Full Text of my Interview with Invisible Oranges
Last month Colin Dempsey of the metal blog Invisible Oranges interviewed me for a feature about the vision behind my music, God’s relation to man, metal’s role in world history and so on, and quoted parts of the interview in the piece - here’s the full interview:
Where does the mythology of The Prismatic City of Aesthethica, Kel Valhaal, Reign Array fit in with The Origin of the Alimonies?
Well they’re all part of my narrative of world history, but they fit into different eras. The Origin of the Alimonies is the alpha and omega, the source of time that is outside of time and sets the task for civilization, which is to ultimately achieve Haelegen, the kingdom of heaven. Once time begins, Kel Valhaal and Reign Array are two historical vectors or two lanes along which the energy of OIOION’s Laet is progressively sculpted into the shape of heaven. For Kel Valhaal, time flows backwards; for Reign Array, it flows forwards. It wouldn’t be too far off to associate them with the histories of on the one hand art and religion and on the other science and politics, though it’s more than that, because these capacities structure the soul of every human. Aesthethica is a dimension of experience and collective memory containing the records of experiments from the past, as well as a penumbra encircling our ordinary understanding of reality, society and culture, where Raes of OIOION's Laet that are usually blocked out can suddenly enter the world now and then. Like a dimension of life where things that conventional opinion sees as impossible can be achieved, flickers of genius and meaningful political events and things like that, and there’s also this special access to the past, which gets renewed and transformed. It’s where Reign Array and Kel Vahaal operate, basically. Everything that matters happens in Aesthethica.
With how much Christan theology, Marxist theory, and Deleuzian philosophy informs your work, how important do you think it is for the audience to be well-versed in concepts such as these to fully engage with Liturgy?
I'd say not at all. It's actually important to me for the music to speak for itself entirely, and to just kind of be dripping with love and emotion and connect in an immediate way. According to my criteria for total art, each dimension of the work has to be self-sufficient, so I'd feel like I was failing if the music couldn't be appreciated without an understanding of the concepts motivating it - that's a problem I have with a lot of modernist classical music, like John Cage, for example, where the music is really just sonic philosophy and it means nothing without explicit concepts. Anyway at the end of the day, I'm just composing music that I think is beautiful. If anything, I prefer for the conceptual aspect of the project to actually have a disturbing effect on the experience of the music. In that sense, maybe the answer to your question is yes, because to 'fully engage with Liturgy' in my view is not to only enjoy it musically but to be a bit disoriented, to be wrestling with questions of authenticity, shame, social identity, and religion. I see the music as carrying concepts that to a degree disrupt or call into question the experience of passively consuming music as a fan. Not that there’s really anything wrong with that, but I Iike to create a window into a wider context for those who might find it inspiring. Some of the biggest fans of Liturgy I’m in touch with have no interest in my philosophy, and I’m totally fine with that too.
You talk about the limits of black metal in your Transcendental Black Metal manifesto and how Liturgy aims to surpass those. Is Liturgy an active revolt against black metal traditionalism (whether it be through content or ideology)?
Well first of all I've always seen black metal itself, at least in its most extreme and intense manifestation, as in being in revolt against metal as such. I also don't think of Liturgy's music as necessarily geared towards a black metal audience, a metal audience or any particular audience at all. But I can only really answer that question in the context of my philosophy of history. Beginning with the Origin of the Alimonies, it traces civilization's quest to ride a kind of meta-human emancipatory flux, which I call Laet, towards Haelegen, passing through a series of social and cultural forms or horizons of intelligibility along the way, which I call Armstices, and only grasping the meaning of the whole process once it’s over. What is the world-historical meaning of metal, of music generally, and of culture generally? These questions are always present to me. I see metal in general as the soundtrack or ‘mode of attention’ of an insurrectionary historical phenomenon that began in the 60s and depended on the rise of industrial production and consumer electronics and so forth, and one that was profoundly anti-Christian, anti-patriarchal, anti-intellectual and nonconformist. A justified rebellion against what I call the Armistice of Urizen. But by the 90s a new oppressive Armistice had crystallized, called Varizen. The system had arguably by this time re-absorbed most of metal’s emancipatory energy and was just selling it back to people as consumers (of countercultural identities). Adam Curtis’s documentaries might be the best known reference for what I’m talking about, though I don’t agree with some of his fundamental ideas. Anyway, I see black metal as a breach within that newer ideological edifice that was established in the 90s, looking back to classical music, religious forms, and things like Nietzschean philosophy for something more profound than any other metal at the time could deliver. Its hyperborean version is on the right track, even if I reject it to the degree that it culturally becomes fixated on traditionalism with regard to gender, racism and wholesale disaffection with modernity, and the characteristic lack of hope for collective agency and emancipation. I just think that all those attitudes are characterized by a fear of the actual historical force that drives black metal, an unwillingness to face the intensity of its creative chaos and filling it in with politically reactionary or psychologically defeatist meaning in a hopeless and temporary attempt to prevent it from fully blossoming. The essence of black metal is vital affirmation of mutation, destruction of the traditional social forms that oppress us in tandem with a deep sense of awe towards religion, reverence for the past and the sublime, asceticism, and distance from the ideological surface of culture and the entertainment industry. So really I’m just contextualizing black metal in a different way, I'd say more of an elision of reactionary tendencies than revolt. In Hegel’s language, hyperborean black metal is black metal conceptually alienated from its own essence, whereas transcendental black metal is ‘black metal in-and-for-itself.’ Or Nietzsche would say that hyperborean black metal is a symptom of transcendental black metal.
How do you balance being more radical than black metal, an inherently violent genre, without being confrontational?
I like to think that my sincerity itself has a confrontational quality, even if what's most important to me is just to conduct loving energy in a straightforward way. For me the confrontation lies in an interrogation of the condition of possibility of metal, rather than taking the reality and use of metal for granted, much like Kant’s investigation of the condition of possibility of experience as such. Maybe metal is just the pre-history of something much bigger, unfathomable from within the discursive frame of metal itself - a bit like the way that religious asceticism ultimately gave birth to the scientific method, or the way the paw evolved into the hand. That’s why I fixate on all of the cultural contradictions and blind spots in the form, to stir things up for the sake of possibly discovering latent energies - not that I can really help it. In my mind, preaching love and Christianity and existing as a female and queer composer within the space of metal itself is a pretty radical thing to do.
I find this quote taken from here (https://www.google.com/url?q=https://machinemusic.net/2021/06/02/machine-musics-albums-of-the-decade-an-interview-with-liturgy/&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1623286969461000&usg=AOvVaw1TpvCH5n6FBsZWBE20yPQP) interesting; “I see Origin of the Alimonies as classical music. It’s too composed in the way that classical music is, it belongs more in my view in the classical canon more than the metal canon, and I think there’s something about the emotional signature of classical music, with the way it’s structures, the way it forces you to focus and be patient and maybe not even begin to enjoy something without hearing it many times, but having something there that forces you to keep trying anyway”
Do you think this patience test also applies to metal’s extremities? It makes me think of an album like Mirror Reaper, an album not designed to be listened to ad nauseam but demands focus from the listener.
Sure, plenty of metal and extreme music or experimental music challenge patience, and I love plenty of music like that and don’t think of it as like inferior to the use of classical forms. Classical music uses particular tools for this, though, like harmony, counterpoint, transposition, augmentation, rules to travel between keys in the tonal system or elaborate structures for escaping it, encoding themes in different parts of the piece that re-appear in coded or surprising ways and so on. It’s just a way of hearing and writing music that I’ve always particularly loved, and it structures my output more and more as I get more comfortable with it. It’s also a sphere that is extremely cringe to attempt to integrate with metal, just like rap, so I always love the challenge of performing those integrations in a nuanced way that avoids the pitfalls involved in what it looks like on paper. Origin of the Alimonies isn’t Metallica S&M, with a string orchestra backing a metal song, it’s a much more penetrating and nuanced encounter between the forms. Eventually people will more widely see that it’s a genuine contribution to the canon of avant-classical opera itself, some already do. I get that not many metal fans particularly care that classical opera is a living tradition in 2021 with its own norms, scenes and institutional infrastructure, but it’s very much a real reference point for me. I mostly listen to classical music.
Another quote taken from the same interview. “I believe in the dogmas of the Catholic Church, but I also like the spin on the topic of the body of Christ that you find in French post-structuralism and the philosophers influenced by that. [Slavoj] Žižek is the most explicit about this, that the anarcho-communist artistic transgressive psychoanalytic community is the body of Christ, that that’s the new body of Christ. What’s distinct about it is that it is bound together by a love instead of by social inscription, or class, or race, or whatever. It is bound together because it has a utopian mission, essentially, and it inherently stands against the ways of the world.
Is Liturgy your attempt to unite a community through concrete ideals? Or are you more interested in fostering a space where one could imagine their own utopia?
I’d say both. I don’t think it’s any different from the message of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which in my view is still God’s most recent covenant with man. I want people to genuinely believe in the ideals that I propose, but given that one of the major ones is ‘no heroes’ or ‘kill your idols’, a true acolyte would have to go off and do their own thing, maybe even forgetting or disavowing my influence - which is what I want. I find it most meaningful to reach individuals in the deepest possible way, which has subconscious and inexpressible aspects that are pretty messy. I have very little use for groups. That orientation towards the individual and inner solitude is another aspect of black metal that I’ve always loved, at least in its essence, even if it tends to be betrayed by groups that form and begin preaching orthodoxies, as often happens.
The Origin of the Alimonies’ press release describes it as hovering “in the liminal territory between the music industry, the art world and the contemporary philosophy community, reiterating the message of Jesus via William Blake by belonging nowhere, only half-comprehensible within any established framework, puncturing hypocritical ideologies while crying out in the name of love.”
This recalls your Perichoresis theory, the influential nature of art, philosophy, and music. How does love come into this three headed theory?
Yeah the aspect of perichoresis that that quote refers to is what I call “arrogation”, where isn’t so much about combining music drama and philosophy at the level of style (for which I use the term “coalescence”) as it is about traversing the current cultural infrastructures of all three simultaneously as a kind of illegible and only half-welcome alien entity. Using cultural infrastructure as a material to experiment with and harness rather than hoping to be transmitted through it along already established channels, be they mainstream, DIY, social media, fine art institutions, whatever. There are two other aspects of perichoresis too, “siphoning” and “catalysis”, which I guess I won’t get into here. Love in this case is like the blood flowing through a non-orthodox ‘body of christ’, a force binding individuals to one another, probably in a temporary and fragile way, in the name of their authenticity and humanity - as an alternative to the more obvious binding forces like scapegoat-producing tribal affiliations or self-interested quasi-cynical practical alliances.
How would you define love in this context?
In this context love is something that is in the world but at odds with it inherently, something that kind of clogs its gears or creates a breach, that half-fits but disturbs the smooth flow of terrestrial ideology and power, and in doing so opens up and sustains a space where divine light can enter.
A few questions regarding your lecture on God’s Eternity (
You mention how God’s necessity was easier to accept to make in older times; does Liturgy play a role in your confirmations of faith?
On subjective necessity, in relation to God, you say “I guess not everyone has this experience, it’s a big part of my life - it must be created/it must be done in this way.” You relate this back to your creative drive. How has this driven Liturgy’s musical developments and themes?
For me, creative drive is like a completely overpowering force. I just submit to it, suffer for it, it feels like fate. My vision of making this opera, to integrate the languages of Wagner and Messiaen with metal and trap music and to continue and transform Blake’s mythopoeia, it’s been like obsessing me since I was 20, it really felt almost like a mental illness for the early part of it before I had any clue how execute it. Like I always have this perplexing flow of musical information in my mind, it feels very much like music hijacking my attention so it can write itself, whether I like it or not. It made me very socially awkward for a long time because it’s hard to turn my attention away from it. That's what I mean by subjective necessity, where something just absolutely must be a certain way aesthetically, no matter what the sacrifice, with no thought of what will come of it or whether it makes sense.
Is it possible for this inclination to turn into a reaction?
If what you’re asking is whether it’s possible to overdo it or have it turn destructive, I think so. The potential destructiveness and tragic quality of the drive is maybe inherent. For me that’s a big part of where religion comes in. It’s always important to have other practices going on that foster humility and maintain a wise perspective, which balances out the willingness to sacrifice and live in faith for the sake of the unique drive.
You say that starting with a philosophical discussion of anything one believes is obvious, and begin honestly contemplating it, it will arrive at the conclusion that there must be a god. If everything occurs because there is a God then where does free will stand in regards to artistic expression?
Personally, I don’t experience my own creative expression as free, or it’s kind of like the dialectic of freedom and necessity we were just talking about. I’m just driven to learn the skills I need to make this complex music, with the help of my super talented and skilled bandmates, and keep expanding the nature of the project and so on until God is done with me. And I think in a way that's how it is for every artist, even if they don't see it that way consciously. I really like Schelling’s conception of free will, which is basically that humans have free will only so that they can for a period of time make the mistake of serving their own limited ideas of how things should go, and through the pain they cause themselves by doing that, have the opportunity of making contact with God’s will, which I call OIOION, and then use their infinitely unique perspective to serve God from there. That doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as freedom, it’s that actual freedom is a higher subjugation to God’s will, which is for the person in question to live in faith and pursue their autonomous creative drive, freely. To be unfree is to betray that drive, consciously or otherwise. But God’s will is the construction of a world comprised of expanding universal human creative self-realization.