Revolt of the Apes

Could it be that nearly two years have passed since we bestowed the (questionable, minimal) honor of “Band of the Week” on All in the Golden Afternoon? Apparently so.

At the time, we admitted to being unable to describe the band’s superb, wondrous, washed-out sound, wowing to their “songs that sound natural in the broadest sense: songs that were not assembled, but born, songs free from artificiality, affectation or inhibitions,” and the incredible staying power of both their music and a pin attached to the lapel of a black jacket.

Nearly two years later, we’re no closer to finding the words to describe how their songs move us – and the pin on the jacket remains.

We’re positively thrilled to present a new video from All in the Golden Afternoon, entitled “The Fog is Filled With Spirits,” a 35mm dreamscape conceptualized and shot by the band’s own Rachel Staggs on location in White Sands, New Mexico. Enjoy.

all in the golden afternoon – “the fog is filled with spirits” (official video) from rachel on Vimeo.

A new All in the Golden Afternoon full-length is coming later in 2013. Please do yourself the favor of checking out their “Magic Lighthouse on the Infinite Sea” LP and stay tuned as we consider naming “Tidal Wave” our favorite song of forever.

We need Spiders.

You may not be like us. You may not need music like that made by Spiders – aggressively awesome, spectacularly speedy, frill-free rock and/or roll flying on the twin engines of riffs and restlessness. That’s ok. You take what you need. And we need Spiders.

Some background may be in order here, but it’s certainly not necessary. You don’t need much background at all to fall into the Spiders’ web. You don’t need to know that the band hails from Sweden. You don’t need to know that they’re currently touring Europe with their friends and countrymen, Graveyard. You don’t need to know that there’s an MC5 poster making a cameo appearance in this video for “Hang Man,” taken from their first full-length, “Flash Point.”

You don’t need any of this to fall in to the Spiders’ web. Like the chopper that sits at the center of the cover of “Flash Point,” the Spiders sound is loud, fast and practically impossible to resist when offered the chance to take a ride (not to mention potentially dangerous without a helmet).

We need Spiders to remind us of high times when we’re feeling low. We need Spiders to remind us of the thrills that come from blasting out nine songs in twenty-seven-and-one-half minutes.We need Spiders.

“Flash Point” is out now on Crusher Records. Original Spiders photo by Kristin Lidell.

There’s more than a hint of slow-motion mystery in the music and overall sonic path of Haunted Leather, a band of Michigan mystics deeply involved in top-level fuzz-pedal alchemy. Their latest release, “Red Road,” does little to shed much light on the root of that mystery, nor their ultimate distorted destination. Rather, it compels us toward repeated listens – and while each listen draws us closer to the source of their gritty, grey-sky grasping, each listen also ends with the realization that enlightenment, on this red road, will never be reached.

And that feeling is very, very exciting. We recommend it highly – just as we recommend listening to Haunted Leather at high volume.

The mystery we mention in relation to Haunted Leather is less, then, about the unknown and more about the unknowable. Reduced strictly to their core elements – guitar and drums, paired with the drone and moan of chanted incantations, all laid atop a thick molten-core of organ hypnosis – the music of Haunted Leather should be monumentally knowable. Indeed, as is befitting their name, the sound here is marked by the howling history left by all manner of the ghosts with guitars who’ve travelled this “Red Road” before them.

What gets under our skin, into our heads and drives us out of our mind is the way Haunted Leather are able to transform these signposts into spirits of their own. We hear it in the first banshee-shriek let loose on “Shapes on the Wall.” We hear it in the clean, serpentine guitar lines that float, apparation-like, over top of the glimmering “Diamond Sleep.” And we hear in the reflective, reverberating ruin of broken dreams that is “Mirror.”

It’s here that we start to assume that the tunes of Haunted Leather are less played than they are unleashed, less written than they are remembered, less knowable than they are cryptic reminders of a path still unfolding. The “Red Road” is one we’ll continue to travel – continue to haunt – for some time to come.

“There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.”

― Joseph Conrad

It’s Not Night: It’s Space have a lot to say. What remains remarkable to these apes is that they’re able to say almost all of it without words.

When we first submitted to the gravitational pull of It’s Not Night: It’s Space, via the band’s debut EP (“East of the Sun, West of the Moon”), there was no doubt that we would be following the band’s orbit on their next approach. What we couldn’t have predicted is just how breathtaking we would find that follow-up to be.

“Bowing Not Knowing to What” is the band’s first full-length journey and somehow manages to capture nearly every disparate, distortion-driven element of our currently amplified cosmos into one unified universe of sound. Crushing rhythms merge easily with otherworldly guitar lines, reflecting the best of the East and the West (let alone that residing West of the Moon) across the spectrum of amplified space. It is a majestic, quantum-leap of an album, showcasing a band that has moved from great to quite possibly unstoppable.

Wordless as the music of It’s Not Night: It’s Space is in general, the result is something never less than lyrical. As mentioned previously, as evidenced by the W.S. Merwin-quoting title, and as confirmed by this mammoth interview, It’s Not Night: It’s Space have a lot to say, and we could not be more thrilled to offer our bow of respect to their words below. Long live raga-roll. Enjoy.

Is it fair to assume there is a shared fascination with outer space among the members of INNIS? To what do you attribute the origin of this fascination? How does that fascination manifest itself, if at all, in your everyday life? Can you sum up or capture precisely what it is about space exploration or the cosmos that carries such significance for you?


We certainly love reading mind-bending science articles about space and are fans of thinkers like Carl Sagan and science fiction like Philip K> Dick and most recently blown away by Olaf Stapeldon’s Star Maker. We also particularly share a deep love for authors like Tim Leary, Robert Anton Wilson (RAW), and Terence McKenna, and they have plenty to say about the implications of space travel and humans leaving the Earth. But really, the thing about space and the name of the band has to do with what we see as the difference between Night and Space. Maybe the best way to describe it is by pointing to a hierarchy we see. There’s Cultural Reality, Natural Reality, and Cosmic Reality. Each one being progressively more real, so to speak, which means less human-centric, less self-serving, containing less of the baggage of History and the trappings of Language. So Night is a human-centric, Earth-bound cultural concept. There’s a sense of stepping closer to The Real if we were to just adjust our language a bit and call it Space. Maybe small steps are all we can ever take, but there’s a certain kind of humility inherent in keeping close to The Real and it’s that very humility which we find to be so sorely lacking in humanity these days. Maybe some cultures, particularly ones of the past, have harmonized all levels of the hierarchy, but American culture seems so blatantly and obstinately out of touch and solipsistic in regards to those other two levels beyond the Cultural.

What are the overlaps in your own mind between a fascination with the cosmos and what we might pompously refer to as “the artistic process”? How does one inform the other in your experience?

If we are inclined to believe that Language is the prime engine of this Cultural Reality, the goal then is to find ways to step beyond it. Space represents the boundless and the great hope of “as above so below” is that we can eventually find that the same boundless potential exists right here. That the Ultimate Reality is that there is no hierarchy at all. So, anything that transcends boundaries and touches the numinous is what we are interested in: communication beyond language through purer symbols or through music itself.

Our process has consistently started, for every single song (except “The Gathering” which Tommy composed in his bedroom and then we tracked/fleshed out in the studio), at the same spot: the jam. We just tune in and let ourselves be informed by our sensibilities, by each other, and by the Other. We have some kind of recording device rolling so we can later comb back over what we channel and then decide what stands out and how to piece it all together, what story is trying to be told, what needs to happen next, how can we finish it. So it becomes this co-creation with what we call the Fourth Member. There have been many times where we will listen to what comes out of our instruments in the moment of a jam and it will feel more like we are in an audience rather than in the act of writing. For us, that’s the best place to be. We are fond of Lorca’s concept of duende for this reason because in one sense it is a type of muse that informs but also simultaneously is a quality that can be observed in a piece of art.

What can you tell us about your own personal musical evolution? How have your own listening habits – not just the music you listen to, but when you listen to it, why you listen to it, and what you take from it – evolved over time? Can you pinpoint a specific album or a specific band that served to spur your own interest in a more expansive musical universe? What captured your attention about that music initially, and how do you feel about it today?

As we do more and more interviews and we analyze these types of things, we realize that in spite of our collective agreement on what is important, our individual tastes in music and individual interests in philosophy are unique to each individual.

Tommy: The history of my present musical preferences is a bit interesting. First, I must mention that I grew up in an extremely musical family. My grandfather was an accordion player and some of my earliest memories are of him dancing around the house with his accordion. My father played Spanish ballads on the Hyostar hummingbird acoustic that eventually became my first guitar at age thirteen. My grandmother sang in her church’s choir, so did my mother. So my exposure to, and interest in, music started really early on. I started getting into my uncle’s vinyl (you know… the ubiquitous cool uncle) when I was around twelve or thirteen years old. I dug on “Disraeli Gears,” “Benefit,” “Magical Mystery Tour,” “Sgt. Peppers,” “Aftermath,” “Wheels of Fire,” “After Bathing,” and also all sorts of weird world and experimental music. I guess I really had no choice as far as the selection went. If I remember well, the initial appeal wasn’t so much the music but the mechanical act of handling the records and the record console. It just seemed like such a grown up thing to be able to do unsupervised. But, inevitably, the music took hold. Through my later teens and twenties I pretty much dug deep into punk rock and all its offshoots, partly because that’s what my peers were listening to but mostly because I identified with the ideals. What is interesting is that I have come full circle to stuff in the same vein as those initial records: namely psych, world and experimental music. I guess if I had to point to the band that brought me back into the fold (so-to-speak) it would be the Soft Machine. I was stuck listening to the same records over and over, mostly 80s hardcore and alt stuff, and some of the more artsy punk, and feeling incredibly bored by it all and dissatisfied with the “indie” thing in general. Then the first Softs album somehow landed on my stereo and it struck such a primordial chord; it led me to rediscover some of my old favorites as well as dive deeper into the psych ocean. It’s such an amazing record. It’s not all jazzed out yet but the jazz is there, just under the surface. It’s whimsical, heavy, literate but not in a pretentious way. It just sounds like it’s drenched in psychedelic honey and it wears a Dali mustache.

Mike: I became really passionate about music, as a listener who started making emotional connections to music and identifying with it, in 7th grade and carried that all the way through high school, but that whole time I was pretty unadventurous. I just didn’t have the mindset/resources to step beyond the mainstream offerings. I absolutely felt totally suffocated by it though at the same time. I can remember wandering the aisles of Tower Records, dying to find just one thing new and worthwhile but being utterly unaware and directionless. So I was obsessed with the classics like Zeppelin and Sabbath and Neil Young and 90s alt radio offerings. I always remember being totally enamored by “A Warm Place” on “The Downward Spiral.” “If only bands could write whole albums like this,” I thought. Then finally, as internet speeds got faster, I found Godspeed You! Black Emperor. That was it for me. The gateway drug for sure. There’s no way I can encapsulate what they mean to me here, but rest assured, an enormous portion of my musical heart belongs to them. The doors they opened totally affected the way I listen to and play and write music now too. Through them I found bands like Do Make Say Think or Ash Ra Tempel and suddenly I was listening to the music itself, how it unfolded, how movement happens, and no longer just hooked on a vocal melody.

Kevin: I grew up enjoying alternative music picked up from the radio and MTV like Green Day and Nirvana. By the 6th grade, I was turned onto Punk Rock and started forming bands with friends. I was quickly attracted to Anarcho-Punk, as it’s called: bands like Aus-Rotten. My interest in punk comes from an overall ongoing interest in liberty, self expression and exploration, so I always find myself drawn to bands and music that radically critiqued traditional cultural boundaries and tried to create something in the mundane world but not of the mundane world. I started liking heavier bands like Infest, His Hero is Gone, Tragedy, and From Ashes Rise. At the same time, I got turned on to a wonderful plant called Cannabis and soon found my way to the classics like Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and the Doors, and I realized how radical these people were in their own way through their music and lifestyles. I feel around that time my appreciation for all music as a means of expression grew. Since my punk days I have also deeply enjoyed and been inspired by bands like Neurosis, Isis, Om, Dead Meadow, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age. Those artists have been hitting the spot for me for years now, unceasingly. What stands out to me about the music I’ve explored after punk was this unhinged exploration of expression in and beyond words, a means of charting new states of awareness through sound, and even the altering of one’s state of awareness through it too. I cycle through listening to Raga, Folk, and tunes from the 60s and 70s too. Music has had its place in my experiences with meditation and altered states of consciousness as well.

What were your first forays into writing, performing and recording music of your own? What was most surprising to you about your early experiences? How do those experiences compare or contrast with your overall experience in INNIS?

Tommy: I’ve been in a few bands with a few good people before It’s Not Night: It’s Space. Most were punk bands; and most, with one exception, lacked motivation and/or direction. Through all of this I have recorded on my own. I guess I started committing things to tape sometime around my early twenties. Mostly little acoustic, nonsensical ditties that I would write in a few minutes, record and then forget about. It was all mostly for therapeutic value. The “songs,” and I use quotations here very purposefully, were pretty disposable and were never meant to be shared with anyone. Then, as I became more and more frustrated with the bands I was in, I decided to just go for it and do the lo-fi, home recorded thing on my own. I did that for a bit but it was so sporadic that it never really caught. Some of those songs were the first that Mike and Kevin heard when they decided to ask me into the band. All in all, INNIS may as well be my first band. I had come to think it was nearly impossible for all members of a band to be of a musical mind. I mean, we are very different people in many ways, but the way we all complement one another in the musical realm, and the way we all approach the Other, and the ways in which we make our songwriting process receptive to it … I have never experienced anything like it and am incredibly fortunate to be on this ride.

Oh yeah, and what most surprised me about my first forays into playing music for people is how incredibly unglamorous it really is. It’s basically a lot of heavy lifting and hanging out in damp basements and cold garages. And sometimes the cops show up.

Kevin: I started playing in bands and writing songs at age 11 when I got turned on to the local punk scene in New York. I started attending shows nearly every weekend or every other weekend from that age until I was 18. I first played drums and bass in thrashy punk and hardcore bands. In my last band, Sick of Talk, I played guitar. We played some fast and heavy stuff and some doomy stoner tunes before we broke up. We had a lot of fun playing and getting to participate in the DIY network around the tri state area. We released two 7” EPs and took one long weekend tour around a few eastern states. What I found amazing, and still do find amazing, was the process of writing music that I want to hear because I dig on it, and then upon sharing that with people, learning that they have enjoyed it or that it satisfies some musical interest of theirs.

With Sick of Talk, we found ourselves playing alongside some of our favorite bands, on sold out bills, opening up for them at one of CBGB’s last shows, and on stage at B.B. King’s in Manhattan. I never tried for my musical endeavors to bring any particular results, but have since learned that anything can happen when you just do your thing and see what the world makes of it.

In my old bands, I would whip up some fast riffs and we would blast them out; it was fun and gnarly, but this project has been a lot more experimental and collaborative. INNIS from the start has been a much more group minded and intuitive journey through sounds and reflection upon sounds in the process of jamming and composing psychedelic soundscapes. We seem to arrive at these psychic moments while jamming together where our hivemind kicks in and a song flows out as it wants, the duende arrives. Crazy things can happen there that one person can’t compose on his own. We work hard and play hard, I can say that for sure. The reactions we get from people at times is of a whole different caliber than other music I’ve played. People say some crazy and nice things. We really love what we’re doing and have been met with an inspiring amount of appreciation locally and otherwise, which we are definitely very grateful for.

Mike: I started playing drums my Freshman year of high school when I finally convinced my dad to take his old kit down from the attic, but this is the absolute very first band I have ever been in. So for half my life, I just felt this intense frustration and angst during any given set of some shitty bar band while I was out on the weekend. I wanted to create so badly and just never found myself in the right situation to really put work into a project. I had jam sessions here and there with good people, but nothing to call my own. My passion for being in this band is at least half fueled by that kind of finally feeling I carry with me. I can honestly say that I can’t imagine how this band could be any closer to what I have always dreamed of doing with music. If fourteen year old me could see us, he would be really excited and for that I feel blessed.

There’s an aspect of poetry that reveals itself on your stunning full-length debut, “Bowing Not Knowing to What,” which is somewhat surprising, giving the largely lyric-less nature of your music. What led you to choose the line as the title for the album, and are we correct to identify the source of the line from W.S. Merwin’s poen, “For the Anniversary of My Death”? What does that poem – or more directly, the final line of the poem – represent to you? How and where does that train of thought appear in the music of INNIS?


Mike: As we were saying before, we each bring different interests to the table, which is not to say the interests are exclusive, but we each seem to have our areas of expertise. Literature and particularly poetry are my thing.

If I can talk again about my formative years, aside from feeling suffocated by mainstream music, I just felt suffocated in general. There was a distinct lack of value all around me that seemed to be swallowing me. No one, neither my peers nor the culture at large, seemed concerned with my concerns or to be taking life seriously. But in my early twenties, around the same time I discovered Godspeed, I started reading Terence McKenna; I read The Romantics, and then The Transcendentalists, and then The Beats, and then other American poets who didn’t necessarily belong to any movement like Merwin or William Stafford. And suddenly, there were these voices speaking this language I had never heard anywhere else, voices that cut through all the unnecessary and echoed the awe and wonder I had always felt connected to for as long as I could remember. I remember standing in Barnes & Noble once in the poetry section just trying to grasp how these voices all slipped through. The slightest counter balance to all the heaviness of the culture at the time (war; consumerism; terrorism, etc.).

Merwin, in particular, is one of my favorite voices for a variety of reasons, but essentially he would understand the difference between Night & Space. He is absolutely a poet who in many ways distrusts language which, as you point out, is ironic. But walking that line between totally forsaking language and being totally consumed by it is a very important task. It might be described as an awareness of limitations and that awareness goes a long way in solving problems of our culture which is something RAW would understand and also something Jacques Derrida would understand. But without getting too sidetracked (too late?): the poem “For the Anniversary of My Death” has always been one of my favorites. It’s pretty much the perfect poem: so profoundly potent yet so simply composed. The speaker of the poem considers the fact that much like we have our birthdays marked on the calendar, our death days are marked there too; we just have no way of knowing which day it is. But, we live that day once a year just as we live our birthdays. So in essence the poem is a pondering of that mystery and sort of encapsulates one of those moments where a thought bends your mind just enough to stop you in your tracks but with enough grace that you fall in love with the mystery of being. And that’s what the last line is really all about. Reverence. Not based on some dogma, but reverence for Being itself. Genuflection before the great mystery. Humility. When you boil down the band’s individual interests and passions, there is that general sense of reverence behind how each of us approaches the world individually and what we hope comes across in our music.

While it’s impossible to select a favorite song amongst an album that hangs together so nicely as just that – a complete album, a complete and coherent expression – we will admit to being utterly engrossed with the song, “The Mantis & The Cow”? What can you tell us about the origin of this song? What led to the choice to use the recitation of Aliester Crowley’s poem “The Pentagram” within the song? Is there a Crowleyian fascination within INNIS and if so, to what do you attribute this? What does the line, “man was the lord of the fire” mean to you? Do you prefer the proper pronunciation of Crowley, or do you default to the more common, Ozzy-popularized pronunciation?


Like our other songs, “Mantis” started with a jam. The first riff you hear is the first one that just appeared one day in the midst of an extended session. Mike drew a picture a long time ago of a Mantis Being and a Cow-Skull Being and for some reason that came to him when trying to name the song. Because of that imagery, the song took on a distinct narrative quality. Mantis hero crash lands on an Evil Cow Lord’s planet. Capture and suffering/battle and redemption/salvation all follow. It’s one of the main examples of that kind of co-creation we’ve experienced. The music was telling us a story and we were listening to it, but simultaneously trying to figure out how to finish the story with subsequent parts.

When mixing and mastering the album we thought that the build-up section where Mr. Crowley appears could use a little special something and we were planning on back masking his poem with some swirlies but when Rick [Birmingham of Tree House Audio, producer of the album] dropped it in, it fit so perfectly that we didn’t touch it.

The poem itself goes through a sort of history of mankind, detailing how humans have conquered each element over the course of our evolution. We have become Lords of Earth, Sea, Fire, and Air. But the last realm which we have yet to conquer is the realm of the Spirit. So the idea of mankind conquering its suffering and redeeming itself through the mastery of Spirit, happily fit with the narrative of the Mantis and the Cow in this sort of triumphant moment of the song.

Kevin: The Crowley (I pronounce it Crow-lee) fascination can be attributed to my ongoing studies and interest in the Occult. For the past five years, I have found myself drawn toward ancient wisdom, astrology, and magick. I was turned onto Thelema (Crowley’s Philosophy, translating to “Will” in Greek) by Robert Anton Wilson’s work Prometheus Rising which was a consciousness changing book inspired by Crowley’s methods of Magick. I’ve been reading the Beast’s work for years now, and Crowley’s dedication to synthesizing spiritual wisdom from traditions east and west, his dedication to the liberty of the individual and shameless reverence for nature and the cosmos has always resonated with me deeply, thus I realized I was a Thelemite. When thinking about Aleister Crowley it is, in my opinion, important to look at him as more than an individual who wanted to offer humanity a new philosophy; his insights and libri are the product of humanity reaching a time where an individual can actually travel, learn, synthesize and share all of the wisdom of the world and also utter new truths about man’s Spiritual nature. I do believe Crowley was tapped into the values of the future, which is why he was received with so much friction in his time. He was also just a dude too, and had his rough edges as humans do. I’m currently a member of the Thelemic fraternity the A.’.A.’. So the themes of mystical reverence for our connection with the cosmos has been a part of my daily life, and so for me music is another yoga or sacred dimension of life. The art and symbolism we use has meaning to all of us; I know that. I think the awareness of the sacred power of art and reverence for nature and wisdom is something that we as bandmates all connect with. In fact well after INNIS started, I noticed this cool connection between one of Crowley’s visionary experiences and our band’s name. From The Vision and the Voice: “And it is night; and because the night is the whole night of space, and not the partial night of earth, there is no thought of dawn.”

What music have you been listening to lately? If push comes to shove, what is your favorite Iron Maiden song and why?


Mike: I seem to have a preoccupation with prolific drone artists. Evan Caminiti’s (of Barn Owl) solo work continues to floor me; Richard Skelton’s output this year was great; I have been digging as deep as possible into Steven R Smith’s work; especially in light of the success of Barn Owl, Smith is the epitome of shamefully overlooked; Zelienople; Always, always, always Stars of the Lid; Secret Museum of Mankind stuff; Sultan Kahn; Didgeri Dudes is surprisingly fantastic in spite of their name; oh yea, and I heard GY!BE put out a new album or something.

I have honestly never listened to Maiden. If you said Sabbath, I would have been all over this (correct answer there is “Wheels of Confusion” which we hope to do a 20min cover of someday).

Tommy: I’ve been keeping an ear out for this one group out of Brighton, England called Diagonal. Their debut came out in 2008, I believe, and it was absolutely phenomenal. They have a second album coming out on Metal Blade in November (that’s for the US release. I think it’s already out in the UK on Rise Above Records) and already their teaser track is hitting all the right notes as far as my ears are concerned. Besides that I’ve been getting a lot into anything to do with Felix Pappalardi. Nantucket Sleighride is an incredible album. Jack Bruce’s records after Cream seem to end up on my playlist quite often lately. Especially Things We Like, the Jazz one. Oh and Bach. Always Bach. Bach is for bassists.

Unlike Mike I do know a bit of Iron Maiden and I’m not afraid to flaunt it. No pushing or shoving required, my favorite Iron Maiden track is “Invasion” off of the Soundhouse Tapes EP. I guess I dig it and the rest of that EP because, unlike most of their later stuff, it seems to have a bit more teeth and grit and hunger. Paul Di’Anno was great. Much better than that other dude, in my humble opinion.

Kevin: I have recently been digging on the new Om record, Weird Owl’s albums, Norman Greenbaum tunes, and Mike turned me on to Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats. I only know a few Maiden Songs, but as one might guess “The Number of the Beast” is what I would lean toward.

Do you consider the members of INNIS to have a vision or prognostication for what you would like to achieve with your music in the near future? Or do you feel your next step is more left up to chance? What aspect of the band has been most surprising to you thus far? What are the areas of your music that you feel you have only now just scratched the surface of, and what promise does that hold for you in the future?


In terms of future sound, we will probably continue to allow ourselves to be informed, but we are all interested in exploring more open and textured spaces.

As far as other achievements: during an interview we did for a local paper this year, we were commended for not settling for local notoriety. We come from an incredibly active and talented region. There’s lots of stuff going on but some acts choose to keep it local while others branch out. It’s still hard to say what our next step would be. It has all been incredibly analogous to riding a wave so far, which is to say there seems to be a momentum that is entirely out of our control, but at the same time, you want to be conscious and aware upon the board you are riding so you can make adjustments as necessary. That’s the way we’ve been operating and it’s been working.

Pretty much any recognition at all in a world totally inundated by music has been really surprising. Locally, there was a sort of “bar band” barrier to break through in our home town considering it is a college town. Bars want to make money by making safe choices for their weekend events, so you could imagine an oft-too-loud instrumental psych band would be last on the list, but because of our drive to just play and hit open mics and never willfully turn down a show, the taste for us has been acquired and that in and of itself has been surprising. But again, it all just seemed to happen. We pushed very little but we resisted nothing. And all the while the scene around town has become more and more adventurous thanks to lots of different artists and collectives and venues. So now that we’ve done the Kickstarter thing and had support come in from all around the world, it makes us very excited to think that if the right heads got a hold of what we are doing, we can up the scale of the story so far.

Practically speaking, our goal would be to be acquire enough resources to obtain more instruments and continue to make more music. Socially speaking, we’d love to continue to play with bands that we have lots of respect for and vibe deeply with: Weird Owl, Eidetic Seeing, Ancient Sky. Philosophically speaking, if art is the way human beings honor the world, then to be honored for the way you honor the world is probably the most deeply satisfying thing we know of.

Author Stanislaw Lem wrote the following in his book, “His Master’s Voice”:

   

“Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the     blackmail of the ‘superior knowledge’ that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows     from simple arithmetic.”

Your thoughts?

The reductionist materialistic mindset is certainly something that we see as a major problem with our culture. Derrick Jensen’s latest book called Dreams does a pretty good job at analyzing all the ills that arise from it. Science at its best can be pretty psychedelic. The fact that we can distinguish the difference between Night & Space is totally a revelation that belongs to science. But at its worst science can enable things like slavery, industrial mechanization, and genocide. Maybe the problem is exactly what Crowley was getting at in his Pentagram poem. We’ve gained (what seems like) a mastery over the material world but we experience all this angst because our culture is still afraid of inner space, of consciousness, of mind, of anything that can’t be measured in material quantifiable terms. As RAW once said, mysticism used to be a branch of science. It is the ordered study of consciousness and its altered states. We’ve lost that connection and it’s sorely needed. Real change in American culture isn’t going to come about through politics or prescribed leaders. It has to be a bottom up cultural change, a shift in value systems. The best way to shift values is via the psychedelic experience which again is tied to what we began with: transcending boundaries of culture, language, history, etc.

What’s next for INNIS?

We’d like to do some kind of tour. Surprisingly, we have never played a show outside of New Yorks state. Not even to New Jersey or anything. We play a silly amount of shows. 43 in 2011 and we are already over 50 in 2012. But all of them have been in the confines of our state lines. But, aside from the Kickstarter, we depend on our own pockets which are not very dependable. So, we’ll have to see how it goes. All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet, or so we’ve heard.

It’s Not Night: It’s Space

Enjoy.

It’s tempting to build a rickety but traversable bridge between the gargantuan sounds of Black Bombaim and White Manna, given the seemingly opposite, far-ends of the color spectrum where each band has nominally set up camp. But this is no ceremony of opposites – and neither band seems even slightly interesting in limiting themselves any particularly slivers of color, shape or sound. In the overall approach of both bands, there’s more than a few threads connecting the chasm between absolute darkness and pure light – sonic rejections of duality abound.

Black Bombaim’s absolutely epic excursions may be born out of a dark pool of light, though it immediately becomes clear that the band is doing more than simply throwing down the intergalactic gauntlet on “Titans,” a double LP consisting of four, ferocious, side-length excursions hurtling towards space-rock bliss. Indeed, these Portgugeuse pioneers appear to be throwing down not just the gauntlet, but the helmet, the saber and the sword as well.”Titans” is the sound of an intergalactic sprawl, with every swirling shade of the known universe used to almost overwhelming effect. Rock-solid riffs, long, time-bending improvisations, those woobly-boobly synths – all present and accounted for, of course, but they’ve brought with them some unexpected yet very welcome guests.

Opening opus “A” (followed, naturally, symbolically or both, by the equally epic “B,” “C,” and “D”) begins for us in a place of cozy, caveman comfort. A genuinely Geezer-esque bass line announces the identifiable core of “Titans” journey – the universal “om” or pranava, “that which is sounded out loudly.” This comfort lasts hardly even a definable moment before an eruption of effects-laden guitar roars to life, threatening to tear the listener apart via the grip of trembling, tremolo tentacles. Salvation is offered by some superb, propulsive drumming, offering some sense of equilibrium – but these gravitational guardrails soon come undone as well, giving Black Bombaim an exciting and explosive sound. The album’s only vocal performance – a vicious, bile-spewing chanting of the Plutonian priests, every bit as dead as it is alive – soon demands that guitar, bass and drums to live as one, defiantly daring the listener to complete the journey. Our ticket is fully punched – no return trip necessary.

Somewhat closer to home, then, exists the trip of White Manna, hailing from the visionary state of California. Given the sun-kissed evergreens at dawn that grace the cover of their self-titled Holy Mountain debut, you’d be forgiven for initially considering White Manna to be more earthbound than chaotically cosmic. Yet if the title of the band’s album opener “Acid Head” isn’t an instant eye-opener, its parade of heavenly, hypnotic heaviness should render any listener’s third-eye (ear?) squeegeed quite cleanly. “Rise, rise – won’t you rise?” goes the song’s refrain, but the question seems rhetorical, at least when directed toward the band as a whole. White Manna seem to levitate from the ground easily, nearly effortlessly, resulting in an album where one instant classic is only followed by another.

At their most expansive (most notably, on the penultimate track “Don’t Gun Us Down”), White Manna shows the ability to match any band in the race toward space – outer limits be damned, White Manna is an energetic riff-rocket hurtling toward the stars powered by pure, unrefined fuzz-fuel. To ours ears, however, the surprise lies the natural, unforced projection of the mantra-like vocal lines that ultimately allow the band to more than live up to its illuminated billing. On “Keep Your Lantern Burning,” the vocals take their place as the sonic serpents swirling around the band’s crushing caduceus of ritual space-throb. Here’s to the white light of White Manna, and that hopes that it never goes out.

White Manna have now embarked on a Fall Tour with the translinguistic space-cadets of Midday Veil.

Black Bombaim‘s upcoming efforts include a split release with the inimitable Gnod via Cardinal Fuzz Records.

The name of Sweden’s The Janitors captures a workmanlike approach to a certain sound of repeated riff-ology, bathing themselves in distortion almost as an obligation – a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Such was the impression borne of our first introduction to The Janitors, on the excellent “Worker Drone Queen” EP, a king-sized collection of frozen-fuzz-fueled tunes. Opening track “Do It Again” exemplified this sensation most directly, revealing just a hint of mantra-like sonic simplicity, the band pushing, pushing, pushing toward the inevitable collision amplifier-driven awakening. Carry water, chop wood, stomp boxes.

Initially, immediately after having having our mind instantly, mercilessly mopped by the follow-up EP, “Head Honcho,” we were prepared to offer The Janitors a raise for continued stellar performance on doing that dirty job. But it was probably two and a half minutes into “Strap Me Down,” when the wah-pedal flourishes scream louder than the unholy hounds of hell and manage to scrape the very back edges of your skull, that we realized that this is no mere job for The Janitors – this is their distorted destiny, their natural state of being ensnared by snarled sound. The Janitors are less employed than empowered, their insane, trance-inducing amplifier trashing only a job in the same way that the mighty Yeti can be said to be on the clock, and perhaps three-times as powerful.

We’re thrilled to have our ears firmly within the death-grip of The Janitors, and even more thrilled to have our ridiculous questions answered by founding Janitors Henric and Jonas below. Enjoy … and enjoy our old friend Al Lover’s extraordinary remix of The Janitor’s “Death Song” as well.

We have the impression – which is only an impression, as we’ve never been there ourself – of Sweden as a very “clean” country. Do you think this is a fair impression, and does this impression have anything at all to do with choosing the name “Janitors”? What does the name represent to you, if anything? Are you from Sweden originally, and if so, how do you think the atmosphere of the country has impacted you as a musical person?

Yeah, Sweden is clean, not Singapore clean, but still clean. Though the image of Sweden as clean is more an image and sadly not a truth anymore.

The name “The Janitors” has actually nothing to do with that. The first incarnation of The Janitors was born on a museum in Stockholm where we met Johan Risberg (drummer of Swedens indie pride Hell on Wheels) back in 2003. We were all working as janitors/custodians and found that we shared a mutual love for JAMC and sweet, sweet feedback. After a booze-filled night we decided to start a band and the name came naturally. It’s not a very good name but like all other names it’s grown on you when you associate the music with it. .

The main Janitors are born and raised in Stockholm but we have a member from the south of Sweden as well.

Sweden has in the past always put great efforts into culture and art. There are government subsidies that everyone can easily apply for to get your own rehearsal space and instruments. We think this is one of the main reasons why there has been such a large amount of bands coming out of a relatively small country like Sweden.  Other than that, Swedes have always been very influenced by American culture, so most of our influences musically come from the US and the rest of the West.

Do you think there is anything that is definably “Swedish” about the music made by The Janitors? Do you think there is any legitimacy in categorizing music in geographic perspectives – meaning, would we be any more or any less consumed with a band like Dungen or Graveyard if they came from Detroit, or Brazil?

Not really – there might be some cold, dark and isolated elements in our music that can refer to our quite-dull winters, which start in October and end in March, where we don’t really have any sun.

Of course, the environment you grow up in effects you in your creativity, but with globalization, every place in the world is your backyard to go out in – the geographic aspect is less important and politics and environment are the main aspects that could make an impact and influence.

Who are the Swedish artists or bands that made the greatest impact on you in your youth? And today?

Henric: Bob Hund, no doubt (Here they are with a Pere Ubu cover that actually made it’s way to the charts in Sweden). They were the first band that seriously changed my concept of how a band could look, sound and behave.

Jonas: Growing up the punk scene definitely shaped me both as a musician and a person, there was a pretty vibrant punk scene in the early nineties before the Brit-pop and grunge entered. Today I do not listen that much to Swedish music – could be a track here or there.

Nowadays there are an abundance of awesome bands coming out of Sweden, but here’s a bunch of great psych(-ish) bands in Sweden right now that we always give love to: Audionom, Orange Revival, Pascal, VED, Goat, Ikons, Uran gbg, Sudakistan, Hills, This Is Head, Fontän, Syket, Holograms, The Skull Defekts, Beast and Les Big Byrd.

What was the first music that you gravitated to with such vigor and admiration that you absolutely knew that you had to try to create your own? What was it about that music that appealed to you so strongly? How have your thoughts on that music evolved over the years? What was most immediately satisfying for you about playing in a band? What has taken you the longest to figure out?

Always and forever The Jesus and Mary Chain. It was the band that got us started and changed our perspective of how and why music is made. “Psychocandy” really changed our whole view on music, how you could make a guitar sound and the brilliance of three minute tracks in three chords. The rebirth of classic rock’n roll song structures and drown that fucker in grinding noise.

The most satisfying thing about playing in a band was and still is the total takeover of yourself when you are rehearsing or playing live, it is only then and there in a very positive way. I think the longest thing to figure out is the balance between perfection and the beauty of non-perfection, something we are closing in on with the latest The Janitors recordings. It´s also one of the main arguments that we have among ourselves that always keeps us on our toes creatively.

What has been most surprising for you during your time with The Janitors thus far? What were your original aims when coming together, and how had those aims shifted by the time of the “Worker Drone Queen” EP? One of the (many) things that we love about that EP is how it sits almost equidistant between “the riff” and “the drone” (no offense to the mighty Queen, of course).

That we actually kept on making music. We are in our tenth year by 2013 (with a five year hiatus, but still). The original urge in the first incarnation of The Janitors was to fill the void of noise/pop driven music in Sweden. The first setup of The Janitors was quite strange. Floor tom, tamburine and snare drum plus two guitars and a lot of harsh feedback and some kind of pop melody underneath. Very much influenced by JAMC.  We were together for about 1 ½ years and then split up. When we got together again after about 5 years, it was mainly because we missed the feedback and the creativity. We both had become fathers and really needed a creative output. At first we were kind of lost but still got to make an album (“First Sign of Delirium”). Compiled of old and new material that really wasn’t that well thought through and kind of rushed into. After that we almost broke up again.

Then we decided to start our own label (Your Ears Have Been Bad And Need To Be Punished) and started to record the “Worker Drone Queen” EP in our own studio Psychgrottan (“The Psych Cave”). The main goal was and is to only make music by our own rules and get it out to people that might be interested.

What can you tell us about a song that has found its way directly into the coffin-chamber of our heart, “Death Song”? Despite the practice of constraining the headphones directly and tightly atop our ears repeatedly, we’re unable to make out a single-line of the lyrics – they seem to disintegrate in to space-fuzz.

“Death Song” is one of those songs built on a single riff and then just jamming round that one. I had the melody in my head and it fit nicely to the feeling of the intro riff. The lyrics came later on, as usually is the case, I don’t write the lyrics until the track is almost finished. It turned out pretty neat … We really look at the vocals as one of the instruments, and since we have a fondness for fuzz & delay why shouldn’t we bury the vocals in the same as the rest. A spaced-out vocal sound is something we have tried to achieve for a long time, hearing how it “should” sound in my head but I think sound engineers generally are too obsessed with the crisp vocal sound that pops out of the mix and, in my head, does not “glue” to the music. I feel that a delay drenched vocal is better in sync with the backgrounds. Lots of sharp high-band delays makes it pop out in a different, more satisfying way.

How would you compare your latest EP, “Head Honcho,” with its two predecessors? Was there anything in particular that you hoped to execute differently than you had previously, either in regard to the overall sound or to the “vibe” or “tone” of the songs?

The “Head Honcho” was created in just 3 months. We didn’t really have any blueprint for this EP.

For “Sick State” and “Worker Drone Queen,” we had a few songs when starting, but this one was a blank paper.

“Strap Me Down” and “MSSG” were created through jamming before the release party for the “Worker Drone Queen,” and “A-Bow” came to life through a recording Jonas made of a bow (an actual bow-and-arrow bow, that is), tuned to A, hence the name, “A-Bow.” And from that we found the guitar riff instantly and everything else fell into place fairly easily (with a little help from our favorite friend Innes & Gunn).

All in all, the sound of “Head Honcho” is what we were aiming to do with “Worker Drone Queen” but didn’t quite make the whole way. Since we produce and record everything ourselves it has taken some time to get the recording process going and the equipment fine-tuned.

What music have you been listening to lately? If push comes to shove, what is your favorite Hellacopters album and why?

A mixtape from The Janitors right now would contain: Cat Power, Goat, Moon Duo, PJ Harvey, First Aid Kit, Anna Von Hausswolff, The Bronx, The Oscillation, Dead Skeletons, Marduk, Tom Waits, Depeche Mode, Wooden Shjips, Refused, Liars, UFO Club …

For those of you with Spotify here’s a playlist: “Janitors Love, Sept. 12.”

When it comes to Hellacopters, it has to be “Supershitty to the Max.” No doubt, just the title says it all. It was kind of a hit in the face. Hadn’t heard that kind of music since MC5´s “Kick out the Jams,” which we (for apparent reasons) had not experienced live.

What has your experience been playing live with The Janitors so far? In what ways do you hope that your live performance is more than just a faithful replication of what you had previously recorded, and in what ways do you consider a live performance as something “beyond” what can ever be expressed through a recording, through an “artifact”? 

Our live shows are never really a replication of our recordings. We change members and bring in new people from time to time to get the process a bit different. We are quite harder and more harsh live than on record. The feedback can live in another way when you experience it live than the way you capture it on tape. We also work a lot with lights in order to create a visual experience as well. There is always an element of ,“Let´s see where this goes” in the live shows.

The magic of the live performance with all its imperfections and moments is hard to put against the recording process which we are quite fond of. The magic when everything falls into place and a new song comes to life while recording is something we really love.
Until recently we haven’t played much live. We focused on getting our ideas on tape instead. But now we got together a brilliant band that we feel very comfortable with and we have some shows booked. But rehearsing takes time from creating so it’s a balancing act.

In his book “The Mission of Art,” Alex Grey writes the following:

“The difference between lunacy and time-honored religious rituals is a thick layer of morphic resonance built up over many generations of devotional repetition. Many of our most scared rituals would appear to be the behavior of psychotics were it not for their acceptance as demonstrations of faith. Prostrations, the use of phylacteries, genuflection, and numerous self-mortifications – all are strange to the uninitiated. When ritual becomes habitual and widespread, a tradition is born. The power of morphic resonance promotes the unquestioned or unconscious acceptance of traditional behavior. The creative spirit is in turbulent resonance with the collective morphic field. Part of the job of creative persons is to challenge traditional habits of thought and behavior and develop new expressions to surprise and reinvigorate the collective mind-set.”

Your thoughts?

Well, being born and raised in a secular society we see most religious rituals and religion being just looney-tunes. It’s not wrong to believe in something but come on people, get a grip on reality. We are living in the 21st century, and people still wage war to impress invisible superheroes who live in outer space … The Janitors believe that through repetition comes beauty and that no chain is stronger than the weakest link, so take care of yourself, your friends and those around you that don’t have the benefits you have.

What’s next for The Janitors?

The first Stockholm Psych Fest was September 22nd. The first of hopefully many that we are a part of and helping curate. We finally got together an awesome band so there will be more live shows in the future.

We are writing new songs for the vinyl that will collect our favs from the past EP’s. It will hopefully be done and out by the end of the year. A lot of nice remixes of “Worker Drone Queen” and “Head Honcho” are in the making, featuring good people like Al Lover, Swedish favs Fontän, STRSSMMNT and many more. For all of you reading, drop us an email if you’re interested in remixing! That’s 2012.

For 2013 we haven’t got a clue so far. we haven’t made that plan yet. We got some offers to do gigs in Europe and a visit to the States would be nice.

The Janitors

As near as we can tell, the members of Carlton Melton are not Hopi mystics. But we haven’t completly closed the book on this possibility.

As we instantly fell under the spell of their latest album, “Photos of Photos,” we recognized much of what we’ve found so intoxicating about Carlton Melton from past releases. Indeed, upon our introduction to the band’s “Country Ways” and subsequent crowning as “Band of the Week” (what an honor!) back in 2011, we declared the band essentially impossible to dislike, given their essential raison d’etre – sensory-awareness space rock recorded in a geodesic dome.

But as the releases (transmissions, really) continued to meet our headphones with alarming regularity – particularly the “Smoke Drip” EP and the Aquarius Records compilation exclusive, reasonably titled “AQ Hits” – we eventually came to view the sonic spell weaved by the band with a kind of detached awe. The sound of Carlton Melton is born of equal parts hypnosis and heaviness, resulting in an enormous galaxy of sound, where surprising sounds rise and then fall, existing for a moment, for eternity, or quite possibility never at all.

And when we got about one track in to “Photos of Photos” … that’s when we focused on our suspicions about the band being Hopi mystics.

As near as well can tell, Hopi mystics did not record albums in geodeisic domes in Northern California. Hopi mystics did not blanket the earth with reverb, Echoplex, and sweet, sweet John McBain.

But in the terrifyingly efficient telepathy of Carlton Melton, there seems to be more than a pinch of the mystic.

“In [the] Hopi view, time disappears and space is altered, so that it is no longer the homogeneous and instantaneous timeless space of our supposed intuition or of classic Newtonian mechanics … [Hopi metaphysics] imposes on the universe two grand cosmic forms: manifested and manifesting (or, unmanifest) or, again, objective and subjective. The objective or manifested comprises all that is or has been accessible to the senses, the historical physical universe, in fact, with no attempt to distinguish between present and past, but excluding everything that we call future, but not merely this; it includes equally and indistinguishably all that we call mental — everything that appears or exists in the mind, or, as the Hopi would prefer to say, in the heart, not only the heart of man, but the heart of animals, plants, and things, and behind and within all the forms and appearances of nature in the heart of nature, and by an implication and extension … in the very heart of the Cosmos itself. The subjective realm (subjective from our viewpoint, but intensely real and quivering with life, power, and potency to the Hopi) embraces not only our future, much of which the Hopi regards as more or less predestined in essence if not in exact form, but also all mentality, intellection, and emotion, the essence and typical form of which is the striving of purposeful desire, intelligent in character, toward manifestation — a manifestation which is much resisted and delayed, but in some form or other is inevitable.” – Language, Thought, & Reality by Benjamin Lee Whorf.

Carlton Melton have achieved the most amazing result from their journey toward becoming Carlton Melton: They’ve become Carlton Melton. It was inevitable.

We feel fortunate to be able to live in a world where Carlton Melton continues to release (manifest?) music at a rapid clip, and just as fortunate to have Andy Duvall and Rich Millman from the band answer our ridiculous questions below. Enjoy.

Have you ever personally known someone with the name, “Carlton”? What type of person were they and did they in any way influence the naming of the band? What importance do Country Joe & The Fish – featuring the original, outrageously beautiful guitar playing of one Barry Melton – play in the formation of both the moniker and the machine of Carlton Melton?

Rich: On the first night Carlton Melton recorded together, Andy and I talked about growing up in Delaware and we realized we both knew the same person named Carlton Melton. Andy attended elementary school with him and I played pee-wee football against him. He was a real bad ass that other kids looked up to. That night it seemed like a great name for a band and has stuck with us ever since.

Andy: It’s funny you mention Barry Melton; his son contacted me after seeing the band name somewhere. He asked me the same question – what’s up with the band name?  He is a really nice guy; I invited him to one of our shows but I have yet to meet him. “Country Ways” – a definite nod to Country Joe and the Fish. During one recording session I remember one of us saying we sound like country music – “country” in the sense that we are coming up with this music in the sticks. True country.

Let’s step back from Carlton Melton for one brief moment and reflect momentarily on the time you spent in the band Zen Guerrilla. What did you learn most from your experience in that band? What was the most surprising, least-rapid to manifest benefit of the time you spent with that band? How, if at all, does the spirit of Zen Guerrilla continue to impact the music of Carlton Melton, either consciously or unconsciously?

Andy: The most important thing I learned from playing in Zen Guerrilla is to have fun. When it’s no longer fun, it’s over.

Rich: Over the years I think I have learned more what not to do in a band than what to do in a band. 1995 to 2000 were the best years for me being in Zen Guerrilla. We were tight musically and could play live anywhere with anybody. That was a great feeling. The spirit of that band carries on in the friendship Andy and I still have.

Let’s step back from Carlton Melton and Zen Guerrilla for one brief moment and reflect momentarily on your own early, musical evolution. What was the first music that you can recall being deeply moved by, whether it be excited, sad, happy, etc.? What do you think about that music today? What music was it that eventually “broke the camel’s back,” so to speak, and encouraged you to move forward with making your own music?

Rich: Andy and I bonded early on over a love for Jimi Hendrix. Andy saw me cover a Hendrix song on guitar at a party back in the day and then I think he decided I was cool. I think the 80s post-punk stuff – bands on record labels like SST, Touch and Go, Amphetamine Reptile – they showed you that you could be in a band, tour, put out records and somewhat survive. Growing up, the big arena rock bands seemed so out of touch and out of reach … just not a realistic option for playing honest music.

Andy: I remember always hearing Jim Croce on the AM. He – his voice – really struck a nerve with me when I was a kid. Also, my 2nd grade teacher, for whatever reason, would start each and every day by playing Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken” on a turntable he kept in the classroom. To this day I love that song. I also remember really liking The Beatles when I was really young – once again, hearing them all the time on the AM car radio. I remember thinking the actual band was playing live from the trunk of the car.

Carlton Melton

The concept of “the split” – the split LP, the split EP, the split seven-inch, the split cassette – remains an underutilized favorite of ours for a variety of reasons, not least because the form remains the domain of what might reasonably be called the underground … or the subterranean … or the fuzz-obsessed freaks of burden.

Most notably, a split release allows us the opportunity to blather on predictably, pointlessly, to the delight of no one, about another favorite, underutilized concept – the “oneness of the duality. Not two, not one. This is the most important teaching.”

There’s probably few artists in the galaxy that strike us as better suited for use in the confrontation and contemplation of those heavy head-scratchers like “the oneness of the duality” than Expo 70. Over the course of seemingly countless releases birthed over the better part of the past decade, Expo 70 (the nom de l’exploration spatiale of Missouri-via-Mars resident Justin Wright) has created a marvelous legacy of sonic sorcery – or, to take the name of one of the releases on his own Sonic Meditations label, an inspired school of astral music.

Class, then, is most certainly in session for the recent release on the Sound of Cobra label, pairing Expo 70 with Ancient Ocean. Inspired as always, Expo 70 leads the journey – from sound, entry to everything.

Both artists here offer their own individual, 20-plus minute excursion into the deepest realms of deep listening, droning soundscapes both ambient and astral in nature, weaved together with a sense of a serpentine stream of consciousness, befitting the snake-named nature of the releasing label, Sound of Cobra. In the sound of both Ancient Ocean and Expo 70, there’s no need for the narrow definitions of “song” – and description alone casts a cold shadow over the proceedings. Rather, what applies are the emotions – pleasantly puzzling, stimulating, and enthusiastic emotions, brought about by a warm exploration of individuals slowing time.

Where the split between Expo 70 and Ancient Ocean can be defined as the sound of two individuals effortlessly punching holes into the immutability of time, a different – and altogether more beastly – beast lies at the heart of the third “Collisions” release from the always fiery Rocket Recordings, a split release from Gnod and $hit and $hine. Rather than the individual, the focus here is on the collective; rather than the irrelevance of time, the focus here would appear to be in the eradication of time – eradication with great prejudice.

The impact of Gnod upon our listening habits over the past couple of years can hardly be over emphasized. At the time of our interview with the shape-shifting UK wizards of sound late last year, we were very close to declaring the band to have released both the best and the second best albums of 2011 – and this was before we had been set deep into a cosmic-coma via “Genocider,” the crushing tomb of sound from “Chaudelande Volume II.”

Both Gnod and $hit and $hine bring to “Collisions 3” the full weight of massive, world-crushing force that comes from near complete disregard for convention, mysteriously expanding and contracting line-ups, and the willingness to wield the sharpest points of any number of sounds in order to achieve their goals. With both tracks clocking in around the fifteen-minute mark, dub aesthetics merge with combustible Detroit-bred explosions of raw power, synthesized beats antagonize a world of synthesized violence, chanting codas mesh with the hot breath of levitating bass riffs, and all limits are fast eroded.

May the collisions never end.

“Which means here that the limits between the ego and its opposites, such as the cosmos or God, are wiped out, and one all-combining feeling of community spreads over the entire universe.” Frederic Spiegelberg, 1948, “The Religion of No Religion”

Using that old saw known as “linear time,” we can see that not a great deal of time has passed since we first found ourselves in the orbit of Black Tempest. But then, we didn’t need much time to become enthralled by the sounds of the tempest, and since that time, our admiration has grown boundlessly. After all, space is dark and it is so endless.

Black Tempest is also dark, it should come as no surprise, and some are likely to find the sprawling, gravitationally-uninhabited soundscapes that populate brilliant albums like “Proxima” to approach the definition of “endless.” Certainly these sounds are not governed by any conventional notions of time. Rather, the Black Tempest listening experience owes more to an observation of the limitless and then seeing that limitlessness transformed into a finite expression.

And what an expression it is. Black Tempest’s cosmic creations – informed equally by a direct line of influence from space-and-krautrock pioneers (shadows of Klaus Schulze, Popul Vuh and Tangerine Dream abound) and the more indirect influence of simply being a limitless music-obsessive living in the 21st-century – make great use of the dark reflections one sees when staring into the void of space, but never seem detached from the human element, the magnetic impulse that directs ones attention toward the void in the first place. It’s a sound alien in immediate appearance, yet coursing with human blood at the heart of the machine.

We’re elated to have been brought into the orbit of Black Tempest – an elation upon which time will have only a compounding effect – and equally thrilled to have the heart of this darkness, Stephen Bradbury, provide answers to our ridiculous questions below. Enjoy.

Can you recall a time when either a single piece of music, the single performance of a band, a particular album, etc., changed your way of thinking about music in total? What was that music and what was it about that music that made such a distinct impression on you? How have your thoughts about it evolved since your first introduction?

I guess that’s happened to me a few times over the years. The first time, and thus probably the most profound, would have been Steve Hillage’s “Fish Rising.” I was probably about 12 or 13 when it came out. I used to hang around in our local record shop in the shopping arcade, and the long-haired bloke behind the counter, a few years older than me, recommended it to me. I took it home and it promptly blew my tiny teenage mind. It made me realise that music could take you outside of your normal consciousness to “other places.”

Since then the “classic” Hillage albums (“Fish Rising,” “Green,” “L,” “Motivation Radio”) have become touchstones for me, reminding me that my own music could, possibly fulfill the same function for other people. This is, essentially, what I aspire to.

A few years later I had similar revelatory experiences with Jimi Hendrix’ “Rainbow Bridge” album, and Spirit’s marvelous “Spirit of ‘76” double. I first heard both of these during my first full-on hallucinatory experience, back in the days of “proper” microdots. They opened my eyes to the fact that I wasn’t the first person to tread those mysterious paths, and that music could be a guide and a teacher. This is also something I try to give back to people who take the time to listen to my own music.

Can you recall a time when either a single piece of music, the single performance of a band, a particular album, etc., changed your way of thinking in any arena apart from music? What was that music and what was it about what we might term “the message” of said music that made it so profound for you? How have your thoughts about that music – and that sphere of your life – evolved since your first introduction?

The most obvious example of that would be “God Save The Queen.” Although I’d already heard The Damned and The Ramones back then, when the BBC banned “God Save The Queen” and “prevented” it from going to number one in the singles chart, it revealed to me how music could be a revolutionary force for political change. It seems almost a trite statement now, but back then, as a teenager finding my political feet, it couldn’t have been a more powerful statement. In retrospect the music itself now seems almost irrelevant – it was derivative and the politics was simplistic at best – but the power of it back then was a massive electrical charge up society’s behind. It’s easy to forget that now.

To what degree is music the connective thread that runs through your life? Setting aside for a moment the act of making music, what do you get from music? Would you describe music as either your foremost obsession or your longest running obsession, or perhaps neither?

Music has been a connective thread through my life for as long as I can remember pretty much. I can remember bouncing around to “Bits And Pieces” by The Dave Clark Five when I was little more than a toddler. I still get that irresistible urge to dance to the right music. Now, of course, I also get the cerebral and spiritual thrills and spills, but those took longer to evolve in my mindset. Music is both my foremost obsession, and my longest running obsession! If you could talk to any of my family or friends it wouldn’t take long to confirm that fact! Music is pretty much everything for me – my whole life revolves around it one way or another. Our house is a shrine to my records and instruments – I don’t know how my family put up with it to be honest!

What were the steps that led to you first making the conscious decision to make music of your own? What were your early experiments in sound like? What was most satisfying to you about the creative process? What remained – and perhaps still remains – most mystifying?

School friends and I formed a band when I was about 12. Initially we just did the usual covers, but I soon went on to form another band with two friends who, like myself, were more progressively minded. We used to play local youth clubs and the like. We tried to do great long concept pieces (it was the early 70s!) – I remember one gig where the three of us even had slide projections and stuff, quite something now I look back at it. It is so long ago now it is hard to recall much about the creative process, but I do remember it involved smoking sneaky cigarettes!

When did you begin your path under the moniker Black Tempest? What does the name represent to you, if anything at all, and in what ways does that spirit manifest itself in your music, if at all? Like our (perhaps erroneous) assertion regarding music being a connective thread for life in general, do you identify a single, definable thread running through all that you’ve done as Black Tempest thus far? Was that something that you wished to achieve from the outset of Black Tempest, or have you seen this thread transform or reveal itself through time?

The Black Tempest thing was a few years back now. I’d been using an old stage name (which I’m still known by in certain quarters), Squid Tempest, but decided I needed something darker as I was going to try a nastier, more metal sound than previously. So I switched the Squid to Black, in homage to Sabbath. Back then there were no other band I knew of that used the Black prefix – it has since, sadly, become ubiquitous, and Black Tempest looks like a hundred other band names. I’m considering changing the name at some point, but I’m a little reluctant as it is now familiar to quite a few people.

Certainly there’s something connecting the releases “Proxima” and “Ex-Proxima,” which served as our introduction to Black Tempest. We find both collections to be beautiful and are receptive to multiple listens to both – sometimes, in fact, shuffled together in a single playlist. What, from both a micro and a macro perspective, are the similarities shared here, and what are the distinctions that led to the “Ex” designation?

“Proxima” was a bunch of recordings put together for a release on Apollolaan Recordings, run by the very wonderful Matthew Shaw. I was going through a creative purple patch at the time and recorded far more than was needed for a single CD. Matt didn’t want to put out a double, so I released it as a separate CD a short while after. Thus the “Ex” refers to the tracks being “from” the Proxima sessions.

What music have you been listening to lately? If push comes to shove, what is your favorite Klaus Schulze album of all-time and why?

So many brilliant releases this year it’s hard to just list a few! Here goes:

White Hills – Frying On This Rock

Hookworms – S/T

Teeth of the Sea – Your Mercury

Nope – Revision

Carlton Melton – Smoke Drip

Sylvester Angfang II – Various Recordings

Kogumaza – S/T

Gnod – Chaudelande Vols 1 and 2

Mugstar – Lime

Goat – World Music

Baroness – Yellow and Green

The Heads – Enten Eller

You’re Smiling Now But We’ll All Turn Into Demons – Contact High

Om – Adviatic Songs

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats – Blood Lust

Lumerians – S/T

Various Artists – Electric Eden

… and a couple of older ones:

Kevin Ayers – Harvest Years box

Todd Rundgren – Something/Anything

Edgar Froese – Solo

Favourite Klaus Schulze? “Timewind”!

How do you describe your music to the curious? Do you feel there is more or less to be explained, digested or perhaps translated from largely instrumental music? Do you tend to think of your music in either visual or perhaps “atmospheric” terms, or is there another, strictly personal sort of an alphabet that you refer to when summoning the Tempest?

I never enjoy trying to describe my music, but the description usually comes out as some thing corny like “experimental electronic drifty ambient” or simply “a bit like Phaedra-era Tangerine Dream.”

Much of my music is very spontaneous, so I don’t deliberately go for an instrumental approach. In recent times the results have been largely instrumental as you say, but this isn’t a planned strategy as such. My singing is more appropriate to some of the more rock influenced music that I’ve played on in the past rather than the trippy atmospheric things I’ve done in recent years, so maybe that is just the way of it.

Alex Grey says the following in his book, “The Mission of Art”:

“Yet no art is without influences. Artists who examine the art world and the work of their contemporaries open themselves to potentially refreshing influences that may bring their personal vision to full fruition … Artists cannot evolve in total isolation from other art, yet the art-historical imperative for making art, an art for art’s sake, or a concern for only the formal characteristics of art, is not a sufficiently deep motivation to sustain art as a living cultural force. Artists breathe in and are inspired by the condition of their world. Todays artists need to consider the consciousness-evolutionary imperative.”

Your thoughts?

Crikey! That’s pretty deep! How about asking my favourite colour or my lucky number?!

I wear my influences on my sleeve. Or, at least, I’m not afraid to admit what influences me. Black Tempest is clearly heavily influenced by Tangerine Dream, there’s no sense in pretending that isn’t the case. I’ve tried, however, to take that a stage further and inject my own thing, and add a more contemporary hallucinogenic edge to it. Whether that has been successful isn’t really for me to judge, but it certainly seems to have gone down OK with the people who have been kind enough to listen in. I aspire to inspiring people, and providing a soundtrack for peoples excursions into the territories of the “other”, the spiritual, the lysergic, the psylocybic, the meditational and the far out. A guiding vibration, an uplifting sonic path to follow if you so choose.

What’s next for Black Tempest?

Exciting times ahead! Fresh from the appearance of the expanded line up at the Supernormal festival, a film of the adventures of Black Tempest in outer space is immanent. The expanded line up, by the way, features the extraordinary talents of Spaceship Mark Williamson and Dan “Kosmischeboy” Doughty, two people I was really thrilled to have a chance to work with. For those who don’t know, at Supernormal we did Space Opera Live. Space Opera is a podcast that I’ve been doing this year – a spoken word science fiction story set to improvised synth music. In its live form it was accompanied by an amazing animated projection made by Dave “Hand of Dave” Longey from the States, and our costumes involved some incredible “alien spaceman” masks made by Felt Mistress.

The next recorded output will be a collaboration that I’ve been working on with the amazing Dead Sea Apes. I’ve loved working on this project, they are such like minds, and we’ve had an almost telepathic rapport while doing this. The results have to be heard to be believed! With luck this will be a vinyl release on the new Cardinal Fuzz label. To say I’m excited by this release is an immense, IMMENSE understatement!

And finally, I’ve just started working on the next Black Tempest release. I’ve been collecting field recordings the last few months, and I’m starting to splice these in with various improvised synth recordings and other sonic tit-bits. I may include some poetry and even (GASP!) some songs/singing, or something resembling that at least. Or maybe not, we’ll see!

Phew! Are we there yet?

Black Tempest