Into Another World: An Interview with Trhä
Hello and welcome into a beautiful, rare glimpse inside the inner workings of a flower. I'm sorry, that's not the right intro. Hi! Shall we walk down a stoney path into the pulsating heart of the ocean? Nope. Not it. But getting closer. Greetings and salutations, here's a wonderful exchange of words some might call an interview (I actually did when deciding to choose a headline for this piece, mostly because "the inner workings of a flower" doesn't produce those sweet, sweet CLICKS and EYEBALLS). I had the utmost pleasure to converse with the delicate, powerful soul behind Trhä, a musical entity comprised of black metal and rose pedals that entered our collective souls in the dawn of new millennium, and has, for my money, just completed one of the most astounding musical annus mirabilis type years in the history of recorded music. Three full-length albums, eleven splits, five eps, and all of it, seriously, all of it sublime and amazing. I hope you read this and listen to their music. That feels fitting.
As ever, check out my various interview projects and other cool shit. And if you'd like to keep abreast of the latest, most pressing developments follow us wherever I may roam (FALSE!) (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, TIK TOK! and even Bluesky), and listen to my, I guess, active (?) podcast (YouTube, Spotify, Apple), and to check the charity compilation albums I release annually, including 2023. You can support my unholy work here (Patreon), if you feel like it. Early access to our bigger projects, weekly exclusive recommendations and playlists, and that wonderful feeling that you're encouraging a life-consuming habit. On to Trhä.
The preliminary thing is that I don't do general interviews. I usually pick an album or something very concrete and I talk about that, and usually it's an older album. So that's kind of the lane I've chosen for myself. But sometimes I make an exception, so this is one of them. So this will just be a conversation about music. The setting off point is Trhä, but, if it's OK with you, we'll talk about more than that.
Yeah, we can talk about anything.
OK, great. So that's the point of introduction. So, I'd like to begin with the first question, which is: Do you remember a moment you had with an album, or a song, or artwork or a live experience, or someone's haircut, whatever, that really kind of rewired your brain when it came to music? Like, heard you thought music was one thing and then that came along, and now “Oh shit, it can be that too. With the qualifying addition that obviously this happens a lot and if you listen to music and you love music, then your mind gets blown away by music every week. So I guess what I'm pointing at isn't what happened last week, even though we can't talk about that later, but a very early moment where you were like a kid and you remember, like crashing into something and it really changing how you thought about music?
Yeah, obviously I've had very impactful moments, especially when I was very young, with music. But I don't remember ever actually consciously thinking that something was earth shattering to my concepts of music beforehand. I always remember loving things I discovered and loving things that were brand new, but never thinking that, or at least I don’t remember ever thinking: “Wow, this completely introduces something that I would never imagine before.” I mean, obviously every new thing I discovered was brand new, but I remember when music was inspiring. Maybe especially when I was young and discovering new music it was inspiring to me, in an unconscious way, the emotional impact, but never in a categorical way, as in “Wow, I discovered this new way that you can make music.” Obviously every time I discovered a new genre it was exactly that, but I never thought about it, or at least I don’t remember ever thinking about it in terms of someone who did something that just shattered the scope of what I thought was possible in music. I just never thought about it that way.
OK, maybe I'll clarify that, maybe I'll make it into a better question, with a personal note. I have this thing about permission, which you might not have, and other people might not have. I respect that. But some of my earliest and most significant musical experiences for me are moments that feel like: “Oh, so you're allowed to do that?” So, I have a very defined sense of what is “OK” and “not OK.” So, for me, sometimes when I hear…. I'll just throw an example that's off the top of my head, when I heard Carcass I was like: “This is so messy and wrong, in so many ways, but it's great.” So, my experience with that is not necessarily cerebral, like: “Oh, a new category has dawned in my mind.” But my experience is: “Oh shit, I didn't know there was this whole path I can now take because other people have taken it and proven to me it's doable, or OK, or passable as music.” So I guess I'm just explaining that from my end. Sometimes when I ask this question I add the word “scary,” as another variant of that. So we can focus on deep emotional impact. Does that help?
I just thought of a possible answer. So, I remember discovering music where I was conscious of the fact I had an affinity with that music, I just hadn't discovered that music before. Like for example, when I discovered what you might call post black metal or depressive black metal. When I first heard that, I remember immediately thinking that this – for example the clean guitar parts that you hear in depressive black metal, those clean guitar intros that are really sad sounding, I remember that years before I even knew what black metal was, and definitely before heard anything of this kind of music, that it reminded me of what I have loved to hear back then. Some of the music that I did listen to, which sometimes did sort of do those kinds of things with the guitar, like with the clean guitar parts, and now this is a whole genre with that. So, that, this was when I was 14, was a moment when I do remember actually thinking that that was something that I have been wanting to hear has been done and was being done. And that's when I started getting into post black metal and that kind of stuff.
When I was 13 and 14, the main thing I listened to was emo, but the kind of bands you would get into when you first got into emo. A lot of people would argue they aren’t even emo, but I don't really care about that. I call [those bands] emo pop because it is kind of emo, but it's also pop music. That's all I listened to and that's what I was in love with at the time. And it wouldn't be years later, like a few years after that, when I discovered what “real” emo is, emotive hardcore from the 90s. Obviously, the emo I was listening to when I was younger came from that, and that it was cool to discover where that came from. Like, the origin. I mean, I love emo pop and all that, but even stripping down the pop part and just making it pure hardcore, I remember just thinking: “Wow, this is perfect. If I had listened to this before, I would have loved it.” But it's so cool hearing like those elements and the kind of music that was just at the time, but purified.
I've asked this question a lot of times so I have a good sample size going. And often people talk in terms of a linear progression. Something like: “I listened to, whatever, Guns N’ Roses and then I discovered Ride The Lightning and I was like, oh shit, that was crap, this is much better, and obviously Ride The Lightning informs what I do, because I wanted to do that.” That’s one main type of reaction. And then sometimes people describe that as a continuing progression like: “I listened to Metallica and I liked it, and it was extreme, but then I heard Carcass and that was extreme-er, and then I heard Discordance Axis and that was even more extreme.” An infinite progression towards something. But that's not what you're saying. That's not what I'm hearing you say. What you're saying is: I already knew what I wanted. But it wasn't until I found it that I knew that that's what I wanted.
Right. For a lot of things, it did feel like that. But, for some things it was kind of like what you're describing, in the linear sort of way, I discovered things that align more and more with me. Like, I’m reaching a point where music sounds more and more the way I want it to sound. Maybe that's not the way to put it. But yeah, I mean that did happen to me. For example, when I first listened to metal it was power metal. And I loved that. It was perfect. And then I started listening to melodic death metal, and from there, anytime I discovered something more extreme and more melodic, it felt like that was converging more and more toward what I wanted. So, in that sort of way. I mean there are so many paths to music, because, you know, obviously there's so much music and I've discovered so much music, and all of them take different paths. A lot of times it was exactly that, where I discovered something that felt like I had already loved it, I just didn't know about it. And other times that I discovered something that was completely brand new to me and that I hadn't thought of before.
Is it the case, in both forms – I'm asking, I don't know – both the linear “I'm getting closer to what I want” and the kind of reverse “I wish I had known this at the time” – is there a way that they both serve the same desire?
Yeah, they do. I mean. I love both. I love discovering what I want to hear, and I also love discovering something new. So, music provides every avenue.
But I guess what I wanted to ask is, is there a way where what we're calling now the linear progression is actually also getting closer to who you are, either in terms of taste or your personality? If I find the perfect encapsulation of extremity and melody, the most extreme melodic thing, I will be closer not only to who I am now, but who I was when I was, I don’t know, eight years old. I realize this is a weird thing to ask.
I think so. And I also think that your path of discovering music is also your character development.
“Character” as in a fiction or character or your character?
Well, you said “personality.”
Yeah.
When you listen to music and you discover music you do both things: You discover your personality that was already there, and certain music will help you express that and bring that out. it'll help you realize that. And at the same time, you also discover new parts of your personality that you had no idea about. I think you do both of them.
Speaking for myself, the freaky part is the parts about yourself you never knew about. Until they were expressed either through your art, obviously, right, or through someone else's art. I mean, I guess that's why I sometimes use the word “scary,” because that sometimes is a scary experience. It's not always sunshine and roses when you find out a new part about yourself. That's part of the shocking part. Maybe this is a bit of a rant, but in a way, when people go to a show and see a band they've never heard of and get shocked into loving that band, the thing that shocks isn’t just that it exists, but it's also about you. “I like this, this is something I like.”
I remember in the 8th grade, someone asked me…. I remember not consciously, but kind of consciously trying to find the most extreme bands I could because I lived in a relatively small community where I felt like that kind of music both spoke to me and made me feel different than a lot of people that I was with. But I remember getting into White Zombie and Megadeth, two very important bands for me at the time, and someone from my class just randomly asking me if I listened to the “really heavy bands,” and I mentioned those bands and I remember him taking a step back as if I had some kind of weird disease. And I remember liking that feeling. That there was something pleasant in other people not wanting anything to do with what you like.
Yeah, I think everyone has at least one moment in their life where they feel a sense of accomplishment, just for listening to the most extreme or the most obscure music. And that becomes like a trophy. Like when you tell someone or when you show someone “Oh, yeah, this is what I listen to” and it's the most extreme thing. Obviously they're shocked because they never thought of anything like that. It's pretty funny. I'm sure anyone that listens to extreme music has had that moment at least once.
Yeah, I think some people thrive on that emotion, to this very day. I do, at least partially, because why else would I keep looking for new bands. Actually, I found Sadness because of that impulse, just roaming Bandcamp, clicking on random stuff. So, why did I just click – I think it was Leave – Why would I click on something? What am I looking for? To me, it's very clear that I'm looking for something that is not something I know, and not anything that anyone else knows. And obviously you can abuse that sentiment, but I think it can be a positive too.
OK, so I had this thought in my mind when I listened to a whole shitload of your music in preparation for our conversation. I mean, I listen to a shitload of your music anyhow, but I listened to even a greater shitload of your music before our conversation. And I had a new thought, and it's a thought that you might reject, I'm cool with that. I get rejected all the time, I have kids. And the thought has to do with tiling, overlapping tiles, right? It works on several levels: Your music tends to feel like overlapping tiles, to me. Some people are good at creating very clear, crystallized musical moments or genres. But it feels like, even within your songs, everything is overlapping. It's kind of like a cabbage. And, when you think about it, a lot of the projects you do feel like that to me as well. They kind of overlap with each other. So, you could say that life has nothing to do with Trhä and Sadness, or any of the other stuff, but they all kind of sound like they come from the same person, and they all share a basic vocabulary that I think you would agree is there. And so, how do you feel about this idea of overlap? That things overlap over one another?
I agree. I mean, I know my music and I can definitely see the overlap. For example, when you mentioned different projects like life or Sadness, you can somehow tell, even if they don't sound the same, or even within the same project when songs don't sound the same, there's my signature in the songs – whatever genre it is. I agree with that. And I like to think that that's the case. I’d like to think that other people recognize it, and some people have told me that before. For example, even with Trhä, when I first started it, I didn't announce my identity…
I was very surprised. Because I was a big Sadness fan, since 2017, and I wasn't into Trhä at all, I didn't like it at first. And then I began to really like it and I just randomly went on Metal Archives and was like “Holy shit! It's that person”. So I didn't know it was you, at first.
Yeah, well, that's how the truth came out, because people just assumed it was me. Which was nice because it made me think that there is something really recognizable about my music in particular. So, I do agree with that, if that's what you are referring to with the overlap. That no matter what I make, it still overlaps the same origin, which is this thing that I produce in music, particularly like my signature.
I think the signature is part of it, but I think it makes me think…. Like, if I imagine you at the center of the cabbage. Let's play a game, let's imagine you are at the center of a cabbage. Is that? OK, with you?
All right. Yeah, I like cabbages, oranges.
OK, good. Me too. Cabbages are awesome, and beautiful. And so let's imagine you're at the center of a cabbage, and so you emanate, you create one leaf, let's call that leaf “life,” whatever it is. Again, I think this relates also to particular songs, but let's talk about the projects because that’s easier. So you grow one leaf, and the reason that leaf is created is because you need it. That's how I think about art. I think things are created because they were needed, either as self discovery or self-expression, but something is driving that stuff out. And so you made that leaf, and you're like: “OK, that covers one part of the sky for me. I like living in this cabbage leaf, but that still leaves 95% of the sky exposed, and I'd like to live in the cabbage.” I'm sorry for this very childlike story. And so, I create another leaf that overlaps slightly, right, because you were trying to do something different, but it's still like next to what you did. And so that slightly overlaps. And then with time, because you want to live in the cabbage, you become surrounded by these tiles or by these overlapping leaves of your own creation. So what ends up being created is a world, an artistic world in which you live. So, that’s one of the big things that I really wanted to talk about, this idea of creating a world for yourself. Is there a way that the more projects and the more and more songs you create, the more put-together cabbage becomes, and the more comfortable you are? Is that something you can kind of resonate with? I really am very sorry.
Yeah, yeah. The reason I make music in the first place is a personal one. Even if what I'm creating is already there, just like the cabbage or plant analogy, if you think of any plants or any fruit or any flower, everything is already written in the seed, it just blossoms, or grows, or sprouts. Not because something new had to be created, it was already there. I could have lived my entire life without ever making music or publishing music, and I would still have the same emotional vocabulary, and the same stories to tell. But for some reason I've always had the tendency or the need to capture it in some way. That just feels like what my purpose is. For whatever reason I have some experience, some emotional experience, and my first instinct is to capture it, you know? To create something out of it. And I've never tried to ponder why that is, it's just that that’s what it is. And that does feel similar to the way a cabbage has this tendency to grow and sprout all these leaves. Just like a flower has the tendency to bloom. That's exactly what happens with me, and I'm sure anyone else that creates art can agree with that. I think that's a good analogy.
You know, I never thought cabbage would come into conversation, but there you go. It's also delicious.
It is. I love cabbage.
It’s great in all its forms. OK. so, given the fact that you already had a couple of leaves under your belt, and your cabbage was doing all right. You had an inhabitable, warm cabbage. Why then add Trhä? What did that overlapping leaf do? What kind of desire did that fulfill for you, other than the fact that you might have been interested in doing something that was “black metal,” right? What do you feel that does for you?
OK, so, like you said, I had always liked black metal. So, that was in 2020, when I started that, and I have been releasing music since 2012. And even if some of the things, like Sadness and a bunch of other projects, were kind of black metal in a way, I had never really made a black metal project. Like, a pure black metal project. I remember…. OK, well, there's a lot of things to say. So, Trhä started in the beginning of 2020, March and April. And it started with that first album, and this is not going to be surprising, but I was listening to Paysage d'Hiver, I was listening to a lot of that, and that wasn't the first time I listened to it, I listened to Paysage d'Hiver years ago, but I was listening to a lot of that at the time, and I remember thinking: “Wow, this is super cool. I want to do something like this.” First, because it's super cool and it was inspiring, but also because I was really nostalgic about winter. Like, the whole theme of Paysage d'Hiver is winter, and obviously it’s perfect winter black metal. And I miss winter so much, because at that time I was living in Texas, and there's no winter in Texas. There are no seasons. And I missed it so much.
[Laughs]
I missed winter so much. And so that's part of what went into me starting with the first album, which is very wintry, wanting to return to that essence, wanting to capture that I was very nostalgic about winter and I if I couldn't be in winter, the best I could do was create it, have in my fantasy. So there's that.
And also the whole premise of Trhä is that everything comes from a completely different world, a different dimension, a different universe. The origin of Trhä is this continent that I drew, that has all these countries, and that's really where everything comes from, especially that very first album. And that idea isn't brand new, because the whole creating languages and drawing continents, I did that so many years ago. But right then, in 2020, when I made the first album, was when I actually put focus into really realizing that. Because I had drawn the continent before, and the final continent that I actually drew, which I still have, was based on these ideas that I had many, many years ago, with similar stories. But this was way more realized. This was improved and actually developed, and it wasn't just an idea that I had that wasn't organized enough to capture. It was like: “OK, I finally did it.” And specifically for that time, which was the beginning of 2020, I was, like I said, very nostalgic about winter. I missed winter so much. And it was escapism, and more so than music typically is, because this is actually about a specific place. When I make songs about this other place, it's really this perfect, magical place that I want to be in. Not just escaping into the memory of winter and how much I miss it, it’s also that through creating that and creating this world and creating the music I'm escaping into this fantasy, which is this place, and it's such a perfect place, and especially because my circumstances at the time when I started, that when I started that first album, I was in a miserable place. Not just Texas, but just in life in general. I was absolutely not happy at all, about anything. And so basically the only thing I had that I could use to escape that was my own imagination. And creating Trhä helped that. And that’s how Trhä started, in addition to wanting to make an actual black metal project, without the emo stuff. And I fail, because even when I try to make black snow songs it always ends up sounding emo in some way.
[Laughs]
Especially with that first album. After that first album, I would end up reusing ideas from many many years ago. So, Trhä wasn’t born out of thin air – a lot of the things that you hear on those albums, I recorded a long time ago. The whole concept of a perfect magical place, and the creating a language, all of that pre-existed. It was just that it finally all came together in that particular moment, and I finally organized those ideas enough to create it.
I have. I have so much to say about that I don't know where to begin, so I'll just begin with the dumbest point I have, which is: What a wonderful thing art is, that if you don't have winter, you can create winter for yourself. Isn't that amazing, that you're generating the weather?
[Laughs] Yeah, it is.
Even that, without getting into the language and the continent and all that stuff, that in itself is quite ambitious, right? Like, emo is very ambitious emotionally, but usually kind of the starting off point is, you know, life is shitty and I am unhappy about that. But it's often very small, as in very personal. And when someone makes an album because they want to change the weather, so to speak, that's not a small thing. That's a big thing, that's a world thing. And so that in itself is kind of black metal, right? Because black metal is very big in scope.
But even on top of that, I think you alluded to this, and I think it's the case, creating a world that isn't the world outside and creating a language in a place that fits that world, is the most black metal thing ever. And it's one of the things that mark, say, a band like Summoning, that follow the Tolkien path. So many bands like Tolkien because that's what he does, he creates a world and a language and a map, and a place you can escape into that feels like a real place. When you're in it, you feel like you're there, and that it's real, even though you know you couldn’t buy a ticket and go there, still it's a real place. And so I think that's black metal, but I also want to say that, I mean, obviously I agree with you, you're failing at it horrendously.
[Laughs]
In a wonderful way. Because when you are, you know, a person in Texas being unhappy about not having winter and who likes emo and who wants to write a black metal album, that will not end up being what someone else's idea of a black album album might be, it actually ends up being better. Because, we're not looking for purity here. We're looking for whatever it is that you bring.
Yeah.
And whatever it is that you bring is very engaging and very emotional and very poppy, which I'm sure a lot of black metal purists hate, but which I love – I mean, the fact that they hate it also makes me love it more, so that’s an added bonus.
[Laughs]
All this really links to the black metal lineage at large. But what makes me think of is an interview I did about a few years ago with Neige of Alcest [HERE] And I don't even know if you like Alcest, and if I don't know if you've read interviews with him. But the way he approaches the music created under the Alcest canopy, or cabbage, as long as we're going, you know, vegetable metaphors, is…. Well, he says it more directly. He says: “When I was a kid, I got to experience this other world. I came into contact with a world that isn't our world. And that world was so beautiful and so perfect and so sweet that I've dedicated my entire life to getting back.” And so Alcest is his way to go back to that world, to kind of paint the picture out of my kind of faint memories of a child of that perfect world. And I hear a lot of that kind of general attitude in what you're saying. Except, maybe, for the childhood parts, and I'd like to ask that if you feel like that's connected? And here we go back to the first question where we said you can discover black metal but also feel like you were discovering who you were, right? So, is there a way where you getting under the black metal umbrella is something of a nostalgia for childhood?
Yeah. Not particularly particularly black metal, but any music I make, whether it's black metal or something else. So, childhood in general is the most common theme throughout everything ever made. Childhood in its essence of purity, because that's exactly what childhood is. Especially my childhood, because my childhood was great. My childhood was not corrupted by despair and abuse and things like that. And a lot of people don't have the chance to experience childhood in its purest form, because that innocence is corrupted through just misfortune. But my childhood in particular was essentially perfect. Internally, especially. And I'm a very nostalgic person, not just to my childhood but also my adolescence, and just life in general. All the moments in life are always very magical and they bring something. But there's something very particular about childhood, which anyone can agree with, unless they had a horrible childhood. And the reason it intertwines so well with my music, and it's always somewhat there, even if I'm not specifically talking about being a child or my childhood, is because childhood and the purity of childhood is literally existence in the purest form that you can attain in life. The more you live, the more you grow up, and the more you experience these misfortunes, and the more your mind is corrupted, and the more your spirit is corrupted by horrible things that happen in life, like abuse and all that, the less pure people are. And that's why a lot of times people grow to be very miserable and cynical and just really boring people, because the beauty and, in my opinion, innocence of being so new and fresh in the world, and everything is so fresh and everything is pure and innocent, the more you corrupt that, the more you just lose that magic.
But, yeah. So, In Trhä a lot of times I talk about magic, beauty and things like that. And this magic is very particular to this other world that I mentioned, but it's also literally the magic of purity and innocence. And my first time experiencing exactly what I felt was the purest moments of my life was childhood. What's amazing about children is that when I was a child, obviously I had created in my imagination many fictional things, I basically lived in my imagination the entire time. But, even existing right here in my physical human body, I experienced all the magic that I could have ever conceived. Now that I'm not a child anymore, and misfortunes have corrupted my spirit, when I think about true magic and these beautiful feeling that I try to capture in Trhä and this beautiful feeling that permeates everything in this other world, this other continent, when I think “Well, what does that feel like?” I'm literally referring to this, to what it felt like to be pure in this human body. And also what it feels like to dream, because dreaming is also the purest way to exist. It's so formless. You have no connection to a physical body, you're just dreaming. At least for me, I don't know what other people's dreams are like. But dreaming is just the pure and absolute way to exist, and so is childhood.
You might not have an answer to this question, and that's fine. But, do you feel like the Trhä leaf of the cabbage touches on the essence of what the cabbage is at all about? Because, the cabbage in general, not just Trhä, is an escape into something else, but Trhä is about that escape. It's about another place. It's literally about another place. And so it's really the most essential, or kind of the key into the lock of the whole mechanism, or whatever you want to call it? Do you feel like when you're in the cabbage, whether it's when you're writing the music, when you're conceiving the music, when you have an idea for the music, when you see someone's Bandcamp comment on the music, do you feel like whatever it is that you feel like has been corrupted by adulthood, do you feel like that fixes some of that? Not permanently, maybe, but like, for a moment.
You mean like in a therapeutic way? Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the reward of creating something in general, that you feel like you can capture, that you can hold it in your hands. That's what happens when I create Trhä, for example, and when I'm recording Trhä, for example. When I'm in the process of literally recording it, I can drift away and feel like I'm having a more hands-on experience with what it is I'm trying to capture than if I'm just thinking about it. Yeah, creating the music and having the products afterwards is literally being able to hold it, in a way. And that's why I have the tendency in general to always capture anything that happens. Any experience or any idea or anything that's inspirational in a way, my immediate tendency is to hold on to it or capture it, so that it's not just an ephemeral thing. I don't know, I have for some reason the tendency to always capture anything in the form of a memory or something that you can revisit, something that you can still hold on to and doesn't slip away.
I'm enjoying this conversation immensely, and this is also very beneficial to me in the sense, but I also write, and I think what almost immediately comes to mind with writing is that what it does for me is that it helps me remember things. It's not just that I think it captures….. I didn't think I liked that term when you first used it, but “capture” does work because. Because, l have this long short story or novella that's about a lot of stuff, but really in its essence, for me, when I read it, not when other people read it, when I read it I read it to to remember how it felt like when my wife was pregnant with our first child, and there was war, and we were stressed out and it was hot outside. And so, every time I read that, for me, I'm there. I can see her sitting in a yellow dress, worried. And I can feel the heat. It's all there. So, in that sense it's capturing, but I still need to think about it. Because, from the moment I wrote that scene or wrote that memory, successfully managed to “capture” it, that becomes the memory. I don't have an alternative version of that memory. Whatever it was that I created of that moment is the moment now. You see what I'm saying?
Yeah. That's another way to think of capturing, for example, to immortalize. Even if you decide: “Oh, I don't like this album, I'm going to delete it” you still immortalize it, because as long as anyone has heard it, it's immortalized in their memory or in their character development as a human being through time.
Yeah, because you made it.
Yeah. When I say “capture,” it's one word, but it really refers to so many different things. It's so many things that you're capturing, and you're capturing it in so many different ways, and for so many different possible experiences. It's a really complicated idea, to capture.
Yeah. I'm beginning to see that. I think the reason it put me on the defensive for a second is that it feels like documentation in an archival sense. Like, I took a picture of something and now it's in the cupboard, which is not how I see what I do when I describe things, I do something that a picture can't do. I bring something to life, and so that is a capturing, but it isn't that capturing. So, in my mind there was a moment there…. OK, never mind. But I want to talk about something else. Which has kind of this dual-pronged thing. So the first thing is that one of the things I noticed with you and your music, and obviously this is a recurring theme when it comes to your projects, is that most of them you do alone, and you also mentioned the fact that you lived in your imagination as a child. And one of the interesting themes that I've been kind of into is “isolation.” And everyone has a different form of it and we can get to yours in a second, right? Because you can have isolation because you live in Israel, and if you're a metalhead who lives in Israel, that's a form of isolation. You're not in “the scene” of anything. It's even worse, mind you, than Texas. Not only for its lack of winter, but also because you feel so far away from anything that you find interesting. And obviously that's a subjective choice – there are people who grew up where I grew up and felt completely connected to a scene and to a place and knew all the bands and were in bands. I wasn't that kid. And so I felt isolated and I felt happy in my world with my Helmet CD and whatever, right? That was my isolation.
But then you meet other artists and you interview them and you find out that some of them are isolated because they're Swiss, and the Swiss are kind of crazy like that. All the Swiss bands are really weird. Anyway, it's crazy. It's a whole thing. And I was obsessed with why Swiss bands were so crazy. And one of the answers I got was [in THIS interview with Bölzer, MM]: “We were isolated.” And then I interviewed Inter Arma [HERE], they're from Virginia, and then I talked to them and I found out they all grew up in these small towns and they only knew one other metalhead. And so that's one other form of isolation. And one of the things I feel isolation is good for, if you could say, is that when you're isolated you're kind of forced to create your own unique way to say things. Whereas if you're just in a big scene that gets swallowed up by competition, by comparisons, whatever, that might be more difficult to achieve. So that's something positive that isolation does. It forces you into who you are and what you want to say, and then you go out into the world and the world says: “Oh, that's special. How did you get to be so special?” So, does any of that make? Sense to you? Do you feel like A) You were or are isolated? And B) Does that kind of contribute to how you go about writing and thinking about your writing and so on?
Not just my writing, but literally everything, yeah. I am and I always have been isolated. I wouldn't say I feel isolated, because I've always been content in my isolation. And that’s my entire life. I've never been a social person, and in the few times I ever really tried to be social, it doesn't work out, just because it doesn't. I don't have the social skills, you know, to properly integrate myself with other people. But it quickly became apparent that I'm an isolated person and that's just how I led my life ever since. And I was never crippled by loneliness. I never felt like: “Oh, I wish I were part of a bigger community, I wish I knew people that liked the same music I do, I wish I knew people that I could play music with,” and all these things. I never thought about life that way. I was always a very personal person.
And so, is the music I make affected by that? I mean, I can hear it. I don't know if anyone else hears it, but I feel like in my music you can hear that it's very isolated. And I don't mean that in a depressing way, like: “Oh, I'm so lonely, I hate it,” but rather just I feel like you can hear that my music is not extroverted. I don’t think it sounds that way. I don't know what anyone else thinks of when they hear it or when they think about that, but that's what I feel like. I feel like my music and everything I do, really everything about my life has always been that. I mean, you can't ignore the influence your social environment has on you and the things you do, and the things you end up creating, and the way you develop it. It's 100% influenced by that environment, whether you want to or not. If you isolate yourself, and you're alone all the, you are simply not influenced by your interactions with other people. Your development is entirely personal and singular, with your own self and your own thoughts, which is something that people who are in constant interaction with other people – which is not a bad thing – but they simply don't have that same amount of time or opportunity to be personal with themselves and interact with themselves and be introspective. That's why a lot of people actually are afraid of loneliness, a lot of people depend on social interactions because they can't handle being alone, for whatever reason. I feel like a lot of times it's because they can't handle facing themselves, by themselves, with no one else to distract them.
And so, yeah, if you are a social person, whether it's very social and you have a lot of interactions all the time, and you talk to a lot of people, or you have only a few very close friends, you're constantly being influenced and you're constantly have those environmental effects being applied to you. And every single day, every single day of your life, whether you're by yourself or you're with certain other people, it's always influenced me. So I feel like it's just not me. For example, those people that you mentioned feel very isolated because they live in a place where they don't relate to other people, and by nature they are extroverted people, their interaction with people that they don't feel comfortable with…. For example, you can feel you can be an isolated person while simultaneously being surrounded by other people, and those other people, you don't feel like they're nurturing you, they're still influencing someone because they're creating a distance between you and people in general.
So, I just wanna step in with two kinds of things that came to mind. One is pop music. And the other is just how extremely popular you are – it’s all relative, right? – for a very idiosyncratic artist. You have a very big audience. Which of those would you like to answer first: pop music or about a lot of people listening to you? Choose your own adventure.
OK, pop music first.
Pop music is a very un-isolated form of music. It’s literally the public consciousness formed into a kind of melody that pleases a lot of people, in a good way. I'm not saying that in a bad way. And there's a shit-ton, and I believe that is the technical term, “shit-ton,” of pop music in your music, and there's a shit-ton of pop music in Trhä. It's interesting to talk to you about this, and I agree with you completely: Your music sounds isolated. No one reads an interview with you and goes “Holy shit, I thought Damian was this party-animal metalhead with a battle vest
[Laughs]
Because the music sounds like the kind of music in which a person is emoting, expressing emotions that are very at times extreme in a way that you have to be by yourself, right? So, it sounds isolated. But what then does pop music do in your music? Because, in a way, it sounds like what you’re saying is that the outside is filtering inside through not people influencing you but through melodies or sounds or ideas.
So, I like pop music and pop-influenced music. For example, like I said, when I was 13, I listened to a whole lot of what I call emo-pop, because it's not really emo in the way that, you know, emotive hardcore is emo.
What band would be emo pop?
So yeah, I listened to a lot of The Used, I listened to like.
OK
That kind of stuff. Like, the early The Used, like the first album, that kind of stuff. I love that. And even the less abrasive-sounding, just like pop punk or just really poppy…. That stuff is my favorite kind of music, to this day. Because, even if there's so much more you can capture through black metal or any kind of experimental music, the emotion that's captured in those melodies, which some people will just say: “Oh, those are simplistic melodies.” First of all, music doesn't have to be complex, and those melodies, those kind of like emo, poppy melodies especially, obviously the ones that I used to listen to, are really the most emotional to me. They really go directly in the most unfiltered way possible to exactly the kind of emotions that I was feeling back then and that I capture using them. So, I've always liked pop music ever since, and obviously it's so easy to get into pop music. Because it's the most obvious music, you're most exposed to it. It's hard to get into underground music because you have to go out and search for it, but pop music was always there. It's always there, even if you don't want to listen to it. As long as you exist in society, even if you’re an isolated person, it always ends up coming back to you.
It's like breathing the air.
Yeah. I was never “Oh, I don't like pop music,” because I always did like it, and especially the melodic choices. And so…. What was the question?
Is it a way of the outside coming in?
In a way, maybe. I feel like a lot of the people who do like my music relate to this common denominator, which is those melodies that are very easy. The reason they're accessible, like the pop music melodies, is because they kind of touch upon a very natural human emotion that is very easy to feel, regardless of who you are, those kinds of melodies are very accessible because they're very emotional, especially for me. The kind of pop and emo melodies that I love, they're so basic and so primal in their emotion, as in my emotions, and they are the most potent emotionally, because they're just like the origin of emotion itself. It feels like the strongest and most impactful emotions are the most basic ones.
But, in another way, my experience with music, whether it's pop music or anything else, is entirely personal. It's my own experience. When I bring pop music into my music, it's not because I'm reprising memories of when I used to go to pop music, or something like that. It's still my own experience. Whether or not it was pop music, it's still my personal experience and it was still my isolated experience, whether I was listening to pop music, it was always in the context of my own personal, reclusive environment. It just so happens that those kinds of melodies that sound poppy or sound emo are the most impactful to me. And even when I don't try to, they always just come out, like I said before. I was supposed to just make black metal, but most of the time it ends up being very melodic. And not even melodic as in black metal melodic, melodic in the poppy kind of way.
Yeah. Do you know a band by the name of Spider God, have you heard of them?
No. Spider God?
You'd love them. They’re from the U.K. They do black metal, but when it comes to stepping on the pop metal pedal, they smash that button. They even did a whole album of pop covers. But even before they did that, it was so obvious in the music. Even when I wrote a blurb about them, before they started doing covers, I wrote that they sound like a black metal ice cream truck,
[Laughs]
Because it sounds so sweet and poppy and whatever. But, what I wanted to say about was that a lot of times when we're talking about metal and hardcore it's focused on that edge that that music has and that appeals to a lot of people. And often there’s an issue with melody, because melody doesn't have that edge. it's not edgy to have melody. But then sometimes when everything is ugly, when you press on something beautiful, you let a flower bloom inside the ugly, it feels even more sinister, and more extreme, and edgier than just copycatting another Immortal riff. Because it's not supposed to be there. You're supposed to be in this icy cave of hate, and suddenly there's this nice lily.
That's ironic, because a lot of times it seems like those same people who will dislike your choice of melodies because it doesn’t fit the envelope, but then isn’t the whole point of extreme music is to be radical and be different and shocking? So isn't it equally as shocking to put certain kinds of melodies in a really harsh-sounding genre?
I agree, and I agree that it is shocking, and some people don't like that kind of shock. Apparently, the people who like shocking things don't like to be shocked. Which is shocking.
Yeah. It's very ironic.
I did an interview with Liturgy a while back, and they caught a lot of shit back in the day for doing stuff with black metal you're not supposed to do with black metal. And I think the essence of what it was is her saying: “Well, isn't contrarianism, and being spiteful and doing things intentionally to disturb other people, isn't that your whole shtick? So now you can't be disturbed?” So, yeah.
But now we reach the second path in the choose-your-own-adventure scheme, being that you have a big audience. That is a fact, and I think you recognize that fact, right? Every time you release something, a lot of people are going to listen to it. Myself included. Sadness, Trhä, anything you do and a shit-ton of people want to listen to it. And that's great. But what's interesting to me is how does that feel? Given the fact that you're fine being by yourself? If you're fine being by yourself, how does it feel to know, even in the process of creation, you're going to press publish on the album and a lot of people will want to listen to it and will engage with it? And they will leave comments and send you emails. How does that feel?
Part of it is very surprising, and it's always been surprising, and it still is surprising to me. Because, my first instinct is to think that no one is going to relate, or no one's going to like it. Not in a bad or pessimistic way, like: “Oh no, no one’s going to like it!” No. What I mean is that I don't… With Sadness or Trhä or anything I do, obviously it's very personal to me and it's very expressive for me, but in my own experience. I don't assume that other people have that same emotional experience, so it's always shocking to see people actually genuinely have a deep connection. And I don't assume that they’re the same experience that I have, obviously everyone has their own experience. But just in general, it’s always been shocking to see people actually enjoy it. I just don't assume people are actually gonna like it. So, it’s less surprising to me to see people that don’t like it than those who do, actually. So that's one thing.
The other reaction I have is that it's really cool, because I have my own experience of being impacted by music in a very deep and personal way. I remember, a long time ago, when I first started releasing music, thinking that it would be so cool to be able to provide that same thing for someone else that my favorite music has provided for me. And that happened. That ended up happening, and people expressed it to me that they have. So, that's one reaction that feels really cool, to know that not only can I create something that's emotionally impactful for me, but equally so for other people. That's meaningful because I know exactly what it feels like to be personally and deeply impacted by music, and that's kind of one of the things that makes you want to make music in the first place, having those experiences. So it always feels really cool to see people genuinely having such an impactful experience to something that I created.
And that also immortalizes what I'm creating. Like, when I say “capture,” the fact that other people have…. It doesn't even have to be a positive experience. For example, when someone dislikes it, and especially when they hate it and they feel the need to express how much they disliked it, that's still creating a profound experience. And all of those experiences, whenever someone listens to my music, they are immortalizing it, it's immortalized in their memory and their character development, their archive of all the emotions that they’ve ever felt, my music is forever immortalized there. So, that's another way to capture it.
Do you feel like the fact that you are this person who is fine being by yourself and expressing yourself through music, is there any way you feel like there’s this border with the outside world that's being transgressed when people are coming at you and saying they love your music or they hate your music?
Well, that is the clearest entry to the outside world that I have, my relationship with the people who listen to my music. And that relationship is really…. It's not a personal relationships I don't. I don't actually talk to anyone, and it doesn't make me uncomfortable.
OK
Because, if I don't want to talk to someone, I just won’t do it. I guess, like you said, it is transgressed, that whole veil is penetrated. But it's cool. It doesn't necessarily make me uncomfortable. I don't feel like the whole world is seeing me. If I did feel that then that would be ridiculous because I'm the one who's making the choice to publish it. I could always make music and not publish it if I didn't want the world to see me. But I also do like the world to see me, in a way. It probably sounds like it doesn't make sense: “How are you such an isolated person but you also want attention?” I don't really want attention in the sense that people come up to me and invade my personal space that I establish. If someone listens to my music, they're not doing that. They're still paying attention to me. But I'm still the keeper of my personal space.
I just wanted to say that I'm having a great time, but I don’t want to take up more of your time, and I think we're good. But I just want to say, as per your comment about people having a connection with your music, I had a very interesting moment, which I don't remember having happened to me, when I was setting up the interview. And I was looking at whatever news websites or whatever chores I had to do, and I told myself: “Ron, this is a bad way to put yourself in a mental space to talk to Damian. You should be listening to music. That's better for you than all that bullshit.” So I decided I might as well be listening to your music, since I'm going to be talking to you. And so I listened to one of the more recent Trhä albums, but I don't remember the title, the fourth most recent.
Is it the blue one? [Note: Yes, it is – rhejde qhaominvac tla aglhaonamëc, now also part of my 2023 best-of list, MM]
It might be the blue one. Yeah, and so. And I just thought, you know: “I'm having a great time right now. I'm feeling this person, and I don't feel like I want to talk to him anymore.”
[Laughs]
I actually felt like avoiding this interview to continue listening to your music. And so I think that's a testament to how human, and emotional, and real, “real” is the word I use for that, it is.
