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Post by Darkcrawl on Aug 30, 2007 0:04:47 GMT
Totally agree with Brooke's views about Chavs. A world obeying to the laws of The Axis would be fitting punishment for them.
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Mike
Tarpaulin Skin
Transition Engineer
I will cure the world of this plague of hope...
Posts: 247
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Post by Mike on Oct 4, 2007 19:54:00 GMT
I found some old interviews on my old PC today. God, do we talk a load of bollocks or what..?! By "we" I of course mean "me". I've only browsed through these but there's some fairly embarassing stuff in there; for a start, I think I make some arsey comments about a few bands I have nothing but respect for (and some who are toss and deserve a bit of mudslinging). Try and spot which ones are which...
PAGAN ZINE
1- Story of the band Brooke: Me and Mike started jamming in late ’99 in a band called Minethorn which was sort of a death/black metal hybrid. For whatever reason, that band dissolved and in the downtime Mike created the Axis demo and asked me to do bass and vocals. That demo got a few positive reviews, which led us to be signed to Rage of Achilles for the release of the first album. Mike: Axis has evolved a great deal since the band began at the end of 2001, in directions that were initially unexpected but have very much come to dominate the sound. If you listen to our first embryonic stumbles into TAOP’s world then you’ll find little more than some inarticulate stabs of rage and disgust that bear only trace amounts of the scope and cinematic dimension that we’d later pursue. As we developed, the initial overwhelming hate and biliousness we were trying to vent started to develop a filmic backdrop, and a growing obsession with exploring the dimensions of fear. The dark ambient elements grew out of that and very quickly swallowed our prior sound, leaving little trace. Adding the “The” to our name marks the turning point where modern Axis was born, turning from a relatively straightforward metal band to the kind of evocative, unified metal-bolstered-ambient that we’ve been trying to do ever since. Conventional songwriting was shouldered aside in favour of sculpting sonic environments, and the concepts became far more elaborate, psychologically charged and arranged with a notion of cinematic narrative. If there’s anything that’s characterised Axis continuously throughout our history it’s a desire to provoke the most visceral emotional reactions possible with our music. The other continuous principle in our work is to act completely on instinct through the writing process, trying to trawl our own subconscious and draw out the darkest fears; we’ve always felt to an extent directed by something greater, and that our creative process is ultimately ritualistic, a communion with an unknown darkness that uses us as tools to show the world what it may become. Other bands may say similar things and call it Satan; but for us that name is an obsolete, simplistic and misleading buzzword that’s totally infected by the shortcomings of humanity. Our approach is quite simply to appreciate a genuine sense of power within a certain kind of darkness that preys on certain parts of the human imagination.
2- Since your beginning you are interested with Silent hill mythology. Why this ? cause of the traumatic stories or the creatures ?
Brooke: SH really grabbed us because of its uniqueness the way that all elements in the game transcend to create more than the sum of the parts, everything is so considered and well put together that the whole experience becomes enveloping. The monsters for example are not just designed to look gross but each one has significant meaning to the game that usually adds a layer of horror on its own.
Mike: The SH series is quite simply brilliant art. The reason that it’s had such a great impact on us was that it closely mirrors the kind of work that we ourselves have always had the desire to make. I don’t think it’s right to say that Silent Hill inspired us in the sense that it exposed us to completely unfamiliar ideas and that we’ve been striving to recreate it; we’ve been thinking of these concepts since before SH came out, it’s just that SH has provided exemplary lessons in how to execute such ideas and it’s just such a beautiful encapsulation of the precise themes that interest us. It can be astounding to discover something that’s so acutely likeminded and compatible with your tastes, to give your own ideas additional validation and make you realise how great these concepts can be and how far they can be taken. That’s how we feel about Silent Hill; like explorers in the same field, almost contemporaries in terms of our working methods and aesthetic ambitions, but the fact that they’re so damn impeccable about it means it can’t help but seem like we’re just trailing along behind them sometimes.
3- Has the work of Akira Yamaoka an influence on you ? Brooke: Definitely so, the other half of the Axis demo was an ambient project called Pulse Fear which was more influenced by his work than Axis was at the time, but the two have become entwined. One of the reasons SH is so effective is because of the atmospheres in the music and sound design and we wanted to achieve something as powerful with Axis.
Mike: Definitely, but it’s a very different matter to construct such evocative and eerie ambient accompaniments to environments occurrences that appear explicitly on a screen to working through the more abstract medium of pure music. I think it’s wrong to over-assert the importance of his work to us because our approach to metal and integrating the ambient sounds into our characteristic riffing style is something that’s unique to us. We are fond of dropping in references and sonic “salutes” to Yamaoka though, he has indubitably had a great impact on us even if we’ve transmuted that impact into something distinctly our own. The use of sirens and radio static are our principle ways of paying homage to SH.
3- Like the most of gamers, is SH 2 your favourite ?
Brooke: I think they are all great in different ways but number 2 definitely has a special place for us, it’s had my favourite story so far, definitely.
Mike: Likewise, SH2 is probably my favourite. It’s the extra emphasis on the human drama that makes it that extra bit compelling, it engages you emotionally on a deeper level and you become more psychologically connected with the characters. The fact that the horror is a little more subtle and downplayed gives it a little more of a dread-inducing edge, too. All this said, there’s nothing quite like the original impact of playing the first one for the first time, and the fact that it has noticeably dated in technological terms does absolutely nothing to diminish its innate terror, which is not something you can say for many games. A lot of people forget, in light of the more sophisticated sequels, just how fresh and astonishing the first one was. The third one is equally masterful, but SH2 still retains the edge.
4- And your opinion on the last opus ? Really under the 3 first…
Brooke: If you mean SH4 then I think that because it wasn’t meant to be another SH game just something separate in the same universe, like a spin off, so that’s maybe why it didn’t stand up as well against the others, though its still a great game. Those ghosts…man, they where awesome, they remind me of Blut Aus Nord’s music. Mike: I think SH4 is very much undeservedly maligned. It may not be as compelling a game as the previous three but it was a bold attempt to expand the series and showed an uncompromising intent to experiment and keep the series moving. It may have been ultimately flawed, but there’s still so much to it that maintains the breathtaking Silent Hill magic. Many of the touches are fantastic, conceptually it’s very intriguing and if the gameplay seems a little crude, the atmosphere and vision is still ultimately intact. The results may have been unbalanced and inconsistent but I think it deserves a lot more respect than it’s got from the supposed “hardcore” fans, who mostly seem to display the same myopic, self-satisfied bleating that infects scenesters everywhere. Ultimately it’s been the victim of overly restrictive schedules, pressures from the parent company to keep the market ticking over at the expense of development time, and the smallmindedness that you find attached to any “cult” audience. I stand by it 100%, but at the same time I’m very heartened by Team Silent’s self-criticisms and their foreshadowing of the next game (hinting at a return to the uncompromising artistry of the SH2 period).
5- Is the work of AOP the __expression of your inner SH? How could appear your monsters ?
Brooke: To an extent, we certainly put the dark part of ourselves if you like into the music, a lot of rage and frustration and suchlike, but at the same time it’s just as much of the external wrongness of the outside world. If I was an SH monster I couldn’t tell you what I would look like but it would definitely involve bloody puss ridden bandages, rusted metal meshing, suppurating rotten flesh and vomit.
Mike: As I was detailing before, we have a lot of the same obsessions and tastes as the SH team, so in the sense that TAOP explores the nature of fear, psychological horror and attempts to represent our own subconscious sense of darkness, isolation, repulsion, claustrophobia and the like, then I suppose it is. If I was an SH monster, I think I’d be one that’s heard yet not seen, a distant scurrying in catacombs below or an unsettling squirming behind closed doors, or something like that.
7- You are mixing metal with ambiant/Indus sounds, is it easy to make ?
Brooke: Depends on how you mean easy really, it’s easy to come up with metal riffs and a load of sounds then just lump them together in a mess, but the hard part comes with crafting it all together into a flowing, coherent, seamless whole and that’s what we’re trying to do, meld them both together.
Mike: Superficially easy, instinctive and natural, but in practice a psychologically exhausting and horrible ordeal. Coming up with the basic sounds is not difficult but its getting them to match up with the sounds, textures, smells and other sensations that won’t leave us alone until we’ve got them exactly in sync. Our detractors would probably say that it must be ridiculously easy because all we make are silly noises, and just bash our guitars indiscriminately with a few random squeals thrown in, but it’s literally a case of trying to represent a whole other, nightmarish world through sound, and as long as we feel that we can “see” it, and have exorcised it from our own brains, then that’s the important thing. 8- Are the ambiant sounds the best way to create so darker climax ?
Brooke: Definitely for us they are, there are certain sounds and atmospheres that we are trying to create that are just not possible to attain on a guitar.
Mike: If you’re trying to create a sonic environment, the most logical thing to do is to use identifiable, recognisable sounds from an environment, metal straining, broken glass grinding and the like. What brings the darkness to life is counter-pointing these ostensibly prosaic sounds with more abstract and manipulated ones: it puts you in a difficult psychological position where you have to either accept that the abstract sounds are as “accountable” in the environment as the real ones, and therefore force your imagination to recreate whatever might make such horrible sounds, or to question the reality of the real sounds and give up on trying to account for the environment logically altogether. Either is inevitably disorientating and provokes an interesting psychological reaction. There is, of course, a third option, which is just to dismiss the lot as a load of crap, and that’s one that many listeners and reviewers have taken. That’s their business, though, and not our concern. In Silent Hill, they’ve got that additional spatial option where the sounds made can be accounted for by the movements of something. There’s a creature on SH3 whose death throes sound like they’re derived from several overlying recordings of someone unblocking a sink, but with the visual stimulus present the mind automatically makes the more visible connection and has difficulty discriminating the fact that the sound and image are separately created and orchestrated together. It just means that if we want to create a similar effect we have to work a little harder, but from what a few people have told me they’ve imagined some really complex and inventive things to go with our sounds, and that’s really satisfying for us. We’re definitely an interactive band in that respect, like Lynch films have this interactive element; the audience bears at least some of the responsibility of deciding what’s going on and what effect it has on them.
9- Metal aspect is limited to the essential, dark elements are on the first plan, will you not abandoned the metal parts for a more atmospheric sounds in the near future or do you want to stay metal ?
Brooke: I think the real sound of Axis is a combination of the metal and ambient so I don’t foresee the metal element being dropped any time soon, it’s one of the things that make us unique, the blend of metal and ambience in the way we do it.
Mike: I think the 50-50 balance we’ve struck on “Deleted Scenes” is just about right for keeping our work dynamic and varied, though if we deviate from this pattern in future then it’ll only be because we think the material requires it. To be honest, I think if we got to the stage where Axis became pure ambient, that would be the end of the project, because we’d have exhausted our metal ideas. Brooke is exactly right there saying that Axis thrives on the chemistry between metal and ambient, and the fundaments of our sonic character grow out of that reaction. Our goal is to unify the styles, not to filter one out in favour of the other.
10- You have made some rehearsals for upcoming shows. What ould we hope from this show? Particular visual, more metallic sound ?
Brooke: I can’t really comment much on what to expect as we don’t really know that much ourselves. For the first shows there probably won’t be much in the way of stage visuals but once we know Axis will work live then chances are we will start doing something visual, obviously there won’t be any corpse paint, inverted crosses and spikes! We should be able to replicate the albums sound-wise live as we now have someone to orchestrate the noise and ambience, we’re going to try and create something much more visceral live and there will be some improvisation on the ambient front.
Mike: There’s little I can really add to that, suffice to say that if we had the budget to achieve a tenth of the sort of ideas we have, it’d be a show to remember.
11- Actually my favourite work from you is your mcd physical hillucinations, but why have you only made 666 copies, now it’s really hard to find it. Would it be reedited ?
Brooke: It was originally meant to be a split E.P. with Blut Aus Nord but due to logistics that never came about, so Code released it as the limited E.P. as a separate thing to the main contract. I don’t imagine it being re-released anytime soon or even ever to be honest I quite like having a little hard to find E.P. for folks to dig out.
Mike: The limitation was purely due to budgeting and distribution restrictions, it was the only way to do it without it being a massive loss for Code. Our fanbase has never been so extensive that I can really imagine a load of people clamouring over it as a much sought-after rarity, as far as I’m aware a year on from release those 666 still aren’t sold out. It’s a really important, special and personal release for us, and we feel this is a good way to respect that particular closeness we have with it; there’s a lot of suffering in there that’s a bit too private to share with too large an audience.
12- You qualify your cds “therapyâ€, is it therapy only for the listeners or for you too ?
Brooke: A little of both really, it’s always very fraught but eventually therapeutic to work on Axis material, there is definitely a sense of relief and accomplishment when an album is finished and I would like to think that the listeners get some thing out of the experience other than just hearing music.
Mike: It’s a really visceral catharsis for us, exhausting on many levels. I wouldn’t call it therapy, exactly, more a quasi-religious ecstasy that just comes upon us and drains us mercilessly of everything we have to give. It’s true that psychological themes have come to the forefront of our work, but if there’s therapy there then no one needs to be told that it’s a pretty damn perverse approach to therapy! Having studied psychology at university I take a lot of simple pleasure out of exploring the nature of mental illness and disorder and providing this strange and sardonic inversion of my training. Someone on a message board called us the world’s only psychiatric black metal band, and while I personally feel there’s a lot wrong with that description, it is rather nicely put.
13- Have you begin to work on material for the next opus ? How will it sounds ?
Brooke: We have been brainstorming some ideas and probing the general feel of things but nothing is definite yet, it’s just too early to say, aside from the live shows we are enjoying a bit of a break from Axis material, we both have various things to work on in the mean time. The first album by my other band Mine[thorn] is nearing completion and that also has Axis bassist Ian in it and is due for release late this year or early next, Mike has his projects and Dan is recording with Bal-Sagoth for their next album.
Mike: A lot of ideas are starting to circulate, the motivation is building up, and greater resources than ever before are at our fingertips. We can already see that things can be taken much further and done much better than we have before, so it’s only a matter of time before we start our next work. How long the process will take to complete it is another matter, but the ambivalent truth is that the Axis never leaves us alone for too long…
14- thanx very much for your answers, I let you to conclude ?
Brooke:…Remember its never over…
Mike: We’re not nearly far enough into the dark yet.
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Mike
Tarpaulin Skin
Transition Engineer
I will cure the world of this plague of hope...
Posts: 247
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Post by Mike on Oct 4, 2007 19:54:27 GMT
EUTK ZINE
Please introduce AOP and your history.
Mike: Axis of Perdition formed at the end of 2001/beginning of 2002 when I wrote and recorded three tracks of ugly, discordant black metal as a diversion from my main band at the time. The singer from that band, Brooke, joined as vocalist during the recording session, completing the initial lineup. Those three tracks became the "Corridors" demo which attracted the attention of Rage of Achilles Records, who signed us for our debut album "The Ichneumon Method", which expanded on the brutal and chaotic direction of the demo into a far more expansive, cinematic style that moved us quickly away from our black metal origins into more psychedelic, anime-influenced territory with rudimentary forays into dark ambient. Following an amicable split from Rage of Achilles, we changed the name slightly to The Axis Of Perdition and moved to increase our dark ambient elements into a constituent part of our sound rather than an accessory; we want to create a unified style that uses dark ambient and extreme metal textures interchangeably in cultivating a vivid and psychologically disturbing atmosphere based on our tastes in horror. "Physical Illucinations In The Sewer of Xuchilbara (The Red God)" is the first fruits of this direction, on our new label Code666. We have now expanded the lineup to include a bassist and drummer, though the latter could not participate in the new album due to a back injury. This is the first album of AOP I listen to. What is changed respect your previous album?
Mike: "The Ichneumon Method" was a very divided album, with the then-embryonic aesthetics and intentions of Axis mixing uneasily with ideas from our previous collaborations. Many of the influences and styles that were implemented overtly on the first album are no longer a feature of the band's modern incarnation, such as the explicitly Lovecraftian references, science fiction motifs and the general apocalyptic feeling. Also, the dark ambient which has become such a lynchpin of our still was little more than a garnish on an otherwise fairly straightforward brutal metal record. Since then, we've focused specifically on a more human feel, the bewilderment and terror of a person trapped in a nightmare world, while sonically representing that world with a mixture of twisted metal and prominent ambient textures. With "Physical Illucinations", horror and atmosphere became the main concerns more than ever before, and we have acknowledged the overbearing influence the Silent Hill series has had on us. Our writing style has not changed especially between cds, but we have become far more improvisational and experimental, and trusting to instinct - on "The Ichneumon Method", certain parts suffer from a feeling of being too overworked and a lack of spontaneity and magic. Our work has also become far more psychologically and emotionally exhausting to create, and I believe has all the more vitality for that. We have a kind of spiritual faith in Axis, as it always seems to find the right ideas and the right resolution to problems at the right time, sometimes to an unnerving degree. We don't really feel in control of how the Axis is growing anymore, and that's both worrying and exhilarating, and ultimately very draining. The Axis takes everything out of us nowadays, and "Physical Illucinations" is a testament to this dedication, particularly in the harrowing vocal performance.
Your sound could be defined as black/industrial, but the way you made it seems to be really chilling. Dark/ambient and noise are other components of your sound, so in the end black metal is only a minority influence, or at least this is my opinion. How much do you feel close to black metal concept?
Mike: Personally, I feel that we're essentially a dark ambient band that uses extreme metal as one of the textures in its canon. The direction of the music and aesthetics of the band are rigidly governed by our dark ambient work, and the metal is constructed to support that rather than vice versa. Our goal is to create an atmosphere so lucid as to draw the listener into the hellish world of the music, to disorientate them, to psychologically and emotionally shake them up, and to make them wonder what might've escaped from the speakers or from their subconscious when the music has ended. To do this, the music needs to be as cinematic as possible and there is no room for following conventional song structures, adding a rock'n'roll feel, catchy riffs and the like; the riffs and everything else are there to abstractly suggest the presence of a fully dimensioned environment within the sound. This agenda is obviously very distinct from the angle of ideological propaganda and misanthropy that black metal depends on, so while I do appreciate black metal and it has its place in my personality, I think it's simply inappropriate to apply it to AOP, though the demo could be considered a work of BM.
A great inspiration is industrial civility of your daily reality. It was the same for Godflesh. May you deepen for us your thoughts about that civility and about your daily reality?
Mike: Axis is definitely all about urban horror, the repulsion and attraction of derelict and abandoned buildings, decay and rust, as in the Silent Hill series. The concept of the Axis is that such strange and eerie places reflect an incursion by a darker reality on our own at that spot, like how a ruined house or hospital can seem to accumulate human negativity and become so strange and at the same time alluring in their squalor. Anyone unlucky enough to wander into such a spot might find themselves trapped in an increasingly disturbing unreality where their claustrophobic surroundings seem to be descending into a kind of hell, and one that is aware of them and that progressively recreates their personal nightmare. The lyrics of our songs tend to involve the semi-coherent musings and reactions of a person trapped in such a place for real, particularly on the new album which is a concept piece about an unnamed protagonist who wakes up to find himself unaccountably trapped in labyrinthine, nightmarish parody of a hospital. Again, this is very much influenced by the Silent Hill series and we make no secret of that. It could follow that this is just beginning of a vast-scale degradation that would see our whole reality devoured by something darker; humanity's instinctive abuse and neglect of the world could almost be seen as an unconscious ritual preparation by the entire race for this coming darkness. The centre of this darkness, the source of the contortion, is what we call The Axis Of Perdition and it's that that we're named for. Our music is like a wordless sermon in praise of the dark, and a ritual summons calling it forth. That's the concept and artistic premise of our work anyway - the background to the "plot", as it were. This kind of fascination with urban decay is definitely something that has come from growing up and living in Middlesbrough. Some of the nastier, most neglected parts of the town seem to develop a palpable sense of unreality, until you're worried what might be behind all the boarded up windows in the abandoned houses, worried that a few wrong turns and you might wander unsuspectingly into some weird cul-de-sac of sane reality that is slowly being submerged in darkness. A lot of the time when we're working on material, we have specific nearby locations in mind, places where we have been and our own freaky experiences there. For example, there's an abandoned domestic care institution literally around the corner from the house where we've recorded all our releases, and every time I walk past it my imagination is crowded by the unsettling things that might be behind those mesh windows. It's a fascination that's always been with me and there's always inspiration around if we simply keep our eyes open. In terms of our day to day encounters with other people, there's always far more human detritus staggering around than any sane person can possibly stomach.
May you speak about mcd’s lyrics?
Mike: As it's Brooke's prerogative to discuss the lyrics, I'll let him take care of this one...
I know you’re not interested in politic or religion, while black metal is strongly opposite to religion and other institutions of the system. Why this choose?
Mike: We're too engrossed in our own concepts to be interested in politics or religion. We're entirely concerned with horror, creating a frightening atmosphere and leading the listener through a welter of cinematic imagery and that just doesn't leave space for a getting on the soapbox to harangue the proletariat, or traditional blasphemy in the orthodox satanic mould. The majority of the concerns of black metal just aren't relevant to the work we're doing. If we see fit to use religious or political motifs then we will, but I can't see it happening anytime soon. Our conceptual complexity and approach to music tends to dictate its own sense of spirituality, and our use of the term hell is strictly in terms of how the human mind can cultivate its personal hell through all manner of conscious and subconscious, personally and culturally acquired fears and objects of disgust, shame, guilt, insanity etc. As in the SH series, any inhuman figures represented in our work are meant as manifestations of the protagonist's inner negativity and traditional satanism/demonology and its related iconography is entirely extraneous except as a helpful starting point for the new listener.
Once I did an interview with your country-mate Akercocke and its damn singer who continuous claim for worshipping Satan all days. Why some so-called black metallers are so stupid? What are your opinions about all that black metal bands deep involved in Satanism?
Mike: I think Satan is mostly a convenient umbrella term for a very disparate range of attitudes nowadays, to the point where its use its almost exclusively emblematic, just as an instantly identifiable icon which nevertheless has little in the way of core values attached to it. Given that the average Satanist can be anything from a orthodox satanist with their beliefs orientated entirely round christian mythology (such as the current "evangelical BM" bands like Deathspell Omega), to a LaVeyan satanist who uses the term only as a badge for a non-conformist, egocentric approach to behaviour, to all kinds of metaphors in between that can be by degrees oblique, intriguing and frankly dodgy, it's hard to comment on it satisfactorily. I think with Akercocke, their satanism is a mixture of genuine practice and marketing technique that I personally find a bit too sensationalist for comfort at times (like turning up to the metal hammer awards in a horse drawn victorian hearse) though they're clearly intelligent, passionate and well-researched in doing so, and I can at least appreciate that. Great entertainers and musicians even if it's not my cup of tea all the time. In the case of a band like Arkhon Infaustus, their more serious approach benefits the material with a great feeling of darkness and power which, regardless of my own beliefs about satanism, I find quite exhilarating. It just comes down to how a band uses their satanism. For my own part, I think the word Satan could be almost too easily applied as a handy emblem for my beliefs, an easy but hugely loose and overgeneralising technique, and that to do so would degrade them and make me entirely vulnerable to preconception and misconception. My beliefs are mostly modelled by my academic training in Psychology and by extension a healthy balance between a very scientific pragmatism and an adaptability to fluctuating knowledge and the impermanence of "facts". Satan is a fun word but ultimately it's just a word, and I personally think it's a redundant one in this day and age.
Anyway, U.K has some good black metal bands as Anal Nathrakh while other bands as Cradle Of Filth deviated their attentions toward different things. What are our opinions about these ands and U.K. black metal scene?
Mike: Cradle of Filth drifted off my radar years ago, and what work of theirs I did like has for the most part aged terribly, and while what they're doing isn't exactly bad, it just doesn't interest me at all. We get compared to Anaal Nathrakh a lot, though the only reasons I can see are ones that are overly general and unacceptable, mostly because we have fast programmed drums, though our guitar work, approach, aesthetics, atmosphere use of ambience bears no relation. I like a handful of Anaal Nathrakh songs but mostly they just bore me [NOTE FROM MIKE OCT 07: The 'Thrakh are good lads who are passionate in their work and think it through with total care and attention. I just get sick of Axis getting compared to them all the time and it brings out my "Meeeooow" side]. The UKBM I'm interested is very underground, on secretive labels, and the bands involved probably wouldn't appreciate me handing out signposts so I'll leave the detective work up to your readers. We're a deliberately isolationist band ourselves, so the happenings and internal politics of the UK scene don't really involve us or engage us. At the end of the day, despite its rather dodgy reputation in the rest of the world, the UK scene is has the same highs and lows and bickering and posturing as every other national scene. The UK artists we identify with are the likes of Esoteric and Godflesh, though what they'd make of us is frankly anybody's guess.
May you anticipate something from your upcoming “Deleted Scenes”?
Mike: "Deleted Scenes From The Transition Hospital" will be released on March 28th. It's our richest, most cinematic, ambient based work yet (there's a thread of noise always present even behind the riffs now). Rather than pulverising the listener with a wall of noise, we're experimenting with subtlety, and the intention is to maintain a sense of all-pervading dread and despair, concentrating on ever-stranger and doomier material (we've discarded the blastbeats completely for this album). The ambient sections are very complex collages of sound and we've gone far further in documenting the full range of prosaic and abstract noises of a fully fledged environment, in this case the different eerie and disturbing areas of the "Transition Hospital". The concept and lyrics refer to an individual who unaccountably wakes up in this place and the progress of the album documents his exploration of the labyrinth, various encounters and locations, growing increasingly frightened by the way in which the place seems to manifest the darkest aspects of all his fears and guilt, culminating in his reaching the centre and uncovering his reasons for being there and coming face to face with his fears made flesh. The experience as a whole is far more intimate and emotionally charged than ever before. As Brooke said to me when delivering the final master, it's a whole heap of Wrong, and it's definitely our finest achievement thus far, though we are incredibly satisfied with "Physical Illucinations".
Do you think it will be a good reason to start a European tour?
Mike: Careful what you wish! There is a good chance that the Axis will be hitting the live stage in this year, with the potential for European dates. Keep your eyes peeled... (Incidentally, I'd love to know where that expression came from, it sounds very painful). I imagine we'll start off doing support slots, of course...
I give you all the time you need to say what you want. Don’t waste it!
Mike: I have one thing to say and one thing only: IT'S NEVER OVER....
Ok, we’re at the end. I please you to greet Eutk.net readers!
Mike: Hi, EUTK readers. I hope you Unjoy AOP. We want to touch your eyeballs....our fingers are *mostly* clean.
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Mike
Tarpaulin Skin
Transition Engineer
I will cure the world of this plague of hope...
Posts: 247
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Post by Mike on Oct 4, 2007 19:55:32 GMT
The overall artistic (not only musical) expression of your band is quite bizarre. What is the most attractive for you on this bizarreness?
Art in general that exists on a knife-edge at the furthest outreaches of acceptability tends to be both divisive and compelling, and offers great potential for manipulating and feeding off the preconceptions of the consumer to cultivate strong emotional and physical reactions. The bizarre side of Axis mainly derives from the joy of exploration into the unknown and to keep surprising and provoking reactions in us as much as anyone else. I think the key characteristic in our music is a continuous conflict between repulsion and attraction, and we try to keep the music full of physical sensations and textures, make it an evocative environment that you could almost touch or taste (while wishing that you couldn’t), but make it something that you can’t help but explore out of simple fascination. The bottom line is that in order to work with a fairly continuous set of materials and keep maintaining a strong feeling you just have to keep challenging yourself, and in Axis, the feeling is everything.
Seems you are very familiar with the musical (and probably lyrical too) expression of „schizo“, „psychotic“ etc. Are you studying, describing, and expressing the states of psychic abnormality and psychic diseases?
The horrific mood of Axis is based on playing with concepts of psychological disorders, yes. Fundamentally, we’re trying to suggest an environment where your perception is not to be trusted and you must continually question your surroundings and the integrity of your sanity. By mixing up identifiable, accountable sounds in our ambient parts, like machine sounds, metal dragging, liquid flowing etc, and contrasting them with processed and manipulated sounds to create the hypothetical sounds of horrible, unearthly things, we’re trying to present the listener with a catch 22 situation: either accept that all the sounds are real, and let your imagination loose in constructing ideas of what could be making the stranger sounds, or decide that none of them are real, and have to question everything that you perceive. This mimics the kind of effect that some psychoses and disorders can have on people, and the deep dread and fear that can come with not being able to rely on your senses to tell you what is real any more, which is undoubtedly very frightening. If the listener is interacting with the music wholeheartedly then either approach should have the kind of unnerving effect that we’re trying to create, but if you can accept the unreality and allow your mind to just run free with it, then I think that’s a lot more enriching and you’ll find the music more rewarding. The act of listening to Axis is definitely interactive and what you get out of the music is going to depend on what you bring to it in the first place.
How do you define normality? Do you consider yourself as normal? (Tell me why – even if you think you aren’t :-)
That’s a tough one. I think a lot of people would consider it abnormal to dwell on the things that go into Axis as intensively and obsessively as we do, but I think to be able to appreciate the sheer power and inherent fascination of the things that inspire us is really a blessing. We’re just really passionate about music and horror and doing our best to unify the two. To be honest, I think to just submit to the grey 9 to 5 routine that society tries to impose on you and stick to the blandest, most predictable and most contrived forms of lowest-common-denominator art that lots of people seem to be content with and consider to be the benchmarks of “normal” and “acceptable” is completely abnormal. We’re in a wealthy and privileged society with all our needs essentially catered for, so people have no excuse not to find things to be passionate about and not try and challenge themselves. When you think of all the great art and thought that has come out of suffering and upheaval in life and the world, that so many people are only capable of homogenous sludge in times of prosperity is pretty sickening.
Do you study your own „inside“, your mind, psychic states etc.?
Definitely. What probably keeps Axis compelling to us and others is the fact that we’re developing our work by trying to shock ourselves, explore our own fears and consciousness, and make ourselves feel the visceral sensations and emotions we trying to create. We have to put faith in our own reactions and consistently try and intensify the impact the music has on us as listeners ourselves, it keeps things very honest, instinctive and uncontrived. With this kind of music, as soon as you try and over-think and try and manipulate things too much you can extinguish the spirit of it all too easily.
I have only the promo CD without lyrics, can you please briefly tell us the main story behind „Deleted Scenes“, and how do you develop the basic idea, story...?
Essentially, “Deleted Scenes” concerns an unnamed protagonist, who wakes up in a dark, claustrophobic, derelict building that initially appears to be an abandoned hospital, and which he appears to be completely trapped in. Alone and completely unable to remember how he came to be there, his only choice is to try and explore the place and find the way out. The further in he goes, the more dark, dank and derelict the place becomes, growing filthier and more treacherous to navigate. He’s not alone and that there are…things nearby, observing him, stalking him. Is the place even like a hospital any longer, is it becoming a distorted and horrific labyrinth that makes no sense and couldn’t possibly exist in a sane reality? His mental state deteriorates, but he has to keep moving, to escape, and to find out ultimately what he’s doing there, even if the knowledge destroys his mind. Why he’s there, what he encounters on the journey and all the details I’ll leave to your imagination. If we gave you too much information it probably wouldn’t engage you as much.
Are you inspired and familiar by the artists like von Trier or Lynch whose feeling (and probably the milieu or background, which they describe) is probably near to yours? The word “scenes” evokes the close relation to some movies.
Lynch, very much so. The lounge music buried under the static and noises at the end of “Pendulum Prey” is a minor homage to Lynch’s work, as you could probably have guessed. Lynch’s attention to detail, the sheer emotional gravity of his films, uncompromising devotion to his art and a vision that can only be called breathtaking, are all a great inspiration for anyone who takes their work seriously. Like Lynch though, you’ll be hard pressed to get us to explain our work in too much detail, because the mystery preserves something that might be lost otherwise. I’ve heard great things about Von Trier’s “Riget”, and that’s on my list of things to check out.
Why are these (your) scenes “deleted”?
That’s one of the things we’d prefer you to decide on for yourself.
From which state to which state is occurring the “transition”? Is it something like from “being” to “non-being” (or another state)?
That could be one. The transition doesn’t have to mean to move from one concrete state to another as much as to illustrate the process of continuous change, evolution and devolution. It could be the distortion of the human mind and body into something darker under the influence of the Axis, equally it could describe how the apparent “hospital” illustrated in the story slowly becomes something else. It could be any change in your perceptions before, during and after listening to the album. I don’t want to set any of these, or any other explanation, in concrete for you anyway. We have our own explanations, of course, but who’s to say ours are necessarily more valid than yours? As I was saying earlier, at best listening to Axis should be an interactive experience between music and listener and in that context then you’re free to draw your own conclusions however you see fit.
Do you work with your topics in the more abstract or imaginative way (is your creativity for you a way to transcend, f. ex.?), or in the contrary, you catch the real problems of the real world?
We’re interested in the real world to the extent that we can take inspiration from real derelict environments, real dark places, genuine psychopathology, psychogeography, and urban mythology and the like. As for world problems, politics, and the black and white realities of life, we’re not really concerned with that at all. Our work is set in an abstract, imaginative horror environment that behaves to the rules we set it and derives from film and literature in the like, so it’s set in deliberate contrast to, and in preference to, the real world. The imagination is so much more fertile and rich in possibility, to keep our feet “on the ground” would be boring. I’m not keen on the word escapism, but it covers a lot of what I’m trying to say.
Are you interested in the world of hospitals (or even mental hospitals, bedlams)? Did you visit often these places to search for some inspiration?
Real exploration of derelict environments, and recording found sounds on location is becoming a greater part of Axis all the time. To keep focus on creating visceral, textural sounds and stimulate ourselves there’s nothing better than looking round such places. Derelict buildings, particularly asylums and the like are just that evocative, exciting, enticing and fascinating that I could never see enough of them, they’re just endlessly beguiling and powerful. Seeing a building in that state seems to intensify the emotion and atmosphere within it to such a degree that they’re absolutely perfect backdrops for exploring the repulsion vs. attraction paradigm that I mentioned earlier. They’re the postmodern equivalent of ruins, or like naturally evolving sculpture, and I think they should be celebrated as such, with respect rather than being cordoned off, hushed up and torn down by a society obsessed with new shiny things, pretending nothing exists but the bright and new and comfortable, unconcerned by learning from the changes that it’s been through and the realities of urban decay.
The atmosphere of your songs is sometimes quite eschatological. Are you interested about the “human last things”, palliative care, “end of the road”, life after death? How do you imagine the end of being – is it definitive?
Our first album dealt with apocalyptic themes as much as we wanted to, our long term interests are in more low key, idiosyncratic, person-centred “stories”. We’re interested in death in the context of how fear can be promoted and cultivated by threat of death and especially about the intrinsic human fear of the unknown, of which death is foremost. So while I can say death is an important tool to Axis, we’re focused on creating these frightening stories first and foremost so we use it as and when the story requires it, not as an object on its own, if you see what I mean. We certainly don’t dwell on it in the more fundamental sense that say, so-called “suicide BM” bands do.
Does some philosophical doctrine, direction or “school” influence you? If yes, then which one and how?
Nothing in particular philosophically, no. It’s just not the area we’re working in, we’re not promoting a specific ideology. All our artistic concerns are bound up in stimulating fear, presenting evocative scenarios and stories for the listeners to involve themselves in, and exploring dread and the unearthly through psychological, psychogeographical and cinematic methodologies. This is one of many reasons why people are hugely wrong to call us “black metal”, as we’re not operating within that philosophical domain at all. Most people seem to either ignore or actively disbelieve in this viewpoint, and call us black metal anyway, but understanding the relevance of ideological propaganda and our lack of it is something you’d think would be profoundly obvious to anyone who knew anything about what black metal is.
Are the feelings very important for you? Which one? I feel fear, anxiety, incertitude and uncomfortability in your music. What is your feeling from it? In the same time this anxiety is very abstract. Can you describe more the general and main mood of your music?
As I said before, the feeling is everything. Without repeating myself too much, it’s ultimately fear in all its different forms and degrees of subtlety and uniquely different impacts that we’re exploring. We want the sounds to stimulate the senses and travel deep into the strange territories between repulsion and fascination. The other feelings you cite are things we’d consider within this broad model of fear, and the fear derives from this sense of psychological uncertainty, the constant need to question the evidence of the senses and the integrity of the mind, the descent into the chaos, darkness and confusion of what could either be a diseased mind or a nightmare world of genuine horror, or both.
Is this musical anxiety and fear closely connected with the nowadays situation in the world? And is your music or lyrics a mirror (or reflection) of this situation around?
No.
Are you very familiar with the dark ambient and industrial music? More precisely – do you think Axis Of Perdition is still more about metal, or more about non-metal (ambient etc.) music? Sometimes I am not sure :-)
Axis is probably best described as a dark ambient band that uses metal as part of a range of textures. The metal parts are developed and executed with an ambient sense of aesthetics and structures, emphasising continuous flow and maintaining mood rather than trying to satisfy pop sensibilities with catchy hooks and the like. The overall idea is to unify dark ambient and metal into a style that’s both and neither. Most of the criticism we get is from people who are either unable to accept that we’re not trying to win them over within five seconds with a fat riff and play up to their self-satisfied expectations and inability to deviate from comfortable patterns, or think that we’re misguided to try and meld the genres like this and think they know better. Both are quite amusing – in fact the way millions of people the world over think that an internet connection gives them instant authority on any subject is downright hilarious - but it’s not something we waste too much thought on. It’s not our problem. We seem to be getting through to some people though, and for just one person to say that they’ve really been affected and moved by our work is very gratifying and very humbling. Oh, and very weird!
Can you name some of your most inspiring bands? (My tip is something between Emperor and In Slaughter Natives...)
In Slaughter Natives are good but we don’t really take any influence from them for Axis. There’s loads of ambient stuff that has been important before and/or that is influencing me now though, too much to list. Maeror Tri’s “Emotional Engramm” has always been a huge inspiration, though on the surface there are little similarities. It’s a great album though, and most importantly it was my first ambient album and opened me up to a whole new world of musical possibilities. After that, Megaptera, Raison D’etre, Sephiroth, and recently Atrium Carceri and Gruntsplatter have all played their parts. The other really big influences on our ambient sections is simply incidental ambient/noise used in horror cinema, and especially in the Silent Hill series of games. In terms of metal, Emperor were an influence in the beginning, Blut Aus Nord have been a huge influence, and Meshuggah too, but mostly the more we’ve built up a body of work the more we’ve derived inspiration and ideas just by reviewing our previous work and thinking about different places we can take the style that we’ve personally developed. Just recently I’ve been enjoying the new Deathspell Omega, too, though whether this’ll impact on the band, I don’t know.
What do you think about the current so-called post-black wave, where your band is placed too, amongst the acts like Anaal Nathrakh, Blut Aus Nord, Aborym etc.?
I think post-black metal is a pretty crap umbrella term, really. There’s no unifying philosophy or style to the bands who get called post-black metal, and some (I put Axis forward as a particular example) have no relation to black metal anyway. It just seems a lazy and unjustified way of tidying up what’s perceived to be a cluttered scene, as if it were as simple as that. I think there’s very little comparison to be made between any of the above bands, and of the three Blut Aus Nord are the only one that we feel any kind of artistic and aesthetic kinship with. The other two are decent bands but I don’t see where the comparisons fit together except out of sheer laziness and inattention and I should think the other bands don’t appreciate it any more than I do. These sort of meaningless and half-baked genre ideas are really something to be actively discouraged as much as possible.
18. Do you have an idea, how your musical evolution (or revolution) will continue? Can you tell us something about the forthcoming material, if you prepare it yet?
No idea, really? Not a clue. We’re just going to keep at what we’ve already been doing, as before, but trying to challenge ourselves, do everything better, and make the experience even more vivid and engaging and detailed than before. I do feel at the moment that we found about the right balance on “Deleted Scenes” with it being a straight 50-50 split between metal and ambient, so provisionally I suppose that’s something that might stay the same on the next one. Apart from that, we’re only just starting to think about the next album now, so it’s at such an embryonic stage that there’s really nothing to tell except that it’ll be Axis again, only more so!
19. Many thanx for your answers, if I forgot to ask to something important, here is your place…
Cheers for the interview, and remember: It’s never over…
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Mike
Tarpaulin Skin
Transition Engineer
I will cure the world of this plague of hope...
Posts: 247
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Post by Mike on Oct 4, 2007 19:56:48 GMT
GRIND ZONE
1. It’s passed just a short time since you released the EP. What kind of responses did you get for it? Are you still satisfied with the EP and with the feedback from the audience and the magazines?
Brooke: The EP was fantastic for us; it was the first release where we even came close to what we want to achieve so whilst in terms of production quality it may not hold up against the new ones, the material it contains certainly does. The press we got was great, people either loved it or just could not seem to understand it at all and deemed it worthless because they could not fit it into the pre-concieved ideas of what a song or music should be. Either response is really a vindication for us.
Mike: The difference in satisfaction between the EP and “The Ichneumon Method” was enormous; I think that with our debut album we were unsure where our strengths lay and what the best direction was, and consequently the material is characterised by floundering. I think this disorientation added to the atmosphere of it, but it wasn’t quite the right ‘type’ of disorientation. The EP is the soundtrack to us finding our identity and capitalising on it artistically, which is why it turned out to be a hundred times as horrific and critically divisive as our previous work. The depth of the material took on a quasi-spiritual sense of gravitas for us and I think that that pushed our audience into far more extreme (and satisfying) reactions.
2. This is the second release for our italian Code666. Are you happy with how it is working for you?
Ian: It seems to be working fine for me personally and the label are doing a great job with this release even though we had a few minor setbacks. Brooke: They did a great job with the EP seeing as originally it was meant to have been released a year ago on a different label (scheduling issues forced the switch so no bad blood there). Code666 have been very supportive towards us which has been great given that we are quite an eccentric band to work with and that there have been so many near misses with disaster along the way with this album, I’m surprised we have not driven them mad.
Mike: Emi and Code666 have demonstrated a tremendous tolerance for our completely dysfunctional work habits and a great deal of support throughout the making of an album that for us was very difficult, challenging and exhausting to put together. I feel very comfortable with Axis occupying a space on Code666’s illustrious roster, as every band appears to have a few screws loose too, and none fail to be less than engrossing.
3. Is there a sort of link between the EP and the new album? I ask you this beacuse I feel a strong link between the two works, mostly in the atmospheres…
Ian: There is a link between the two, yes, with it being the same sort of environment and eerieness but in seperate locations.
Brooke: Yes very much so, the EP and new album both take place in the same environment so to speak, a wretched twisted shadow of our world where reality has been warped by some malignancy that is slowly seeping into our own. The EP was someone stumbling into this place of blood and rust after becoming lost within the labrynthine twists of urban dereliction and decaying tenements where we all grew up. The album however is someone waking up to find themselves inexplicably trapped witinh a vast, maze-like, decaying mental hospital, travelling further in, slowly discovering how they came to be there.
Mike: In some respects “Physical...” was a test-ground for projected ideas and forms that only take proper shape on “Deleted Scenes...”, so they’re most certainly linked in that way, and of course much of the composition took place in relatively close space of time so the evolution is perhaps clearer from the EP to “Deleted Scenes...” than from “Ichneumon” to the EP. The principle difference in terms of the new album is that we’ve applied a narrative structure and an all-encompassing context; the titles and artwork hint at this disturbing journey of dread, terror, isolation, claustrophobia and the dark side of self-discovery that the protagonist in the lyrics makes. That said, we didn’t want to provide overt notes about the concept or reveal too much about the story as it’s very much the listener’s job to use their imagination, pick up our hints and create their own interpretations, just as it is with a film like “Lost Highway”.
4. Which is the bigger difference between the two works? And why did you choos to release the two work in different periods?
Brooke: The EP was originally written and recorded over a year ago, but various events postponed its release until Code where able to release it last November. The biggest difference is that there are no blast beats on the new album, not a concious decision as such, we just never found a place to put any. The writing had taken a much more focused and cinematic edge, using music not so much to make songs as to illustrate a scene and create a sense of environment. Also in that period our performances, sound design and production techniques have improved vastly, meaning that we can include more elements without the sound turning to mush.
Mike: “Deleted Scenes...” is our first release where everything has been motivated by creating a vivid cinematic experience; even on “Physical...” there were still a few sparse fragments of (comparatively) headbangable, band-orientated riffing. With “Deleted Scenes...” we devoted ourselves wholly to a cinematically derived method of composition, using our metal parts as a dark ambient band might, as textures and angles and constituent parts of the sonic environment that we’re building. We also used much richer, more detailed ambient soundscapes and experimented much more with space and “shaped silences”. The intention is to make the conceptual world of the Axis as vivid and visceral as possible, to create a sense that when you close your eyes while listening, you feel as if you’re submerged in this whole other, darker world that’s frighteningly close and coterminous with our own. As part of this, there aren’t actually any points on the new record where there’s no dark ambient – there’s a continuous thread of evolving sound continuously happening under everything, sometimes just on the edge of hearing.
5. How does an Axis song take life? How do you approach to the composition work?
Ian: As with everything, all it takes is that initial spark of an idea whether it be the surroundings you’re in or what you perceive your music should mean. It’s just what you feel it should be.
Brooke: It varies for each song; there’s always an initial trigger of inspiration, anything from a scene in a film, a line in a book, a random idea, an abandoned building nearby or even the noise an old rusted kitchen utensil makes, but most often we draw inspiration from ourselves and our own imagination. It kind of all self-perpetuates. Once that initial sound is there the rest of the song generally grows from that very quickly.
Mike: The ideas tend to come in their own time and no amount of straining to come up with something or trying to concentrate on something else will dissuade them from it. Usually with each riff idea I tend to improvise and experiment with different shapes, recording a demo version as I go, each individual thread and riff leading naturally into another by instinct. I’m a great believer in narrative flow and continuity in a song, and I hate choppy songwriting where tempos, key signatures and the like jump around, so there’s always a certain linear sense of inevitability and horrible logic to Axis compositions; they’re refined to their most twisted point in order to cause a maximum emotional reaction in the listener. It’s only fair if the music is as psychologically exhausting to listen to as to make, after all!
6. Which is the feeling permeating the new album? Which kind of emotions do you feel while listening your music and which kind of emotion did you want to comunicate by composing music?
Ian: We all have our own emotions of what we feel that this music should generate for us and people who listen to this album, but it’s really up to the listener to determine what it means to them.
Brooke: We don’t really want to imprint our own emotions and such on the listener. Ideally we would like people to listen to the environment we have created, to immerse themselves and experience it for themselves. What came into your mind when you were listening? When we create, a lot of real negativity, emotion, bile and anger go into it especially when I perform vocals, but those are ours and for us alone, we are not the type of people to display those aspects of our lives for sympathy or publicity.
Mike: I think the most common emotional reaction to this new material is dread. The slow pace, claustrophobic ambience and general focus on eerieness rather than brutality give it much more of an unnerving, subtle feeling of fear than the rather more vulgar “smack in the face” approach that we’ve used in the past. I’m not going to discuss the finer points of my own reactions, but I will say that it is our absolute goal to emotionally and psychologically shake up the listener as much as possible, disorientate them, repulse them, engage them in the most visceral manner that we’re capable of. It’s of paramount importance that our listeners are shaken by what we do, and if that means that our audience remains small, idiosyncratic and cultishly devotive, then that’s fine by me. We’re most certainly not catering for the common headbanger down the pub, and as such I think we’d be more properly considered a dark ambient band in aesthetics, approach and goals than a metal band these days.
7. Why did you choose to be a musicist? Which is the cause that push you going on playing with Axis? Is it a sort of catharthic act
Ian: The reason I decided to be a musician was really just basically that I wanted to learn an instrument and I wanted people to hear what I thought I had to offer. I seem to able to do that with Axis which is a good thing for me.
Brooke: I decided to be a musician the moment I saw Iron Maiden on TV! Axis is strange, it wasn’t so much “started” as it just “happened” and by the time we noticed it was too late to stop it. Something that irritates us greatly is when bands through in half-arsed attempts and adding other genres together, like adding an odd bit of sci-fi keyboard and suddenly declaring that they are something new and significant. We are trying to completely meld the ambient/industrial and metal segments together into one seamless whole and this was kind of a reaction to the mentality I previously mentioned, there is so much arrogance and mediocrity especially in the underground that it makes me sick.
Mike: Most bands that are considered “experimental” nowadays are just dabblers with a very faddish, tokenistic approach to using “unconventional” elements in their music. We want our music to unify metal and ambient completely, nothing by halves. The majority of bands who claim themselves to be industrial metal use the elements exercise a total apartheid in combining the elements, and the experience of hearing bands like that is like trying to listen to two different records at once, being engaged by neither and concluding with the impression that the band involved is either inept, chronically indecisive or simply unwilling to take any real risks. This isn’t to say that Axis is a pure reaction to these kind of bands, but we were galvanised that little bit more to push ourselves harder by the sheer limpwristed mundanity of much “experimental” metal. As for catharsis, there’s certainly an element of that there, but with each record our music becomes less about our own outbursts of negativity and more about creating a cinematic experience that’s no less visceral, but a lot richer and more imagination-provoking. As for why I started, one day I looked down and was surprised to find a guitar in my hand. I’m not sure how it got there but I’ve had no luck trying to put it down for more than a few minutes at a time since.
8. Would you please try to illustrate the lyrics hidden under the music? What do you talk about with this new album?
Ian: I can’t really begin to illustrate the lyrics that are under the music as it isn’t me that writes them and which for what is left up to the listener to make his own interpretation of them.
Brooke: The lyrics represent the central character’s exploration of the transition hospital and of their own mind as it unravels with each revelation. Again, I wouldn’t want to go into specific detail and would rather the listener come to their own conclusions. That aside, the lyrics do have more personal meanings for ourselves but those are for us alone.
9. Which is the music you mostly listen to at the moment? Is there any band really worth to be payed attention to?
Ian: I am listening to bands like Killswitch Engage and Chimaira at the moment.
Brooke: I’m listening a lot to ‘Sol Niger Within’ by Fredrick Thordendal’s Special Defects and on a related note the new Meshuggah album, as well as ‘Alien’ by Strapping Young Lad, and ‘Figure Number Five’ by Soilwork.
Mike: As ever, I’m trying to listen to a thousand things at once. My recent playlist includes Shining, Torture Wheel, Leviathan, Angelo Badalamenti, Antimatter, Thine, Akira Yamaoka, Blut Aus Nord, Silencer, Maeror Tri, Fantomas, and Nachtmystium among many others.
10. Do you think you could ever play live with Axis? What do you think about the live dimension for your band?
Ian: Definitely, and hopefully in the near future. Hopefully, it will be frightening for the audience as well as eerie and atmospheric at the same time.
Brooke: It’s something that is being worked on and we hope to be playing live by the end of the year. I couldn’t possibly forsee what an Axis live show would entail but if it’s as traumatic for us as recording is then it should at least be ‘interesting’ for the audience.
Mike: You will hear more on this matter sooner or later, all I can say is if we survive rehearsals without going mad we may well be impetuous or misguided enough to try it in front of other people, though what they may make of it I couldn’t say.
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Mike
Tarpaulin Skin
Transition Engineer
I will cure the world of this plague of hope...
Posts: 247
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Post by Mike on Oct 4, 2007 20:13:00 GMT
AN OLDER EUTK INTERVIEW
Please let me know who answers to these questions and try to be exhaustive.
1) Please introduce AOP and your history.
Mike: I formed the Axis Of Perdition in 2002 during a period of inactivity with my then-band Minethorn. I recorded the guitars and programmed the drums for the “Corridors” demo myself and drafted in my Minethorn band-mate Brooke to provide vocals and bass. We created the ambient material together. Finding the material far more engaging and satisfying, I left Minethorn and Brooke placed the project on ice to concentrate on Axis. “Corridors” secured us a deal with Rage of Achilles Records, later that year, and our debut, “The Ichneumon Method”, was released in 2003. Since its release we became acutely aware that this album was a diluted impression of what we wanted Axis to be, held back by the inclusion of old ideas and riffs dating back to the early Minethorn days. In Summer 2003 we set about creating a “pure” Axis release, the half-hour “Physical Illucinations in the Sewer of Xuchilbara” EP, and this is only just getting released now on our new label, Code666 Records. Presently, we are putting the finishing touches to our second album, “Deleted Scenes In The Transition Hospital”. The goal of The Axis of Perdition is to sonically recreate a dark universe of repulsion and contortion, hugely inspired by the work of directors such as David Lynch, authors such as Ramsey Campbell and especially, the “Silent Hill” series. We wish to create the sensation of the listener hearing not just “music” but the complex, quasi-visual sounds of a vivid environment, by melding extreme metal and dark ambient into a single, unified sound that can be defined as both genres yet neither. This “environment” we create is something we feel a spiritual connection towards, a place of nightmare as close as the underside of shadows, and every Axis release is opening the mind further to its contamination.
2) This is the first album of AOP I listen to. What is changed respect your previous album?
Mike: Essentially, it’s only been since our first album “The Ichneumon Method” that we feel the band has come into its own. In hindsight, “Ichneumon” was a compromised and restrained album due to the use of old ideas and motifs from our previous bands that hampered the full expression of the “pure” Axis material. It was a necessary transition for us and now we feel free to completely open ourselves to the Axis and go wherever it wishes to go. Our influences, goals, beliefs and intentions remain the same as before, but we’re only just managing to properly express them through our music with this recent EP release.
3) Your sound could be defined as black/industrial, but the way you made it seems to be really chilling. Dark/ambient and noise are other components of your sound, so in the end black metal is only a minority influence, or at least this is my opinion. How much do you feel close to black metal concept?
Mike: When the demo came out, we considered ourselves black metal but we soon felt that the classification was inappropriate. This is not to say that we feel “above” black metal or that we’ve progressed beyond it, just that the music we do is too different for us to be comfortable. Axis doesn’t have black metal ideology or goals, it’s simply a communion with inner darkness and nightmare that dispenses with antichristian motifs and “realistic” concerns. We prefer to call our non-metal work dark ambient rather than industrial, again to avoid inappropriate connotations. In the booklet to “Ichneumon” we stated that we performed something that there “isn’t words for yet”; this may seem arrogant but the fact is we can’t at present come up with a satisfactory term for a blend of extreme metal and dark-ambient that tries to be a unified sound rather than just chopped up black metal bits and dark ambient bits mixed together without merging.
4) A great inspiration is industrial civility of your daily reality. It was the same for Godflesh. May you deepen for us your thoughts about that civility and about your daily reality?
Mike: Our daily reality is indeed very important to us, but only as a template for the horror material we impose on it. As with the “Silent Hill” games, we’re particularly inspired by decay, dereliction and desolate urban scenes as the basics for creating an oppressive and engaging nightmare environment. If you considered the concept that the atmosphere of a derelict building comes from the normal, “healthy” building existing contiguously with a “hellish” version of that same building, then that’s the kind of horror impression we’re trying to make – as if going deeper into a derelict and ruined environment will eventually lead you out of everyday reality and further into an absolute hell that impinges on that reality. I think it’s the same kind of fascination that you get with the “infiltration” movement; the urges to explore abandoned buildings and allow the dark atmosphere of such places to affect you as much as possible. We just take that a step further by peopling the darkness with a real threat, being trapped in such a place with no escape and “things” from that hell being born, shaped and deformed by your inner fears, guilt and remorse, becoming aware of you. Not an apocalypse – we get called “apocalyptic” too frequently, though it was appropriate at the time of “The Ichneumon Method”, but the manifest of one’s own personal darkness as a nightmare that devours you whole and will never let you free of it again.
5) May you speak about mcd’s lyrics?
Mike: The lyrics are predominantly Brooke’s concern so he’s in a better position to comment on them. All I can say is that the lyrics represent the semi-coherent musings, fears and experiences of a hypothetical character trapped in such a nightmare. If you think about how that repulsive and psychologically exhausting such an ordeal would be, then consider that the final words of the MCD are a repeated, frenzied scream of “I’m coming home! I’m home!” then you can start to put together how we ourselves perceive the hell that we imagine.
6) I know you’re not interested in politic or religion, while black metal is strongly opposite to religion and other institutions of the system. Why this choose?
Mike: Since all our material is about creating our own horror environment, everyday “realistic” concerns are simply irrelevant. We want to plunge the listener into darkness and drown them in repulsion, not give them a social studies lecture, and we wouldn’t blemish our personal darkness with a load of inappropriate upside down crosses and suchlike either. The traditional imagery and lyrical content of black metal just doesn’t fit Axis.
7) Once I did an interview with your country-mate Akercocke and its damn singer who continuous claim for worshipping Satan all days. Why some so-called black metallers are so stupid? What are your opinions about all that black metal bands deep involved in Satanism?
Mike: To be honest, I’ve read a few interviews with bands who’ve delivered a broadly similar message as Axis, but they chose to associate their personal darkness with the word “Satan” in a manner which has nothing to do with conventional Satanism, so in an abstract way it could be little more than a distinction of one’s taste in nomenclature, which I can appreciate even though the term “Satan” really puts me off. The more straightforward, garish and sensationalist satanic bands I can appreciate in a way as long as they’re not too cartoonish, but it’s nothing I’d really associate with.
8) Anyway, U.K has some good black metal bands as Anaal Nathrakh while other bands as Cradle Of Filth deviated their attentions toward different things. What are our opinions about these ands and U.K. black metal scene?
Mike: The UK doesn’t have a unified “scene” as such, but several layers of self-contained “mini-scenes” ranging from the deep underground upwards. The UKBM bands that I listen to are deeply underground and probably wouldn’t thank me for spreading their names around, so I won’t – I enjoy unearthing discoveries on my own too much to give others easy signposts, it’s an under-celebrated pleasure.
9) May you anticipate something from your upcoming “Deleted Scenes”?
Mike: “Deleted Scenes…” will take you…further in. It’s a concept-centred piece about an individual who discovers himself to be in a seemingly abandoned, labyrinthine hospital from which there is no escape. The album documents his exploration of the hospital, going deeper and further in as the place grows more surreal, more nightmarish, and he confronts his inner darkness made flesh in an ordeal of horribly telling self-discovery, culminating in his reaching the centre of the labyrinth and its true meaning. Musically, it’s a lot slower, more tortuous and more ambient orientated than our previous work, we wanted to cultivate an atmosphere of despair and mounting dread that fast, blasting material would simply interfere with and denigrate.
10) Do you think it will be a good reason to start a European tour?
Mike: Nice thought, but our material is becoming ever harder to replicate live. We’re going to do our best to bring the Axis to the stage one day, but how that’ll happen is as yet anybody’s guess.
11) I give you all the time you need to say what you want. Don’t waste it!
Mike: I would warn our listeners and potential listeners: don’t try and anticipate where the Axis is going. The only guarantee is darkness. Don’t come looking for catchy songs, you will only find disorientation, chaos and hell, and if it’s too impenetrable for you, then just stop trying now. I don’t want to come across as patronising or arrogant by saying that, but people (reviewers especially) insist on trying to squash us in with the catchy-songwriting, let’s-go-play-Graspop brigade and criticise our work on those terms, and it’s like complaining that Whitehouse don’t have a mosh-pit anthem. My other advice is that a familiarity with the Silent Hill series will put you nicely in our headspace if you don’t know them already, especially the first three. Not enough people pick up on their enormous influence on our work.
12) Ok, we’re at the end. I please you to greet Eutk.net readers!
Mike: We know where you are now. If it’s your wish to let the darkness in, then we will not be held responsible for the consequences. In a way, we’re sorry, but the fact is it will never stop.
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Mike
Tarpaulin Skin
Transition Engineer
I will cure the world of this plague of hope...
Posts: 247
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Post by Mike on Oct 4, 2007 20:19:20 GMT
AN OLDIE (PRE-PHYSICAL) FROM SOMEWHERE OR OTHER
1. Your native city Middlesbrough is being usually described as center of universities, heavy industries or birthplace of captain James Cook. Could young people do other things there than to study at university, to find job in a factory and during the weekends come to the James Cook-Museum?
Brooke: Not really, it’s a bit of a dead end place. I don’t think anybody really goes to the museum, the last time I went I was still in primary school. Mostly Kids hang out in the streets drinking underage or taking drugs, it’s quite a depressing place and most of the population have no hope of doing anything better or more worthwhile with their lives. People spend their weeks working mainly then getting wasted on the weekend, as the alcohol is quite cheap here that’s pretty easy to do, the weekend bender is as good as most people’s lives get.
Mike: Middlesbrough as a place of industry is really a thing of the past, there’s a lot in the way of chemical works but with the loss of the town’s original metal industry a lot of the area seems purposeless and simply decaying slowly. Like most towns it maintains a strange balance between architectural progression/postmodernism and dereliction, depending on where you go. Obviously, we are particularly drawn to the latter…
2. For example have you ever been the fan of the Middlesbrough Football Club?
Brooke: I think I went to a match when I was just a kid but that was only because people who attended this particular match got free tickets to go to London for a weekend, that was the only reason I went. I’m not a football fan or sports fan in general, it would distract from playing music!
Mike: I’ve never followed sport…
3. How much did your direct neighbourhood influence your musical development or face of Axis of Perdition?
Brooke: A massive part of our inspiration comes from where we grew up and the people we encounter on a daily basis, large parts of Middlesbrough are just full of empty houses that have been shuttered up for years, filled with disgusting, sub-human, degenerate drug addicts, I cannot fully express my contempt and disgust for these ‘people’. Look at our art work and lyrical samples in the album booklet its not that far from the truth. Add to that the fact that there is so much heavy industry in the area, in fact there’s more industry than there is residential living area I think, most of it is unused now but it’s still there doing whatever it was designed to do, just left forgotten about and running for decades.
Mike: We’re completely fascinated by dereliction, old decaying buildings left to subside into squalor, and Middlesbrough has no shortage of these places. You never know, walking past a boarded-up house, or an abandoned hospital in the dark, what sounds you might hear behind the crumbling walls if you stopped to listen. It’s easy to imagine hearing something non-human, straight out of a Ramsey Campbell story, shifting lazily in there, and we are very happy to have our imaginations run wild in such circumstances. There’s a repulsive allure and fascination with these kinds of places that we wholeheartedly subscribe to – it’s the same fascination as the “infiltration” movement, really.
4. One of your first release was split CD with your side project Pulse Fear which is aimed at ambient/industrial . Maybe there has been next connection between your roots in Mddlesbrough and your music. What band was the first – Pulse Fear or Minethorn/Axis of Perdition?
Brooke: As I said above our roots in Middlesbrough as you put it are a big part of our sound. Minethorn came first, formed by Mike and myself in winter 1999 as a pretty dull black / death metal Hybrid with some early fumbling attempts at the industrial/ambient side of things. Minethorn had stagnated by 2001, also there were problems with the other members of the band. We had started messing with more experimental side of things and the rest of the band weren’t as into that as us, so things just ground to a halt. We had already recorded the Pulse Fear demo in the summer of 2001, basically spending a weekend in near constant ambient free-form jam and ending up with near two CD’s worth of material. By late 2001 Minethorn was more or less finished in that incarnation and it was in early 2002 that Mike asked me to sing on what would be the Axis 3 track demo. It was towards the end of these sessions that we started adding the ambient techniques learned in Pulse Fear and applying them to Axis, it just seemed logical at the time to split the demo over the two projects as they were similar enough and there was plenty of room on the CDs!
Mike: Certainly we a lot of the organic samples we use are inspired by our environment. Mostly what we attempt to do is recreate the natural ambience within derelict buildings, then subvert the sounds themselves and rearrange them until they are appropriately unnerving and unearthly. The Pulse Fear “technique” that Brooke spoke of is more along the lines of effects-laden guitar drones in the vein of Maeror Tri and latterly Troum, complemented by these organic sounds. Over the course of Axis’s history Pulse Fear has gradually been submersed into the main project and pushed further in its new context, so future Pulse Fear recordings are probably not going to happen unless we change that project’s direction…
5. Ambient passages (or something like this) can the listeners find also in music of Axis of Perdition. How important part do they play for you, what would you like to express by means of them?
Brooke: The ‘madness’ as we call it is very important for us; one of the defining points about Axis is the sonic horrorscapes we create with these noises. There are just certain ideas and feeling and emotions, mental images and the like that just cannot and will not let themselves be represented by the standard guitar, bass, drums and vocals set up and keyboards can add only so much atmosphere. Dark ambient and harsh noise are always things that have interested us and once we had thought of adding that element to our music it seemed wrong not to add it, we have always been surprised that no one has done things the way we have before.
Mike: The idea of Axis’s style overall is to blend dark ambient textures with extreme metal elements to create a single unified sound, though the balance is rather skewed in favour of the metal on “Ichneumon”. We want to create music as visual and cinematic as possible, within a horror context, and ambient noise textures tend to be rather more effective in horror for some reason, and cultivate senses of darkness, coldness, alienation, isolation and above all, dread, which are all things we want to stimulate with our music. Undoubtedly, we’re going to keep bringing the ambient portions further forward in our music and it’s entirely possible that one day in the future we might drop the metallic portions entirely, who knows?
6. Do you have any idea about next development of Pulse Fear and its possible collaboration with Axis of Perdition?
Brooke: Pulse Fear was very much “of the moment”, we had been playing through a particularly inspirational computer game called ‘Silent Hill’ and listening to Maeror Tri a lot and it just all came together in PF. To be honest at the moment it doesn’t look too likely that any more Pulse Fear will happen, at least not in the immediate future. All the kind of ambient soundscaping has been absorbed my Axis anyway, though I won’t rule out anything yet.
Mike: What he said…
7. Talking about ambient music is there any inspiration from bands around Cold Meat Industry in your music? What do you think about their contemporary direction?
Brooke: We do listen to acts on that particular label but more for enjoyment rather than inspiration.
Mike: I suppose on some levels our ambient sections could be likened to Megaptera (who are excellent), but we use far more complex, far more layered sounds on the whole. In terms of dark ambient while we are enormous fans of specific acts we have extremely limited tastes in the field. We’re not really interested in any of the medieval ambience, apocalyptic folk, death industrial or anything with a military slant or Darkwave bits, so really we like very little in this field. We just love horror orientated ambient, preferably packaged with pictures of derelict buildings, and of course we adore Maeror Tri. Our biggest ambient influence is the incidental ambience/noise and music of the Silent Hill games – the Silent Hill series pretty much captures every element of our tastes and quirks in a nutshell to a frightening degree.
8. In one review is your sound and music described like mixture between Fear Factory and Zyklon. But I have another name in my mind – legendary Mysticum. Do you like this ancient band and what do you think about this resemblance? Agree or disagree?
Brooke: I’ve never heard that comparison before; I’m a huge fan of Fear Factory and quite enjoy Zyklon, though to a much lesser extent. I’ve never heard Mysticum so I couldn’t actually tell you!
Mike: I wouldn’t really agree with those comparisons, though I’d rather get Mysticum comparisons than Anaal Nathrakh or Aborym ones. Our guitar work is extremely distinct from all these bands. Mysticum are/were an excellent band but I’m not sure if “In The Streams of Inferno” has aged particularly well, to be honest. I think our closest philosophical comparison would be to Blut Aus Nord, even if the music doesn’t seem similar on the surface – best to say we share a mentality.
9. From the outside it seems there is new wave of black metal in Great Britain, the bands which took over torch of the extreme music from Norway – Axis, Anaal Nathrakh, Frost or Void. Do you have same view from inside? Have you been in contact in other bands?
Brooke: I suppose it does look like that from the outside but we’ve never been in contact with any of those bands, as far as Axis goes we’re very insular and keep to ourselves. We aren’t trying to create a scene and we don’t want to be part of one, we just want to create music we enjoy.
Mike: We enjoy isolation too much to really identify with other bands very often, and we’re not really interested in flying the flag for British metal. We certainly fly the flag for dark cinematic music, but that’s different…
10. What do you think about development of Norwegian BM scene and its contemporary face?
Brooke: I’m not really into scene or genre’s as such I tend to like individual bands so as far as black metal is concerned I like some old ‘true’ bands and I like some newer ones as well, it depends entirely what piques my interest.
Mike: My tastes in black metal are a little odd. On the one hand I’m fervently orthodox and suspicious of high profile acts, and very protective of the original values of the music, but I also like many bands who have radically altered their style and experimented, so that equally you’ll find me listening to Fleurety or Leviathan, Ulver or Ondskapt, Manes or Beherit. What I tend to dislike is the bands in the middle, the ones who don’t commit to a strong direction or conviction, dabbling ineffectually in different genres or presenting an inoffensive, watered down version of the music, and the glossy likes of Dimmu and Satyricon. Though I tend to look at individual bands rather than scenes and certainly not nations, I think in traditional terms Norway fell behind long ago, though arguably everything that needed doing has been done, so there’s no real obligation there. I do like Carpathian Forest and Gorgoroth but their last albums were no more than moderately decent.
11. Despite of globalization you seem to be a bit cutted from musical metal scene. Is this right impression?
Brooke: If you mean Middlesbrough, then not really, as far as things go the majority of people are into whatever is popular at the time, at the moment its all this Emo stuff, a few years ago it was all Nu – metal, its pretty much the same as anywhere else where people into seriously extreme music are in the minority. To my knowledge there are (including us) 2 extreme metal bands in Middlesbrough and only slightly more in the Teesside area as a whole. If you mean AoP then you’re very correct; early in the Minethorn days we learned that scenes are just there so people/bands can pretend they are better than other people/bands and its got very little to do with the music (which is what interests us) so we cut ourselves off and germinated in isolation, the vast majority of bands that were big in the ‘scene’ when we started out have either split up or stayed in exactly the same place and that pretty much applies whether you’re talking about the local scene in Middlesbrough or the UK as a whole.
Mike: Scenes just tend to be arenas for petty bickering, self-congratulation, backslapping and trying to cultivate a musical authority that simply isn’t there, especially on the Internet. More and more often, dealing with the average myopic, opinionated metal-head is enormously depressing so we tend to avoid the “scene” as much as possible.
12. I was a little bit confused. I was thinking AoP is a two-man band and was founded as a studio project. But then I read news you sacked your drummer, Dan Mullins. Did you change the concecion or philosophy behind Axis of Perdition?
Brooke: HA! That’s quite funny! No, AoP started out as a two man studio project and Dan was very briefly involved around the time of recording our soon-to-be-released EP. He left of his own choice, there was no ill will and we are all still good friends, he actually recently joined barbarian metal kings Bal Sagoth so you haven’t heard the last of him!
Mike: The philosophy behind Axis allows room for any sort of musical ideas, styles, and genres, as we’re mainly interested in creating cinematic music – the extreme metal is there at the moment because that’s what we want to do.
13. Are you going to play live gig? Have ever played on a stage?
Brooke: Minethorn did a few gigs in the beginning and we have both played live in other bands its great and we love it! But at the moment it’s not feasible with Axis though that doesn’t rule out anything for the future.
Mike: If we can firstly find the right musicians who can play the material perfectly and are on the same wavelength as us (both very difficult criteria to meet, admittedly) then all we need to overcome is my nerves and fear of messing up the material onstage. If we can do an occasional live show and make it special, then it’s something we’ll certainly try and do. 14. Two or three years ago you were very satisfied with your ex-label Rage of Achilles. “Duncan is one of the few people who have entirely clicked with our vision, so we´ve had very good relationship thus and I do´nt see that changing.†– it´s your words. What´s happened? Duncan changed the strategy of label or you had a better offer from Code 666?
Brooke: Duncan told us the direction he wanted to take the label at the time and had we stayed the full term of the contract we would have become very alienated and out of place so we chose to go to in search of somewhere else. It was an amicable split we didn’t have and still don’t have any problems with RoA; we were sad to hear that Rage of Achilles was closing down we will always be grateful for the chance they gave us. We hade a few offers but the one from Code 666 suited us best at that time. AoP isn’t something you can make predictions about and other labels wanted us to sign multi album deals and at the time we weren’t sure that AoP had more than even one in us. Also Code 666 has a very eclectic roster and a band as Idiosyncratic as us fits in nicely…by not fitting in!
Mike: That’s pretty much the start and the end of it.
15. Before your new album by Code666 scheduled for next year you will release split CD with Blut aus Nord by Appease Me Records. How did it occur and what is its part in existence of AoP?
Brooke: A journalist friend of the band let us know that Blut Aus Nord were up for doing a split with someone and we let them know that we were interested. They liked our music and our whole concept and we just clicked together. However, it’s no longer a split, it’s just going to be us on our own as the first release in a series with the BAN half coming after then further releases after that. It fits neatly into the developing AoP mythology/philosophy as a transition from the first album to the second.
Mike: I think while we’ve got clearly distinct and unique styles, Blut Aus Nord and us have a great affinity for each other’s music and I certainly feel privileged to have had the opportunity to work with them. However, Appease Me is becoming a sub-label of Candlelight and because of some scheduling problems it is now unconfirmed whether “Physical Illucinations” will be released through them after all…more news when we have it, I suppose.
16. A specific chapter in life of AoP are the texts. You are said to be inspired by H. P. Lovecrat. My opinion is your lyrics are much closer to Nietzche´s philosophy. Is that right or totally mistaken?
Brooke: That’s quite interesting to hear, Lovecraft heavily inspired us in the late Minethorn/ early AoP days but a subtler more insidious background of our own devising replaced that. Not having read any Nietzsche I couldn’t comment on that, though its somthing I’ll look into in future.
Mike: Films and authors mostly inspire the lyrics and general accompanying texts, and Lovecraft is not particularly influential compared to some others, such as Ramsey Campbell. We mix in our cinematic and literary influences with our own experiences and philosophies to try and create disturbing, vivid imagery. The nature of the Axis Of Perdition is actually quite spiritual for us, the world Axis presents is a potential evolution of the world if pollution, decay and degradation consume it. The sheer wantonness of humanity in readily contaminating the earth almost provokes the idea that the action is being suggested or imposed on us by something outside, or as if the derelict buildings and horrible parts of the world are incursions from a darker reality slowly blending into ours. This reality would have its own beings, tortured and warped and evolving for the specific purpose of suffering and enduring pain, and once exposed to the reality humanity becomes more and more like its denizens beings as they interact and move towards the ultimate evolution of horror. This is the kind of vision that we’re trying to provoke, obviously it’s very heavily influenced by Silent Hill but it’s also something we feel very, very strongly about. As to the Neitzsche references, most of the foundations for even the most modestly nihilistic thought were laid by Neitzsche so for people like us it’s inevitable for that influence to come across just through the way we behave and how we cope with the world.
17. Have you ever heard about holotropic breathing? It is way to discover your inner space and know your subconsciousness invented by czech psychologist Stanislav Grof. Your texts seem to be written after experience from holotropic breathing….
Brooke: Again, this is new to me, it’s something that we will have to look into. We often get the feeling that whilst in the full flow of working on music we are being influenced from outside or inside possibly, certainly a lot of the ideas seem to come from nowhere but be too fully formed to have just “happened”, its strange and not something I can explain fully.
Mike: Our writing process is like a stream of consciousness that seems to have its source completely outside of us, as if we’re simply conduits. Communications from the Axis, as it were. I have to admit I find the concept of holotropic breathing a little hard to swallow but it might be interesting to try, nevertheless. Whether I experienced anything profound or not, at least it would be an excuse to simply relax and listen to music for several hours!
18. Mike you have degree from psychology. Do earn your livings with it? Have you ever tried to determine your diagnosis?
Mike: I wish. The majority of serious psychological jobs nowadays require a PHD, which I currently don’t have the heart to pursue. I have applied for a few psychological positions here and there but to no avail. As for diagnosing Axis, absolutely, I covered it in one side of A4 (computer printed, that is) but at the moment I’m afraid it’s not for sharing….
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Mike
Tarpaulin Skin
Transition Engineer
I will cure the world of this plague of hope...
Posts: 247
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Post by Mike on Oct 4, 2007 20:20:15 GMT
Reading all this stuff I'm starting to think I've changed a lot as a person just since '04. Brooke too.
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Post by Darkcrawl on Oct 4, 2007 21:13:21 GMT
In what way? You haven't, *gulp*, mellowed have you?
Interesting reads, though. Thanks.
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Mike
Tarpaulin Skin
Transition Engineer
I will cure the world of this plague of hope...
Posts: 247
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Post by Mike on Oct 4, 2007 21:48:52 GMT
I'd say we're "differently wrong"...
Edit: I've just given them a proper read. The overwhelming majority of it I quite happily stand by, it's just that round about the beginning of Axis I was quite overbearingly pompous and that's taken a while to get away from (assuming I actually have, o' course). I think the big difference is that collaborating with Les has meant we discussed Axis a great deal with him so that he was as informed as possible when writing his narrative parts, and that opened up a lot of doors deep down at the core of what we do and why we do it. Consequently, some quite difficult personal truths have spilled all over it and changed the situation for us quite intimately. Because of that, the music and our attitude towards it have taken a bit of an overhaul. All that stuff still stands, but there's the feeling there now of what's *really* bubbling away underneath it all.
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Mike
Tarpaulin Skin
Transition Engineer
I will cure the world of this plague of hope...
Posts: 247
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Post by Mike on Oct 5, 2007 12:06:16 GMT
ANOTHER RANDOM ONE
1) In the previous interview we did, you left me with “one day you will understand why”. May you explain what has left to understand and why?
Primarily, it’s an open-ended question inviting listeners to draw their own conclusions. There’s a definite meaning and intent to the statement for us and we made some effort to lay it out in the track of the same name on “Deleted Scenes”, so we feel that that speaks for itself. It’s an implication also that Axis isn’t necessarily logical or easy to understand and the process of developing your own interpretation is as important as the music itself – it requires effort and interaction between band and listener to find a mutual understanding or at least an attempt at finding it. We’re not the kind of band to provide all our intentions and thoughts on a platter for the listener to peruse without any kind of effort on their part, because such an easy arrangement kills all the involvement, satisfaction and emotional rapport for them if they don’t have to work at it. Think of it like a David Lynch film – the material is there, but it hasn’t been streamlined for easy digestion, it just exists in and of itself to be analysed as the consumer sees fit, or just for them to sit back and experience unconditionally.
2) New album marks your definitive leaving of black metal for a totally black ambient/industrial/doom sound. May you explain this evolution and why?
There wasn’t a conscious decision to our development, it was just a natural evolution. We’ve always intended to have this really involving, vivid, cinematic sound but it’s taken a while to achieve that. The mood evoked by the concept is very much one of dread and despair, which naturally made the material much slower and atmospheric, though if anything even more visceral and frightening than the previous material. The lack of blast-beats was just a natural side-product of this process, as was the increase in the amount of ambience. It’s the slow drip of horrific self-realisation rather than a torrential deluge of chaos and terror, which tends to be more ephemeral, less meaningful and less effective in the long term. We wanted to really shake people up psychologically and emotionally, to leave really deep mental scars. The more emotional stuff is more intimate and involving, and the ambience is used to try and create a fully-formed environment for the listeners, and the upshot of these two factors is that it becomes an album that it’s easy to just get completely engrossed and lost in.
3) May you speak about lyrical concept? You claim to yourself as a product of industrial decadence of your town. How it accords with the “transition hospital” and its mental diseases?
Lyrically, The Axis Of Perdition tends to vary between the narrative description of characteristics and events of the sonic environment we create, and the semi-coherent observations of a person trapped inside this “place”. There are strong themes of ambivalence and doubt, in terms of the conflict between repulsion and attraction to horrible things, and questioning one’s own sense of reality and the darkness and treacherousness of the subconscious. The new album has a coherent storyline concerning a character finding his way through a labyrinthine, nightmare parody of a hospital that gets stranger and more disturbing the further he goes and the more he uncovers his reasons for being there. We could provide the lyrics to this but we’d prefer the listener to flesh the story out in their imagination from the raw materials of music, ambience, titles, and artwork. The importance of our home-town is in our fascination with dereliction and decayed urban environments, rust and filth, alienation and isolation.
4) What were your feelings while you were recording the album? Are you able to explain to our readers?
It certainly wasn’t as viscerally raw and painful as the E.P. was to create, but there was still the usual tension and psychological stress there from what we as people were putting into it. The individual specifics of our lives won’t be discussed but we all have our thorns as it were and Axis is the forum where this is vented in a horrendous, emotionally and psychologically exhausting cathartic outburst. We could just sum it up as what you hear on the CD is what was felt by us during work, as the it’s just the closest we can come to documenting all the thoughts and impressions that were trying to escape from our heads at the time. In terms of just the actual recording process it was an almost unmitigated nightmare. We had just about every single setback imaginable, from computer failure and loss of data to personal injury (Dan hurt his back badly early on while recording is drums, which is why he hasn’t appeared on the album as originally promised). At times, we were dangerously close to either giving in or at the least murdering each other, through mercy or anger or frustration or all three. Somehow we got it finished to our own satisfaction but it literally scraped through just after the deadline so we veered frighteningly close to failure. Hopefully we haven’t managed to drive the Code666 staff insane quite yet – they’ve been really rather saintly in their tolerance of our dysfunctional and eccentric working habits.
5) You said “Blade Runner” was a big inspiration for you. Are there other films that are for you an inspiration?
Ridley Scott was in Teesside, being inspired by it, twenty years before Axis, so it’s a testimony to mutual roots, though we are enormous fans of that movie anyway. The appropriation of imagery from it only really occurred on our first album, we’ve become more specialised since then. A lot of the films that originally inspired us, like “Blade Runner”, “Akira”, the original “Ring” trilogy, the “Tetsuo” films and “Eraserhead” feel like they were satisfactorily dealt with on the first album so we haven’t really drawn much influence from them since. On the new album, we were enormously inspired by the film “Session 9”, which is practically required viewing for anyone who buys the album, and lots of David Lynch, particularly “Twin Peaks”, which was how the jazz section came to pass, a brief moment of indulgence in Angelo Badalamenti worship. The only influence that has been consistent throughout all our work is the “Silent Hill” series, which remains our single largest and most deeply explored influence.
6) You announced to me that your fans would be surprised with some “weird” elements on new album. Were you referring to piano jazz at the end of “Pendulum Prey”? Or, what else?
There were some parts that time restraints meant we could not fit onto the album and were left off that on the surface would have seemed initially out of character to anyone unfamiliar with certain of our influences. We won’t say too much at this point, as they will probably be used later on. The jazz thing was as much a surprise for us as anyone else, but it came off to our satisfaction. The lack of the more aggressive metal parts (particularly the lack of blast-beats) and the pursuit of a more ambient-doom direction was something that happened through instinct and following our muse as obediently and unquestioningly as ever. This if anything was the biggest risk we took, as up to this point a lot of our reputation has been based on and emphasised our use of intense speed on earlier releases, to the point where we felt it was detracting from our artistic intentions.
7) I have described AOP as “Mz412 meet Void Of Silence meet Evoken, infected with Godflesh”. How do you agree with this definition?
Void of silence and Godflesh definitely. The VOS influence is certainly evident (though not consciously intended), it just kind of popped up when all the parts were put together. While we don’t listen to much Mz412, the Nordvargr solo album was a regular feature on the play-list while we were recording. All these little bits have emerged in the final work, filtered through our own muse. None of us have actually heard Evoken, so we can’t really comment on that.
8) Did Ian Fenwick participate to the album composition? What’s his contribute?
Ian played the bass on the album and contributed towards arrangements and some of the bass parts. As always the ambient noise side of things was a group effort. Ian has been a member of Mine[thorn] since before the inception of Axis so he was the obvious choice to fill that particular role. He would have been inaugurated sooner, but it’s only in the past 12 months that his gained the confidence in his own ability to allow him to play and write as part of the Axis collective.
9) What you can say me about your side project Mine[thorn]? Some news?
Mine[thorn] is not so much a side project as a parallel partner to Axis, and TAOP guitarist Mike is not involved beyond being an occasional session member for little bits and pieces, such as a one-off gig a couple of summers ago. Mine[thorn] is currently working on the debut album which will be released by Code666 in late September this year. Musically uses much the same techniques as Axis, just to a different effect; the sound is akin to giant machines scraping off the face of the earth.
10) You do not love live playing. How do you think to promote the album?
We love to play live, but unfortunately it’s taken a while to put together a line-up of suitable people to replicate our material in the live format. Locally, very few people are into extreme music and even fewer of those play instruments let alone have the right mindset and skill to play our material, so rather than rush into it we have bided our time until we can do things properly. The most difficult thing was to find our drummer (Dan Mullins, also of Bal Sagoth). We are starting rehearsals now and hope to be playing live by the end of this year though I would expect isolated events rather than prolonged touring. Rest assured that Axis live will be interesting, not to say morally reprehensible, for all involved.
11) Are you already able to say what will be your future evolution? Any new stuff?
We are somewhat perplexed ourselves by this, but somehow we have found ourselves working on the third album already a mere week and a half after the release of “Deleted Scenes”. Thoughts are coming and are being constructed, and a definite shape is forming, though it’s far too early to say anything publicly about it. It’s going to take considerable time to form it properly so I wouldn’t expect anything earlier than 2007; a healthy two-year gap between albums, in other words. 12) Ok, last famous words…
Mike: It’s never over… Brooke: bite it and show me the middle… Ian: Pustulio commands you…
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Mike
Tarpaulin Skin
Transition Engineer
I will cure the world of this plague of hope...
Posts: 247
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Post by Mike on Oct 5, 2007 20:07:53 GMT
SOME ITALIAN ZINE
After an album for Rage of Achilles you’ve come under our Italian Code666. How did you get in contact with them?
Mike: We concluded our relations with ROA amicably following the release of “The Ichneumon Method”, and mailed promo packs to various labels. Code666 offered the most accommodating deal, and so the decision to work with them was easy, not to mention that the ethos of the label and the diversity of its signings were compatible with how we wanted to be represented.
I know that Rage of Achilles has failed… What will it happen with the distribution of The Ichneumon Method?
Mike: At the moment, nothing has been arranged regarding the future of “The Ichneumon Method”. Due to the scale of Rage of Achilles, a worldwide promotion was difficult and therefore in some territories we were inevitably a bit underrepresented. If demand for the debut album emerges in the future then some kind of reissue may be arranged with whatever label shows interest at the time. I should stress that Rage of Achilles put 101% effort into working with us and were great to work with.
Introduce the new album to the Italian audience…
Mike: “Physical Illucinations…” is our most recent attempt to capture even a fragment of the Axis as we see it, a short, crowded glimpse of the horror and repulsion manifest in the dark. It’s a much truer and closer representation of our plans and visions than “The Ichneumon Method” was, far more refined, far less diluted by the restraints of conventional metal. We wanted to represent decayed urban horror through a far more unified blend of dark ambient and metal than we had attempted before, to create sounds that felt quasi-visual, so that the listener feels they are not hearing simple songs or music but hearing the complex and evocative sounds of a living environment all around them, just an eye-blink away. Something you can still feel even after the last note has died out.
Physical Illucinations…: make it clear, what does this title mean for you?
Mike: “Physical Illucinations…” means having your most frightening hallucinations made flesh, to not just be insane but to wholly enter a world crafted from your own horror. The occult reference in the title is for people to discover on their own, but it should suggest that the act of entering a dimension moulded from your own fears is in fact to link into something even darker, an underworld that has nothing to do with conventional Christian impressions of “Hell”, but containing its own “awareness” that not only notices you, but will never let you be safe again. That taints you forever.
This album sounds visionary, sounds like a nightmare translated in music. What does it express for you? What did you want to express through it?
Mike: It’s a transition for us from paying any kind of fealty to conventional song structures and straightforward musical concepts, the escape from the stifling mundanity of simply being a metal band in other words. We don’t want catchy hooks and grooves, we want to create the sound of our own personal darkness, a whole universe struggling to escape our minds that we shackle into CDs to taint other people with its insidious touch. You hit the nail on the head when you said “a nightmare translated in music”, that is exactly what it is, a sonic representation of a place that is the ultimate nightmare.
What if I say: too chaotic???
Mike: It will seem too chaotic for many because like a scene in a film, there a lot of things occurring at once, and sometimes seeming incoherent, sometimes seeming to conflict, but it’s all one complex entity and it can be appreciated in no other terms, because that’s the way real life is, not easily digestible chunks. Quite simply, if you come expecting catchy tunes, rational structure and the like, you inevitably will find it frustrating and intractable because in your head you’ll be trying to perceive it as something it’s not. Bottom line, everything about the recording is pretty much how we planned it, and deliberately made to be a raw experience and not something “cerebral” that can be dissected easily into riffs and hooks and influences and whatever. It’s not meant to be easy. It’s meant to be a vivid experience of horror that will leave you emotionally drained and feeling contaminated.
This is an EP. Are you going to release a full album? Anticipations?
Mike: We’re working on the second album at the moment for a projected release on Code666 in March 2005. It will simply be Axis, but more so. It will have a far more defined “concept” and flow to it than we have used before, and be from a more human perspective – exploring how the hell invoked within the Axis is shaped by negativity; guilt, betrayal, despair and the like. As always, it’s very emotionally exhausting and physically draining to create for the Axis but I don’t feel we have any choice in the matter.
Extreme cinematic noise-scape metal, says your bio. But how do you prefer to define your musical style?
Mike: I actually wrote that bio so that’s pretty much the best I can do at the moment, ha! To be honest, I’d prefer to be able to simply say “It’s Axis” and have people know what I mean just by saying that. Our own view of the Axis is so broad, from our personal history, our philosophy, our fears and doubts, our tastes cinema and literature, the inherent spirituality of connecting to a darkness that we feel is separate from us but that we nevertheless believe in and have faith in wholeheartedly, the way we as members connect and collaborate, the way the band’s evolved – there’s simply too much to sum up in a single sentence, particularly in an area of music where most people seem to be jaded, cynical, small-minded, extremely short attention spans and little appreciation of genuine artistry.
Influences? What kind of music do you listen to? And which bands influenced you in the past, leading you to create your own style?
Mike: We’ve gotten to the point with Axis where we’re mostly self-influenced, but we still take a great deal of inspiration from films and literature. The musician that I admire most and take inspiration from would be Akira Yamaoka. I appreciate a great deal of music across most genres but very little of it influences Axis to be honest. My tastes in black metal are fairly unforgiving and moderately traditional – apart from the obvious choices, I’m particularly enjoying Shining, Forgotten Tomb, Leviathan and Silencer at the moment, and I thought the earlier works of Xasthur were excellent though he’s been in something of a slump since “Funeral of Being”.
The roster of your label is more than sophisticated. Do you know the other bands of the roster? Do you like them?
Mike: Code666 has consistent roster of idiosyncratic and talented bands, and I have trouble singling out highlights, but I loved the Nordvargr album that they brought out, as well as the Void of Silence albums, that have both been quite astounding. Initially I was a bit doubtful about the new direction of Manes, not because I dislike the kind of influences they were bringing in (far from it) but that I’m naturally a bit suspicious of alternative music when it’s marketed at the standard metal demographic. However, “Vilosophe” turned out to be excellent too if a little disorientating at first.
Conclude as u prefer
Mike: It’s taken a year since completion, but “Physical Illucinations…” is finally here. Don’t take the darkness lightly because for us, it’s never over.
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Post by Tyranor on Oct 22, 2007 10:12:43 GMT
I see that both EUTK iterviews contain the same questions. I believe others noticed that too. I find it funny that you answered those questions twice Well whatever but it's nice to see that you have such a patience. Overall I'm personaly very pleasantly suprised to see these sources.
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Mike
Tarpaulin Skin
Transition Engineer
I will cure the world of this plague of hope...
Posts: 247
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Post by Mike on Oct 22, 2007 16:44:42 GMT
I think when it was actually published the answers were probably both cut and pasted into one article, but I somehow missed that when I was posting them here...
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Post by Dalihrob on May 13, 2011 17:39:06 GMT
deathmetalbaboon.com/album-review-the-axis-of-perdition-tenements-of-the-anointed-fleshwww.metal-archives.com/reviews/The_Axis_of_Perdition/Tenements_%28Of_the_Anointed_Flesh%29/300018/Transcendent_Logoswww.mortemzine.net/show.php?id=2635Some reviews of tenements, the first one is particularly funny and the third is mine. Quite interestingly the review scored around 600 views in less than 24h and now it is easily the most viewed article of the month on our site, nice. As far as I know, similar thing happened only with Burzum and Master's Hammer reviews - here's the translation: Am I Dead? No you’re not dear Urfe, this is just a beginning and now things are looking rather woefully for you… Your outing in Locus Eyrie was quite passable, don’t you think? Well, if we don’t count those few incidents with various abominations craving for your tasty skin (yummy, yummy) and I really don’t envy you that small conflict on the lake with a precious Khaergon… Well don’t be afraid dear Urfe, you’re safe now and this is just a beginning. Do you hear those air-sirens? The procedure begins, one day you will understand why… One day maybe. “Urfe” was an extremely “non-metal” album which caused (surprise, surprise!) quite a commotion. “Tenements (of the Annointed Flesh)” is on the other hand the most metal-sounding recording of THE AXIS OF PERDITION, maybe even more than the debut “Ichneumon Method”. So you can expect almost an hour of blast-beats, aberrant guitar riffs and tortured vocals. With an exception of Intro/outro which will definitely remind you of mr. Urfe and one ambient intermezzo “Dark Red Other”. Quite calm is also the last but one song “Ordained” thanks to which you will probably experience a feeling similar to that when you finish reading a good book. Provided that you’re well familiar with both “Deleted Scenes from the Transition Hospital” and “Urfe”. Unfortunately there is plenty of various imperfections. Be it a weirdly programmed and sounding (paperboard-like) drums or some excessively stretched moments. I for example mind the scarcity of non-metal elements. The transition from “Urfe” to “Tenements” is quite violent – it’s mainly because of an absence of Leslie Simpson – protagonist of Mr. Urfe – those few Urfe’s words are taken from previous album. I would welcome the bigger amount of ambient, industrial or even noise textures but I am afraid that already chaotic album would become almost unlistenable. And it would be stupid to try imitate the chaos of EP “physical Illucinations”. This is Your Reward! Guitar playing is perfect, one disgusting melody follows another and I have to admit that some moments touched my personal definition of a “Perfect Melody” which resulted into almost painful uneasiness together with nervous Kafkaesque paranoia but also an ecstatic happiness. On the other hand some riffs have an interesting violent vibe. I’ve never felt aggressive when listening to TAOP’s music – I rather felt like hiding in a corner. But now I feel like grabbing a rusty pipe and smacking someone hard. Most of the riffs will probably remind you of Blut aus Nord or Deathspell Omega (and I guess I won’t spoil anything If I also add Morbid Angel and Fear Factory) but it definitely isn’t copying. Melodies are whirling, they resemble a dark red vortex full of silt, dead bodies and filth. – they play with you insidiously. You should be glad that soul cannot throw up because when listening to “Tenements” you would probably drown in your own vomit. To conclude this review… I really hope that after listening to all that chaos you will have a headache and you’ll tear your hair in frustration of all that disharmony and evil. And don’t you dare to lie down on the listening!! Wait till the night, isolation, when nothing will disturb you. I just need to wait till I get my original copy. “Tenements (of the anointed flesh)” contains plenty of detail waiting to be revealed, not mentioned the lyrics and liner notes which are for the first time in the band’s history included in a booklet. And some responses from readers: “For me, one of the best albums of the year – Brilliant” “It hasn’t happened to me since Deleted Scenes and sometimes during Esoteric that I have felt so sick because of music. My compliments to the band “Again this is Axis I love which messes me up like drugs, that’s a feeling I don’t get very often. Together with new Blut aus nord a top album of 2010”
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