Interviews and reviews

[Darkcrawl]

Hey guys,
Does anyone out there know of any interviews with the band published on the 'net? I looked a while ago and found none!
Also, does anyone have a transcription of the Terrorizer review of 'The Ichneumon Method', I can find the issues with the other releases in. Was there an interview with Terrorizer around the same time and which issue is it?
Also, good luck with your Masters Mike, what are you studying?
Phew, that's all folks!

[kodos86]

The only interview I ever recall seeing is the one that was poted on the older version of the site, from when the Corridors demo came out; I'm not sure if that one exists on the internet anymore, what with the newer site having been launched.

[phrozenspite]

I think there have been at least 2-3 Axis interviews in Terrorizer and I may have the issue with the axis review, will have to check

[phrozenspite]

ah here we go issue 109
Axis Of Perdition
'The Ichneumon Method'
Rage of Achilles
Here Be Monsters. In fact, who even dares to imagine what lurks on this seemingly innocuous slab of plastic. 'The Ichneumon Method', from seemingly out of nowhere and nothing, is a dark revelation, an almighty 'what the (unholy) fuck' set to leave jaws agape and eyebrows raised the length and breadth of the extreme metal scene. That is to say, by those that are simply disorientated by it, and run howling for mercy back to the unchallenging and cosy realm of their record collections, but also by those hungry for new sensations, who should assume the position now for some punishment of the most sadistic and satisfying kind.
Axis of Perdition: A British two-piece playing avant-garde black metal with the mechanistic battery of a drum machine prominent in their imposing wall of noise. Comparisons with Anaal Nathrakh are inevitable, and indeed understandable. However, for all that the experience of Nathrakh puring acid all over the rulebook of sonic spite was a thrilling and invigorating one, Axis of Perdition take such groundbreaking darkness a stage further. For all that they hit with less of a blowtorch intensity, this is because their headfuck post-apocalyptic black-rage comes spinning viciously form a decidedly more bizarre place. For all that the spiralling guitar motifs of 'To Walk The Corridors of Hell' remind of some of Devin Townsend's cyber-freakshows, and for all that the awesomely bleak Lovecraftian spoken-interlude of 'Forms on the Other Side of Silence', interntionally or not, is pure primetime Throbbing Gristle. Axis of Perdition clearly have their own sinister agenda that we can only wonder at the origins of. No matter, this is a record steeped in atmosphere, one to provide an aural landscape to fore the darker realms of the imagination. What's more, this is no crass genre-cross-pollonation, rather a cold, sharp unified vision unnerving in its potency and precision.
A band altogether in their own sci-fi damaged, horrific wasteland headspace, Axis of Perdition bring forth a veritable nihilistic aural necrovortex akin to having one's brains sprayed with liquid nitrogen in a torture session one hundred and fifty years into the futre. Confused? You will be. Yet you'll love every terrifying minute of it.
[9.50] Jim Martin...
it got album of the month and was # 4 on their list of albums of the year I believe.

[Darkcrawl]

Thank you VERY much, sir. You are a credit to this ward.
I definately haven't read that review before. I stumbled accross TIM (The Ichneumon Method) in HMV after the end of year pole and didn't get into it at first. Then, I played it about 3 months later in Germany and thought wow, this is actually amazingly dark!
There we are fact-fans!
By the way, I've got my days off for December at work and don't have too long to change them, any news on live dates?

[Mike]

Here's an interview I did for the now-defunct Foreshadow Zine back in January or so. It's a bit outdated now but there's enough detail there for you to get your teeth into, and I thought it was a shame for it to just be sat around. Oh, and it's a Masters in Music.

THE AXIS OF PERDITION

Firstly, can you explain a little about what the Axis of Perdition is? It's an unusual name and some traces of a manifesto, or at least a set of beliefs, can be found on your sleeve notes.

Big question. Where to start?
The Axis of Perdition is not a manifesto, or philosophy or ideology, though these are components if minor ones; the Axis is a mixture of a state of mind and an unshakeable feeling or quasi-awareness of another reality impinging upon and gradually digesting our own. The core theme of our work is that our reality is blurring with a horrendous, parasitic nightmare reality which manifests as a dark, derelict aspect of our world, and which responds psychogenically to the guilt, fears and subconscious dread of humans who are unlucky enough to become embroiled in it. The Axis Of Perdition refers to the epicentre of such a place, a kind of cancerous, self-perpetuated outpouring of primal hell, source of all contortion and degradation. We imagine the that neglect, ignorance and general abusive traits of civilisation that has resulted in such things as pollution, rust, dereliction and suffering could almost as a ritual preparation of the world, exercised unconsciously by our race as a whole, to unify it with the nightmare reality as a kind of mass punishment for the crime of simple existence. Our music is like the hymnal accompaniment to such a ritual, and like religious hymns it encompasses awe and worship, celebration and contrition, but foremost all the spectrum of human fears. It does definitely have its spiritual dimension; we find it impossible to account for where all the ideas come from and sometimes the process of creating the music feels like a moment of spiritual ecstasy.
The Axis of Perdition can also be described in terms of a specific feeling and/or chain of thought; to be simultaneously repulsed and attracted by something disturbing (such as the mingled horror and charm of abandoned buildings), and to be worried by this ambivalence, to sense irreversible changes to ones psyche, and fear dark things rising out of the subconscious, and to above all question the evidence of what you can consciously perceive, as a dread-fuelled dose of Cartesian doubt. We aim for the listener to be torn between the desire to keep listening and the desire to pull out the CD and stamp on it rather than hear it again, almost for fear of what remains after the music has ended and you're not sure what's escaped from the speakers, what the sounds could have done to the world around you.
If all this sounds familiar, it's because we're enormously and unashamedly indebted to the "Silent Hill" series, though this shameless worship only really came to fruition recently with "Physical Illucinations"; "The Ichneumon Method" could be more accurately described as metal for biomechanical demons to use as a soundtrack for trashing Neo-Tokyo. The Silent Hill worship has very much become our dominant theme and motive force though. I can only hope that this feeling has extended to the extreme metal parts as well as the parts that are comparable to the relevant in-game music/ambience.
This said, I’m really just being facetious and self-deprecating; the things we’re expressing were lurking in our subconscious long before we played Silent Hill, they’ve just hit upon an uncannily similar vein of expression and exploit it so impeccably that we can’t help but doff our cap to them. I’d feel a bit ridiculous trying to call them contemporaries, but I feel like we are mutual explorers in the same field, not an idol / worshipper kind of relationship. It’s just very gratifying to come across something that so consistently mirrors your own taste and consequently there’s definitely a significant debt. We’ve always had the map, but they’ve beaten a great route through it that it’s hard to avoid.
To create the music that we do is to feel completely involuntary; it is not like having ideas, but having images, smells, and all manner of textures and sensations crammed into your head for you to either purge or go mad from the overstimulation. We are driven to be staggeringly, almost irrationally meticulous in the creative and recording process, and it always leaves us psychologically and often physically exhausted. We do it compulsively and seemingly without choice, which makes us feel quite the zealots sometimes, but there's truth enough in that. We are trying to recreate vivid, fully dimensioned environments, events and sensations purely in sonic form, so that simply listening on headphones with your eyes closed could make you feel submerged in somewhere entirely different, trapped in a nightmare that resonates with a very human negativity and drags out all your doubts and guilt to be faced in its blemished, contorted flesh. We're only reaching this goal on the current cd, "Deleted Scenes From The Transition Hospital". The artwork, integral to the Axis experience though it is, is simply priming for the imagination to drift in the right directions when listening. Perhaps in the future we should look into scratch and sniff panels and a complimentary bucket of props to prod yourself with? Anyway, the overall effect we seek to achieve is cinematic, and therefore our compositions are built more around filmic convention, particularly in terms of abstract, non-diegetic sound, and it's through this goal that the dark ambient parts entered for their ever-increasing role in our sonic canon (more on this later, of course).
However, beyond all this talk of concepts and aesthetics, The Axis Of Perdition is four guys trying to scare themselves (the founder members myself and Brooke, plus new arrivals Ian on bass and Dan on drums). It is the result of growing up in Middlesbrough, the unpleasant things it's done to our distressingly fertile imaginations. It's the two of us (and latterly, another two luckless souls who were in the wrong place at the wrong time) devouring horror cinema, sounds, and literature, and simply working to transfer all the accumulated negativity of mundane existence into sonic form, mostly through experimenting and improvising at my place - we're a scummy DIY bedroom band and proud of it.

Out of all the descriptions that are made of AoP's music, possibly the most frequent seems to be "Lovecraftian". You make use of a Lovecraft passage on a track from The Ichneumon Method but there does appear to be some more inherent similarity of feel between your music and Lovecraft's written work - a sense of worlds beyond our sphere attempting push through, of minds driven insane by fear and of howling voids. Would you say this is an apt description and, if so, is it intentional?

We get the Lovecraftian thing a lot, and while I can see its appropriateness, particularly to our earlier work, I think on the whole the comparison fosters misconceptions, as do the more primitive misanthropic aspects and expressions of the demo and "Ichneumon". While we do share some of the core concepts of Lovecraft's work, the kind of horror that we implement them is markedly different, as our work derives from more modern, more urban horror like the prime works of Ramsey Campbell, or David Lynch, or of course Silent Hill. Nevertheless I'd say your point is correct, but that the relationship doesn't extend as far and explicitly in our music as many would have you believe.

Some of the music on both The Ichneumon Method and the latest mini-CD is blindingly complex and takes a number of listens to hear all the levels making it up, how do you go about writing these sounds? Is there any distinction for you between the black metal and the more ambient pieces?

The writing comes in a flood, usually. I place a lot of emphasis on experimenting in the studio and exploring the dimensions of each riff to the fullest, just to find out how much I can twist it. My writing style is naturally chaotic and technical, but I try and use the technicality as a device to create atmosphere and feeling, and as such the majority of the really technical parts are also the most horrible because I'm employing the techniques to make my guitar scream in torment rather than just widdling indulgently. The arrangements are generally made on instinct, once I have one riff in place the rest of the song just seems to extend out naturally in both directions from wherever the central point was. I think "like cracks in broken glass" is a pretty straight metaphor. The drum programming is approached to bypass real drumming entirely and punctuate the riffs in different ways each time to achieve a profound sense of disorientation, though now that we have a drummer who can play that way anyhow, it's not really my area anymore.
While our best material seems to turn up in one big psychedelic blow to the brain, it's very psychologically draining and exhausting because it means we throw everything we've got into creating a fully formed track often in the space of just a few hours. But as Justin Broadrick said in an interview recently, "the sun just doesn't shine for you until a song is finished". Or in our case, the sun gets blotted out by a storm of filth that rusts our eyes over until we've appeased whatever it is that shoves ideas into our heads. There's often a worrying, preordained sense of completion there that makes us wonder just how all the little details seem to just turn up without our being consciously aware of them - sometimes the conjunction of two disparate ambient sounds can create new noises which we simply did not put there. There are a few incidences on "Physical Illucinations" where I'm convinced there are subtle sirens in the background that just showed up in the final mix without any such thing being placed.
The ambient is generally put together the same way, through improvisation. Our ambience recipe is a fairly even balance of organically produced sounds and manipulated sound samples. The former can be anything from vocal noises, kitchen utensils, other household objects, nefarious doings with drains, and DIY percussion. The latter includes the like of radio static, and any number of sampled squeaks, rumbles, crashes, squelches and metallic shrieks that we sample from films and sound archives and heavily manipulate electronically. Most things get stretched, chopped, reversed, repitched, and get drenched in environmental audio FX to the point where they're almost completely unrecognisable. They're then arranged to mimic non-diegetic noise soundtracks in horror, and to create a sense of hearing a complex environment on the other side of the speakers, hopefully a very frightening and disturbing one.
Our ambient work has only really taken its proper place in our palette with "Physical Illucinations", and it was definitely underused and underappreciated by us beforehand. It's only with this release that the sounds started getting organised to create a sense of environment, though admittedly it does devolve into an overwhelming wash of noise quite often, and that's absolutely right for the EP. The whole point is to stop using ambient merely as atmospheric padding and try and create a single unified style that uses extreme metal and ambient parts interchangeably in the pursuit of a powerful, engrossing, moving cinematic atmosphere. My favourite way of putting it at the moment is to compare our methods and goals to those of Francis Bacon; when speaking of his own work he said that if he painted a person screaming, he'd try and "paint the cry", abstractly representing to the sound and the emotion of the moment rather than just a visual snapshot. In contrast, I'd say we try to "cry the paint"; we want to represent not only the sound and emotion of the moment but also the environment it occurs in, what's happening around it, generally translating visual data into abstract sound, which is why everything is so apparently complex and disjointed. It's a completely different ballpark from the average extreme metal band and as such I think we would be much better described as a dark ambient band that uses metal as part of its vocabulary rather than vice versa.
Still, a great deal of people persist in putting us in the catchy songs and hooky riffs box, and then upbraiding us and/or dismissing us because we quite obviously don't measure up to that particular set of standards.

As well as the complexity of the music, there's also the all out fury. How do you make your instruments - especially the vocals - sound so, for want of a better word, deranged?

I'm sorry to say that it just comes naturally. It disturbs me sometimes. There's a great deal of accumulated emotion, that much pent up rage, frustration, overwhelming disgust, fear and despair that goes into our work that from the beginning our music has been warped irrevocably out of conventional metal shapes. From the start we've used unpleasant, unconventional scales and the multitracked chaos of the guitars evolved out of the writing/recording technique, but really all it takes is that we fill up with negativity and then we simply know how to purge it effectively. The vocals are applied in quite a varied way across our musical folio as a whole; sometimes narrative, sometimes the thoughts and emotional turmoil of a person "caught in the Axis", sometimes purely as another non-verbal component of the ambience. The fact that "Physical Illucinations" is almost purely composed of deranged screaming is heavily tied up with Brooke's life at the time; he had that much inner shit to get out of his system. It was absolutely horrifying just to be in the next room while he was doing them - he did the lot in a three-hour stint of total fury and anguish and I genuinely thought for a while I might have to call him an ambulance until he emerged clement as ever to check out the latest developments in Transformer fandom.
We're also dissatisfied by the paltry standards of sounding dark and frightening in extreme metal, as it's very, very rarely as dark or actively frightening as it's sometimes intended to be. Ultimately we really, really want to shake the listener up psychologically and emotionally, to move them and disturb them profoundly, rather than just be something to headbang to at a gig, and that means we have to push ourselves that much further and explore some very dark places - after all, our first goal is to shake ourselves up. We live it so you don't have to. Except that you do, when you listen to the CD of course.

Focusing on the vocals for a moment, you use a number of different styles - screeched, spoken-word and sampled. This gives quiet a devastating effect compared to the normally mono-tone "extreme-metal" vocal styles. Is this an intentional diversity of just something that came naturally? The new EP makes use of a number of samples from one of the Silent Hill games (3, is it?), all of which have a definite feel. Is this something that appeals to you?

Each CD has tended to dictate the nature of the vocals on them. "Ichneumon" suited an alien flavour using distortion and a broad range of effects. "Physical Illucinations" is an ordeal of terror, insanity and torment that demanded the deranged screaming used predominantly on it. The forthcoming "Deleted Scenes..." album uses a more grandstanding narrative style (including bolder forays into clean singing territory) as well as interjections by the "character" involved which tend to be along the same ragged lines of emotional outpouring as "Physical". With music this complex and (more to the point) cinematically charged, a straightforward monotone performance based on traditional extreme metal vocals simply wouldn't be appropriate.
The samples on "Physical Illucinations" are indeed from SH3. We're trying to gradually fade out the use of samples as we grow more engrossed in our own conceptual world rather than borrowing associations and impact from film and game sources. They're extremely useful signposts for what kind of imagery we want listeners to visualise, but as people are getting more familiar with our style and we're getting that much more articulate in expressing it ourselves they're definitely becoming extraneous, though we're not above using a few key lines here and there. The new album uses a couple of lines from "Session 9" that were too apt not to use, but as far as I can recall, that's all.

Let's talk about the difficult subject of genres for a while. Although they can be something of a bind, genre tags help us poor music writers let people know what new music sounds like but most reviews and articles seem to get themselves tied up in all manner of knots when discussing AoP. Most seem to plump for "black metal", often with a suffix or prefix attached, but few seem to concentrate on the ambient/noise aspects of the music. I myself once described it as "power noise but on guitars". Do you have any thoughts on the matter?

You're closer than most. I think we're a dark ambient band at heart, as I stated in more detail earlier. While we have used white noise before, we're more concerned with atmospheric noise. The "black metal" part is something that I think has only ever been marginally true, and then only on the "Corridors" demo. Though I am very into and very involved in black metal, the aesthetics and the intentions that are presuppositions of that genre are simply too different to those of AOP. The motives are different, and by that distinction "black metal" is simply an inappropriate term regardless of many questionable prefixes or suffixes are attached in trying to make it fit.

What influences - musical or non-musical - direct you most?

Silent Hill is obviously a very important one, in terms of both the finished product and the techniques and intentions that have gone into it. The same can be said of David Lynch's work, both in terms of his films and the most basic premises of his aesthetics and vision, and what he does to achieve them. Myriad western and asian films and directors on top of that. In literary terms, we're very indebted to Ramsey Campbell's work, particularly his short stories such as "Hearing is Believing". His way of realising urban horror, acute observation and grasp of the inherent fearfulness of unreality are all things we've attempted to plunder in our way. We're also heavily influenced by the surroundings of Middlesbrough.
Our predominant musical influence, as with most bands with even a small recording history, is ourselves, though I'd cite Maeror Tri, Troum, Esoteric, Angelo Badalamenti, Godflesh, SYL, Ulver, Bethlehem, Fleurety, Void of Silence, and all manner of dark/horror ambient acts as having made a relevant mark on me at one time or another. My actual favourite band is probably Anathema, but they don't really have any bearing on Axis as far as I can tell.

You've previously stated in some articles that AoP's lyrics may not be made public. Are they based on personal experience?

This is a bit undecided, to be honest. The "Ichneumon" lyrics are easy to find online. The "Physical Illucinations" lyrics aren't currently published, and while they and the lyrics for the new album are more personal they won't necessarily remain unpublished for that factor. As much as anything, we're just too interested in filling our booklets with pictures to look at. It's unknown at this point whether the lyrics for "Deleted Scenes..." will be published, as that album has a very concrete concept, and a written accompaniment might well facilitate that. It's ultimately up to Brooke, as he has prime responsibility for them, so I can't really say right now.

What does the future hold for AoP? I know a new full-length's in the works...what can we expect from this? Will there be a chance for AoP live events?

The new album, "Deleted Scenes From The Transition Hospital" will be released on the 28th of March. It represents our most visual, detailed and cinematic work yet. There's been no attempt to repeat "Physical....", not that we'd want to. It's a much more subtle, atmospheric affair than our previous works. We've forsaken the blastbeats completely and concentrated on the slower, more sinister end of our sound. On the whole, I think that while it was entirely correct and necessary at the time, the relentless sonic battering approach we've used, and particularly the hyperspeed drums, has detracted from our overall message at times, and we felt it was high time we proved we weren't dependent on just throwing everything at the listener at once, that we're capable of subtlety. Not that our goals or views have changed one iota; just the practice.
The intention was not just to create a frightening listening experience but a very intimate one, built around the same cumulative, creeping dread and psychological techniques as used in the SH series rather than bludgeoning the listener again. It's a concept piece based on the experiences of an unnamed protagonist who wakes to find himself unaccountably within a nightmarish, labyrinthine abandoned hospital. The album documents him venturing deeper and deeper into the place, into growing darkness and unreality, before finally confronting his reasons for being there, which he'd hidden even from himself. The ambience is far more complicated and rich this time round to suit the idea of the album as a journey into personal hell, and there's a pervasive sense of despair threaded all through it. We tried to balance the material fifty-fifty between metal and ambient, and if people complain about the relative paucity of raging metal parts then they haven't quite understood what the Axis Of Perdition is all about. We just felt that with the way we were going, there was an increasing need for some sort of "story", and I think it's something that we'll develop further in future on subsequent releases.
As for live work, at the moment there are definitely plans for the Axis to hit the stage during 2005, and we’re certainly going to try as hard as physically possible to make it work. Rest assured, whatever happens it will be a horrible experience that everyone involved will simultaneously enjoy and regret.

MICHAEL BLENKARN
JANUARY 2005

[Darkcrawl]

Thanks a lot Mike, that's a really useful interview in terms of info about TAOP and the recording techniques etc. and some recommendations. I'm finding it quite difficult to find Ramsey Campbell books, I have a few stories in Lovecraft tributes but that's all at the moment.
I too like Void of Silence and was contemplating getting the Twin Peaks soundtrack (and I want Season 2 but that's quite difficult too).
A Masters in music? What do you know about music, eh? Don't frighten the lecturers!

[Myklon B]

The problem with Ramsey Campbell is that he was completely out of print/circulation in the UK for about ten years, but he is generally a fixture of secondhand bookshops so as long as you keep your eyes peeled, he's not too difficult to track down. I'd recommend going for a collection of short stories, like "Alone With The Horrors", as his novels are never as good.

The thing with Twin Peaks season 2 is its only out on DVD as a dodgy dutch bootleg that usually does the rounds on eBay for close to three figures at a time. I know its in the process of being polished up for DVD release but as and when that happens is anyone's guess.

Actually, the guy who takes the classes I've been doing so far is an afficionado of hyper-experimental classical and electronic music and he described "Deleted Scenes" as mellow. And to answer your question, I know shit all, hence taking the course.

[Darkcrawl]

Thanks once again for the advice.
I ordered a Maeror Tri CD yesterday as well as another ambient group I liked the sound of ('A Fire'- Dead Voices on Air).
As for your lecturer, you'll have to tie him to a chair and leave 'Physical Illucinations...' on repeat. Mellow indeed, that'll teach him.
Mind you, if he's into some of the more extreme electronica which I occasionally dabble in, he could almost be forgiven.

[Tyranor]

Very interesting and resourceful interview indeed. I myself am pretty heavily into dark ambient and some idustrial stuff so I feel quite at home. I personaly think that term "industrial" could be attached to "Ichneumon Method" not only because of some used sample in there but because of it's structure and rythmycs. And of course it's offensive nature. It doesn't sounds like metal really for me. It sounds like rust which consumes everything. And paradoxically I find it very headbangable and never really feel tired of it.
P.S.And talking about extreme music I don't know anything more extreme than japan noise (Merzbow, Aube, Masonna...).
Please more interviews ;D

[Darkcrawl]

What Merzbow album would be best for someone who hasn't heard their stuff? I would like to broaden my horizons a bit.
I hope you have the new Sigh album, Tyranor, if not, why not?!

I myself like the riffs in Ichneumon... as well as the overall concept of a lurking horror which decays humanity and its creations.
I really like 'Deleted Scenes...' because it delves more into the fear and sense of aloneness in a dark, haunting environment. Very appealing to me.

[searinglight]

I highly reccomend the 'Sun Baked Snow Cave' collaboration with Boris if you're looking for a slight introduction to Merzbow. Tyranor's got a point I believe, I have never heard anything more violent, migrane-provoking, harsh, and awsome.... than some of these Japanese noise artists.

Oh, as a warning.... these guys are LOUD. Now, trust me here, I do not usually give this warning... but I do believe that this deserves a warning of the calibur of "Loud" as it stands.

[Tyranor]

darkcrawl said:

What Merzbow album would be best for someone who hasn't heard their stuff? I would like to broaden my horizons a bit.
I hope you have the new Sigh album, Tyranor, if not, why not?!

No, I haven't heard "Gallow Gallery" yet. I will check it out for sure. Truly great avantgarde metal band.
About Merzbow, you can try out any of it's efforts, but take warning as it was said. It's nearly unlistenable. Very very harsh. But I believe Masonna is even harsher
I myself very rarely "try" to listen to such stuff. Noise in it's purest form.

[zovcouk]

Merzbow Vs Nordvargr's "Partikel" is great, but may give you head explodee.

[phrozenspite]

try the one with Genesis P Orridge of Throbbing Gristle, its called A Perfect Pain... also are there any Gruntsplatter fans here?