Building a New World - Interview with IRON WARLOCK (GRUNLEGGENDER) - 6/4/2026
Building a New World - Interview with IRON WARLOCK (GRUNLEGGENDER) - 6/4/2026
Through recent contact I've been made aware of this project, among others, by sole permanent member Iron Warlock. Here he goes into great detail about the story behind his project and his personal challenges. It is an amazing read through, thank you IW for the great answers! - Rusty
1. First of all, how are you doing? How’s the weather been in the UK?
By and large, very well. Life is extremely busy with producing material for some of my other projects (The Haligtree, Vassal and more) arranging the next steps of Grunleggender.
The weather is very much on and off as it always is in the UK, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I love sunshine just as much as I don’t mind torrential rain, and when you’re on the move walking through a beautiful place it scarcely matters as long as you’re warm enough.
2. Regarding the origins of Grunleggender, what inspired you to start creating Black Metal in this style? What does the name mean?
As I’ve covered in other interviews, heavy guitar music of all kinds were at the forefront of my world growing up. My dad listened to a lot of stuff like Jethro Tull, Hawkwind, Gong, all that classic 70’s shit that rules, and my mum was a fan of weird arty electronica in the vein of Aphex Twin, Nurse With Wound, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Massive Attack etc.
They both had a shared interest in folk music though, and were both musicans and performers as I am. Acts like Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson, Roy Harper amongst others.
The story goes, I reach my teens and find all the obscene classic death and black metal of the 90’s and 00’s, and it never really leaves me after that.
I’m from a small village in the Peak District, and had a few friends who were into heavy music of different stripes, we’d all grown up with parents who had either been into heavy or unusual music of whatever description. One kid loved that crappy 00’s deathcore, another really liked punk, Oi and ska, we had a lad in our group who was really into trip hop and drum & bass, there was me who loved old school death metal. It was like someone wrote a bloody film and we were all caracatures in some kind of alternative rock version of Stand By Me. We formed bands that would start, dissolve, occasionally play in the pubs doing Rage Against The Machine covers and the like, we were absolutely fucking awful but I don’t think anyone had the heart to tell us, because we were just kids with nothing else to do who were having fun.
I honestly think our parents were just glad we were doing something creative and not getting out of our minds drinking and doing drugs like it sometimes is in remote areas of the countryside. People often associate rural areas with affluence, but there’s also a hell of a lot of poverty in these places, families that don’t have much money can’t do much for their kids in some instances, they get bored without knowing what to do with themselves, and all it takes is discovering a bad crowd and that’s it, you’re a junkie.
There’s a reason Macclesfield was named the least cultured town in the UK for quite a number of years, it’s cause half the youth populous of the surrounding areas referred to it as “Smacklesfield”.
Our first band was called The Yeti Convention, which was a name we got from a copy of Kerrang that described Tom Ayara from Slayer as “looking like he’d stepped on stage coming straight from a yeti convention”. We all thought it was hilarious. Eventually we decided to change the name and start playing heavier death metal/deathcore sort of music that was becoming popular at the time. The rise of swoop hair and breakdowns was immediate, and although I wasn’t keen on it at all, it was an easy guitar style to play so I went along with it.
As kids do, we all would fall out over stupid things like girls, and who was cooler than who etc; all the really stupid shit.
The last band I remember we did was with this older guy from Brazil who had moved back to England with his mum, he was an absolutely amazing drummer but by god I’ve never met anyone with such a crippling weed addiction.
We decided in our infinite wisdom to create a “Reggae Death Metal Band” called RaggaCadaver. We lasted about two practices before the drummer became a paranoid shut in and refused to see anyone. Turns out he’d been trying it on with one of the other lad’s girlfriends to no avail, we didn’t have much to do with him after that.
I’ve mentioned this in previous interviews I’ve done, but there was one other guy who was sort of a cameo character in our friend group who was really really into black metal. He was a weird, tiny guy who dressed completely normal and was developmentally disabled. He had the weirdest, darkest record collection of scary looking black and death metal. He was very quiet and rarely hung out with us unless there were a couple of us at any one time. He had this bizarre minimalist bedroom where all of his records were in a pull out unit beneath his bed, and he made his own raw black metal demos on an early DAW on his ancient desktop PC.
What I learned about black metal from him was instrumental in planting the seeds of what would later become my involvement in the scene, and in creating this music myself. I remember being at his house late one night, a small group of us were listening to these records and there was a girl with us who was extremely freaked out. His appearance, the music, the fact that he had a necronomicon open on his kitchen table, I’m pretty sure he was trying to turn the conversation towards nationalism but everyone naturally kept redirecting it to more comfortable, normal topics.
In the end my friends decided they wanted to go drinking in the woods and make a camp fire because it seemed like more fun than hanging out at this weird creepy guys house listening to what they considered to be the worst music they’d ever heard. (I believe it was a jaunty flute bit on the first Falkenbach record that did it)
I felt bad for him, he was clearly not a social guy but he’d plucked up the courage to invite people over as his parents were away and these other kids had totally rejected him. I didn’t really ever see him again after that, any attempt we made to contact him was met with silence.
As it stands, I credit that guy as the one who introduced me to true black metal. Not the mainstream Dimmu Borgir, Behemoth black metal, but the real and ugly black metal that permeates through the underground to this day.
During a lot of my twenties, (I’d moved to the city at 18) I’d been playing guitar and singing in bands that typically ended up going nowhere, either people weren’t interested or didn’t get on, or were too lazy or lacking in creativity to form any kind of meaningful project. I got bored and disillusioned with playing in other people’s shitty bands that would be born and would die in the same practice room, never to see the light of day.
For a while I withdrew from the world of heavy music and stuck to making rubbish trendy lofi ambient trying to get on one of those fancy European labels like Janushoved or Posh Isolation Records, I’d painstakingly put together albums of soundscapes using tape recordings over riffs played on guitar/microkorg using a Boss Loop Pedal.
Some of them would be compositionally quite impressive for the medium, but the sound quality was so bad it would never have been mistaken for anything more than a demo.
Soon the itch to play heavy music again was inescapable, and I needed to get it out of my system at the very least. My old cheap Stratocaster knock off was no longer up to the task for many years, but as luck would have it, the spirit of one man black metal found its way in. My friend Andy who had a project called Caïna for many years was deciding to sell some of his guitar gear, namely a Peavey EXP.
This was the guitar he’d used to write some of the more recent (at the time) Caïna material. The way it all panned out with the people he was hanging out with and working for at the time though, I think a lot of the gear he had during that period he associated with bad times, so he just wanted rid.
It was on a hike through Goyt Valley, where I was born, that I wanted my own project of epic concept metal. I’d been learning Norwegian this time, since I have some heritage dating back a few generations to Scandinavia.
Grunleggender is old Norse for “Founding Legends”.
I’d already got a small practice amp and a modest pedal set up so I started writing riffs, I’d been listening to a lot of Saor at that point, so a lot of the early Grunleggender songs have a Celtic sort of cadence to them. The fïrst Grunleggender song I ever wrote was “What Lies Within A Mask” Off of the EP, but at the time of me starting the project that riff was different in idiom to my initial plan for the project as a whole, that song was fleshed out beyond just being riffs long after I’d actually finished the first album. I recorded the fïrst demo (Utforskende, Overhærendre) using Audacity, I still had no clue how to use a proper DAW which, as a technophobe, was a pretty daunting challenge to overcome. But with the help of Spenser Morris, a sound engineer who has worked with Saor/Panopticon amongst others, gave me some great instruction on how to get it all going using Reaper. Once I found my feet with the tech side of things, I began work on the first album that would begin a concept trilogy, and afterwards decided to write the EP using material I had leftover from making Landmarks.
The deliberate choice to go it alone with this project was, in hindsight, an opportunity to prove to myself that I could make something of worth entirely myself. After years of playing in other people’s bands and never really feeling satisfied, it was great to delve into the unknown and explore the parameters of making these songs in solitude. Learning new instruments and technology and finding how to best write with them was a welcome challenge. I didn’t want to become one of those wankers that starts a band, calls it mine and yet has other people writing on it. I didn’t want to become one of those guys that would call the shots in spite of having questionable talent or creative ability compared to other people in the room. I’d been in those situations before with people, fevered egos that command a respect that isn’t deserving. It’s one of the reasons I so loathe figures like Mark E Smith (The Fall). I can’t stand that guy, he was just an angry pissed up Frank Sidebottom-sounding cunt.
If I made and released stuff and it sounded bad the the ears of other people, I wouldn’t be letting down anyone else but myself, and it would be my sole responsibility to ensure what I was writing was of a high standard and done with honesty and integrity.
Mark E Smith is what I consider to be an irredeemably worthless individual, acting in a way that attempted to be an applicant to the world of music not through talent or artistry, but through throwing drunken tantrums and insisting that he was some sort of genius.
If you have to tell people you’re a genius, then you’re little more than a fool.
And more fool the people who put up with him, if I was in a band with that guy he’d end up with a nose like a coat hook turned sideways.
I’ve never come across anyone quite that bad but I don’t understand why anyone would want to work with that sort of talentless worthless turd of a man, the only things he ever benefited from were created by other people with him taking credit for it all. In my opinion, he deserved only misery. The type of artist I wanted to become is one that is recognised by hard work, integrity and ingenuity. Ronnie James Dio was a perfect example of this, total talent compressed into a small fellow, but always a gentlemen to fans and bandmates alike. The testament to Dio’s qualities can be seen in that wherever you go in the internet, no one seems to have had any kind of bad experience with him. There’s no evidence that he was ever rude to anyone or treated anyone unfairly. From start to end he was a consummate professional in his field who was rightly respected by anyone who came into contact with him. Even his back and forths with Ozzy only came about due to Ozzy bringing up nonsense to the media. Ronnie couldn’t resist putting him down, and I find that an admirable quality too. If someone talks out of line they should be put in their place, it can be done without violence or overdoing malice, like a silent verbal assassin taking thier target down.
That’s the role model I’ve always looked towards. Not some unprincipled wanker who can’t even play a single instrument or even sing a note.
You could have handed Mark E Smith a bag with a radio in it and he still couldn’t hold a tune.
Fuck him, rest in piss.
3. Regarding your newest album, The Essence of Expedience, there seems to be a wide range of influences, especially that of Black, Death, Doom Metal, and a touch of Folk and Ambient. What are some more specific influences for you?
Grunleggender was always sort of penned to be an atmospheric black metal sort of project, but I don’t always see it as such, it just sort of is what it wants to be at whatever time it wishes, which I think can be offputting for a lot of people, but it’s never been something that bothered me too much.
I’ve spent much of my life exploring different worlds in music, not just the limitations of the world of metal. There’s much variety in the metal world, the slow and oppressive atmosphere of doom, the fast and abrasive riffs of death metal, the cold and dissonant melancholy of black metal, the adrenaline filled, circle pit inducing thrash metal. I’ve been into electronica for about as long as metal, my older sister was a fan of the Warp Records IDM that came out of the 90’s. Aphex Twin, uZiq, Boards Of Canada etc.
Discovering Black Metal was a huge turning point in what I initially understood about the world of music, as I'd mentioned earlier with that guy I knew growing up.
As a kid, and as a teenager I’d never put too much thought into what the people behind this all this music might be like, but what I'd learn about the world of black metal at large sort of offered me a lot more context as to why that guy I knew was the way he was. It was music for social outcasts, separatists from the way normal people think and feel.
Finding out about what happened in the 90’s in Norway challenged my worldview, I didn’t realise that people who made music could actually be “evil” (by my young mind’s understanding of the world)
These guys weren’t just making music about darkness and esoteric occult stuff, they were practicing it.
I’d imagine a lot of kids discovering this stuff probably felt the same way. I was exposed to this sort of surface level fïrst and second wave black metal (Bathory, Venom, Mayhem, Darkthrone) via media outlets such as Kerrang and the early internet of the 2000’s, and of course, my weird friend showing me stuff that was obscure (at the time) like Judas Iscariot, Nargorath etc)
There wasn’t as much concrete information about what took place in Norway so understandably there was a lot of Mythos around it.
The skull necklace, the photos, the murders, the church burnings.
I remember thinking “Fuck! this stuff is real!”
It was intriguing, scary, and made me wonder how many other scenes in the world could be this savage and dangerous.
I remember hanging out with some friends at a biker pub in Stockport called The Town Hall Tavern when I was in my teens (fake ID from college doing the heavy lifting) and talking to some old metal heads who were more “in the know” about what took place.
A lot of the stuff they told me I later came to realise was bullshit they’d heard from rumours and taken as gospel from whatever source they’d heard it from.
It was always “yeah my mate knew Euronymous, his old band played a show he was at and he was stood at the front and saw all the pins on his jacket” etc.
I took it as all as gospel as I was a gullible kid, but at the time it thrilled me that there was such a recent mythology behind this music that I loved.
It wouldn’t be until a lot later that I’d learn about what transpired with other bands like Absurd and some of those other bands that were essentially copycats causing trouble trying to imitate the “evil” stuff.
I was never keen on Absurd anyway, the music sucked, it wasn’t really even black metal and by that point the appeal of dark evil acts for the sake of that sort of pseudo-satanic nationalism had run its course in my mind, I didn’t care much for the political end of things, I didn’t really understand the nuance until I was a lot older.
Discussing politics wasn’t really a thing for teenagers in the 2000’s, I didn’t know what left wing or right wing was, all I knew was what was in my village, which kids were okay to hang out with and which ones I should have avoided, navigating the fields during certain times of year so that you didn’t get killed by a Bull that was grazing or avoiding dangerous plants like Giant Hogweed, what to do if you’ve been stung by a wasp or a bee, all the things kids should know.
I don’t know what it’s like for kids now by and large but I’d imagine with how all the discourse is shoved down your throat as an adult, it’s a knocking bet that they’re doing the same to kids in order to get them propagandised and ready to fight one another into adulthood.
I look at the way kids in the metal scene are now with the influence of social media and all it makes me think is that ideology was never pushed on us anywhere near this much when I was that age.
We had stuff like Rage Agajnst The Machine and people ironically wearing t shirts with Che Guevara on, but the nuance behind it was never discussed. You never had someone in your face telling you that using a particular word was a “micro-aggression”.
I later found out that the best way to not offend anyone is to just not speak to anyone ever. Which was fine by me because I hated social interaction more than anything else.
Even now, I think you should be able to listen to what you want to without being accused of being a nasty piece of work by people who’ve never met you. The internet has this way of dog piling on people who are minding their own business and not bothering anyone.
Listening to Drudkh isn’t going to radicalise you, all it will do is probably make walks in the forest a bit nicer.
People forget that behind the music and the public perception of certain artists there is a person that thinks and feels and has dreams and aspirations.
Look at Seth Putnam, he’ll be remembered by most people through YouTube video essays as the worst guy of all time, but you dig a bit deeper and you find he was actually pretty talented and smart. He was just pretty fucked up. Same goes for GG Allin, all the mythology around him was that he was some irredeemable monster, but people have posted accounts where they’ve had quiet, unrecorded conversations with him and when the cameras and tape recorders were off, he was a thoughtful and even-minded person deep down. I think the act he put on was a manifestation of deep trauma. I honestly think he was in the closet and had a lot of issues with that due to his strict Catholic upbringing and his dad being completely fucking insane.
Same goes for Carl Panzram, the prolific American serial killer from the 17th century. Panzram was cruel and violent, and had the physical power to back him up, but not once did he ever direct that hate towards a woman, it was always men. It was very likely because he lived in a time where he didn’t and couldn’t understand himself, nor anyone else.
I’d sooner choose to venerate someone like Putnam or GG than the aforementioned Mark E Smith because they actually had real musical talent when they weren’t making music that was at best, in poor taste and at worst extremely offensive to anyone and everyone.
Picnic Of Love has actual great guitar work on there and it’s funny as hell.
I don’t think I’d ever relate to anyone who would try to ruin someone’s life if I didn’t agree with something they had to say, because they’re free to think what they want, I don’t give a shit, I’m not them and they aren’t me. Other people’s opinions hold no power over me.
I see all these “sketch list” spreadsheets and all I think when I look upon them is “fucking hell, get a life”.
My grandmother was an evacuee during WWII and I’ve always listened to her intently about her memories, the fear of Hitler and the Nazi’s was still there in her bones even as an old woman. The media she’d seen since she’d been a child to when she grew old only reinforcing these feelings of hostility and anger towards what was done to our country by the war.
Imagine how fucking scary that must have been, you were a small kid growing up usually in pretty bad poverty in the industrial north of England and then all of a sudden you’re being told you’re off to live with a stranger in the middle of nowhere because a scary guy from another country is gonna drop bombs on you, you’d be scarred for life!
One day, a family member of ours who had got into Buddhism was having a discussion with her about how he can see that there is good in all people.
Immediately the conversation went to “well, what about Hitler?” His response was “well he might have done all those bad things but he was an animal lover.”
They had to agree to disagree at that point.
It was like an unstoppable force of arguing in good faith met an immovable object of realistic contempt.
Someone with good endless good intentions met with one who is followed by the ghosts of war their whole life.
You don’t have to agree with everyone on everything to be able to work together and crack on in life.
I’ve often looked at the world of politics in relation to music in a way that could only see it as completely exhausting. Specifically seeing Dawn Ray’d live one time supporting Wode was an interesting example.
Musically I thought they weren’t bad on record having heard their debut album.
The riffs on record weren’t the strongest but the inclusion of violin was enough to hold my attention.
But seeing them live was an experience, and not a positive one. They spent literally minutes between songs complaining about some woman who had been sent to prison because her kid wouldn’t go to school(?)
I remember standing with my mate, we’d occasionally glance at eachother as if to say
“What is happening here?
Who gives a shit?
What does any of this have to do with Black Metal?”
Last straw was when the singer started saying stuff about killing the police, my mate walked out at that point as his sister was in the force, the singer was lucky he didn’t get up there and twat him one.
If you can’t express it in your songs, don’t be spending 10 minutes talking at me when you should be up there playing.
At that point I got a lot more picky about what bands I chose to see, I want leather jackets, spikes, beer, and good riffs.
I don’t want to be working my arse off for 50 hours a week to have someone in a band I’m watching try to tell me I should think about this or that.
You can fucking do one, mate. No one cares!
It’s one thing to raise awareness for stuff you care about, but to inflict it on people who are there to enjoy some music after a long day of work is no good.
Normal working people don’t care about your weird misanthropic bullshit rhetoric.
To not engage in politics is not an extremist position, and I really don’t understand all these people that think so. I really dislike the “if you’re not with us you’re against us” mentality.
I owe a lot to the world of hardcore too, in my late teens moving from the countryside to the city, I got in with a crowd of hardcore kids who for a while were a great source of kinship alongside the metal community I’d found myself inhabiting. The raw energy and simplistic riffing I found very appealing early on, and wanted to incorporate some of those grassroots DIY hardcore sentiments into the very early Grunleggender material. It was for a time more like blackened hardcore than straight up classic style black metal.
In Manchester, the 2000’s/2010’s had something of a revival of subcategories in hardcore. You had the youth crew revival with bands like Feral Youth and Survival, beatdown bands whose names I forget (sorry boys) springing up everywhere. Most importantly for me though , was the sort of “secret” sect of hardcore that came around at that time. The underground scene within the underground scene.
Bands like Iced Out, Knifedoutofexistence, Oathbreaker were all relatively new to the scene.
A lot of these bands were formed out of the straight edge/vegan and crust punk elements that had permeated through the subculture throughout the 90’s but this sort of “Mysterious Guy Hardcore” became a thing everyone wanted to know about but few were ever actually allowed in.
It’s silly in hindsight, it was like a crust punk vegan knock off of Euronymous and Helvete, with all these bands hanging out in V Revolution, at its original location when it was a record shop, before it moved to being only a restaurant, and then closing following Covid and the vegan bubble profoundly bursting.
Hanging around these guys gave me a sense of a theme that I found to be inspiring, although I wasnt yet quite sure what to do with that inspiration. It rubbed off on more people than just me, you can see it in some other projects that were around that scene at the time, my old pal Andy (Caïna) was involved with this “secret hardcore scene” and ended up producing what was essentially a hardcore record with black metal elements Setter Of Unseen Snares.
He’d been making straight up black metal for a number of years, and even he’d found himself influenced by it.
I came to fall apart from that scene, I came to realise that a lot of the people in it weren’t well adjusted and oftentimes rather spiteful and vindictive, something in later years I would come to learn as a defining trait of the extreme politically charged music scene.
I never wished any of them any ill will, I’d just got tired of having boring conversations and arguments with passive aggressive losers.
One of the funniest periods were when the band Goodtime Boys were just starting to come about.
For those who don’t know, it was formed by ex-synth player and backing vocalist of UK chart toppers The Automatic. Alex Penny was a top fella, and he really stuck to his guns as an artist. I only hung out with him a couple of times but he was a great laugh. It must have been strange going from stardom to the underground so quickly, and by his own admission.
People would always singer “What’s that coming over the hill? Is it a monster?!” to him to wind him up, which always seemed to do the job.
The allure of musical variety comes in many forms, discovering new microgenres of musical worlds I was already familiar led me to dive down rabbit holes in the internets cavernous network of blogspot pages, YouTube algorithms, messageboards, discovering stuff like Vaporwave, future funk, textured ambient music, and neoclassical artists all lend themselves to stoking my curiosity, what would I do with all this knowledge? What would be applied to this journey I was undertaking? The answer was clear but I had not the means to carry it out yet, it was perhaps a blessing that I had yet not the skill to apply these thoughts to action until I was truly ready, until I’d gathered enough inspiration from the far corners of the world of music that I’d entrenched myself within. It became less about the people in the scene and more about what they were creating, and those who recognised this paradigm as such began to be seen by me as something akin to kindred spirits.
So that’s how I was led to input so much of what I’d learnt about music into what would become Grunleggender.
I want the project to do well but I’m not in the habit of changing what I want to do with my music to kiss the arses of the scene’s denizens or try to build a reputation as the cool trendy act.
If I want to put a fruity piano ballad in my album with a load of atmospheric blackened death metal I’m gonna do it and no one will stop me.
As Grunleggender is a concept project, with an underlying story, it can be expressed more effectively using a more varied means of communication.
Incorporating elements from the different corners of the world of metal, electronica, industrial etc; allowed me more freedom to express what I wanted to convey through this record.
The story of The Essence Of Expedience is one of bitterness, resentment, but also acceptance of harsh realities that are often presented to us through a pacified means.
Landmarks, the fïrst chapter, was an album describing youthful resilience, defiance of a broken status quo, with a righteous loud and bold nature.
Essence on the other hand, is a wounded animal in a state of panic, thrashing and writhing as its breathing becomes more laboured, the pain it feels it cannot understand, and in moments of what could be considered reprieve, it carries a quiet dignity and wisdom that stands as a contrast to Landmark’s naivety.
When I was writing The Essence Of Expedience, I wanted to take all the worst things about myself and lay them all out on a table to examine them. That pitch black Neanderthal inside that is screaming an inarticulate fervour. I wanted this album to be so unlike the last it almost was becoming something that sounded like a different project all together, but it was still somehow inexplicably Grunleggender, it was a part of that world I’d built that I had no knowledge of or had never thought to explore.
I wanted this album to be obtusely inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t fully paying attention to it, to just create a wall to keep everyone out who wasn’t capable of accepting something that wasn’t entirely to their own taste.
That can be found in the fïrst song, The Endless Divide, when the song slows to a crawl and the organ and doom riffs begin, I meant that as a skill check to anyone who might be considered “a fussy eater”.
My reasoning being if you can’t pay attention through one long and difficult part, then you don’t deserve the good things that are to come in the record.
I grew up listening to CD’s and vinyl records before digital format was even invented, in a time when you put on a record you were making a commitment to listen to it all, there was no skipping songs, there was no cherry picking things you liked, it forced artists to compromise into linear formulas to keep peoples attention, when in reality they likely wanted the freedom to write and sequence their songs how they wanted from their heart. I’ve never wanted my works to live in a world of such restriction and compromise, at that point I might as well be making shitty pop music for normies making sequenced songs that take an hour for me to start and finish.
When I was making The Essence Of Expedience, I was at a time where I was deeply unhappy with how my life had turned out. I’ve never been one for talking about my feelings, as when you’re a man you sort of just have to crack on, otherwise people just think you’re a pussy and you can’t be relied on for anything.
I was the rock for other people, always going the extra mile to ensure the people in my life were supported.
It didn’t matter to me whether I was happy or whether I was sad, all I knew was that my life had to have purpose and meaning, otherwise I was of no use at all.
I was afraid that if I spoke my mind, the people close to me in my life would stop loving me.
It all just sort of coalesced into the songs I ended up writing for this record. It had classic death/black riffs when it wanted, it had a lot of 16th notes on the percussive end when it wanted, it had industrial elements, and all the lyrics I pulled out of my brain were a result of many deeply unpleasant thoughts about modern society.
The long and short of it was I went through a particularly difficult patch during and after making this record, and found myself wondering why I’d fucked everything up and made all the wrong decisions and made a mess of my life.
Making music seemed to feel like the only thing that I could confidently say I was good at and that I enjoyed.
After some conversations and some soul searching with family and professionals, I discovered at the age of 35 that I have autism and ADHD.
My parents had tried to get me diagnosed but in the 90’s, it was just seen as more work for teachers and governing bodies so they were just told I was lazy, stupid and that they’d done a bad job bringing me up.
Any time I was struggling with anything, particularly in mathematics, I would just be told to pull my finger out and sort myself out.
I felt like a fucking alien a lot of the time when I was a kid. I’d just look at stuff to do with mathematics on a page and it might as well be all written in Greek the way I wouldn’t be able to take any of it on board.
Even to this day, seeing people solve X times Y or A divided by B without having to think about it at all is like watching people perform unknowable esoteric sorcery, sometimes I’ll just throw my girlfriend a random math problem and she’ll be able to solve it immediately whereas I’d have to get a calculator and a piece of paper to even begin to get my head around it. It’s weird because some things to do with numbers I have no problem with at all, like numbers to do with DAW stuff I don’t have any kind of issue with and other things like money are no problem, but anything beyond that you might as well be asking a dog which way it is to Mars.
English and music where my strengths in in secondary school. I’d write essays that contained words even my teachers weren’t aware of.
Other kids would try to bully me for the extensive vocabulary I made full use of, but it usually just ended up in me saying “well maybe I’m smart and you’re just thick as pig shit”.
Safe to say, I got into a lot of fights over the years.
I grew up and moved out and went through all the things you go through when you move out at 18, just trying to survive on my own without any help. No education or qualifications led to shit job after shit job and dealing with a revolving door of house moves, being laid off, taking another shit job, awful commutes, just an string of annoying bullshit for years.
I’d just gone through life trying to do things the normal way but struggling owing to how I thought about things, a lot of people I’ve met in my life have probably thought I was normal as I’m very verbose and seemingly normal and intelligent, when in fact I was academically a dunce, and all I took from formal education was that I hated being around people who I didn’t understand, or who didn’t understand me.
I remember distinctly one night after a particularly long day of recording for the album, I was awake in bed in the early hours just unable to think of anything other than this strange abstract thought I could only construe as;
“I’m not really a proper person, I’m not really human.”
“I’m an artist fïrst and a person second, once I’ve created all I can there will be nothing left to live for.”
I knew when I thought these thoughts that I had to figure this shit out or I’d end up doing something mental like turning on the gas and falling asleep with the windows closed, or getting myself piss drunk and going into the woods with a knife and letting myself be claimed by the elements in the middle of winter.
I spoke with those who had known me longest and it was clear that I had to find out what the hell had been wrong with me my whole life.
I always hated the idea of having a mental label on me, that people would mistreat me or disregard me if they knew I had what would be perceived as some kind of mental deficiency or limitation.
What I was worried most about wasn’t how I am perceived in the general public eye, but how my works may be perceived if word got out that I was autistic.
I was worried that people would think everything I made was just slop from the deficient mind of some retard and not take anything I made seriously.
I wouldn’t want the reputation of my music to be tarnished in that way, it would be like taking everything I’ve made out back and shooting it all in the head.
When I did more research into the subject as I was navigating learning about it, seeing others saying the exact things I’d been thinking was like a weight on my shoulders had been lifted.
Learning all of this was equal parts frustrating, and a weight off my mind, I always thought something was wrong with me and that I was a complete fuck up, but it just turned out I was trying to go about things in the way that “normal” people do without the brain schematics that are required for that sort of navigation. I never discovered that there could be different ways to navigate dealing with people and dealing with adversities you face in life.
On the one hand, being chucked out into the world and learning to survive when I was still quite young was a natural, good thing. But the sense of unease and that something wasn’t right would follow me around like an omen.
I just sort of kept my mouth shut and dealt with whatever came my way, without complaint. I thought things were this difficult for everyone. When I learned that not everyone got thrown out at 18 and it wasn’t wholly a wholly normal thing to be cast out without life experience or any kind of support, it was an unsettling realisation.
After I got my diagnosis, people in my life were very supportive of me too, I was so thankful I had acquired a network of people who wanted to help and could see I was in pain and struggling.
My girlfriend was my rock at that point, she understood autism and it’s idiosyncrasies, as there’s a lot of it in her family. My sister who is a medical professional also has a great understanding of it and a unique perspective of being able to see how I was when we were growing up.
One thing that stood out was a comment from a former bandmate of mjne who I still maintain a decent friendship with.
I told him about the news and he said “yeah, no shit! I always knew.” And when I asked him how he knew he said
“Not once have I ever heard you sing out of key.”
That was when I started to feel a lot better about things, you need to see these things for their positives and strengths rather than as weaknesses or limitations.
People find out how many projects I’ve got on the go at one time and seem shocked, but to me it’s the normal thing to do, I’m making up for lost time in a way. If I’d have known all the technical aspects of things when I was twenty I’d have had such a massive body of work by now, so in a lot of ways I owe it to my former self to catch up and do all the things I wished I was capable of when I was a kid and when I was in my early twenties. I think of it as me utilising a permanent state of being, wanting to become like my heroes.
I don’t ever want people to think I perceive myself as some kind of idiot savant or neurotic clown outside the world of my works, I’m very socially adept and always have been. Sometimes to a degree where I’ll pick up on nuances in conversations that others completely miss.
I’ve always felt the need to prove myself having lived a life without much external encouragement, and although it took a very long time to get here I’m getting that validation from myself and myself alone, which is a relief. I’m doing good things that I love and that counts more for any amount of failures I’ve had to wade through in life.
I don’t feel quite as bad about the way things are now, and I think making The Essence Of Expedience was essential in coming to know myself a bit better.
4. At an hour and a half length, The Essence of Expedience is a pretty hefty album, but great all throughout. What was the process like behind writing this album, how long did it take before you knew it was complete?
To be honest, I just have a bit of a problem writing songs that are any less than 10 minutes long.
If I like an idea or I think it has legs and can get a bit of evolution going, I’ll usually stick with it for a good while until I’m find a place that it can comfortably end.
The song Through The Ages was a lot like that, it was intended as a musical journey through human history, from cave dwelling times, through folk music and reneissance periods, right up to 70’s prog and eventually to modern day era sounding black metal. It’s easily the most experimental piece on the album and is a little out of place compared to the doomy oppressive atmosphere, but I didn’t feel bad including it as exploring human history was Essensial to the plot.
With Essence it was a matter of wanting to get as many of these really dark concepts out onto a recording as possible. People say therapy is good, but I disagree. When you’ve got a hard copy of all your emotional turmoil pressed into one disc, you can feel a lot better about deleting that emotional turmoil from your hard drive (brain).
I don’t do anything in half measures, what you hear on The Essence Of Expedience isn’t actually all the songs I wrote for it, there are actually some that didn’t make it on the album because they were too different thematically to the direction of the record. I’m probably going to release them in some form in the future but for now they’ll remain in the vaults.
I’ve got the same sort of issue with the new Haligtree album producing at the moment. It’s not yet finished but it’s still standing at about 1 hour and 15 minutes in runtime, and that’s with one more song still to record. And that’s part one of a series, so I may very well be dead in the ground before I get to the end of that.
Something about hour+ albums are really appealing to me, like how you’d sit down to watch a long 2/3 hour film or a series that’s even longer, why wouldn’t anyone want to listen to a great piece of musical art, there are long form ideas that can be conveyed?
With Grunleggender I’d written all my lyrics for this album before I’d written a single piece of music, and typically I’d take those lyrics and write the music based upon how I feel reading the lyrics back to myself.
I’d open the DAW and play some chords and change them until I found the point of which my feelings about these words synced up with what I was playing. Maybe that’s why everything ends up being so long, I’d begun writing music in a style more akin to classical composers who would write movements that would make up the elements of a “songs”. Gustaf Mahler was a king of that world. I found that style of writing more interesting for a storytelling perspective than writing linear 4-5 minute songs that had a consistent motif. I like writing songs that drag you off somewhere whether you like it or not, these are songs that in my mind have more power over a listener who is engaged with the record. It’s like the record is calling out to a listener to join them, to take them somewhere and show them something that they can’t find anywhere else. It’s like finding a dead body in the woods with your friends when you’re a kid. If you never went on that journey out of the way, you’d have never discovered it.
For better or for worse, it’ll be something you’ll remember it for the rest of your life.
I find it thrilling to write songs like that, where there is no clear ending from where you’re stood at the beginning, it’s a sense of adventure, be it joyous or macabre. I like to add elements that can only be picked up on repeated listens too, one of my favourite films as a kid was Labyrinth, there’s tons of things hidden in the background of those amazing sets, patterns and faces in the walls that are easily missed the first time around.
To have elements like that that can be discovered after a couple of listens can feel like you’re listening to something new or that can lead you to reassess your perspective on a piece of work.
5. What are the themes behind this album, and what do they mean to you?
The concept of Grunleggender as a project follows the end times of mankind as we know it, taking place on a fictitious version of earth that is going through turmoil.
Dream Of The Great Forest EP sets up the theme that the global populous has begun to yearn for something natural and real, the first album Landmarks On The Road To Ruin takes place in a time where people reject the modern cultures that have been force upon them. People across the world become freed from the constraints of usury, war, consumption, materialism, to their respective cultures that existed before Abrahamic faith took control of the world. A desire to return to living alongside nature rather than against it begins here in these stories.
There’s an element of pride in those songs in Landmarks, a perhaps undeserved confidence in mankind’s ability to work as one to achieve things that stand as a testement to fighting adversity and evil.
The Essence Of Expedience, as I’ve mentioned earlier, examines mankind’s worst traits. The deception, the betrayal, the creation of systems that move us further from a unified understanding that nature is the true God to be worshipped. The broader narrative of this album follows a protagonist, who discovers the key to returning this world to its natural state.
This character based on someone I knew growing up who met a terrible end, I was wished to honour his memory by gifting him life as an avatar in this story. In spite of being a person addled with vicious tendencies, decisions made in anger, I chose him as the protagonist. In that sense, I wanted to offer that real person who I knew some form of redemption, even if it wasn’t in real life.
He would be ridiculed and torn into by all those around him, his family bringing him to a place he did not belong and could not understand, socially exiled and brought to the brink of what it can mean to feel rejection. But in dojng so he was able to comprehend the world as it was in a way no other could, why he was so hated by those around him. He would learn the true meaning of consequence. In doing so, his personal journey would lead him to learn of a hermetic order of ancient druids, waiting for someone who could undertake the journey to plant the seed of a great tree, one that existed eons ago, the cradle of all life on the planet.
It was this man’s life being brought into existence, however reviled by all around him, that would be an instrumental aspect of nature’s return.
He would later become the last living human on Earth, embuing the seed with the final words our species would will ever speak.
“The seed that was planted has not a name, for what will grow from it will have no need”.
Mankind’s ego and ceaseless ambition dies in those final words, as the album draws to its close.
The last song on the album really hits hard, you’ve got the last human alive taking upon himself the introspection and reflection of his entire species all at once, I urge anyone listening to read those lyrics when they reach that part of the album.
6. How do you see The Essence of Expedience in comparison to your earlier works?
When I was writing Landmarks On The Road To Ruin and Dream Of The Great Forest my understanding of the functions in a DAW wasn’t amazing, I was writing songs around the limitations of what I knew about how to record using these means. A lot of elements in these earlier songs were made using little hacks and discoveries I’d made in order to try and make things sound seamless and natural, I’d find a way in the end after a lot of experimentation, but later find out the same effect could have been achieved by a simple right click and an adjustment of an option I was completely unaware of. Landmarks was an exercise in finding my true feet with these modern software’s idiosyncrasies. I decided to challenge myself to make an album under a different project in a month at the same time I was doing mixing and mastering for Landmarks, and that was The Haligtree’s Ours Is The Power And The Might, a project that was based around old video game music, specifically RPG battle music.
I found myself wanting to improve how I was programming drums, to make them have more flair and personality. I played drums as a kid and always had that sense that I knew how rhythms wanted to be but my playing couldn’t match up to what I’d composed for it in my head, that compositional skill lay dormant for a very long time until I’d spent more time with experimenting with my drum plug-in whilst making The Haligtree.
My drum mapping greatly improved during that time, which meant that moving forward my guitar playing could become more angular and complex because it now had drums with the complexity and variety to match its pace.
All the videos I’d watched over the years of how drummers like Buddy Rich, Bill Ward, and Darkside played and composed their beats started to feel like they were a lot more achievable now.
All the Venetian Snares tracks I’d considered had god tier drum mapping and skill seemed to be closer to my understanding than ever before.
It’s like everything started to sync up a lot more with my head and the DAW.
Making that Haligtree album felt like a different beast entirely to Grunleggender which was a breath of fresh air, it was like hanging out with a different group of people who have a different vibe.
By the time I was making Essence I’d surpassed a lot of my previous limitations of medium, the drums were more complex, the riffs were nastier and more jagged, it all just took on a more mature and refined form than my previous works as Grunleggender. It only made sense to take that newfound steel and make something dark and nasty with it.
A great example of this is in Curse Thy Wretched Name, the second song on the album. If you listen closely the drums shift about like a boxer, ducking and weaving and feinting to cause confusion whilst staying on rhythm, with variations of the bars switching up each progression. The bridge and into the chorus is probably one of my favourite songs to map drums to, a friend of mine commented that the fills sounded a bit like a Drum & Bass song, which I take as a compliment as there’s some really great mapping in some Drum & Bass, especially from the late 90’s/early 2000’s. Probably listening to a lot of High Contrast, Calyx & Teebee in my teens with mates did that.
The fïrst song I actually penned for the record was Enemy Of Christ, it really helped set the tone for what I wanted to do with this record, it has that pissed off blackened thrash/hardcore attitude, especially into the chorus when K.DWS comes in. That’s another song that morphs and shifts, I wasn’t sure where I wanted to take it and it had basically run its course as a fast number, so I thought “why end it here, this can be extended into a downbeat segment” and that segment is one I’m the most excited about playing live, if only because no one would be able to resist knocking eachother around in the horseshoe with those riffs, they came straight out of the hardcore scene with champion mesh shorts and Life Of Agony longsleeves. And then into the noisy segment, I knew what I wanted to do with this record by this point, it was an exercise in walking the tightrope of heavy and experimental.
People have said to me the difference between early Grunleggender and Essence is like night and day. I think when people started hearing this record, that’s when people started taking the project more seriously. It’s an improvement over what I’ve done already, and I hope I can make this kind of wave happen again in the future.
7. You worked with several other artists on this album for vocals. What was it like working with them? Did you always feel that some of your songs needed additional vocal contribution, or were the collaborations more spontaneous?
For an album that is as long as this one is, I ended up getting bored of hearing the sound of my own voice. I’m a good vocalist, I get things right a lot of the time and I have a wide range, but it’s also cool to hear different voices on records, like a supporting character in a book or film that’s just there for one or two chapters or arcs that people would take a liking to.
My fïrst initial thought was that I wanted a couple of guest vocalists on the album who speak/sing in a different language, so I contacted Myrkviðr who I’d seen do some good covers of French black metal bands. I sent her the lyrics and demo of Social Contagion, and she sang the translation directly into the part of the song I’d laid out for her and she basically smashed it in one take, I was thoroughly impressed.
I initially was concerned that it might have taken a few go’s or if I wasn’t offering up enough direction for her but she definitely understood the vibe of the song and just went for it. It was that smooth that we even briefly talked about making a project out of that kind of formula.
I’d contacted a couple of other non-English speakers from other bands too, namely Shayan of Trivax, who was keen on the ideas I’d pitched to him, but he was understandably busy with his podcast and organising the upcoming new Trivax album and tour, he did however express interest on working together on something in the future though, so we might see another project of mine with some Farsi shrieks on yet.
So I asked my friend K.DWS (frontman of Andracca) if he’d be interested in contributing to.
He initially said “I don’t know” (I think he wasn’t so keen on the earlier Grunleggender material) but when I mentioned that I’d basically written a Slayer song he mind was changed to “fuck yeah I’m in”.
Naergoat, was a similar story, we were at Fortress Festival together with our friend group and I believe after a few beers I’d asked him to do some guest vocals after hearing some of the new Kelvikus material he’d been working on. Fuck me that guy is talented, he does all his own music production and visual artwork, and you can give him any song to learn on guitar and he’ll pick it up immediately. A real multi talented guy that deserves way more recognition in the scene.
His vocals are unholy, I have no idea how he manages it. I’d attempted to contact some bigger names too, in the mind of “don’t ask, don’t get”. If they say no, they say no.
My mindset being that if I can get David Firth to perform on my metal album, I can get anyone. I’ll address how that came to be in a short while.
Chip King (The Body) gave no response even though I knew he’d seen the DM’s which was a bit annoying, at least have the decency to respond to someone who is offering collaboration even if you can’t do it or don’t particularly want to. I’d never leave someone on read who’d want to collaborate with me.
Jokes on him though, I did the vocals in his style myself using a vocoder on my Korg with an FX chain I’d slapped together in minutes to achieve the same effect as his vocal style.
Piece of piss, sounds better than any of his vocals on their material too.
Don’t big league people, it’s just not the done thing.
8. Tell us a bit about your other projects… and do you have any more projects on the way?
So in addition to Grunleggender there is the following;
The Haligtree - I mentioned this one earlier. It is a result of me venerating all the amazing music from games I played as a kid, and a lot of the music I grew up listening to with my dad. All the crazy prog rock that came out of the 70’s and 80’s can be heard in this world of synths. It also serves as a tribute to Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Elden Ring (of which I’ve sunk many hundreds of hours into)
The project as it is now, is equal parts dungeon synth and JRPG battle music, but recently has taken on more elements of traditional prog/pop rock stylings.
The debut album Ours Is The Power And The Might was released through Woodland Crown and Personal Uschi Records in 2025.
I’ve just released a split of new material with traditionalist dungeon synth artist Blades Of Folmär via the new up and coming UK dungeon synth label Blaggard Records, which as of writing this, is available for pre-order on their bandcamp page with physical tapes on sale.
As of now, I’m nearing completion of the second Haligtree full length, which is the beginning of a series of concept albums based on the lore of Elden Ring called The Caged Divinity. The fïrst part of this series will release later this year, and in my opinion is some of the best music I’ve ever written, I’m really excited for people to hear it.
It’s like if Rick Wakeman made a dungeon synth record.
Vassal - A psychedelic stoner doom metal band I joined last year as singer. The other guys in Vassal I met at a Dopethrone show and after a few beers, we got on like a house on fire (lock in at the Salisbury with Dopethrone and their entourage) putting away an obscene amount of beer, belting out Dio era Sabbath numbers, and waking up to discover I was in a band group chat. Nothing quite like it.
We started work on refining the material the guys had already written and arranging a setlist for live shows, which I was ecstatic about as I’d never had the chance to perform those types of songs live before, I’d always just performed in crap hardcore or black metal bands where other members only wanted my voice to sound one way.
The songs have this great blend of classic 70’s psychedelia and chunky, heavy contemporary heavy doom metal.
We played our our first show at Cosmic Vibration last year which was massive, I’m still in disbelief that we got offered that slot only off the back of a demo we’d shown to Dan, the head honcho of CV. It was an amazing experience and really set the tone for the direction we want to take with the band.
Robert D. Johnstone - This project being under the banner of my namesake, is for simple and ambient electronic music, a lot of it is textured soundscapes, some of it is traditional ambient synthesiser music, almost all of it could be considered a tribute to Brian Eno, Suzanne Ciani, Sarah Davachi, William Basinski, more ambient moments of Aphex Twin & Boards Of Canada. I released a long form ambient piece last year called Desire Communicates It’s Natural End which is available to listen to on YouTube.
Gemonian Stairs - This project consists of dark, noisy arty ambient and droning percussion, if ever I have ideas that are a bit too abrasive to use for anything else, I’ll usually catalogue them and use them for this project. I’ve only done a couple of EP’s with this project and it’s been a while since I’ve done anything with it, but I feel like it’s on its way back. It’s twitching tendrils bending their way over the horizon to make their presence known once more.
Pisstorectumy - A very silly, unserious death metal/goregrind project I did a few years ago as a side project whilst I was making the early Grunleggender material. Grunleggender was super serious and concept driven, with themes of high fantasy and historical/cultural analysis. I felt the need to make something dumb and heavy that didn’t require too much thought.
I’d actually been to a show that had a ton of goregrind and Pornogrind bands playing it that was probably one of the funniest shows I’ve ever been to, which was definitely a catalyst to me creating Pisstorectumy.
Everyone looked like they were having a great time and it was good to see some bands like Pivorapist and Brutal Sphincter who play what they like playing and don’t take their art too seriously.
Just heavy riffs, blast beats, beer swilling and harmless immature humour. Inflatable dick balloons being thrown about, the lot.
The Forbidden Fondue Fountain EP was made in the space of about a week in between tracking guitars for some of Grunleggender’s Landmarks On The Road To Ruin. I just programmed some shitty drums, played some easy old school death metal riffs and came up with stupid, disgusting lyrics about some 4chan reprobate kidnapping and torturing a burglar, pointing out local hardcore guys from 2010’s who tuned down and called started calling their music death metal (even though it’s clearly still just the same hardcore riffs they’d been playing for years) because hardcore apparently “wasn’t cool anymore”. In my opinion you can’t call yourself OSDM if your guitarist can’t play a face melting solo with tremolo or sweep picking, something these hardcore guys never learned to do in their tenures of playing songs consisting only of power chords in drop D and nothing else.
You could argue that Obituary’s riffs are a lot like hardcore but without the lead guitar finesse you’re just attempting to make an imprint in an already much larger footprint of those that came before you.
There was a cover of Manowar’s Black Wind Fire & Steel which was pretty funny.
I did fast solos for Pisstorectumy and I wasn’t even trying to make something necessarily good. Anyway,
Things To Come - There’s tons of things I want to try out, some things I’ve started already, some that are still on the drawing board.
Halcyon Frontier - an acid house/IDM/jungle project that I’ve been tinkering with whilst making the new Haligtree album, that album has a lot of elements from the world of 90’s D&B and Jungle, and I’ve got a craving to start making stuff that is more traditionally in line with that style of music in my own way. I want those songs to have no story, Aphex Twin said in an interview that the beauty of electronic music is that you don’t really have any way to talk about it to other people, it’s there to be listened to and it doesn’t require comment, but it will lure you back sonically with repeated listens inevitably once you find an artist that gets their hooks into you. That’s why I end up writing down funny phrases that either me or my girlfriend come out with in order to make a list of song titles from which I can pick and choose. There’s a little demo of that project on instagram. It’s very likely I’ll just release sporadic singles for that project rather than full dedicated albums.
I have two new atmospheric black metal projects I’ve been writing riffs and lyrics for;
The fïrst one I haven’t decided on a name yet, it is something more in line with how I chose to write the fïrst Grunleggender record, that kind of Celtic folk/Melodic, mountainous black metal has crept its way back into my brain as of late.
The other one is called Nocturnal Visage, a more raw and stripped back project that has massive emotionally charged reverb soaked dream-like riffs. Songs that tell the tales of ancient ghosts that walk the surface of the moon.
There’s a good chance I will be using these new black metal projects as a means to collaborate with some friends I’ve been wanting to work with for a while, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Lastly there’s the long awaited piano jazz album I’ve been wanting to make for a number of years.
Booze soaked catchy tunes about the shit you get put through being from a piss-poor working class broken family without any hope or prospects.
Pop Songs that serve as a giant, unbending middle finger to John Lennon’s “Imagine”.
9. What about live shows, is there anything upcoming that we should catch?
As far as Grunleggender goes, I would like to say I’ve made progress with putting together a live lineup, and whilst I do have members on standby, it’s just not going to happen any time soon with how much I already have going on.
However, Vassal and its presence as a live act is really taking off this year.
We will be playing the following dates this year;
11th July - Bastardstock at The Alma Inn, Bolton
31st July - Druidess at Star & Garter, Manchester
28th-30th August - Cosmic Vibration Festival in Sheffield
3rd October - Stoned Statues at AATMA, Manchester
31st October - Riffolution at Rebellion, Manchester
There may be some Newcastle/Birmingham dates later in the year but these aren’t yet confirmed, keep your eyes peeled.
By and large, very well. Life is extremely busy with producing material for some of my other projects (The Haligtree, Vassal and more) arranging the next steps of Grunleggender.
The weather is very much on and off as it always is in the UK, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I love sunshine just as much as I don’t mind torrential rain, and when you’re on the move walking through a beautiful place it scarcely matters as long as you’re warm enough.
2. Regarding the origins of Grunleggender, what inspired you to start creating Black Metal in this style? What does the name mean?
As I’ve covered in other interviews, heavy guitar music of all kinds were at the forefront of my world growing up. My dad listened to a lot of stuff like Jethro Tull, Hawkwind, Gong, all that classic 70’s shit that rules, and my mum was a fan of weird arty electronica in the vein of Aphex Twin, Nurse With Wound, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Massive Attack etc.
They both had a shared interest in folk music though, and were both musicans and performers as I am. Acts like Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson, Roy Harper amongst others.
The story goes, I reach my teens and find all the obscene classic death and black metal of the 90’s and 00’s, and it never really leaves me after that.
I’m from a small village in the Peak District, and had a few friends who were into heavy music of different stripes, we’d all grown up with parents who had either been into heavy or unusual music of whatever description. One kid loved that crappy 00’s deathcore, another really liked punk, Oi and ska, we had a lad in our group who was really into trip hop and drum & bass, there was me who loved old school death metal. It was like someone wrote a bloody film and we were all caracatures in some kind of alternative rock version of Stand By Me. We formed bands that would start, dissolve, occasionally play in the pubs doing Rage Against The Machine covers and the like, we were absolutely fucking awful but I don’t think anyone had the heart to tell us, because we were just kids with nothing else to do who were having fun.
I honestly think our parents were just glad we were doing something creative and not getting out of our minds drinking and doing drugs like it sometimes is in remote areas of the countryside. People often associate rural areas with affluence, but there’s also a hell of a lot of poverty in these places, families that don’t have much money can’t do much for their kids in some instances, they get bored without knowing what to do with themselves, and all it takes is discovering a bad crowd and that’s it, you’re a junkie.
There’s a reason Macclesfield was named the least cultured town in the UK for quite a number of years, it’s cause half the youth populous of the surrounding areas referred to it as “Smacklesfield”.
Our first band was called The Yeti Convention, which was a name we got from a copy of Kerrang that described Tom Ayara from Slayer as “looking like he’d stepped on stage coming straight from a yeti convention”. We all thought it was hilarious. Eventually we decided to change the name and start playing heavier death metal/deathcore sort of music that was becoming popular at the time. The rise of swoop hair and breakdowns was immediate, and although I wasn’t keen on it at all, it was an easy guitar style to play so I went along with it.
As kids do, we all would fall out over stupid things like girls, and who was cooler than who etc; all the really stupid shit.
The last band I remember we did was with this older guy from Brazil who had moved back to England with his mum, he was an absolutely amazing drummer but by god I’ve never met anyone with such a crippling weed addiction.
We decided in our infinite wisdom to create a “Reggae Death Metal Band” called RaggaCadaver. We lasted about two practices before the drummer became a paranoid shut in and refused to see anyone. Turns out he’d been trying it on with one of the other lad’s girlfriends to no avail, we didn’t have much to do with him after that.
I’ve mentioned this in previous interviews I’ve done, but there was one other guy who was sort of a cameo character in our friend group who was really really into black metal. He was a weird, tiny guy who dressed completely normal and was developmentally disabled. He had the weirdest, darkest record collection of scary looking black and death metal. He was very quiet and rarely hung out with us unless there were a couple of us at any one time. He had this bizarre minimalist bedroom where all of his records were in a pull out unit beneath his bed, and he made his own raw black metal demos on an early DAW on his ancient desktop PC.
What I learned about black metal from him was instrumental in planting the seeds of what would later become my involvement in the scene, and in creating this music myself. I remember being at his house late one night, a small group of us were listening to these records and there was a girl with us who was extremely freaked out. His appearance, the music, the fact that he had a necronomicon open on his kitchen table, I’m pretty sure he was trying to turn the conversation towards nationalism but everyone naturally kept redirecting it to more comfortable, normal topics.
In the end my friends decided they wanted to go drinking in the woods and make a camp fire because it seemed like more fun than hanging out at this weird creepy guys house listening to what they considered to be the worst music they’d ever heard. (I believe it was a jaunty flute bit on the first Falkenbach record that did it)
I felt bad for him, he was clearly not a social guy but he’d plucked up the courage to invite people over as his parents were away and these other kids had totally rejected him. I didn’t really ever see him again after that, any attempt we made to contact him was met with silence.
As it stands, I credit that guy as the one who introduced me to true black metal. Not the mainstream Dimmu Borgir, Behemoth black metal, but the real and ugly black metal that permeates through the underground to this day.
During a lot of my twenties, (I’d moved to the city at 18) I’d been playing guitar and singing in bands that typically ended up going nowhere, either people weren’t interested or didn’t get on, or were too lazy or lacking in creativity to form any kind of meaningful project. I got bored and disillusioned with playing in other people’s shitty bands that would be born and would die in the same practice room, never to see the light of day.
For a while I withdrew from the world of heavy music and stuck to making rubbish trendy lofi ambient trying to get on one of those fancy European labels like Janushoved or Posh Isolation Records, I’d painstakingly put together albums of soundscapes using tape recordings over riffs played on guitar/microkorg using a Boss Loop Pedal.
Some of them would be compositionally quite impressive for the medium, but the sound quality was so bad it would never have been mistaken for anything more than a demo.
Soon the itch to play heavy music again was inescapable, and I needed to get it out of my system at the very least. My old cheap Stratocaster knock off was no longer up to the task for many years, but as luck would have it, the spirit of one man black metal found its way in. My friend Andy who had a project called Caïna for many years was deciding to sell some of his guitar gear, namely a Peavey EXP.
This was the guitar he’d used to write some of the more recent (at the time) Caïna material. The way it all panned out with the people he was hanging out with and working for at the time though, I think a lot of the gear he had during that period he associated with bad times, so he just wanted rid.
It was on a hike through Goyt Valley, where I was born, that I wanted my own project of epic concept metal. I’d been learning Norwegian this time, since I have some heritage dating back a few generations to Scandinavia.
Grunleggender is old Norse for “Founding Legends”.
I’d already got a small practice amp and a modest pedal set up so I started writing riffs, I’d been listening to a lot of Saor at that point, so a lot of the early Grunleggender songs have a Celtic sort of cadence to them. The fïrst Grunleggender song I ever wrote was “What Lies Within A Mask” Off of the EP, but at the time of me starting the project that riff was different in idiom to my initial plan for the project as a whole, that song was fleshed out beyond just being riffs long after I’d actually finished the first album. I recorded the fïrst demo (Utforskende, Overhærendre) using Audacity, I still had no clue how to use a proper DAW which, as a technophobe, was a pretty daunting challenge to overcome. But with the help of Spenser Morris, a sound engineer who has worked with Saor/Panopticon amongst others, gave me some great instruction on how to get it all going using Reaper. Once I found my feet with the tech side of things, I began work on the first album that would begin a concept trilogy, and afterwards decided to write the EP using material I had leftover from making Landmarks.
The deliberate choice to go it alone with this project was, in hindsight, an opportunity to prove to myself that I could make something of worth entirely myself. After years of playing in other people’s bands and never really feeling satisfied, it was great to delve into the unknown and explore the parameters of making these songs in solitude. Learning new instruments and technology and finding how to best write with them was a welcome challenge. I didn’t want to become one of those wankers that starts a band, calls it mine and yet has other people writing on it. I didn’t want to become one of those guys that would call the shots in spite of having questionable talent or creative ability compared to other people in the room. I’d been in those situations before with people, fevered egos that command a respect that isn’t deserving. It’s one of the reasons I so loathe figures like Mark E Smith (The Fall). I can’t stand that guy, he was just an angry pissed up Frank Sidebottom-sounding cunt.
If I made and released stuff and it sounded bad the the ears of other people, I wouldn’t be letting down anyone else but myself, and it would be my sole responsibility to ensure what I was writing was of a high standard and done with honesty and integrity.
Mark E Smith is what I consider to be an irredeemably worthless individual, acting in a way that attempted to be an applicant to the world of music not through talent or artistry, but through throwing drunken tantrums and insisting that he was some sort of genius.
If you have to tell people you’re a genius, then you’re little more than a fool.
And more fool the people who put up with him, if I was in a band with that guy he’d end up with a nose like a coat hook turned sideways.
I’ve never come across anyone quite that bad but I don’t understand why anyone would want to work with that sort of talentless worthless turd of a man, the only things he ever benefited from were created by other people with him taking credit for it all. In my opinion, he deserved only misery. The type of artist I wanted to become is one that is recognised by hard work, integrity and ingenuity. Ronnie James Dio was a perfect example of this, total talent compressed into a small fellow, but always a gentlemen to fans and bandmates alike. The testament to Dio’s qualities can be seen in that wherever you go in the internet, no one seems to have had any kind of bad experience with him. There’s no evidence that he was ever rude to anyone or treated anyone unfairly. From start to end he was a consummate professional in his field who was rightly respected by anyone who came into contact with him. Even his back and forths with Ozzy only came about due to Ozzy bringing up nonsense to the media. Ronnie couldn’t resist putting him down, and I find that an admirable quality too. If someone talks out of line they should be put in their place, it can be done without violence or overdoing malice, like a silent verbal assassin taking thier target down.
That’s the role model I’ve always looked towards. Not some unprincipled wanker who can’t even play a single instrument or even sing a note.
You could have handed Mark E Smith a bag with a radio in it and he still couldn’t hold a tune.
Fuck him, rest in piss.
3. Regarding your newest album, The Essence of Expedience, there seems to be a wide range of influences, especially that of Black, Death, Doom Metal, and a touch of Folk and Ambient. What are some more specific influences for you?
Grunleggender was always sort of penned to be an atmospheric black metal sort of project, but I don’t always see it as such, it just sort of is what it wants to be at whatever time it wishes, which I think can be offputting for a lot of people, but it’s never been something that bothered me too much.
I’ve spent much of my life exploring different worlds in music, not just the limitations of the world of metal. There’s much variety in the metal world, the slow and oppressive atmosphere of doom, the fast and abrasive riffs of death metal, the cold and dissonant melancholy of black metal, the adrenaline filled, circle pit inducing thrash metal. I’ve been into electronica for about as long as metal, my older sister was a fan of the Warp Records IDM that came out of the 90’s. Aphex Twin, uZiq, Boards Of Canada etc.
Discovering Black Metal was a huge turning point in what I initially understood about the world of music, as I'd mentioned earlier with that guy I knew growing up.
As a kid, and as a teenager I’d never put too much thought into what the people behind this all this music might be like, but what I'd learn about the world of black metal at large sort of offered me a lot more context as to why that guy I knew was the way he was. It was music for social outcasts, separatists from the way normal people think and feel.
Finding out about what happened in the 90’s in Norway challenged my worldview, I didn’t realise that people who made music could actually be “evil” (by my young mind’s understanding of the world)
These guys weren’t just making music about darkness and esoteric occult stuff, they were practicing it.
I’d imagine a lot of kids discovering this stuff probably felt the same way. I was exposed to this sort of surface level fïrst and second wave black metal (Bathory, Venom, Mayhem, Darkthrone) via media outlets such as Kerrang and the early internet of the 2000’s, and of course, my weird friend showing me stuff that was obscure (at the time) like Judas Iscariot, Nargorath etc)
There wasn’t as much concrete information about what took place in Norway so understandably there was a lot of Mythos around it.
The skull necklace, the photos, the murders, the church burnings.
I remember thinking “Fuck! this stuff is real!”
It was intriguing, scary, and made me wonder how many other scenes in the world could be this savage and dangerous.
I remember hanging out with some friends at a biker pub in Stockport called The Town Hall Tavern when I was in my teens (fake ID from college doing the heavy lifting) and talking to some old metal heads who were more “in the know” about what took place.
A lot of the stuff they told me I later came to realise was bullshit they’d heard from rumours and taken as gospel from whatever source they’d heard it from.
It was always “yeah my mate knew Euronymous, his old band played a show he was at and he was stood at the front and saw all the pins on his jacket” etc.
I took it as all as gospel as I was a gullible kid, but at the time it thrilled me that there was such a recent mythology behind this music that I loved.
It wouldn’t be until a lot later that I’d learn about what transpired with other bands like Absurd and some of those other bands that were essentially copycats causing trouble trying to imitate the “evil” stuff.
I was never keen on Absurd anyway, the music sucked, it wasn’t really even black metal and by that point the appeal of dark evil acts for the sake of that sort of pseudo-satanic nationalism had run its course in my mind, I didn’t care much for the political end of things, I didn’t really understand the nuance until I was a lot older.
Discussing politics wasn’t really a thing for teenagers in the 2000’s, I didn’t know what left wing or right wing was, all I knew was what was in my village, which kids were okay to hang out with and which ones I should have avoided, navigating the fields during certain times of year so that you didn’t get killed by a Bull that was grazing or avoiding dangerous plants like Giant Hogweed, what to do if you’ve been stung by a wasp or a bee, all the things kids should know.
I don’t know what it’s like for kids now by and large but I’d imagine with how all the discourse is shoved down your throat as an adult, it’s a knocking bet that they’re doing the same to kids in order to get them propagandised and ready to fight one another into adulthood.
I look at the way kids in the metal scene are now with the influence of social media and all it makes me think is that ideology was never pushed on us anywhere near this much when I was that age.
We had stuff like Rage Agajnst The Machine and people ironically wearing t shirts with Che Guevara on, but the nuance behind it was never discussed. You never had someone in your face telling you that using a particular word was a “micro-aggression”.
I later found out that the best way to not offend anyone is to just not speak to anyone ever. Which was fine by me because I hated social interaction more than anything else.
Even now, I think you should be able to listen to what you want to without being accused of being a nasty piece of work by people who’ve never met you. The internet has this way of dog piling on people who are minding their own business and not bothering anyone.
Listening to Drudkh isn’t going to radicalise you, all it will do is probably make walks in the forest a bit nicer.
People forget that behind the music and the public perception of certain artists there is a person that thinks and feels and has dreams and aspirations.
Look at Seth Putnam, he’ll be remembered by most people through YouTube video essays as the worst guy of all time, but you dig a bit deeper and you find he was actually pretty talented and smart. He was just pretty fucked up. Same goes for GG Allin, all the mythology around him was that he was some irredeemable monster, but people have posted accounts where they’ve had quiet, unrecorded conversations with him and when the cameras and tape recorders were off, he was a thoughtful and even-minded person deep down. I think the act he put on was a manifestation of deep trauma. I honestly think he was in the closet and had a lot of issues with that due to his strict Catholic upbringing and his dad being completely fucking insane.
Same goes for Carl Panzram, the prolific American serial killer from the 17th century. Panzram was cruel and violent, and had the physical power to back him up, but not once did he ever direct that hate towards a woman, it was always men. It was very likely because he lived in a time where he didn’t and couldn’t understand himself, nor anyone else.
I’d sooner choose to venerate someone like Putnam or GG than the aforementioned Mark E Smith because they actually had real musical talent when they weren’t making music that was at best, in poor taste and at worst extremely offensive to anyone and everyone.
Picnic Of Love has actual great guitar work on there and it’s funny as hell.
I don’t think I’d ever relate to anyone who would try to ruin someone’s life if I didn’t agree with something they had to say, because they’re free to think what they want, I don’t give a shit, I’m not them and they aren’t me. Other people’s opinions hold no power over me.
I see all these “sketch list” spreadsheets and all I think when I look upon them is “fucking hell, get a life”.
My grandmother was an evacuee during WWII and I’ve always listened to her intently about her memories, the fear of Hitler and the Nazi’s was still there in her bones even as an old woman. The media she’d seen since she’d been a child to when she grew old only reinforcing these feelings of hostility and anger towards what was done to our country by the war.
Imagine how fucking scary that must have been, you were a small kid growing up usually in pretty bad poverty in the industrial north of England and then all of a sudden you’re being told you’re off to live with a stranger in the middle of nowhere because a scary guy from another country is gonna drop bombs on you, you’d be scarred for life!
One day, a family member of ours who had got into Buddhism was having a discussion with her about how he can see that there is good in all people.
Immediately the conversation went to “well, what about Hitler?” His response was “well he might have done all those bad things but he was an animal lover.”
They had to agree to disagree at that point.
It was like an unstoppable force of arguing in good faith met an immovable object of realistic contempt.
Someone with good endless good intentions met with one who is followed by the ghosts of war their whole life.
You don’t have to agree with everyone on everything to be able to work together and crack on in life.
I’ve often looked at the world of politics in relation to music in a way that could only see it as completely exhausting. Specifically seeing Dawn Ray’d live one time supporting Wode was an interesting example.
Musically I thought they weren’t bad on record having heard their debut album.
The riffs on record weren’t the strongest but the inclusion of violin was enough to hold my attention.
But seeing them live was an experience, and not a positive one. They spent literally minutes between songs complaining about some woman who had been sent to prison because her kid wouldn’t go to school(?)
I remember standing with my mate, we’d occasionally glance at eachother as if to say
“What is happening here?
Who gives a shit?
What does any of this have to do with Black Metal?”
Last straw was when the singer started saying stuff about killing the police, my mate walked out at that point as his sister was in the force, the singer was lucky he didn’t get up there and twat him one.
If you can’t express it in your songs, don’t be spending 10 minutes talking at me when you should be up there playing.
At that point I got a lot more picky about what bands I chose to see, I want leather jackets, spikes, beer, and good riffs.
I don’t want to be working my arse off for 50 hours a week to have someone in a band I’m watching try to tell me I should think about this or that.
You can fucking do one, mate. No one cares!
It’s one thing to raise awareness for stuff you care about, but to inflict it on people who are there to enjoy some music after a long day of work is no good.
Normal working people don’t care about your weird misanthropic bullshit rhetoric.
To not engage in politics is not an extremist position, and I really don’t understand all these people that think so. I really dislike the “if you’re not with us you’re against us” mentality.
I owe a lot to the world of hardcore too, in my late teens moving from the countryside to the city, I got in with a crowd of hardcore kids who for a while were a great source of kinship alongside the metal community I’d found myself inhabiting. The raw energy and simplistic riffing I found very appealing early on, and wanted to incorporate some of those grassroots DIY hardcore sentiments into the very early Grunleggender material. It was for a time more like blackened hardcore than straight up classic style black metal.
In Manchester, the 2000’s/2010’s had something of a revival of subcategories in hardcore. You had the youth crew revival with bands like Feral Youth and Survival, beatdown bands whose names I forget (sorry boys) springing up everywhere. Most importantly for me though , was the sort of “secret” sect of hardcore that came around at that time. The underground scene within the underground scene.
Bands like Iced Out, Knifedoutofexistence, Oathbreaker were all relatively new to the scene.
A lot of these bands were formed out of the straight edge/vegan and crust punk elements that had permeated through the subculture throughout the 90’s but this sort of “Mysterious Guy Hardcore” became a thing everyone wanted to know about but few were ever actually allowed in.
It’s silly in hindsight, it was like a crust punk vegan knock off of Euronymous and Helvete, with all these bands hanging out in V Revolution, at its original location when it was a record shop, before it moved to being only a restaurant, and then closing following Covid and the vegan bubble profoundly bursting.
Hanging around these guys gave me a sense of a theme that I found to be inspiring, although I wasnt yet quite sure what to do with that inspiration. It rubbed off on more people than just me, you can see it in some other projects that were around that scene at the time, my old pal Andy (Caïna) was involved with this “secret hardcore scene” and ended up producing what was essentially a hardcore record with black metal elements Setter Of Unseen Snares.
He’d been making straight up black metal for a number of years, and even he’d found himself influenced by it.
I came to fall apart from that scene, I came to realise that a lot of the people in it weren’t well adjusted and oftentimes rather spiteful and vindictive, something in later years I would come to learn as a defining trait of the extreme politically charged music scene.
I never wished any of them any ill will, I’d just got tired of having boring conversations and arguments with passive aggressive losers.
One of the funniest periods were when the band Goodtime Boys were just starting to come about.
For those who don’t know, it was formed by ex-synth player and backing vocalist of UK chart toppers The Automatic. Alex Penny was a top fella, and he really stuck to his guns as an artist. I only hung out with him a couple of times but he was a great laugh. It must have been strange going from stardom to the underground so quickly, and by his own admission.
People would always singer “What’s that coming over the hill? Is it a monster?!” to him to wind him up, which always seemed to do the job.
The allure of musical variety comes in many forms, discovering new microgenres of musical worlds I was already familiar led me to dive down rabbit holes in the internets cavernous network of blogspot pages, YouTube algorithms, messageboards, discovering stuff like Vaporwave, future funk, textured ambient music, and neoclassical artists all lend themselves to stoking my curiosity, what would I do with all this knowledge? What would be applied to this journey I was undertaking? The answer was clear but I had not the means to carry it out yet, it was perhaps a blessing that I had yet not the skill to apply these thoughts to action until I was truly ready, until I’d gathered enough inspiration from the far corners of the world of music that I’d entrenched myself within. It became less about the people in the scene and more about what they were creating, and those who recognised this paradigm as such began to be seen by me as something akin to kindred spirits.
So that’s how I was led to input so much of what I’d learnt about music into what would become Grunleggender.
I want the project to do well but I’m not in the habit of changing what I want to do with my music to kiss the arses of the scene’s denizens or try to build a reputation as the cool trendy act.
If I want to put a fruity piano ballad in my album with a load of atmospheric blackened death metal I’m gonna do it and no one will stop me.
As Grunleggender is a concept project, with an underlying story, it can be expressed more effectively using a more varied means of communication.
Incorporating elements from the different corners of the world of metal, electronica, industrial etc; allowed me more freedom to express what I wanted to convey through this record.
The story of The Essence Of Expedience is one of bitterness, resentment, but also acceptance of harsh realities that are often presented to us through a pacified means.
Landmarks, the fïrst chapter, was an album describing youthful resilience, defiance of a broken status quo, with a righteous loud and bold nature.
Essence on the other hand, is a wounded animal in a state of panic, thrashing and writhing as its breathing becomes more laboured, the pain it feels it cannot understand, and in moments of what could be considered reprieve, it carries a quiet dignity and wisdom that stands as a contrast to Landmark’s naivety.
When I was writing The Essence Of Expedience, I wanted to take all the worst things about myself and lay them all out on a table to examine them. That pitch black Neanderthal inside that is screaming an inarticulate fervour. I wanted this album to be so unlike the last it almost was becoming something that sounded like a different project all together, but it was still somehow inexplicably Grunleggender, it was a part of that world I’d built that I had no knowledge of or had never thought to explore.
I wanted this album to be obtusely inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t fully paying attention to it, to just create a wall to keep everyone out who wasn’t capable of accepting something that wasn’t entirely to their own taste.
That can be found in the fïrst song, The Endless Divide, when the song slows to a crawl and the organ and doom riffs begin, I meant that as a skill check to anyone who might be considered “a fussy eater”.
My reasoning being if you can’t pay attention through one long and difficult part, then you don’t deserve the good things that are to come in the record.
I grew up listening to CD’s and vinyl records before digital format was even invented, in a time when you put on a record you were making a commitment to listen to it all, there was no skipping songs, there was no cherry picking things you liked, it forced artists to compromise into linear formulas to keep peoples attention, when in reality they likely wanted the freedom to write and sequence their songs how they wanted from their heart. I’ve never wanted my works to live in a world of such restriction and compromise, at that point I might as well be making shitty pop music for normies making sequenced songs that take an hour for me to start and finish.
When I was making The Essence Of Expedience, I was at a time where I was deeply unhappy with how my life had turned out. I’ve never been one for talking about my feelings, as when you’re a man you sort of just have to crack on, otherwise people just think you’re a pussy and you can’t be relied on for anything.
I was the rock for other people, always going the extra mile to ensure the people in my life were supported.
It didn’t matter to me whether I was happy or whether I was sad, all I knew was that my life had to have purpose and meaning, otherwise I was of no use at all.
I was afraid that if I spoke my mind, the people close to me in my life would stop loving me.
It all just sort of coalesced into the songs I ended up writing for this record. It had classic death/black riffs when it wanted, it had a lot of 16th notes on the percussive end when it wanted, it had industrial elements, and all the lyrics I pulled out of my brain were a result of many deeply unpleasant thoughts about modern society.
The long and short of it was I went through a particularly difficult patch during and after making this record, and found myself wondering why I’d fucked everything up and made all the wrong decisions and made a mess of my life.
Making music seemed to feel like the only thing that I could confidently say I was good at and that I enjoyed.
After some conversations and some soul searching with family and professionals, I discovered at the age of 35 that I have autism and ADHD.
My parents had tried to get me diagnosed but in the 90’s, it was just seen as more work for teachers and governing bodies so they were just told I was lazy, stupid and that they’d done a bad job bringing me up.
Any time I was struggling with anything, particularly in mathematics, I would just be told to pull my finger out and sort myself out.
I felt like a fucking alien a lot of the time when I was a kid. I’d just look at stuff to do with mathematics on a page and it might as well be all written in Greek the way I wouldn’t be able to take any of it on board.
Even to this day, seeing people solve X times Y or A divided by B without having to think about it at all is like watching people perform unknowable esoteric sorcery, sometimes I’ll just throw my girlfriend a random math problem and she’ll be able to solve it immediately whereas I’d have to get a calculator and a piece of paper to even begin to get my head around it. It’s weird because some things to do with numbers I have no problem with at all, like numbers to do with DAW stuff I don’t have any kind of issue with and other things like money are no problem, but anything beyond that you might as well be asking a dog which way it is to Mars.
English and music where my strengths in in secondary school. I’d write essays that contained words even my teachers weren’t aware of.
Other kids would try to bully me for the extensive vocabulary I made full use of, but it usually just ended up in me saying “well maybe I’m smart and you’re just thick as pig shit”.
Safe to say, I got into a lot of fights over the years.
I grew up and moved out and went through all the things you go through when you move out at 18, just trying to survive on my own without any help. No education or qualifications led to shit job after shit job and dealing with a revolving door of house moves, being laid off, taking another shit job, awful commutes, just an string of annoying bullshit for years.
I’d just gone through life trying to do things the normal way but struggling owing to how I thought about things, a lot of people I’ve met in my life have probably thought I was normal as I’m very verbose and seemingly normal and intelligent, when in fact I was academically a dunce, and all I took from formal education was that I hated being around people who I didn’t understand, or who didn’t understand me.
I remember distinctly one night after a particularly long day of recording for the album, I was awake in bed in the early hours just unable to think of anything other than this strange abstract thought I could only construe as;
“I’m not really a proper person, I’m not really human.”
“I’m an artist fïrst and a person second, once I’ve created all I can there will be nothing left to live for.”
I knew when I thought these thoughts that I had to figure this shit out or I’d end up doing something mental like turning on the gas and falling asleep with the windows closed, or getting myself piss drunk and going into the woods with a knife and letting myself be claimed by the elements in the middle of winter.
I spoke with those who had known me longest and it was clear that I had to find out what the hell had been wrong with me my whole life.
I always hated the idea of having a mental label on me, that people would mistreat me or disregard me if they knew I had what would be perceived as some kind of mental deficiency or limitation.
What I was worried most about wasn’t how I am perceived in the general public eye, but how my works may be perceived if word got out that I was autistic.
I was worried that people would think everything I made was just slop from the deficient mind of some retard and not take anything I made seriously.
I wouldn’t want the reputation of my music to be tarnished in that way, it would be like taking everything I’ve made out back and shooting it all in the head.
When I did more research into the subject as I was navigating learning about it, seeing others saying the exact things I’d been thinking was like a weight on my shoulders had been lifted.
Learning all of this was equal parts frustrating, and a weight off my mind, I always thought something was wrong with me and that I was a complete fuck up, but it just turned out I was trying to go about things in the way that “normal” people do without the brain schematics that are required for that sort of navigation. I never discovered that there could be different ways to navigate dealing with people and dealing with adversities you face in life.
On the one hand, being chucked out into the world and learning to survive when I was still quite young was a natural, good thing. But the sense of unease and that something wasn’t right would follow me around like an omen.
I just sort of kept my mouth shut and dealt with whatever came my way, without complaint. I thought things were this difficult for everyone. When I learned that not everyone got thrown out at 18 and it wasn’t wholly a wholly normal thing to be cast out without life experience or any kind of support, it was an unsettling realisation.
After I got my diagnosis, people in my life were very supportive of me too, I was so thankful I had acquired a network of people who wanted to help and could see I was in pain and struggling.
My girlfriend was my rock at that point, she understood autism and it’s idiosyncrasies, as there’s a lot of it in her family. My sister who is a medical professional also has a great understanding of it and a unique perspective of being able to see how I was when we were growing up.
One thing that stood out was a comment from a former bandmate of mjne who I still maintain a decent friendship with.
I told him about the news and he said “yeah, no shit! I always knew.” And when I asked him how he knew he said
“Not once have I ever heard you sing out of key.”
That was when I started to feel a lot better about things, you need to see these things for their positives and strengths rather than as weaknesses or limitations.
People find out how many projects I’ve got on the go at one time and seem shocked, but to me it’s the normal thing to do, I’m making up for lost time in a way. If I’d have known all the technical aspects of things when I was twenty I’d have had such a massive body of work by now, so in a lot of ways I owe it to my former self to catch up and do all the things I wished I was capable of when I was a kid and when I was in my early twenties. I think of it as me utilising a permanent state of being, wanting to become like my heroes.
I don’t ever want people to think I perceive myself as some kind of idiot savant or neurotic clown outside the world of my works, I’m very socially adept and always have been. Sometimes to a degree where I’ll pick up on nuances in conversations that others completely miss.
I’ve always felt the need to prove myself having lived a life without much external encouragement, and although it took a very long time to get here I’m getting that validation from myself and myself alone, which is a relief. I’m doing good things that I love and that counts more for any amount of failures I’ve had to wade through in life.
I don’t feel quite as bad about the way things are now, and I think making The Essence Of Expedience was essential in coming to know myself a bit better.
4. At an hour and a half length, The Essence of Expedience is a pretty hefty album, but great all throughout. What was the process like behind writing this album, how long did it take before you knew it was complete?
To be honest, I just have a bit of a problem writing songs that are any less than 10 minutes long.
If I like an idea or I think it has legs and can get a bit of evolution going, I’ll usually stick with it for a good while until I’m find a place that it can comfortably end.
The song Through The Ages was a lot like that, it was intended as a musical journey through human history, from cave dwelling times, through folk music and reneissance periods, right up to 70’s prog and eventually to modern day era sounding black metal. It’s easily the most experimental piece on the album and is a little out of place compared to the doomy oppressive atmosphere, but I didn’t feel bad including it as exploring human history was Essensial to the plot.
With Essence it was a matter of wanting to get as many of these really dark concepts out onto a recording as possible. People say therapy is good, but I disagree. When you’ve got a hard copy of all your emotional turmoil pressed into one disc, you can feel a lot better about deleting that emotional turmoil from your hard drive (brain).
I don’t do anything in half measures, what you hear on The Essence Of Expedience isn’t actually all the songs I wrote for it, there are actually some that didn’t make it on the album because they were too different thematically to the direction of the record. I’m probably going to release them in some form in the future but for now they’ll remain in the vaults.
I’ve got the same sort of issue with the new Haligtree album producing at the moment. It’s not yet finished but it’s still standing at about 1 hour and 15 minutes in runtime, and that’s with one more song still to record. And that’s part one of a series, so I may very well be dead in the ground before I get to the end of that.
Something about hour+ albums are really appealing to me, like how you’d sit down to watch a long 2/3 hour film or a series that’s even longer, why wouldn’t anyone want to listen to a great piece of musical art, there are long form ideas that can be conveyed?
With Grunleggender I’d written all my lyrics for this album before I’d written a single piece of music, and typically I’d take those lyrics and write the music based upon how I feel reading the lyrics back to myself.
I’d open the DAW and play some chords and change them until I found the point of which my feelings about these words synced up with what I was playing. Maybe that’s why everything ends up being so long, I’d begun writing music in a style more akin to classical composers who would write movements that would make up the elements of a “songs”. Gustaf Mahler was a king of that world. I found that style of writing more interesting for a storytelling perspective than writing linear 4-5 minute songs that had a consistent motif. I like writing songs that drag you off somewhere whether you like it or not, these are songs that in my mind have more power over a listener who is engaged with the record. It’s like the record is calling out to a listener to join them, to take them somewhere and show them something that they can’t find anywhere else. It’s like finding a dead body in the woods with your friends when you’re a kid. If you never went on that journey out of the way, you’d have never discovered it.
For better or for worse, it’ll be something you’ll remember it for the rest of your life.
I find it thrilling to write songs like that, where there is no clear ending from where you’re stood at the beginning, it’s a sense of adventure, be it joyous or macabre. I like to add elements that can only be picked up on repeated listens too, one of my favourite films as a kid was Labyrinth, there’s tons of things hidden in the background of those amazing sets, patterns and faces in the walls that are easily missed the first time around.
To have elements like that that can be discovered after a couple of listens can feel like you’re listening to something new or that can lead you to reassess your perspective on a piece of work.
5. What are the themes behind this album, and what do they mean to you?
The concept of Grunleggender as a project follows the end times of mankind as we know it, taking place on a fictitious version of earth that is going through turmoil.
Dream Of The Great Forest EP sets up the theme that the global populous has begun to yearn for something natural and real, the first album Landmarks On The Road To Ruin takes place in a time where people reject the modern cultures that have been force upon them. People across the world become freed from the constraints of usury, war, consumption, materialism, to their respective cultures that existed before Abrahamic faith took control of the world. A desire to return to living alongside nature rather than against it begins here in these stories.
There’s an element of pride in those songs in Landmarks, a perhaps undeserved confidence in mankind’s ability to work as one to achieve things that stand as a testement to fighting adversity and evil.
The Essence Of Expedience, as I’ve mentioned earlier, examines mankind’s worst traits. The deception, the betrayal, the creation of systems that move us further from a unified understanding that nature is the true God to be worshipped. The broader narrative of this album follows a protagonist, who discovers the key to returning this world to its natural state.
This character based on someone I knew growing up who met a terrible end, I was wished to honour his memory by gifting him life as an avatar in this story. In spite of being a person addled with vicious tendencies, decisions made in anger, I chose him as the protagonist. In that sense, I wanted to offer that real person who I knew some form of redemption, even if it wasn’t in real life.
He would be ridiculed and torn into by all those around him, his family bringing him to a place he did not belong and could not understand, socially exiled and brought to the brink of what it can mean to feel rejection. But in dojng so he was able to comprehend the world as it was in a way no other could, why he was so hated by those around him. He would learn the true meaning of consequence. In doing so, his personal journey would lead him to learn of a hermetic order of ancient druids, waiting for someone who could undertake the journey to plant the seed of a great tree, one that existed eons ago, the cradle of all life on the planet.
It was this man’s life being brought into existence, however reviled by all around him, that would be an instrumental aspect of nature’s return.
He would later become the last living human on Earth, embuing the seed with the final words our species would will ever speak.
“The seed that was planted has not a name, for what will grow from it will have no need”.
Mankind’s ego and ceaseless ambition dies in those final words, as the album draws to its close.
The last song on the album really hits hard, you’ve got the last human alive taking upon himself the introspection and reflection of his entire species all at once, I urge anyone listening to read those lyrics when they reach that part of the album.
6. How do you see The Essence of Expedience in comparison to your earlier works?
When I was writing Landmarks On The Road To Ruin and Dream Of The Great Forest my understanding of the functions in a DAW wasn’t amazing, I was writing songs around the limitations of what I knew about how to record using these means. A lot of elements in these earlier songs were made using little hacks and discoveries I’d made in order to try and make things sound seamless and natural, I’d find a way in the end after a lot of experimentation, but later find out the same effect could have been achieved by a simple right click and an adjustment of an option I was completely unaware of. Landmarks was an exercise in finding my true feet with these modern software’s idiosyncrasies. I decided to challenge myself to make an album under a different project in a month at the same time I was doing mixing and mastering for Landmarks, and that was The Haligtree’s Ours Is The Power And The Might, a project that was based around old video game music, specifically RPG battle music.
I found myself wanting to improve how I was programming drums, to make them have more flair and personality. I played drums as a kid and always had that sense that I knew how rhythms wanted to be but my playing couldn’t match up to what I’d composed for it in my head, that compositional skill lay dormant for a very long time until I’d spent more time with experimenting with my drum plug-in whilst making The Haligtree.
My drum mapping greatly improved during that time, which meant that moving forward my guitar playing could become more angular and complex because it now had drums with the complexity and variety to match its pace.
All the videos I’d watched over the years of how drummers like Buddy Rich, Bill Ward, and Darkside played and composed their beats started to feel like they were a lot more achievable now.
All the Venetian Snares tracks I’d considered had god tier drum mapping and skill seemed to be closer to my understanding than ever before.
It’s like everything started to sync up a lot more with my head and the DAW.
Making that Haligtree album felt like a different beast entirely to Grunleggender which was a breath of fresh air, it was like hanging out with a different group of people who have a different vibe.
By the time I was making Essence I’d surpassed a lot of my previous limitations of medium, the drums were more complex, the riffs were nastier and more jagged, it all just took on a more mature and refined form than my previous works as Grunleggender. It only made sense to take that newfound steel and make something dark and nasty with it.
A great example of this is in Curse Thy Wretched Name, the second song on the album. If you listen closely the drums shift about like a boxer, ducking and weaving and feinting to cause confusion whilst staying on rhythm, with variations of the bars switching up each progression. The bridge and into the chorus is probably one of my favourite songs to map drums to, a friend of mine commented that the fills sounded a bit like a Drum & Bass song, which I take as a compliment as there’s some really great mapping in some Drum & Bass, especially from the late 90’s/early 2000’s. Probably listening to a lot of High Contrast, Calyx & Teebee in my teens with mates did that.
The fïrst song I actually penned for the record was Enemy Of Christ, it really helped set the tone for what I wanted to do with this record, it has that pissed off blackened thrash/hardcore attitude, especially into the chorus when K.DWS comes in. That’s another song that morphs and shifts, I wasn’t sure where I wanted to take it and it had basically run its course as a fast number, so I thought “why end it here, this can be extended into a downbeat segment” and that segment is one I’m the most excited about playing live, if only because no one would be able to resist knocking eachother around in the horseshoe with those riffs, they came straight out of the hardcore scene with champion mesh shorts and Life Of Agony longsleeves. And then into the noisy segment, I knew what I wanted to do with this record by this point, it was an exercise in walking the tightrope of heavy and experimental.
People have said to me the difference between early Grunleggender and Essence is like night and day. I think when people started hearing this record, that’s when people started taking the project more seriously. It’s an improvement over what I’ve done already, and I hope I can make this kind of wave happen again in the future.
7. You worked with several other artists on this album for vocals. What was it like working with them? Did you always feel that some of your songs needed additional vocal contribution, or were the collaborations more spontaneous?
For an album that is as long as this one is, I ended up getting bored of hearing the sound of my own voice. I’m a good vocalist, I get things right a lot of the time and I have a wide range, but it’s also cool to hear different voices on records, like a supporting character in a book or film that’s just there for one or two chapters or arcs that people would take a liking to.
My fïrst initial thought was that I wanted a couple of guest vocalists on the album who speak/sing in a different language, so I contacted Myrkviðr who I’d seen do some good covers of French black metal bands. I sent her the lyrics and demo of Social Contagion, and she sang the translation directly into the part of the song I’d laid out for her and she basically smashed it in one take, I was thoroughly impressed.
I initially was concerned that it might have taken a few go’s or if I wasn’t offering up enough direction for her but she definitely understood the vibe of the song and just went for it. It was that smooth that we even briefly talked about making a project out of that kind of formula.
I’d contacted a couple of other non-English speakers from other bands too, namely Shayan of Trivax, who was keen on the ideas I’d pitched to him, but he was understandably busy with his podcast and organising the upcoming new Trivax album and tour, he did however express interest on working together on something in the future though, so we might see another project of mine with some Farsi shrieks on yet.
So I asked my friend K.DWS (frontman of Andracca) if he’d be interested in contributing to.
He initially said “I don’t know” (I think he wasn’t so keen on the earlier Grunleggender material) but when I mentioned that I’d basically written a Slayer song he mind was changed to “fuck yeah I’m in”.
Naergoat, was a similar story, we were at Fortress Festival together with our friend group and I believe after a few beers I’d asked him to do some guest vocals after hearing some of the new Kelvikus material he’d been working on. Fuck me that guy is talented, he does all his own music production and visual artwork, and you can give him any song to learn on guitar and he’ll pick it up immediately. A real multi talented guy that deserves way more recognition in the scene.
His vocals are unholy, I have no idea how he manages it. I’d attempted to contact some bigger names too, in the mind of “don’t ask, don’t get”. If they say no, they say no.
My mindset being that if I can get David Firth to perform on my metal album, I can get anyone. I’ll address how that came to be in a short while.
Chip King (The Body) gave no response even though I knew he’d seen the DM’s which was a bit annoying, at least have the decency to respond to someone who is offering collaboration even if you can’t do it or don’t particularly want to. I’d never leave someone on read who’d want to collaborate with me.
Jokes on him though, I did the vocals in his style myself using a vocoder on my Korg with an FX chain I’d slapped together in minutes to achieve the same effect as his vocal style.
Piece of piss, sounds better than any of his vocals on their material too.
Don’t big league people, it’s just not the done thing.
8. Tell us a bit about your other projects… and do you have any more projects on the way?
So in addition to Grunleggender there is the following;
The Haligtree - I mentioned this one earlier. It is a result of me venerating all the amazing music from games I played as a kid, and a lot of the music I grew up listening to with my dad. All the crazy prog rock that came out of the 70’s and 80’s can be heard in this world of synths. It also serves as a tribute to Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Elden Ring (of which I’ve sunk many hundreds of hours into)
The project as it is now, is equal parts dungeon synth and JRPG battle music, but recently has taken on more elements of traditional prog/pop rock stylings.
The debut album Ours Is The Power And The Might was released through Woodland Crown and Personal Uschi Records in 2025.
I’ve just released a split of new material with traditionalist dungeon synth artist Blades Of Folmär via the new up and coming UK dungeon synth label Blaggard Records, which as of writing this, is available for pre-order on their bandcamp page with physical tapes on sale.
As of now, I’m nearing completion of the second Haligtree full length, which is the beginning of a series of concept albums based on the lore of Elden Ring called The Caged Divinity. The fïrst part of this series will release later this year, and in my opinion is some of the best music I’ve ever written, I’m really excited for people to hear it.
It’s like if Rick Wakeman made a dungeon synth record.
Vassal - A psychedelic stoner doom metal band I joined last year as singer. The other guys in Vassal I met at a Dopethrone show and after a few beers, we got on like a house on fire (lock in at the Salisbury with Dopethrone and their entourage) putting away an obscene amount of beer, belting out Dio era Sabbath numbers, and waking up to discover I was in a band group chat. Nothing quite like it.
We started work on refining the material the guys had already written and arranging a setlist for live shows, which I was ecstatic about as I’d never had the chance to perform those types of songs live before, I’d always just performed in crap hardcore or black metal bands where other members only wanted my voice to sound one way.
The songs have this great blend of classic 70’s psychedelia and chunky, heavy contemporary heavy doom metal.
We played our our first show at Cosmic Vibration last year which was massive, I’m still in disbelief that we got offered that slot only off the back of a demo we’d shown to Dan, the head honcho of CV. It was an amazing experience and really set the tone for the direction we want to take with the band.
Robert D. Johnstone - This project being under the banner of my namesake, is for simple and ambient electronic music, a lot of it is textured soundscapes, some of it is traditional ambient synthesiser music, almost all of it could be considered a tribute to Brian Eno, Suzanne Ciani, Sarah Davachi, William Basinski, more ambient moments of Aphex Twin & Boards Of Canada. I released a long form ambient piece last year called Desire Communicates It’s Natural End which is available to listen to on YouTube.
Gemonian Stairs - This project consists of dark, noisy arty ambient and droning percussion, if ever I have ideas that are a bit too abrasive to use for anything else, I’ll usually catalogue them and use them for this project. I’ve only done a couple of EP’s with this project and it’s been a while since I’ve done anything with it, but I feel like it’s on its way back. It’s twitching tendrils bending their way over the horizon to make their presence known once more.
Pisstorectumy - A very silly, unserious death metal/goregrind project I did a few years ago as a side project whilst I was making the early Grunleggender material. Grunleggender was super serious and concept driven, with themes of high fantasy and historical/cultural analysis. I felt the need to make something dumb and heavy that didn’t require too much thought.
I’d actually been to a show that had a ton of goregrind and Pornogrind bands playing it that was probably one of the funniest shows I’ve ever been to, which was definitely a catalyst to me creating Pisstorectumy.
Everyone looked like they were having a great time and it was good to see some bands like Pivorapist and Brutal Sphincter who play what they like playing and don’t take their art too seriously.
Just heavy riffs, blast beats, beer swilling and harmless immature humour. Inflatable dick balloons being thrown about, the lot.
The Forbidden Fondue Fountain EP was made in the space of about a week in between tracking guitars for some of Grunleggender’s Landmarks On The Road To Ruin. I just programmed some shitty drums, played some easy old school death metal riffs and came up with stupid, disgusting lyrics about some 4chan reprobate kidnapping and torturing a burglar, pointing out local hardcore guys from 2010’s who tuned down and called started calling their music death metal (even though it’s clearly still just the same hardcore riffs they’d been playing for years) because hardcore apparently “wasn’t cool anymore”. In my opinion you can’t call yourself OSDM if your guitarist can’t play a face melting solo with tremolo or sweep picking, something these hardcore guys never learned to do in their tenures of playing songs consisting only of power chords in drop D and nothing else.
You could argue that Obituary’s riffs are a lot like hardcore but without the lead guitar finesse you’re just attempting to make an imprint in an already much larger footprint of those that came before you.
There was a cover of Manowar’s Black Wind Fire & Steel which was pretty funny.
I did fast solos for Pisstorectumy and I wasn’t even trying to make something necessarily good. Anyway,
Things To Come - There’s tons of things I want to try out, some things I’ve started already, some that are still on the drawing board.
Halcyon Frontier - an acid house/IDM/jungle project that I’ve been tinkering with whilst making the new Haligtree album, that album has a lot of elements from the world of 90’s D&B and Jungle, and I’ve got a craving to start making stuff that is more traditionally in line with that style of music in my own way. I want those songs to have no story, Aphex Twin said in an interview that the beauty of electronic music is that you don’t really have any way to talk about it to other people, it’s there to be listened to and it doesn’t require comment, but it will lure you back sonically with repeated listens inevitably once you find an artist that gets their hooks into you. That’s why I end up writing down funny phrases that either me or my girlfriend come out with in order to make a list of song titles from which I can pick and choose. There’s a little demo of that project on instagram. It’s very likely I’ll just release sporadic singles for that project rather than full dedicated albums.
I have two new atmospheric black metal projects I’ve been writing riffs and lyrics for;
The fïrst one I haven’t decided on a name yet, it is something more in line with how I chose to write the fïrst Grunleggender record, that kind of Celtic folk/Melodic, mountainous black metal has crept its way back into my brain as of late.
The other one is called Nocturnal Visage, a more raw and stripped back project that has massive emotionally charged reverb soaked dream-like riffs. Songs that tell the tales of ancient ghosts that walk the surface of the moon.
There’s a good chance I will be using these new black metal projects as a means to collaborate with some friends I’ve been wanting to work with for a while, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Lastly there’s the long awaited piano jazz album I’ve been wanting to make for a number of years.
Booze soaked catchy tunes about the shit you get put through being from a piss-poor working class broken family without any hope or prospects.
Pop Songs that serve as a giant, unbending middle finger to John Lennon’s “Imagine”.
9. What about live shows, is there anything upcoming that we should catch?
As far as Grunleggender goes, I would like to say I’ve made progress with putting together a live lineup, and whilst I do have members on standby, it’s just not going to happen any time soon with how much I already have going on.
However, Vassal and its presence as a live act is really taking off this year.
We will be playing the following dates this year;
11th July - Bastardstock at The Alma Inn, Bolton
31st July - Druidess at Star & Garter, Manchester
28th-30th August - Cosmic Vibration Festival in Sheffield
3rd October - Stoned Statues at AATMA, Manchester
31st October - Riffolution at Rebellion, Manchester
There may be some Newcastle/Birmingham dates later in the year but these aren’t yet confirmed, keep your eyes peeled.
When I get around to it, I want to figure out a Live set for The Haligtree as people seem to be going mad for it over any of my other projects. It would be fun to be up onstage with a full band performing those crazy proggy RPG tunes in costume.
I have a big admiration for acts like Flickers From The Fen who has such a massive variety of different live performances, from the minimal sets where it’s just him and his gear, to the full band stuff with saxophones and cellos and all sorts of things, love that guy.
10. Regarding your album Landmarks on the Road to Ruin, I noted an interesting collaboration with animator/VA David Firth. How did this collaboration come about?
So initially for that spoken word segment I performed that part myself (I was at that time aiming for a career in voice acting that sadly didn’t end up having legs, thanks AI)
The voice I used had striking similarities to a voice David had used for one of his creepier characters during a segment of his fictitious radio comedy podcast Waller FM (arguably the funniest series he’s made, criminally overlooked in my opinion)
So I thought to myself “I wonder how far fetched it would be to ask if he wanted to perform it?”
I sent him an email with a copy of the current demo of the song asking if he’d be interested, I even offered to pay him for it.
To my surprise, he accepted the offer to perform on it but declined my offer to pay him.
I’d been a fan of his for many years and I think him seeing my name in a lot of comments on his works for many years made him more eager to collaborate with me as I’d supported his works basically since I was a teenager, when Salad Fingers and Fat-Pie as a whole was in it’s infancy. His performance was great, I didn’t need to give him much direction other than the rhythmic aspects of the piece.
As a gesture of appreciation, I bought all of the digital copies of records of his that I didn’t already own from his projects such as Locust Toybox, Stegosaurus Trap and others.
11. What’s next for Grunleggender?
Physical copies of The Essence Of Expedience are currently being manufactured and prepared to go on sale with an American record label, this release will feature limited edition custom made/artwork.
I’m really excited to announce it properly.
Behind the scenes, I’m drawing up plans to take Grunleggender to the stage. Figuring out logistics and tech alongside working with session musicans is a new challenge I’m enjoying.
I also want to go back at some point and create folk rearrangements of older more melodic Grunleggender songs, and perhaps play them live outside of the world of metal.
Other than that, Grunleggender as a recording project is currently on hiatus, it sleeps in a cocoon undergoing a metamorphosis.
Whilst I work on my other projects, I’m drawing up the blueprints for what will be the final Grunleggender record, Echoes Of Anthropocene.
This album will again be a broad departure from what we have seen already. The last album ended with the last human alive planting the seed of the great tree, embruing a wish in his words that it would germinate well and usher in with it a new age.
An age without the voice of man.
It might be a few years before we see this final chapter, but I look upon it in the distance as a mountain to climb, that will hopefully be my magnum opus as a creator.
Oddball questions to end:
1. What are some of your favorite albums, metal or non-metal?
Oh my, what a great question!
There’s so many great records, at the risk of making this interview even longer, I will provide for you top 100 metal and as many non-metal albums I can think of so I’m not waffling for all eternity about these great works.
The metal list will include some rock/stuff that was proto-metal, I’m too lazy to include them with a bunch of stuff that’s not even parallel to the metal world.
(In no particular order)
Top 100 Metal:
1 Slayer - Hell Awaits
2 Emperor - In The Nightside Eclipse
3 Motörhead - Overkill
4 Black Sabbath - Heaven & Hell
5 Cannibal Corpse - Tomb Of The Mutilated
6 Falkenbach - En Their Medh Riki Fara
7 Obituary - Cause Of Death
8 Gorguts - Considered Dead
9 Judas Priest - Screaming For Vengence
10 Electric Wizard - Come My Fanatics
11 Rainbow - Rising
12Rhapsody - Legendary Tales
13 Symphony X - V: The New Mythology Suite
14 Protector - A Shedding Of Skin
15 Dismember - Like An Ever Flowing Stream
16 Morbid Angel - Altars Of Madness
17 Sünopher - Nous sommes d’Hier
18 Saor - Forgotten Paths
19 Cradle Of Filth - Dusk & Her Embrace
20 The Body & Full Of Hell - One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache
21 Mayhem - De Mysteris Don Santhas
22 Russian Circles - Station
23 Autumn Strife - Prosperity
24 Rick Wakeman - Journey To The Center Of The Earth
25 Dragonforce - Inhuman Rampage
26 Suffocation - Effigy Of The Forgotten
27 Iron Maiden - Killers
28 Helloween - Walls Of Jericho
29 Black Sabbath - Headless Cross
30 Dio - Holy Diver
31 Ozzy Osbourne - Diary Of A Madman
32 Jethro Tull - Stand Up
33 Cryptopsy - None So Vile
34 Atheist - Unquestionable Presence
35 Darkthrone - A Blaze In The Northern Sky
36 Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath/Paranoid/Master Of Reality/Volume 4/Sabbath Bloody Sabbath/Sabotage
37 Messa - Close
38 Dopethrone - Hochelaga
39 Sleep - Dopesmoker
40 Gaupa - Myriad
41 Wuldorgast - Cold Light
42 Hawkwind - Warrior On The Edge Of Time
43 Slift - Ummon
44 Cancer - Death Shall Rise
45 Autopsy - The Headless Ritual
46 Death - Leprosy
47 Sodality - Gothic
48 Grave - Into The Grave
49 Emtombed - Left Hand Path
50 Hällas - Excerpts From A Future Past
51 Mgla - Exercises In Futulity
52 Ministry - Psalm 69
53 Avslut - Tyranni
54 ION - A Path Unknown
55 Depths Above - Ex Nihilo
56 Venom - Welcome To Hell
57 Kreigsmachine- Apocalypticists
58 Mortician - Chainsaw Dismemberment
59 Incantation - Upon The Throne Of Apocalypse
60 Misþyrming - Algleymi
70 Pagan Forest - Bogu
71 Deathrow - Raging Steel
72 Deathspell Omega - Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice
73 Wombbath - Downfall Rising
74 Profanation - Skull Crushing Violence
75 SpiritWorld - Deathwestern
76 Mega Slaughter - Calls From The Beyond
77 Wormlust - The Feral Wisdom
78 Order Of Orias - Inverse
79 Defacement - Deviant
80 Apparatus - Self Titled
81 Batushka - Panihida
82 Svartidauði - Revalations Of The Red Sword
83 Contaminated - Celebratory Beheading
84 Odraza - Esperalem tkane
85 Noctambulist - Atmospheres Of Desolation
86 Yoth Iria - As The Flame Withers
87 Ad Nauseum - Imperative Imperceptible Impulse
88 Gruzja - Jeszcze Nie Mamy Na Was Pomysłu
89 Forhist - Self Titled
90 eþelþrym - Self Titled
91 Dead Moon Temple - Ænigmasólvoid
92 Mare Cognitum - Solar Paroxysm
93 Monte Penumbra - As Blades In The Firmament
94 Cosmovore - Into The Necrosphere
95 Äera - Schein
96 Andracca - To Bear The Weight Of Death
97 Vallendusk - Heralds Of Strife
98 Stormkeep - Tales Of Othertime
99 Drudkh - Autumn Aurora
100 Véhémence - Ordalies
Top 100 Non-Metal
1 Voyage Futur - Inner Sphere
2 Venetian Snares - Rossz Csillag Alatt Született
3 Mr Bungle - California
4 Reuben Vaun Smith - Warm Nights
5 Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972
6 William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops
7 Old Sorcery - Strange And Eternal
8 Lookfar - Beyond The Edge Of The World
9 Secret Stairways - Enchantment Of The Ring
10 Penda - Plague Cart Hallucinations
11 Bohren & Der Club Of Gore - Midnight Radio
12 Sarah Davachi - August Harp
13 Boards Of Canada - Music Has Right To Children
14 K. Leimer - Music For Land And Water
15 desert sand feels warm at night - သေမင်းတမန်
16 Bill Fisher - Hallucinations Of A Higher Truth
17 Nailah Hunter - Lovegaze
18 Bjork - Debut
19 μ-Ziq - Lunatic Harness
20 Gaussian Curve - The Distance
21 Aphex Twin - Richard D James Album
22 Locust Toybox - Noon
23 Jon Hopkins - Immunity
24 Bill Callahan - Dream River
25 Vaughn Williams - A Sea Symphony
26 glæcire - Pool Water Blue
27 Nick Harper - Instrumental
28 High Contrast - Tough Guys Don’t Dance
29 Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza - Rainforest Hill Part I&II
30 Jan Jelinek - Loop Finding Jazz Records
31 Idris Muhammad - Turn This Motha Out
32 David Bowie - Station To Station
33 Monastery - Garden Of Abandon
34 Horace Andy - Skylarking
35 Massive Attack - Mezzanine
36 Death In Vegas - The Contino Sessions
37 Self Defense Family - Have You Considered Punk Music
38 Kruder & Dorfmeister - The K&D Sessions
39 Matayoshi Takanaka - The Rainbow Goblins
40 KRS One - The World Is Mind
42 Peeping Tom - Self Titled
43 Prince - For You
44 Suzanne Ciani - The Velocity Of Love
45 Brian Eno - Neroli (Thinking Music Part IV)
46 Elaine Radigue - Islas Resonantes
47 Laurie Spiegel - Three Modal Pieces
48 Golden Living Room & Telepath - Virtual Phantasy
49 Ceephax Acid Crew - Cro Magnox
50 Pont Alexandre III - Convalesence
51 Jon Collin & Demdike Stare - Sketches Of Everything
52 Low Low Low La La La Love Love Love - Ends Of June
53 Sangam - Messiah
54 TOWERS - Self Titled
55 Terry Riley & Don Cherry - Köln
56 Ariel Kalma - Le Temps Des Moissons
57 Enno Velthuys - A Glimpse Of Light
58 Emerald Web - Nocturne
59 Malfet - The Way To Avalon
60 Windows96 - Plume Valley
61 Luxury Elite - World Class
62 we are not of importance - Our Lakehouse At The Edge Of The Universe
63 Winter Sleep - Dreams
64 Sierra On-Line - Glass Shutters
65 Takashi Kokubo - Oasis Of The Wind II
66 The Caretaker - Everywhere At The End Of Time
67 Joanna Brouk - Hearing Music
68 Igor Wakhevitch - Kshatyra
69 Hitoshi Yoshimura - Wet Land
70 Casiopea - Mint Jams
71 Wilson Tanner - 69
72 Autechre - Tri Repetae
73 Floating Points - Kuiper
74 Donor Lens - Midnight Store
75 Burial - Untrue
76 The Zenmenn - Enter The Zenmenn
77 D.K. - Island Of Dreams
2. Do you believe in the paranormal/supernatural?
I believe there’s stuff we don’t understand, but I’m more inclined to believe seeing ghosts is a result of perception of how air travels through certain structures. Fear of unknown parameters, and fear in general is a survival response. If you’re sensing a presence in a spooky room it’s probably just the primate part of your brain telling you that the air moving through your cave dwelling is obstructed in some way, thus indicating a presence that is unknown or unwanted in that space. The fear stems from not knowing exactly what it is that you’re up against.
I do really enjoy supernatural elements in my fiction though, like the way that Haruki Murakami deals with afterlife, parallel worlds that have no clear rules or boundaries, which only adds more intrigue to an already mysterious situation.
I’ve actually got some concepts for a ghost hunting themed ambient album for the Robert D. Johnstone project, which I will probably make a start on in the next few months or so when I get a free bit of time.
3. Do you have any pets? If so, what kind? If not, what kind would you want?
I’m a cat man to be sure, we always had cats around us when I was growing up in the countryside.
I do like dogs and rodents and other animals but cats will always be my favourite.
I currently have a little black cat in my lap as I write this, his name is Philiberto Pastiché.
4. Favorite activities outside of music? Are you a collector of any sort?
Music has sort of taken over all aspects of my life.
In a lot of ways, anything else I’m interested in usually has to wait until I need a break from producing. Before I started Grunleggender I was a powerlifter, although I don’t remember what my top sets or 1RM were now. I think my squat was something like 220kg, my deadlift I don’t know and my bench was about 90kg. I was never that strong and the fact I had to spend so many hours training a week on top of work and on top of recording for projects meant I was struggling to keep up a bit.
I had a shoulder injury in 2023 which put me out of action for a while and I never really fully got back to my former strength after that had healed, I’d just ended up becoming a slave to my creations, which by all accounts I was pretty fine with. I do want to start training again though as during the past few years I’ve just become a fat piece of shit, a lot of days I feel like a washed up 80’s rock icon without the millions of pounds to back me up. We’ll get there.
Other than that, hiking with my girlfriend and enjoying nice country pubs to unwind at is the cornerstone to decompressing from all the hard work I’m doing musically.
5. Favorite cartoons?
All the classic adult comedies;
The Simpsons (Golden age) King Of The Hill, South Park. More recent shows like Smiling Friends have got their hooks in me, anything with dry humour and a mad world is a great time in my book.
A really great little series on YouTube by one of the creators of Smiling Friends is Crocodile & Cube: In The Studio.
It’s a real tongue in cheek take on two completely different types of musicians working on something, one is technically a knowledgeable, analytical and calm, and the other is very emotionally driven and unskilled, but a sweet panda likeable character. I’d recommend any musican to check out that series, you’re bound to relate to being one of these characters, or maybe even both.
Can’t stand Rick & Morty though, it’s fïrst season was quite good at the time but god did that series go off the boil quick.
Bojack Horseman is another one I really dislike, I used to see this girl who was obsessed with it as an allegory to how people act in real life, all I thought when I watched it was I couldn’t stand to watch any of these characters and thier myopic, self indulgent, frankly trite situations. She’d go on and on about how genius the story writing was and I would just have none of it. It’s for the type of people that romanticise problems rather than actually try to do anything about them.
My go-to show when I’ve got flu or I’m feeling rundown is the 90’s Moomin cartoon. There’s something just so magical about that series. The stuff the kids in that show get up to was like what we did up in the peaks when we were kids. Stuff like finding a kite in a tall tree and figuring a way of getting it down and spending the day working together to achieve that goal, or finding hidden meadows in the woods to camp out in.
It has such a warm innocent feeling.
One of my earliest memories actually was seeing a show with a duck that was in a similar art style to the moomin show, I couldn’t have been older than two years old, I remember seeing this show at something like 5:00 in the morning. For years I thought I must have imagined it or it was just a dream, until one day I was watching a video by YouTuber Hazel (good channel for fans of vintage or classic anime) and she covered a list of shows that were similar to the thing she was covering and BOOM, there it was in a digression in her speaking; Alfred J. Kwak.
I started my research on this show and it would appear that I remembered much more of it than I initially realised. It had a ton of really serious themes for a kids show, like discussing issues like politics, race, capitalism, I’m pretty sure there was a transgender supporting character too. Even had an arc where the shows antagonist literally forms a political party that is pound for pound the Nazi’s, I laughed at how ambitious this show’s storytelling was.
I’m not really one to subscribe to left or right wing political ideologies, I just think people need to approach each other with respect and dignity rather than allow themselves to be swept up in a dervish of nonsense rhetoric. Common sense is key.
I often wonder if it imprinted on me on how I tell my stories through my music.
Thanks for your time in this interview, I hope we get to know a little more about your project and who you are! If there’s anything else you’d like to add or promote you may do so below:
Thank you for hosting this interview, and thanks to anyone who has supported my works.
Some people might skip to the end and dismiss this mountain of text as being written by AI, but rest assured this whole thing is just leaked from the soup that my brain has become. Just because we’re in a world dominated by computers doesn’t mean that we need to accept them. Use AI for taxes and boring shit so you’ve got more time to use your short life to do good things.
Come and see Vassal playing live this year at a town near you! And watch this space for news on all my projects!
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