Music

Insect Ark | The Rawest Thing

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Through the years and with the help of different musicians, Insect Ark, the solo project of Dana Schechter (Swans), got different nuances, always dark, dreamy, and largely instrumental, spacey and sludgey on Portal/Well, chthonian on The Vanishing. On its fourth album, Raw Blood Singing, the music is both beguiling and crushing; it unearths old places and explores new ground, adding the inimitable drumming of Tim Wyskida (Khanate, Blind Idiot God) and vocals to Dana’s bass and lap steel. A couple of hours after their performance at this year’s Roadburn, I had a chat with the band, including their live guitar and lap steel player, Lynn Wright, to hear their take on this last album.

Raw Blood Singing turned out to be the ideal pretext to dive into the core of the project, talk about its history, and reflect on its essence, but also to listen to three seasoned musicians speak about the twists and turns of creativity, from its material conditions of existence to its most intangible aspirations…

This interview took place in April 2025 and was first published on Radio Metal.

© Lupus Lindemann
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Saturnalia Temple | Lighting up the Path

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“I am that serpent-haunted cave
Whose navel breeds the fates of men.
All wisdom issues from a hole in the earth;
The gods form in my darkness, and dissolve again.”
―Kathleen Raine, “The Pythoness”

For almost two decades now, Saturnalia Temple has been forging its own kind of alloy, mixing old school doom and extreme metal with psychedelism and esotericism. The result is hypnotic and meditative, both crushing and elevating. Its last album, Paradigm Call, was released about a year ago and was the last piece of a first cycle. Its mastermind, voice, and composer, Tommie Eriksson, invited the brothers Gottfrid and Pelle Åhman to join in on stage in the meantime, and this collaboration resulted in some potent chemistry, fertile soil and widened horizon at once. The time was due to get some perspective on what has been achieved so far, and what awaits the band for the future.

That’s what I got the chance to talk about with the three musicians before their concert as headliners of the Eindhoven Metal Meeting warm-up evening last December, where ten years ago almost to the day, Gottfrid and Pelle had played their last set as In Solitude. Fittingly, cycles closing and opening are what this long conversation is about―patterns emerging, past and future, and the flow of creativity. But first and foremost, it is about music: its content, its nature, its power.

This interview took place in December 2024 and was first published on Radio Metal.

© Nox Ithil
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Aluk Todolo | The Vision and the Voice part. 2

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Eight long years after Voix, Aluk Todolo finally released its follow-up, Lux, a dark, gleaming record of faceting guitars and hypnotic rhythms. Light might seem a paradoxical interest for such an obscure band, but it actually is a natural development of their uniquely cohesive discography. A couple of weeks before the release of this fifth album, I had a long interview with Matthieu Canaguier, the band’s bass player, to go over the long gestation of the record and these twenty years as Aluk Todolo.

From the groundwork of the first albums to the meticulous architecture of Lux, from the spiritual dimension of the music to its unique physicality, the Work unfolds, occult of course, protean, and in progress. A quest for the three musicians involved, and for all the listeners willing to join in…

Go to part. 1 (2016)

This interview took place in September 2024 and was first published on Radio Metal.

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Aluk Todolo | The Vision and the Voice part. 1

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“The link between spirituality, beauty, and uniqueness is at the center of the experience of chaos in music.
The voice acknowledges itself as a truly unique sound, as an event, and as matter.
And the listener ends up in the position to encounter and discover rather than know and understand.”
―Théo Lessour, Chaosphonies

The music of Aluk Todolo is hard to place. It spills over categorizations and escapes like quicksilver: psychedelic rock, krautrock, black metal, jazz, and noise are all somewhat accurate, but they don’t quite fit. The trio chose two words to describe it: occult rock. As they celebrate their twentieth birthday and the release of their fifth album, Lux, I finally took the time to unearth and translate into English this interview made in 2016.

Before a concert they played in Lyon with Sum Of R and Neige Morte, I caught up with Shantidas Riedacker (guitar) and Matthieu Canaguier (bass), and we talked about the album they had just released, Voix. From the dark, primordial source of the music to its manifestation in several forms and in several places, here’s a glimpse of the spiritual and material core of the project, and of the many voices that speak through it.

Go to part. 2 (2024)

This interview took place in June 2016 and was first published on Radio Metal.
A slightly ‘augmented’ version was was posted here as well.

© Andy Julia
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Chris Reifert | Blood and Guts since High School

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I couldn’t summarize the 35-year-long career of Autopsy better than Chris Reifert himself: “Musically, we want to rip your head off and kick it down the street.” Nobody does it like these pioneers of death metal; each of their many releases is as visceral and gruesome as their name suggests. I somehow (and unforgivably) missed out on the merciless and, again, aptly named Morbidity Triumphant when it was released a few years ago, but I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. As soon as Ashes, Organs, Blood and Crypts, their 10th album, was announced, I reached out to Reifert, the drummer and vocalist of the band, to chat about it.

Sharp, passionate, and a lot of fun, as friendly as his music is hostile, the musician went over more than three decades of extreme metal, from the first gigs he attended as a teenager in the Bay Area to the festivals Autopsy played the last few months. It’s a story of dedication and integrity, and a lesson of what metal should be: colorful and brimming with life, the way carrion does.

This interview took place in November 2023 and was first published on Radio Metal.

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Scott “Wino” Weinrich | Create Or Die part. 2

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Seven years after Sacred, in 2024, The Obsessed is back with a new line-up and a new album, Gilded Sorrow. In it, the inimitable Scott “Wino” Weinrich does what he does best: gritty, heavy songs lovingly fashioned from decades of experience, ups, downs, and burning passion. In this long, candid conversation, we dive deeper into the world and musings of the musician we caught a glimpse of in our previous interview.

We talked about the band’s expanded line-up and its modus operandi, and went back through The Obsessed’s rich history, from their very beginnings to Gilded Sorrow and from misadventures to creative highs. Focused and hopeful in a world in flames, Weinrich keeps recording, painting, touring, sharing. A whole life’s endeavor summarized in three words: create or die.

Go to part. 1 (2017)

This interview took place in February 2024 and was first published on Radio Metal.

© Jessy Lotti
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Scott “Wino” Weinrich | Create Or Die part. 1

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Scott “Wino” Weinrich is a legend of doom: like all true rock’n’rollers, his life and forty-year-long career have been colorful and tangled, riddled with hardship, setbacks, and successes. It all started with Warhorse in 1976, soon renamed The Obsessed, and after a decades-long hiatus, Wino reformed the band in the mid-2010s, coming back with a new album, Sacred, in 2017. A return to the roots of sorts, weathered and brimming with inexhaustible passion.

It’s about this passion that we talked about when I got the chance to chat with Weinrich for the release of the album. Generous and honest, he went over the return of The Obsessed, the history of his different projects, and everything that is sacred to him.

Go to part. 2 (2024)

This interview took place in March 2017 and was first published on Radio Metal.

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Linnéa Olsson | Bow & Arrow

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Linnéa Olsson has more than one string to her bow. First a music journalist, she then made a name for herself as a guitar player in bands such as Sonic Ritual, The Oath, and Grave Pleasures, before finding her own voice and founding Maggot Heart. With Uno Bruniusson on drums and Olivia Airey on bass, the band forged its own style, a blend of punk ethics and rock’n’roll spirit with a dash of sharpness and dissonance, attuned to the pulse of the city and the night, from the gutter to the stars. Hunger, their third album, is both their most vulnerable and most confident record so far. Throughout its eight songs, Linnéa’s strongest talents shine: aiming high and letting go.

In this interview that took place a few months after Hunger‘s release, she went over the unique path that took her from the Swedish metal scene to Berlin. A hunter more than a prey, lucid and open-hearted, she talked about her doubts and goals, and about finding strength in fragility, and vice-versa.

This interview took place in February 2024 and was first published on Radio Metal.

© Sara Gewalt
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Jürgen Bartsch | The Darkness Starves

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It is not that many bands who created a whole subgenre in one manifesto-like album: Venom with Black Metal arguably, and Bethlehem with Dark Metal for sure. The German band spawned a whole generation of DSBM musicians and influenced many others. Jürgen Bartsch, its creator, bass player, and mastermind, has been forging music from anxiety, creeping madness, and self-destruction for more than three decades now—without ever faltering, as proved by the self-titled album Bethlehem.

For its release in late 2016, I reached out to Bartsch to have a chat about the band’s longevity, its line-up changes, and this last (at the time of the interview) release. Hearty, sarcastic, and open, laughing wholeheartedly even when talking about the worst, he spoke about the history of the band and more personal matters as well: his relationship with death, which he encountered several times already, his mistakes, and his aspirations.

This interview took place in January 2017 and was first published on Radio Metal.

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Feminazgûl | In Darkness No One Reigns

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After the dreamy, atmospheric EP The Age of Men is Over in 2018, vocalist Laura Beach joined multi-intrumentalist Margaret Killjoy for No Dawn For Men, Feminazgûl’s first album, released in spring 2020. Its folk-laced, atmospheric black metal caught the attention of many: both visceral and scenic, mournful and elevating, it’s a celebration of the expressive possibilities of the genre and a breath of fresh air. We reached out to Margaret and Laura for an outlook on the innards of the project, and here are their musings on rot, Tolkien, feminism, and power.

This interview was done by email in November-December 2020 for Stryga, a fanzine published by the enchanting Lia of Absaintes. It’s a stunning thing and you can still buy it here.

© Laura Beach
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