Diabolus, vocalist/guitarist Sanguine Mapsama, and drummer The Carcass, began in 1996. Over time, they've built a strong international following, particularly in Brazil; their website has a separate Portuguese section. Advent Parallax (Candlelight, 2008, produced by Tore Stjerna, artwork by Jos A. Smith) is one of this year's most sonically distinctive records. It's taut yet expansive, clean yet electric. The band is currently on tour with Gorgoroth - the Gaahl incarnation - in the UK. Wrath writes some of the best tour blogs around; you can see them here.

Serpent Recoil

Earlier this year, I chatted with Wrath while Averse Sefira was on tour with Immolation, Belphegor, and Rotting Christ. Fighting the requisite touring illness, he nonetheless spoke at length about South American fans, numerology, one-man bands, and more.

- - -

The band has a strong South American following. How did this come about?

The popularity of the band in South America just kind of happened. Even when we were a demo band, a lot of people from Brazil, in particular, wrote us and supported us and made a big deal out of the band. We kept making friends and making contacts down there. Then we ended up on a Brazilian label for our third album, and we reissued the first album on the same label. Right about that time, we started getting invitations to go play [there]. It culminated in us going down there with Dark Funeral. That was amazing. We haven't experienced anything like that before or since. The scale of it was just massive. We played to 2000+ people a night, just us and Dark Funeral co-headlining.

Was that the tour they recorded for their live album [De Profundis Clamavi Ad Te Domine]?

Yeah, yeah. That front cover - that was the same crowd that we played to. In fact, right before they started playing, we were backstage behind a barrier, and people were pushing over it to try to get to us. Security finally told us, you either need to go out and talk to them, or you need to get out of sight. We were, like, "OK, we'll go out and talk to them." So we went past the barrier, and immediately we were crushed against the wall. My guitarist - he's a big guy, and he was not standing on the floor. He was just kind of dangling there.

One of the things that also got us an extra-good reputation there is that we gave our fans there a lot of access to us. After every show, we went out to the bar across the street and met everybody. A lot of bands don't do that; they hide out. That's what the South Americans want - to be engaged. But they're also fanatical. They mobbed us. They even tried to steal parts of my hair as souvenirs. Girls were sticking their hands down my pants, kissing me, all sorts of things that would never happen in the States, things that definitely would never happen in Europe.

How does the South American scene compare to the European and American ones?

There's really nothing like the South American scene because they want you to be larger than life. They want you to be the hero. They want you to take pictures with them and sign autographs and be the rock star. The US is kind of in the middle. There's a lot of people who are die-hard fans. They get really excited and they want to meet you and talk to you, but they don't attack you. And then in Europe, it's against the rules to be like that. Seriously, anything like that is considered bad. And that's fine. I don't care if it doesn't happen. That is not why I do this. I'm not here to sign autographs and be a big shot. But it's funny the way the Europeans are so preoccupied with avoiding [fandom].

Is it a respect thing or a cultural thing?

No. It's the fact that they're so spoiled. I'm serious. They're spoiled by the amount of bands that they have on that continent, the amount of concerts they have, the amount of fests that they have. And everybody is in a band over there. So it's almost like they're not allowed to be any higher up on the food chain than any other band. It's kind of egalitarian that way. Everybody sort of has to be equal. If you sign an autograph - "Oh, what a poser, what a rock star."

So that's the reaction from European fans. How about from bands?

It's interesting because it's ultimately bands [with whom] we've always tried to cultivate [relationships]. When we started our band, we weren't really worried about getting fans or supporters. We've known all these bands for years. I've known Immolation since 1991. We have all these friends in the scene, and we're more interested in what they think. When we go out and see bands that we like, and play with bands that we like, it's really validating to us that they respect what we do. The underground helps the band grow bigger, but ultimately we treat this as an art collective where it's us and all these other bands that we respect, doing what we're doing regardless of any outside approval.

Speaking of such peers, you worked with [producer] Tore Stjerna [from Watain]. Did you record at Necromorbus?

No, we flew him into the States for a month.

Like the previous album [Tetragrammatical Astygmata].

Yeah. He came to Texas; he produced us again. He's amazing. He's really great, a fantastic producer, really has an innate understanding of the language of music. I really can't say more than that. He really helped make the last two albums what they are.

When he's producing, is he also engineering?

He does everything. He engineers it, he produces it, and he also mixes and masters it. And that's rare. You don't find that many people who are able to do all that. He knows exactly what it is he's going for with the sound. That's why he does it that way. You know what you're getting, start to finish.

At one point, the band moved to Rochester, NY, then moved back to Texas. What went on with that?

We were trying to make the band go forward in Texas, and for whatever reason, it just wasn't working. I mean, it was working - we were producing material. But we couldn't get a drummer. We'd been using a drum machine for the first demo and the first album. And we just needed a change of scene. For some reason, I decided Rochester was where we had to go. I don't know why. I liked the New York scene. I liked Canada, too, which was really close. Sanguine didn't really understand [the decision], but he was behind me on it. So we went and we did find a drummer almost immediately. We played in Toronto with Cradle of Filth - this was in 1999. We played the Milwaukee Metalfest. We played shows all over the Northeast.

Suddenly we were on the map. Everyone kind of knew we existed. Right around that point, it had been about a year. We just said to each other, "Well, that was cool. Let's go home." And we did. Carcass, whom we'd known for years - he'd been in another band - we'd asked him three times to join us, but he wasn't available - I ran into him at a party right when we got back. I said, "When are you going to stop jerking us around and come drum for us?" And he said, "I'm ready. Let's do it."

You referred to Austin as home. What's its draw for you - especially since you've said that the Texas [metal] scene sucks?

It does. Well, I grew up in Texas. Sanguine and I are both from Texas. Carcass was born elsewhere, but he's mostly been in Texas. When I was growing up, San Antonio, where I lived, was really great. A lot of touring bands came through. I had a band when I was 14, 15. We ended up going to college at the University of Texas. I'd traveled a lot even before I was in this band, and I saw a lot of the country. I didn't see anything else that looked better to me. I like Texas as a place. I like Texas as an idea because it has a lot of mythology attached to it - the West, the outlaw state, the rebel state. We were a republic once. Serial killers, chainsaw massacres, all that stuff. So there's a lot about Texas I do like, but the metal scene isn't one of them. But at this point, it doesn't matter because we're plugged into the international scene anyway. We go where we want, and we play with whom we want, and we're not limited by where we live.

How is the partnership with Candlelight?

Fantastic. We went into this being realistic, saying, "OK, they're not going to give us the sun and the moon." No label does that. And they're not doing that, just to be clear. They're not treating us any better or any worse than any other band on their roster. But it happens that they treat all their bands pretty well. They come through on all their promises. We get along with them fantastically, which is really good, because sometimes that doesn't happen. They've actually gone further at doing things for us than we thought they would. They've met our budgetary requirements. They've been pushing the album really, really hard. They seem to be behind us 100%, and I have no reason to believe that will stop anytime soon.

You've said you would never sign with a larger label like Century Media or Roadrunner. What do you think of Nachtmystium signing to Century Media?

The reason we wouldn't sign to Century Media is because we know bands that are on Century Media. And that thing is like a mill. Bands are expected to put out an album every year. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Tour, album, tour, album, tour, album. There's no way to really cultivate a bigger artistic idea when you have to do that. I mean, some bands can, but we're not one of them. If Nachtmystium can do it, that's great. I don't know what their contract situation is. Blake [Judd]'s a pretty savvy guy. I don't know if he'd sign a 10-album contract. A lot of bands did. Get past album three with most bands on that label, even in the old days, and they start getting bad. That's the reason we wouldn't do that. Plus, we don't like the idea of being a small fish in a really, really big pond. At Century Media, I don't see us growing at all. We'd just be a little satellite, like some kind of Eastern bloc country controlled by Russia. That doesn't interest us.

Averse Sefira has very skewed tonalities. Where do they come from?

That's all just Sanguine's head. He comes from a school of playing not unlike Bob Vigna from Immolation or Piggy from Voivod. He's influenced by those guys. Also, he's not a conventional thinker at all. He doesn't think in linear fashions. Proof of that is sometimes we're trying to come up with a design scheme for a shirt or artwork for anything that we're doing - he picks the most faraway method of trying to get to the most obvious conclusion. He does that with his music, too. That's not a bad thing. It gives us our own sound. It makes our sound pretty unique. That's where Carcass and I come in. We help temper that, keep it tethered to the earth. [But] we don't make it real accessible or simple, obviously.

How did you link up with Jos A. Smith? Did you give him guidance as to the artwork?

No, that art that he did for us - that was an original piece that he'd done back in 1977. I discovered it in an old art magazine from 1983. When I saw it in there, I was like, "This is it. We have to use this." It perfectly captured the idea of the [band's] name. We've had a concept for a while of the traveler, the extra-celestial consciousness. And that right there was the embodiment. That was like our main character standing before us.

I didn't know if [Smith] was still alive. He's 73 years old. I found him at the Pratt Institute in New York City. I called him up. I was scared out of my mind. I said, "I found this piece, and I would really like to use it." I just said that we were a band, but I didn't say what we were. He got very excited and immediately asked, like, 100 questions about it. Before I knew it, he was describing to me how he came up with it.

It turns out that he's a really powerful mystic. He trained with a Tibetan monk clan to do shamanism and transcendental meditation. That's how he does all his work - in trances. He's been involved in witch covens. He also worked with the CIA back in the Korean War, I think. So he's had an amazing track record. But predominantly, he's an artist. He pretty much agreed outright to let us have the piece. He wasn't even into metal, but he understood what we were doing perfectly.

When I saw that figure, I thought, maybe that's the Averse Sefira. It looked kind of like an angel.

Yes, that's the simple version of it. Yeah, you got it.

Are there any specific concepts or themes in this record?

The last album was about the terrestrial becoming celestial - the physical form being torn away, and only the spirit is left. This time, it's the celestial coming back into the terrestrial. The title of the album art is "Machine for a Journey of Indeterminate Depth." I love the idea that this figure is like an organic machine. It's sort of like a dirigible that travels. It's a vessel for consciousness. We're all like that, in a way. Our bodies are vessels and our minds are the navigators. So we wrote all about that machine. That's basically the whole album - the celestial form becoming mired in the terrestrial.

If you look at the art, the body is battered and coming apart in places. It's seen eons of time and damage and war. But it still lives, because it's unending. The simple version is that we wrote the album about that endless journey of the vessel. The significance of the title... this is something Sanguine should really be talking about, because he's the big conceptualist. I contribute, but he's the main lyric writer. We call it Advent Parallax because "advent" is a day of great importance. "Parallax" - the concept of parallax view is to have an object - you look at it from one side, and then you look at it from another angle, a parallax view. The same object takes on a different characteristic because you're seeing it in a different way. It's supposed to be the idea of a new vision or process of rebirth. And it's all embodied through the machine.

Your past lyrics have a lot of numbers. Are you guys interested in numerology?

Absolutely.

What numbers are special for you?

Prime numbers, for one thing. We actually put a lot of different numerical ciphers in our songs. A lot of our songs are written with numerological significance. Now we're especially interested in exploring more sigil magick. This album in particular is a hyper-sigil, which is basically a body of work that is one large signifier. We're exploring more of that because we kind of realized that we're practicing sigil magick without knowing it. Our logo - that is an example of sigil magick. [Sigils] can also be physically expressed. We're on tour with Immolation - that's a perfect example. Have you ever watched Bob [Vigna] play?

No, this will be my first time.

Watch him play. He does this thing [mimics Vigna's trademark swinging of guitar]. It's almost like a ritual. If you were to put one of those little flashlights on [his guitar headstock] and to take a picture of it [i.e., with light painting] - sigils. I told him about this, and he didn't even realize it. I said, "That's what you are, you're a sigil mage." And he really liked that idea.

So numerology, sigil magick, divination - a lot of stuff like that. We borrow off a lot of systems. To use a real world example - when Bruce Lee invented his style of fighting, he hybridized a lot of different ideas. He was a sigil magician, too, by the way. [Mimics Lee's trademark hand movements] - sigil magick, right there. Basically, what we've done is try to distill a lot of magical systems that are useful, and to plug them into an overview that works for us. It's kind of like the spokes of a wheel.

The practice of magick isn't common in the "real" world. Do you see your work as an opposition to "reality" or the normal world?

Absolutely. It's about transcending. It's about rejecting.

What are you rejecting?

I'm not going to lie and say that when we come off tour, we just sit around and do black metal all day. We have to work really hard. We all have jobs. We all have regular lives that we can't stand, more or less. The only thing we want to do is this. And this is reality for a lot of bands. The refuge for that is rejecting all the things which are not necessary. There isn't a job in this country that requires 40 hours a week. I'm not a blue-collar guy; I'm a professional. And even my job - I only need about 25 hours a week to really do it. But I have to be there for 40. It's such a waste of life.

Magick and ritual practice is, in part, a way to get past that and create a world within a world. That's one thing I really learned from Jos Smith. He's a complete master of that. All the stuff that he draws and makes - those things exist. He's seen them in another place. I am trying to harness that and cultivate that world within a world.

Speaking of signifiers, I was looking at the corpsepaint you guys have. Is there a meaning there?

Oh yeah. The part around the eyes is the crown of thorns. The reason it's over our eyes is to signify being blinded by the crown of thorns. The lines around our mouths are the threads [from which] we've broken free. Our mouths are supposed to be sewn shut to keep us from speaking the truth.

The band has been around for over a decade. How have you seen the black metal scene change in that time?

It's changed a lot in that the overall quality has gone down quite a bit because now everybody thinks they can have a black metal band. There's a lot of people who get it wrong. They tap into the minimalist aspect - Darkthrone and things like that. People don't understand that black metal is not meant to be terrible.

[Laughs]

The sound quality, the execution - it's not supposed to be terrible. Minimalism has its genius. Burzum or Darkthrone - that's genius, the old stuff. But just playing on shitty instruments on a shitty recording and doing a shitty job of it is not black metal. That is one of the reasons why we've never had any reservations about our making music technical, making it more cleanly produced. [But] we're not trying to make it really shiny. I don't like the way that a lot of modern metal albums are produced. They're kind of over-produced. Too many digital effects. It's very clinical.

But to get back to the question at hand - it's amazing to watch how many bands we've outlasted, big and small. We didn't plan it that way. It's just the way it goes. The bands that are meant to last are still here. The overwhelming number of bands that weren't meant to last aren't here anymore.

Do you see any new blood coming into the scene?

I hate to say no, but I kind of feel like that's the case. I think of a band like Watain as new, but they're only, like, a year and a half younger than we are in terms of when they were formed. They're kind of the upstart in Europe right now. Everybody's into Watain right now, which is amazing to me because we played with them before they really broke out. Past our contemporaries that started around the same time we did, I haven't seen anything that's really changing the face of the movement or the underground. There are pockets of people who will of course pipe up and go, "Oh, what about 'Wolfnacht' from Minnesota?"

[Laughs]

A band pops up with one demo, and it's like, "Oh, this is it! It's going to be big!" But that's the problem. Bands don't last because people aren't doing it for the right reasons. People are too quick to want them before they prove that they're here to stay or create something bigger.

What do you think of the one-man bands, of which the US has a lot - Xasthur, Leviathan, Krohm, things like that?

There's a lot of people, especially in California, who like Leviathan and Xasthur. Personally, I don't really get it. I won't even say it's bad. I just don't get it. The biggest problem with one-man bands is that they don't have any kind of balance. They don't have any checks and balances or other people in a band editing. If Sanguine was a one-man band, it would probably be really genius on a certain level, but no one would listen to it because it would be so alienating. I've listened to stuff like Xasthur and Leviathan. The termination points are really indistinct. It goes on and on and on and on. It's very cyclical. Some people think that's great. That's cool. I don't have a problem with that.

Here's an easy way to explain it. They can't be the vanguard because they are one-man bands. They're not going out there and breaking their asses and going broke out on the road, and getting out there and trying to spread it. [Instead] they get to sit in their homes and play on their Tascam.

Xasthur now is probably one of the most well-known names in the US scene. And he doesn't tour - but he's on Hydra Head, which has major distribution.

Right. My perception of it is that bands like Xasthur - Xasthur in particular. That man is popular with people who aren't into black metal. That's what I've noticed. You've got all these record store folk listening to Xasthur. But they wouldn't listen to us. They wouldn't listen to Watain, necessarily. I don't know if they would even listen to Mayhem or Emperor or any of that stuff. I don't think you'd ever run into anybody whose two favorite albums are the new Xasthur album and Immortal's Pure Holocaust. You're not going to run into that person. It's usually going to be, like, Xasthur and Death Cab for Cutie. Maybe that's not right, but you know what I'm saying.

I don't think [Xasthur]'s reaching the audience that we're trying to reach: the core audience. He's got all these fringe people. We would hate to have that audience. They don't stay with you. They're not there year after year. They don't show up wearing the shirt they bought from you in 1998. We experience that all the time. Good luck to him, but he can keep it.

Links

Blog
MySpace
Official Site
Candlelight Records

Nick Cave interview, Tupelo

by Cosmo Lee

For Pitchfork.tv, I've done a brief interview with Nick Cave (part 1, part 2). If I looked uncomfortable, I was. Try sitting for half an hour under blindingly bright lights on a loveseat with your body facing a camera but your head twisted towards a rock star for whom any time is too early. That sated my rock star appetite for a while.

Tupelo (Nick Cave)
Tupelo (Sikth)

As far as I know, metal bands have covered Nick Cave twice. On Garage Inc., Metallica attempted "Loverman" from 1994's Let Love In. We will speak no more of that. Better is Sikth's faithful take on "Tupelo," from 1985's The Firstborn Is Dead, my favorite Nick Cave record. He revisited its haunted, rain-soaked atmosphere (and the record's title concept) in his 1989 novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. The book is good, often great, but overlong. As Cave explains in the interview, it went to print completely unedited. Evidently, an edited version is due out sometime. I'll recommend that highly in advance.

Interview: Martin Van Drunen, Hail of Bullets

By Cosmo Lee Photo by mithrandir3

It's funny how metallers can be so godlike onstage and so down-to-earth in real life. Martin Van Drunen is case in point. His roar scorched the first two albums by Pestilence and Asphyx; it returns in fine form on ...Of Frost and War (Metal Blade, 2008), the debut by Dutch death metal supergroup Hail of Bullets. When I interviewed him for Decibel (#46, Judas Priest cover), I found him to be straightforward, sensible, and a dedicated metaller. We focused mostly on the album's World War II theme (specifically Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union). The outtakes below capture the remainder of our conversation.

Hail of Bullets - Red Wolves of Stalin

Is Hail of Bullets a reaction to the death metal of today?

It's not meant as a reaction. But maybe subconsciously, yeah. We are all old-school fans, and the reason why we did the style that we do is because we think that nowadays there's not too much good old-school around. There's [a lot of] bands who delve into blastbeats and so-called cookie monster vocals. Not much of us are really into that genre.

How would you compare the feeling of old-school and newer death metal?

In old-school death metal, you find a lot more groove than you do in a lot of nowadays bands. There's a lot of speed in metal at this moment. I think that speed is not really heaviest. To me, heavy metal is more into playing slow and deep than playing fast.

Asphyx and Pestilence have both reformed. Is something going on in Dutch old-school metal?

Gorefest have reformed as well, you know. I don't know. With Asphyx, it was more or less a coincidence because the Party.San festival was pushing us. They desperately wanted us, and we said OK. That wasn't really planned. I'm not sure how it is with Pestilence or Gorefest, but I think that it's not something that you force yourself to do. You have to find a lot of fun again and enjoy yourself. That's more why I think these bands are doing it again. And obviously, there's a demand for it. If there's no demand for it, you might as well not reform.

How did you come to work with [mixing and mastering engineer] Dan Swanö?

Ed [Warby], who is the drummer of Hail of Bullets - he worked with him a lot. He's also drumming on Dan's Demiurg project. Dan was very interested in what we were doing. He more or less offered himself to produce the promo, and he blew us away. He knew exactly how to translate our songs and sound.

What was working with him like?

We weren't working "together." We recorded here in the studio. After that, the files were sent to him, and it all went on .wav files to us, and we checked the mixes. I've never met the man, you know. It's a weird way of working, but that's how it goes nowadays. It's better to do it that way than to fly the whole band in and fly back again. You save a lot of expenses, especially the record company.

How's Metal Blade working out? I remember you not liking Roadrunner in the past.

Metal Blade is really fantastic. It's the best label I've ever worked with. Everything goes smoothly. There's not one thing now that's not going well. The interviews, the whole stuff with financing everything, the contracts -- we were all in different bands, so you have to adapt the contract now because you have to work with different publishing companies [when] you work with different record companies -- to Metal Blade, that was no problem at all. They changed everything in the contract that we wanted to change. They just wanted to sign us, and gave us all the freedom that we wanted.

You're pretty self-critical; you once said you'd redo the vocals on Pestilence's Consuming Impulse. What do you look for in death metal vocalists?

First, variety, and second, [understandability]. I'm doing my best so you can understand what I'm saying, so you can hear a bit of the lyrics. A lot of singers, they swallow whole lines. They start with the first word and end with the last, and in between they're not saying [the text]. Try to put some variety in your voice. Everybody can try some high and try some low. And a lot of strength from the belly, really.

Have you seen the Melissa Cross DVD [an instructional video for extreme metal vocalists]? [Discussion of DVD ensues.]

Well, she should see the amount of beer and cigarettes that I consume. She would probably first tell me to stop that. But to be honest, you need a certain technique to keep up this voice. And I think I have a natural technique, but it's really hard for me to explain [it] to somebody. I can't tell what's going on in my body. It's hard to describe it in words. Just give me a microphone, a lot of noise from stacks, and then I'll perform and give it my best shot. I couldn't stand in a room with no music and train. I need the music. I need the volume.

You're in your 40's now. What do you see in your future?

I feel really good. I enjoy life. It's like a little rebirth. I enjoy everything I do at this moment very much. There won't be a lot of difference between now and 20 years. The strange thing is, there's a big difference between 21 and 41. But there's no big difference between 41 and 61. If you find your personality, you'll still be the same person. But between 21 and 41, you can change a lot. I changed a lot. I just hope that I continue the way that I'm living now.

Links

MySpace
Official site
Artist page @ Metal Blade

Interview: Brown Jenkins

by Cosmo Lee

Lacking the spontaneity that pulls insight from people, email interviews are usually inferior to actual ones. However, Moribund Records assured me that email was the way to interview Umesh, the man behind black/doom metal project Brown Jenkins. Boy, were they right. For my Brown Jenkins feature in the July 2008 issue of Decibel (Opeth cover), I used a fraction of what Umesh sent me. The dude just loves to type. Below are outtakes from the interview.

Forever Funerals
The Ash Eaters

The first Google search result for "Brown Jenkins" leads to a coffee company. Does this piss you off?

No, but it does make me curious. I hope that the people who run that place connect things at some point in the future and send me some of their beans. I'm certainly not going to buy them. I suppose I should be angry that they took that domain before I could grab it, but try as I might I can’t seem to summon the outrage.

You've said that Angel Eyes is more "overtly Satanic" than Dagonite. Can you expound on that?

When I said that some time ago, I think that what I meant is that I felt a lot closer to whatever "dark" forces there are on this planet during the recording of this new album than I did during the recording of Dagonite - close enough to touch them at a few points. It wasn't a great experience. I found out, for example, that I wasn't as enamored of these forces as I once thought I was. Still, though, all of that found expression in the music.

What's the the role of vocals in your music?

I have a love/hate relationship with vocals in metal music. I'm a guitarist, so I've always simply concentrated on the guitars in metal, going all the way back to the mid-'80's, you know, when I first started listening to this stuff. I love the sound of the guitar, the power of its voice, the entire craft of playing it. I don't need lyrics or vocals on top of that.

I usually don't understand the lyrics of other people or what they want to say with them, what they need to say. It all seems so unnecessary, so many words, so many signs of…what? All people usually say, the message between the words, is, "We are a metal band, look at us, we want you to see us this way, this is the way we see ourselves." That's very boring to me. I don't have an image to present, I don't need people to see me being in a band or that I'm a musician or whatever. I don't have an agenda. I don't have any life lessons to impart or oppress people with. I just want to write music that makes me feel good, that creates a world that I can go inside, if only for an hour or two a day, and feel comfortable inside.

If Angel Eyes is overtly Satanic, yet it doesn't have much vocals, does its Satanism come from the instruments?

Well, as you don't have the lyrics, you're not seeing the whole picture, but: yes. I probably only sing 1/3 of the lyrics anyway. The rest are just there to tell the story of the song, or whatever. If a musician is a Satanist, it means he/she is in eternal opposition to reality, to "normality", to accepted and unquestioned beliefs. These psychological themes easily become musical themes, and then individual melodies, in themselves "themes."

It is so easy to be an accepted, mainstream black metal musician these days. Essentially a blueprint or guidebook has been written for any willing adherent if he just pays attention, by all the scene manipulations and historical precedents already set down. It is so easy to have the right look, to say the right things, to rebel in the accepted way, to impress people in the right way, to write the required melodies, to say the "right" things in interviews, etc. It's a system, and it can be worked by any skilled manipulator. The Satanist, even now, is the person who strives for individual expression by forcing what is real and true in his own experience outside himself, expressing his own life, not through clichés, but through his own language.

What does Satanism mean to you?

Blood power, reality power. The right of the individual to willfully impose his internal world upon reality, and then have it take its rightful place not only in his life, in his chain and system of meaning, but in that of the others around him. In my mind, it is a path that is, as its most simple, a series of abstractions and lessons learned from Satan's opposition to a fascist "one" or monotheistic, mono-created reality, to the internal life of the individual, the creation and maintenance, or acceptance of the universe of billions of different realities. It is freedom, not slavery underneath another master. Ultimately, Satanism is beautiful because it is a cause that recognizes, metaphorically or not, our true benefactor, our most precious gift: reason. It is reason that can crush religion, and it is reason that can save us as a species, not monotheistic inanity.

Was it hard to get signed with a fairly vocal-free project?

I don't think so. We did two demos relatively quickly in 2007, got a lot of interest, and then signed to Moribund almost immediately. I don't know why that happened or how; I've been in contact with Odin [Thompson, label head] since about 1998, but, eh, whatever. I'm glad he took notice. We had offers from other labels. I was ready to do some music that would have been cool for other people to listen to and which I thought other people would probably like eventually, so it wasn't a surprise Jenkins got signed so quickly. Not for me, anyway, but I'm totally jaded. No one ever told me, "You need more vocals in this, we need clichéd songs, we need to sell this stuff." You know how the underground works. It might be totally mapped out and commodified, but there are still people out there who can get behind weird stuff. There is still a lot of room for innovation.

Your metal reference points tend to be older. How old are you? Do you see a difference between metal made today and metal from when you grew up?

I'm 34. I don't know what that tells you. I started listening to metal in about '86. I bought Metallica's Master of Puppets and Slayer's Reign in Blood and that was pretty much it for me. My life was changed forever. I should have known better. Had I discovered something more civilized, like jazz or whatever, I probably would have been an astrophysicist by now. Dark calls to dark, right? One can't deny these things; one seeks out the keys to one's nature.

There are a number of differences between metal made today and metal made 20 years ago, but they've been well documented on a thousand Internet message boards. The main difference: the weight of history. While Slayer had Priest always in their sights and in their minds, any band that begins today has to contend with Slayer, etc. This is the supposedly random factor that is at the heart of all of metal, and which changes everything: influence. Metal now has enough of a history that people can wax nostalgic and they don't always sound crazy. All of that weight of history creates its own pressure, its own power and force that must be spun, reckoned with, wittily tested and dealt with.

Your riffs owe much to Godflesh. Is this an accurate statement?

Honestly, I didn't know how influential Godflesh was on my musical development until I started to write and record stuff. Then, all of a sudden, it came out…very obviously. What's strange is that they weren't even a favorite band of mine all the time I was growing up. I would always listen to them, of course, and buy their albums, check in on what they were doing, how they were developing, but I never thought of them as a favorite. Now I know better. They were an amazing band and Broadrick is a fantastic guitarist, one of my favorites, and yes, you can hear his influence all throughout my playing. Listening to my riffs these days, I think you could say that he and Piggy from Voivod were the two guitarists that my subconscious actually paid attention to. Well, and also Iommi. I guess I should move to Birmingham and embrace my heritage? Weird.

Describe the perfect Brown Jenkins sound.

Two guitars, one drum set: snare, kick, hi-hat. The two guitarists are expertly polished and can play anything, from Robert Johnson to Steely Dan to early Floyd to Neu! to Burzum and Bethlehem, and the drummer never lets an errant word slip. Occasionally one of the guitarists growls something. Worlds slip away, right? That's the purpose of music: escape.

Links

MySpace
Older Recordings
Moribund Records

Interview: Dave Adelson, 20 Buck Spin

by Jess Blumensheid

Dave Adelson is the man behind one of doom metal's most gracious labels, 20 Buck Spin. It was born in 2005 with SPIN001, the re-released Supereclipse by Black Boned Angel. From day one, Adelson's life became the label that began as a mixtape of his favorite bands. Adelson bonds comfortably with acts like The Obsessed, Grey Daturas, Coffins, and Graves At Sea, lowering the divide between business partners and close friends. What arose as a love for extreme music now flourishes as a small yet thriving label that continuously gives back to the metal community. With the label's advancing success and his recent purchase of the Olympia, WA record store Phantom City Records, Adelson has been able to pay the bills by doing what he does best: being a true metalhead. We talked with Adelson via email to cap off 20 Buck Spin week.

[Stream 20 Buck Spin's online mixtape]

What are your criteria when selecting bands for 20 Buck Spin?

The only real criteria there's ever been is music that's heavy and/or dark. It also has to be something that I want to listen to repeatedly. Lately there has been stuff I want to release that I don't feel is necessarily appropriate for 20 Buck Spin, and for that reason I'm "spinning" off another label soon. 20 Buck Spin will remain a diverse label that will always have its foundation in metal, even if some of the releases seem to deviate from that label to some extent. 20 Buck Spin is my personal mixtape for whoever cares to listen.

Explain the risks for those interested in starting their own record label.

Well, I suppose the risk you take is losing a lot of money and embarrassing yourself by supporting music that sucks. One kind of leads to the other. Figure out ahead of time what you really want to achieve. Are you doing it to help out friends? Then maybe making money isn't so important. I want to make enough money to keep putting out more records and pay the label's bills. If you can do that, you're running a successful label in my mind. My goal is just to put out good music in a quality looking package.

What is the Business 101 on making connections with bands like Coffins? What causes a band to spark the thought that they'd do justice for your label?

If you think a band is killer and want to do something with them, literally just ask them. That's how I hooked up with Coffins. My friend Mauz gave me their first album, I thought it ruled and I just emailed [Coffins frontman/guitarist] Uchino about maybe doing something and he was into it. I suppose depending on the band it may matter how "established" your label is and what bands you've worked with previously. I worship Darkthrone and Throbbing Gristle, but it's not likely either would consider doing a record on 20 Buck Spin if I asked them.

As for what makes bands think they got the goods to be on 20 Buck Spin, I'm sure they just look at the roster and previous releases, and based on that determine whether or not their band might be to my liking. Actually, sometimes I don't know if bands really pay attention to that, either. I need to put up some kind of disclaimer, I think. I get hit up by a lot of shitty solo projects that have a demo after three months of existence that they deem worthy of me releasing. Probably not gonna happen, lads. If a band thinks I might like them because they play in a similar style to The Endless Blockade, for example, then it follows that they should be as good or better then the Blockade are because I'm already working with them and I don't need two. I already got the best.

Logo by Arik Roper

What's the prized lesson you've learned by running 20 Buck Spin?

Maybe not something I've learned, but something I always believed that has been reaffirmed doing the label is that in the music biz the best way to have lasting relationships with bands, or anyone else involved for that matter, is to treat them honestly and treat them as friends. A band/label relationship needs to be looked at as an equal partnership in my mind, and I don't want to work with bands who don't understand that. The label is not "bigger" or more important than the band, and vice versa. We need each other to achieve the goals we're working towards.

Why is maintaining a small-label mentality so important for 20 Buck Spin?

I've thought a lot about whether I want the label to become some kind of bigger entity like the major metal labels, and I just don't know. I'm pretty happy with the way things are right now. It seems like with the bigger labels, only a very small fraction of the ten albums they release every month are any good. A lot of it is downright embarrassing. Maybe I'm just a snob, but smaller labels always seem to be doing a better job with more sincerity, more fairness to the bands, and finding cool new bands. Having a bunch of employees just seems like a hassle, too. I'm kind of a control freak about the label. The best labels around, like Tank Crimes, Nuclear War Now, Life Is Abuse, and Prank are all one- or two-man ops.

What monetary hurdles do you face with the label?

Man, in my personal life I'm just a working class dad livin' paycheck to paycheck, and the label pretty much works the same way, if that makes any sense. As soon as cash comes in, it goes back out for something else. If I can snag a few bucks to help pay the rent or my phone bill, it's been a good month. Also, if there ever is a surplus of dough, that just means I can release one more record this year than I thought I could (since I'm always committed to more than I can actually afford). In other words, just like life, it's a constant struggle. But I'd much rather live this way doin' something I love and scraping by than live comfortably by slaving away in a cubicle doing meaningless shit for The Man.

Black Boned Angel - Superclipse SPIN001

With Black Boned Angel's reissue Supereclipse in 2005, 20 Buck Spin rose up from the ground. What motivated you to give light to this release along with your own record label?

At that time, that album was kind of the embodiment of a lot of different shit I liked about music. It was utterly heavy but on the experimental side, for sure. I knew if I did a label I wanted to represent both facets, and Supereclipse, being only released as a really limited CD-R, was just asking for a wider release. So, like I said before about contacting people, I just emailed Campbell [Kneale, mastermind behind Black Boned Angel and Birchville Cat Motel] outta the blue, and he was into it. It helped that the bonus track he gave me was about 15 minutes long and the most crushing of the three.

I'd been working at Alternative Tentacles at that time for about six months and felt that a lot of connections I had made and knowledge I had gained through that job would help me get my own label off the ground, and it certainly did help in the early stages. But working for other labels has always had creative restrictions (after all, it's someone else's baby). So 20 Buck Spin was just my way of taking total control of a label in every way in exactly the way I wanted it to be done. No outside influence.

What are your goals for the label?

My goal has always just been to release records and bands I really like and would want to listen to a lot. And I do listen to all the shit I put out constantly. I am intimately familiar with every album I've released. I really just don't want to contribute to the glut of shit records being released all the time, and I hope that the label is not perceived that way. I'd be horrified if I was adding to the landfill of terrible garbage you generally see advertised in the magazines. Seems like people like the records I've been releasing, but it's hard to know how it's really perceived.

The other goal is just to make enough cash to keep putting out more records without losing my ass over it. I can't really afford to lose money in my life, so if the label ever gets that way, I'll just fold it. But at this point it's paying for itself, so in that regard, goal attained.

For their first US tour ever, Coffins were introduced to America via the Maryland Deathfest, with you as their tour guide. What compelled you to drive them all over the East Coast?

Well, luckily I didn't have to drive them all over. The first leg of the tour they were driven around by The Endless Blockade and their awesome driver Christina. So I gotta give credit where it's due. Andrew Nolan, Blockade bass player and lead academic, plotted the course of the tour and booked the shows (with the exception of Deathfest) and coordinated a lot of that. I met up with the band around Pittsburgh, and from there I was Coffins driver, guide, mouthpiece, and spiritual guru. I did facilitate connecting the two bands, as well as getting the Deathfest to bring 'em over. It was a lot of work to make it all happen, but it was more than worth it for me to see two of my favorite bands play together. And witnessing Coffins at Deathfest, the culmination of a lot of work for a lot of people, and seeing the crowd reaction (I was watching from the side of the stage) made it all worthwhile. Bringing a band all the way from Japan to play and the fact that it all went down OK was for me a definite highlight in the label history so far. I'm working on getting them back over to the West Coast, my homeland, in the spring of '09.

Coffins/The Endless Blockade Tour Poster 2008

How has your battle with cancer cultivated the label?

Cancer fucked up my life in ways I can't even begin to explain here. The year it was all going down was the first year of the label, 2005, and that was the main reason I only got two records out that year. My friend Mauz who does Life Is Abuse had to physically assemble and ship out all the Graves At Sea/Asunder LP's for me because I was pretty much bedridden when it came out. Most of 2006 I spent recovering and getting used to my altered way of life, and also there was a lot of other personal upheaval that year, so getting six records out was pretty miraculous. 2007 again was characterized by enough personal problems that I felt like it somewhat affected the label. I felt I could have done better. Now I've moved out of the Bay Area and left behind a lot of bad memories and feel a lot more at ease up here in Cascadia. In a sense, I feel that 2008 might be the first year of 20 Buck Spin operating at full capacity. So I'm hoping I can get through it without any more bullshit going down. If it wasn't for bad luck I wouldn't have no luck at all.

What was life like before you gave birth to 20 Buck Spin?

Life pre-20 Buck Spin was still a lot of involvement with music. I worked at Necropolis Records in the early part of the century, and in the late 20th century I did a 'zine called Short Wave Warfare. Before that, I did a metal radio show at my high school radio station in Concord, CA. So I've been involved with this shit in one way or another for a long time. For most of that time, since I was 20, I've also had a daughter who is really way more important to me than any of this other stuff.

What's your daughter's response to your involvement in the metal community as well as the music you listen to?

Thus far my daughter has little interest in metal - at 10 years old. I haven't pushed it on her 'cause I feel like when parents try too hard to get their kids into what they're into, the kids just reject it during their teen years. So she hears it, it's around, but she's never expected to like it or participate. Living in Olympia now, it's a good place for a girl to be into music. It's very female-friendly here. I think she'll really like the punk rock house shows that are such a big part of the Olympia music scene. I took her to a few shows at [924] Gilman Street when I was still living in the East Bay, and she enjoyed the social atmosphere of it. My daughter doesn't live in Oly yet, she's still in the Bay Area, but visits often and will probably move here in the near future. So, whatever she ends up being into is cool with me - kids need to be allowed to develop their own interests, not inherit their parents'. She loves Miley Cyrus right now, but I've managed to get her interested in stuff like Johnny Cash, Lush (she really loves "Ladykillers" and "Single Girl" [from 1996's Lovelife]), and Kimya Dawson. She's a really happy kid, and doesn't understand why metal dudes are always screaming about shit.

What do you wish to see happen with the label in the next five years?

I want it to grow in a way that allows me to work with more established bands I admire and respect, in addition to still trying to find a lot of newer, worthy bands. Dream bands to work with would be Darkthrone, Bohren Und Der Club Of Gore, Philip Jeck, Nurse With Wound, Eyehategod, Jack Rose, Daniel Higgs, Amps For Christ, and Corrupted among many others. I really just want to keep it relevant. It seems like after a certain amount of years, almost every label, with very few exceptions, seems to lose the ability to put out good records (I'm speaking mainly of metal labels here), even if they are bigger now then they were. In fact, it seems like that growth is directly related to the decline in good records. So, I hope I can avoid that pitfall. If it's starting to feel shitty, I really don't think I'll have a problem putting the whole thing to bed.

I just bought a record store in Olympia called Phantom City Records. So in addition to the label, I'll be concentrating on that for a while as well. It's something I always wanted to do. Despite the shitty climate for selling music these days, I feel like I can make it work to the extent that it pays for itself and maybe even pays me a little. Mostly I just want to have fun with it, just like the label.

Links

Blog
Label
MySpace
Discography