It was an absolute pleasure to talk with Adam Matlock, who I find to be endlessly engaging. He is one of the most dynamic and fascinating musicians I’ve ever communicated with. As you will see and hear, he contains multitudes.
CR:
So, I would like to start by asking where you come from musically. How did your relationship with music start? What were your earliest influences and musical memories?
AM:
Very interesting to hear about your background - I'm certain we must know some people in common, as one of my main musical hats outside of DS is free improvisation. I was never formally schooled in trad/straight-ahead jazz but for about as long as I've been performing, I've been improvising. That part of my life has resulted in some unique and surreal experiences, including getting a few opportunities to make music with some of my heroes.
My earliest musical experiences were taking classical piano lessons from a young age (4 or 5, I think), and then singing Black American spirituals with my family in a choir organized by my mother. She had done that with her family in Ohio in her youth, and she started doing that again in my youth, when we lived in Western Massachusetts.
I'll be honest that a lot of those early memories, while obviously very formative and important in my musical development, were not fully appreciated by me at the time. Music was a thing I did because I had a gift for it, but I was one of those people who didn't really learn how to put the work in musically until adulthood for that reason. I continued classical piano until 13-14 but the thought of doing that as a career, in my teenage brain, was pretty unappealing. (Knowing some people who have done the full classical track as instrumentalists now, I feel somewhat vindicated!, but that's a whole other thing).
It wasn't until hearing David Bowie, in particular the Ziggy Stardust album, which had quite a bit of piano on it, that I started to understand there were other possibilities. At that point I played in a few rock bands in high school, taught myself to play basic chords by ear (which was not something that had been covered in my earlier education), and then started getting more into keyboard/synth oriented music after hearing symphonic black metal, electric jazz, and progressive rock, all of which were motivating and sparked more curiosity to explore.
CR:
I'm interested in your improvisational journey. How did you start down that path? What does improvisation and free jazz mean to you? Feel free to be as abstract as you like with that last question, precise definitions are not what I'm really looking for, I'm more interested in your intentions and what you're trying to do when you are improvising, where your head is, that sort of thing.
AM:
Probably my first experience with free jazz was listening with fascination to "The Creator Has a Master Plan" by Pharoah Sanders (featuring Leon Thomas). My mother gave me a copy of that record, which in hindsight is a pretty serious surprise - but I think it speak's to that album's overall lushness, even when the timbres are heavier, that it was something she thought of fondly. I probably didn't listen to anything else like that for another 10 years or so, coming around to free jazz when I was starting to explore composition myself. I found that as much as I liked the developments of classical music in the 20th/21st century, that more often it was stuff that was filed under jazz, whether it was freely improvised or more intricately arranged/composed, that hit me emotionally while also scratching that itch for timbral exploration.
I always thought of myself as a player as an "improviser" more than a "free jazz" player, simply because I never really had training or a great grasp of the theory or technique of straightahead jazz. That's something I've started working on in the last 5 or so years, with highly uneven results, but I found the out stuff before I found the in stuff, so to speak. I do recognize that, as pointed out by folks like Han-Earl Park, the distinction between 'free jazz' and 'free improvisation' can be a kind of colonial one, and that that's a complicated subject I certainly don't have the answer to on hand. But that was my thinking for a long time.
I do buy the "spontaneous composition" idea of improvisation, though, and I think that a lot of the practice, of improvising either solo or with a group, is a bit of an alchemical quest of self-knowledge, in some way. You're trying to perceive and shape your own expression as it is happening, and of course have your technical understanding of your instrument refined enough to execute that with absolute fluidity. In these ways the composition can be expressed as clearly as possible, with variables based on your mood, the room, the audience if there is one, etc. Of course, it can just be a fun exercise, but you can really go deep with it if you want to. I will say that it took me 5-6 years of improvising to feel comfortable enough to do a solo set in front of others.
CR:
Pharaoh Sanders means a lot to me, not just his solo work but the albums he cut with John and Alice Coltrane. I was pretty jaded towards institutionalized spirituality, and I still have a deep loathing of dogmatic religion, but those three musicians helped liberate me from all that baggage. To me, jazz often spills into holy music, not the pie in the sky kind of stuff either, but rather the holy that incorporates everything, including the existential dread under it all.
I never learned standards or how to read music. I played strange instruments, a blend of end blown flutes and Chinese free reeds, some keyboards, and some guitar. I was taught to improvise by jazz musicians and I played within that context for a few years, but I was never a trained jazz musician, I was an improvisor, as you talk about. I started on the outside and moved on to other endeavors, noise and electronic music melded with my acoustic stuff, so I get what you are talking about. Everything I do is improvisational and it is all influenced by jazz; at the height of my experience in the jazz scene I certainly understood the difference.
I never played in a rock band, but rock and prog and post rock, blues and folk, they are all heavy influences on me. Some classical as well, but generally a step removed.
Could you talk a bit more about influences on your musical sensibilities? I realize these must be evolving through your life. What are some of them that have had the most impact on your development?
AM:
Yes - I know there are some folks in the jazz world who have critiqued the tag of "spiritual jazz" or "cosmic jazz" as cheap marketing terms, but in my understanding its because that current runs through a lot of the music in the tradition, especially in the 60s and 70s. But yes - when as an adult, I discovered the work of Alice Coltrane and then worked backward into later Coltrane and into some of Pharoah's early solo work, I found music that spoke to liberation on not just the physical level, and it has been extremely influential on me. A significant amount of my work has been directly inspired by Alice Coltrane in particular, but it was definitely that first seed planted with "Creator" that helped me to appreciate this stuff later.
When I think of influences, it's not just music that I liked or music that challenged me, it's the music that directly inspired me to make music myself, at a time before that was something that I did regularly - although of course there is some overlap. Probably it was music from Japanese role playing games, especially the work of Yasunori Mitsuda, Yoko Shimomura and Nobuo Uematsu, that first got stuck in my head so deeply that it started turning into new things as it played, and this was before I had a regular practice of composing, recording, or otherwise creating music. I was fortunate enough to track down some sheet music books from these franchises, and this is what helped save my musical abilities from complete atrophy while adolescence was happening. I realize that at some times more than others, this is an influence I wear pretty directly on my sleeve as a composer, and I've made my peace with that.
Next, it was stuff that spoke to me as being possible - the music that, while I listened to it, I had some image in my head of how it could have been created. This meant a lot of music with piano and keyboards in the forefront, which led me from some of the more glam-leaning classic rock into progressive rock (which itself informed a lot of the video game harmony from that era of game soundtracks), and into symphonic black metal. This of course led me to dungeon synth as well as other ambient side projects, all of which inspired me as someone who couldn't imagine how to do that style of vox, or who never really had success at guitar despite a decent effort at one point. I figured I was stuck with keyboards, so I might as well explore the music that wasn't ashamed to have them. Dungeon synth naturally scratched that itch. Of course in 2004-5 the term dungeon synth didn't even exist, and a lot of other black metal adjacent ambient projects felt somehow different from what Mortiis was doing, but I was definitely inspired by the few tracks from Crypt of the Wizard I was able to find online. This incubated for over a decade until I discovered the DS revival in 2015 - but it stuck with me that it was low fi, immediate, not super virtuosic sounding but full of emotion. I discovered the music of Erang sometime in mid 2015, and I have a journal entry from October of that year talking about how that project had led to me seriously considering starting a Dungeon Synth project - and within two months I had recorded my first album as Nahadoth.
Aside from Alice Coltrane and the various JRPG composers, I've long been inspired as a songwriter and performer by Peter Hammill, who fronted a band called Van Der Graaf Generator which famously avoided having guitar for years, instead featuring organ and saxophone. Hammill has an ongoing, extensive solo career, which continues to be fascinating - from the bedroom philosophical bombast of his early work to what is probably the most fascinating series of 'middle aged' songwriter albums I've heard, to his more mellow/ambient later works. I also had a huge affinity to the band/collective Ulver, with Perdition City and the 'Silence' EPs in particular resonating with me in a way that made creating music feel more possible.
Right now I'm as inspired by my peers in the DS scene as anyone else. As such a personal artform, people with even the same equipment can bring a different sensibility to the table, and there are a handful of artists - Phantom Spire and related projects, the work of Evergreen of Fogweaver and many other projects, Adam Kalmbach who created several projects that reshaped my brain (like Abandoned Places, Erdstall), Justin of Ranseur and Xuthal of the Dusk, to name a few - that have directly shaped my musical explorations since starting to work in this style.
CR:
I love talking to other musicians- there are so many people you just mentioned that I don't know yet, which is fantastic. I was lucky enough to see Alice Coltrane play, her last concert I believe, and it was a transcendent experience. I'm not going to sully it with anymore words.
The dungeon synth community, from what I know if it, is full of people creating for the joy of it. You speak well to that. I find its genuine nature to be really inspiring. People are also so very supportive of each other, which I must admit is refreshing.
Could you tell me about influences other than music that inspire you? What fuels the emotions you put into your work?
AM:
I took the assignment - fantasy inspired low-fi keyboard music, which was then my exclusive understanding of what DS was - quite literally. So the title of Nahadoth, which was my first and is in some ways my primary project, was taken directly from a character from N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy. Of course I understand the prevalence of Tolkien in DS, but it wasn't until reading this set of books, authored by a Black woman, that the genre of high fantasy really resonated with me for the first time. From that point, and receiving those books the way I did, I was able to go back to Tolkien, especially to works like the Silmarillion, and my general attitude toward that particular style of fantasy storytelling really changed. I think there was a point where the genre fiction was weird enough that the barriers between science fiction and fantasy were pretty blurry for awhile, and that sort of thing really works for me.
A large majority of my projects are attempts at musical storytelling in some way. Although, rather than being an attempt to portray the story, it's just my musical reaction to it, which I can only hope does the narratives justice. In some cases I have whole projects that are exclusively dedicated to one fictional world of someone else's creation - like Pendragon (Arthurian legend), Dust Seeker (Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass), or specific albums of Nahadoth inspired by Ursula K. Leguin (album - Dispossession) or Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing (album The Green, Regenerating). A majority of the projects are focused on original storytelling, either through accompanying text on the album release on Bandcamp, or in a PDF accompanying the album download, or just via the song titles. Narrative and so-called functional music, like that of films and video games, was an influence early on when I was first attempting to write songs and perform at open mics. So it's always interested me how music can either accompany narrative or set a scene simply by playing with genre cues. I definitely didn't have that language for it at the time, but I was aware of it when I heard it, and the curiosity about that really drove me when I returned to taking playing and performing seriously about midway through college. A great majority of my compositions even before getting into dungeon synth had some narrative element, sometimes in operatic form, others with spoken or other narrative elements.
Part of that involved picking up the accordion, which happened in the context of joining a Klezmer band for credit. At this point the accordion became thrust into my life, and I found that for a long time I enjoyed playing that instrument much more than I liked playing the piano or keyboards. I was inspired by pretty much everything I heard on the accordion, with Klezmer being a longtime favorite - not only the tunes, but the approach to realizing the tunes, which as with any style can go super deep if you want to. I also early on heard Norwegian accordionist Frode Haltli in the large ensemble of composer/saxophonist Trygve Seim, which helped me to see more possibilities of the accordion in jazz or improvised musics. But I find a lot of affinity to folk or traditional music, and while it's still a struggle, I enjoy the process of trying to really understand what makes various styles distinct, even if I don't always execute them that way as a performer.
CR:
Very nice. I have listened to a lot of English folk rock and folk, and taken some deep dives into Scandanavian folk as well. When I am playing winds it might be a detectable influence, but it is in everything I do, even if it can't be discerned. Same thing with my jazz influences.
Anyhow, accordions and related instruments are intensely pleasing to me. My main wind instrument is the ba wu, which is basically a free reed of copper in the mouthpiece of a bamboo flute. I also messed around with a sheng back when I played with the free jazz group, which is a collection of free reeds in bamboo fed by a wind chamber. And I love harmonicas and pipe organs. I have not played a squeezebox, though I had a fling with a pump organ long ago, but I have a soft spot for their sounds and I am not surprised you fell for the instrument.
Thanks so much for the rundown of the literary influences and the insights to what you are thinking of when creating your compositions. I have always been a mythology/fantasy/scifi geek and finding dungeon synth and the like was a delight.
When you compose dungeon synth, what is your process? How much is improvised? What tools and gear do you use?
AM:
I would say that for a majority of my projects, improvisation factors pretty heavily into the composition process. With DS, so much of the music is dependent on the sound design, so a lot of it is randomly flipping through or manipulating patches to find something that sparks an idea. In a small handful of cases I've written out melodies or chord progressions, and for projects with more layers or arrangement intricacy, I've sung lots of ideas into a recorder in order to figure out how to realize them later.
The first Nahadoth recording was created with a cheap Yamaha keyboard (borrowed from a school I was teaching at) and a 4-track recorder. The immediacy of creation is a big part of what has kept me doing this music for so long, especially after a long period of significantly overcooking a lot of compositional ideas to the point where they were no longer appealing - so the idea of recording an album in a week or less was at one point totally unthinkable. But with DS I saw both the advantages and the appeal of working that way, even when sometimes I haven't managed to execute something the way I originally planned. I like using hardware keyboards as a keyboard player, and I like trying to use the limitations of each keyboard to help shape a project, and there was a point where each project used a distinct combination of equipment in order to help me to distinguish the process of one project to another, so I have also sometimes used DAWs for recording, or software instruments as a way to help realize the musical identity of each project.
CR:
The immediacy of creation is a lovely way to put it. I have been focusing on just playing my synth for the last year or so and I am only now bringing guitar back into it. The limitations are more liberating than anything, at least according to my experience.
Can you talk about what Pendragon means to you? I have always loved Arthurian mythology. Why did you choose those three characters to focus on? They are all tragic and complicated. Did you intend to come back or are you leaving this trilogy of releases as a finished product? I think you caught something real with these, they are moving and engaging.
Have you ever read 'The Warlord Chronicles' by Bernard Cornwell? Or Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Buried Giant'? These were the last Arthurian works it I read, outside of random forays into medieval history. Obviously you are a fan of the Excalibur film.
AM:
The origins of my Arthurian interest are fairly mundane - I spent all of my allowance in one afternoon at the "Knights of the Round" arcade cabinet, playing as Lancelot, and while I can't speak to the accuracy of how that game portrayed the legends, it definitely piqued my curiosity. I had the perception that there wasn't much out there designed to engage young audiences with tellings of the Arthurian legends (which, as it turns out, was false), but I was definitely not finding much when I was most actively looking for it. But I kept the flame alive, and eventually found Malory and the anonymous poems, although even those I didn't end up reading until well into adulthood, when I had a little more patience for alliterative verse. It was probably mostly nostalgia that kept that flame alive for so long, and occasional films and TV references to Arthurian legend. I seem to remember that around the time I released Uther, there was another Arthur film coming to theaters that I'm sure was more Hollywood than those stories deserve.
As much as I love the themes and characters within, I'm also interested in that meta-context. In doing some research (besides rewatching Excalibur) for the first album, I discovered how, like so many good things, the Arthurian legends and related imagery have been adopted by English far-right nationalists - who of course valorize all of the knights (except Lancelot because he was French) as symbols of some ideal of national strength. That seems to be a misread to me, but also more importantly is a flattening of the complexity of those characters. If you lionize Arthur's strength without the pride that led to his undoing, you seem doomed to make the same mistakes. So in some way, trying to deal with these characters as human figures who make choices was a reaction to that. I hope to return to this project and this mythology in the near future.
I did, not two weeks ago, finish The Buried Giant. I have some gripes about Ishiguro's dialogue sometimes, but his descriptive voice is so immersive, and I found myself quite submerged in that world - but it did take me about two months to get through that relatively short book. I think that's the only Arthurian novel I've read - other than that, just the classic poetry.
CR:
Can you talk about your Mystal Tree project? I have to tell you, I think it is a great example of your work, both albums are intensely creative narratives that are delightful. You give thanks to a bunch of Japanese composers and I definitely feel those vibes, parts of it reminds me a little of Moondog (or vice versa, I was playing Moondog for my daughter recently and it made me think of the second Mystal Tree album). Will we see more of this story? Where did it come from in you?
I am also quite smitten with 'Forest Floor Diptych'. How did this split come about and how did you and Sunken Grove navigate your collaboration? I appreciate the nature reverence in your work.
Also, I see and share your love of fungi. 'Assorted Mushrooms of New England' is a joy that strikes close to home. Could you talk about your relationship to mycology a bit?
AM:
I think it really was a direct response to both the music and the narrative and aesthetic of a lot of early Miyazaki - of course the composer Joe Hisaishi was one of the people that sort of kept me playing during my period of waning musical interest. The story within Mystal Tree feels to me like Miyazaki fanfiction, which I am happy to acknowledge, but I think also filtered through some of the imagery I've encountered in a lot of different fantasy fiction. As for the music, besides the composers listed, I was specifically trying to do something that was consciously different than what I was doing with Nahadoth, which at the time was my only project. So that meant something brighter, more energetic, more organized and intricate in a lot of ways. A lot of it was just fully playing with VSTs and seeing what came out, and the influences sort of solidified around the possibilities that were emerging. That spontaneity was pretty rewarding, as it has been with so many first recordings of a project. The follow up took considerably longer, of course.
I approached Sunken Grove about it - I had reached out to the artist to express my appreciation for his work, and we both obviously enjoy a lot of similar themes and keyboard tones. So doing a split seemed like a natural choice. We didn't really discuss similar themes except I suppose there was some implicit understanding that it would lean towards 'forest synth' as a way to find aesthetic focus. I was especially pleased we could collaborate on the artwork as well, although there was a third visual prompt that SG sent me that I couldn't find a good response to. Maybe for a future split?
So that definitely ties in to the previous question. I think my overall attitude toward nature has always been reverent, contemplative, although that has deepened in the last 5 years ever since starting to get into mycology. After a lot of passive interest bubbled up since college, I had the opportunity to go bolete hunting with an experienced amateur mushroom hunter, which was an experience that made obsolete a number of things I had previously taken for granted about mushrooms. I soon joined a local mycology club and started going on forays. I would not consider myself an expert by any means but there are some edible and non-edible species I would feel quite confident in identifying, and in spring of 2020 I began cultivating mushrooms outdoors on woodchips, which has been a weird and rewarding experience. This also lead me into a broader interest in forests and more broad categories of ecosystem, which has led me into some home permaculture related avenues and advocacy as well. I feel it will be pretty necessary for humans to get in touch with how their food is made and grown in our lifetimes, both for climate mitigation as well as food security, so it's an increasingly less passive interest for me.
CR:
Thank you for these answers to my questions. I am intrigued by mycology and feel drawn to it for so many reasons (which echo those you mention). You are farther along the path.
Another work of yours in the nature vein is 'Black Epheria'. It is gorgeous and to my ears, sacred music. Can you talk about what that project means to you?
AM:
While I would not say that I started working on Black Epheria with the intent of it being spiritually or magically aligned, it definitely became that to me as the process went on. The most significant part of it was that there was a continuous process that I repeated more or less every 6 weeks throughout the course of a year - spending some time getting to know a nearby patch of forest that was near where I had recently moved, and making some observations that would inform the music, then recording live with two keyboards and sometimes some field recordings through an amplifier in my garage - just going until I was done, which would sometimes take 2 hours, sometimes it was sessions spread over a week. Sometimes the pressure of trying to keep to a schedule that more or less followed the pagan Wheel of the Year would result in some rushed material but it was all honest, and frequently pushed me in ways that I wasn't expecting. Editing was a significant part of that project, especially as it went on. Just taking these hours of recordings, figuring out what was best among them and trying to turn them into more of an EP or album-length presentation was a fun challenge for sure.
CR:
That is a fascinating process. There is something added, I think, when we make a ritual of creation. Thanks for sharing the background of Black Epheria.
Besides Black Epheria, I am also drawn to Conqueror's Mourn. I know it is an odd connection, but the overall project makes me think of Sam Jones, a song about a bone collector perusing battlefields, by Richard Thompson. This came to mind while listening to Four Witnesses. Given the ongoing violence in the world, the bleak view of war and battles and death in this project sings true. Can you speak to your narrative intentions with these works? How did you decide that No more For The Battletrance was the last album in this cycle? I thank you for engaging the darkness and creating such engaging art.
AM:
A lot of the choices RE the arc and scope of a project are fairly intuitive, or have as much to do with technical/logistical reasons as they do creative ones. Conqueror's Mourn was always distinct from other projects by the use of live piano and homemade samples, and while that process produced some work I'm incredibly proud of (and some that honestly baffles me a little), it seemed like that way of working was leading to diminishing returns.
I've spoken elsewhere that CM is largely the way that it is as a result of depression, and the first demo "Battle Weary" came together in a span of 48 hours in the midst of a particularly bad patch of it. I very much appreciate the high barbarian fantasy imagery of projects like Murgrind and Barak Tor, and of course many of the great epic projects nod to mythology and historical epics as much as they do contemporary fantasy. When I read the Odyssey in high school, I had a teacher who was very good at connecting some of the more timeless themes into their most contemporary form, and we looked a lot at how Odysseus basically has all the traits of PTSD from spending decades at war and in supernatural peril. It seemed to me that surely, though it's not glamorous to talk about, some of the best contemporary fantasy heroes might also be similarly scarred. The narrative grew very naturally from there, at how probably everyone adjacent to that violence, whether participants or witnesses, would be similarly scarred, as much as some would be inspired to take up the ways of the warrior themselves. Ultimately, while depression is still an issue for me, it became something that I grew a little more successful at managing, and in some sense ending the project with "Battletrance" was a symbolic act to free myself from the emotional/psychological tethers that had informed the project throughout its existence.
CR:
I appreciate that CM addresses the post traumatic stress that people and characters would be struggling with in these situations. I also think it is a really great way to end a project, and I think that symbolic acts can be powerful.
Can you talk about Nahadoth and how that project has evolved? Where do you see it going in the near future? I've enjoyed the snippets of your live work that I've recently seen you post.
AM:
Nahadoth will forever be the vanguard project in terms of my creative endeavors. On some reflection a few years ago it seemed as though a majority of my other projects, if they had distinctions in terms of the sound palette or composition, had origins traceable to a Nahadoth release where I first felt comfortable trying the idea. Conqueror's Mourn for example, would not have existed without the piano explorations I did on Nahadoth's Excavernous Tales split (with Sreng) even if the latter album was released later. The project definitely casts a wide net in terms of what is permissible within the range of DS, and I'm sure it frequently occupies a border with other genres. But I think the most important thing is that Nahadoth will be the project that for me takes the least work to get into the headspace for, perhaps since its goals are not as clear as say the Arthurian project Pendragon or the vampyric Erszebet, and that in a way makes it quite freeing.
CR:
Can you tell me about your jazz career? I enjoy seeing your touring pictures. Improvising is all I really know of music. I miss doing it with other people- I had to relearn my approach when I started doing solo projects, but it is a far cry from improvising live with others. I did get to do that for four or five years with some regularity and I remember that energy. I enjoy seeing the pictures you post of your live playing and your travel photos are a lot of fun as well.
Adam performing as a member of Anthony Braxton Trio starts at 38:15
AM:
I worry that the term 'jazz career' might slightly over-represent my activities in that department. I have the incredible fortune of having doubled down on the weird stuff as an accordionist and a vocalist, and what that means is that I occasionally get the opportunity to do that on some big gigs with some of my musical heroes at festivals in Europe. These cracks of free jazz, new composition, noise and electronics that I often find myself between are all somehow contained within the umbrella of improvised music, which is actually pretty exciting. You even see arty metal folks in these circles, like Attila Cihar and some of the Sunn folks. It's great that there's space for so much variety within this music, and that's the reason I feel comfortable exploring within that realm.
I certainly don't get these calls to play standards, that's for sure. But I'm always honored to get a call if someone wants an accordion to sound like an existential crisis, or something like insect beatboxing sounds really close to a microphone.
CR:
Adam, I also saw your post about Hypostatic Soundblast Awakening, which I really wish I was close enough to come see. Maybe we could close out by talking about anything else you are willing to share regarding your jazz wanderings and talking about your work with Michael Larocca.
AM:
Hypostatic Soundblast Awakening is a special project to me - it's one of a few very concerted efforts to break down some of the walls that I put up for myself early on in my musical endeavors, wherein I really wanted to keep different projects and identities (and to a lesser sense genre) compartmentalized. It didn't help that many of the improvisers I know didn't really have the patience for the tonality or repetition of DS - and that most DS fans didn't really have context to understand the 'point' of free improvisation. The first demo was recorded in two different sessions, trying to get the kind of energy-music freakout vibe using the old Yamaha keyboards, and just seeing if the results felt anywhere as good on playback as it did while recording. While working on the track that ended up becoming "It is necessary to rise in this flesh..." I experimented with recording some drum loops that were a little more sparse - things with pulse but not specifically time or meter, to make it sound more like the organic sound of a live drummer - and from that moment I knew I had to bring on a percussionist for the next album. I have played duo and in larger groups a handful of times with Michael Larocca before - they're a phenomenal drummer who is part of a landscape of young musicians that are really doing some incredible work around Connecticut and New England - so I reached out for this project. I'm incredibly proud of what we recorded for the "Emanation of Insight" record. But i'm also happy to report that both the times we've done this project live, we've been able to push the template of what we recorded, evolving the sound in some ways I'm really intrigued by. So there's more to come, for sure.
CR:
To close this out, could I ask you about artists you would recommend to people interested in your work? Maybe people who inspire you or you feel deserve a bit more recognition?
AM:
I would love to give some recognition to the project Nebulosa - not super active right now, but one of the original participants in the very first Northeast Dungeon Siege, which happened in a basement. This project, the work of Nathanial Casaregola, is pure American folk horror, using bowed psaltery alongside synths for this totally unearthly texture that is not often rivaled in DS.
Ranseur, who predates me in DS by at least 4 years, and the related projects Gargoyle Collector and Xuthal of the Dusk, are the work of Justin Mank, who works utter feats of trance and hypnotism with a single keyboard and unwavering focus.
Brutus Greenshield, one of the first projects to outright embrace a jazz influence in their harmony and arranging, and rare in being a duo project - they also use field recordings and film samples to create an utterly unique atmosphere. Brutus Greenshield Bandcamp
And a special thanks and hails to three artists who have since passed - Maria Theresa Rice of Morrowdim, Lord Jake Dunwoody of Effluvium, and Geo Romero of Träd and Vintr. I was lucky enough to participate in the scene with all three of them, to learn from their music, and to really feel a genuine sense of loss and sorrow from their passing. And in all cases I was lucky enough to be able to tell them how much I enjoyed their music before they passed. I feel lucky that all three artists have found labels and supporters willing to keep their music alive since their passing.
You should be listening to more of Adam’s work. We barely scratched the surface of his work, which is not an exaggeration. His versatility astounds me. Also, I am intensely grateful that he spent so much time writing back and forth with me. Don’t be surprised if I reach out to ask him questions about his other projects some day, I find him to be inspiring and fascinating.
Here are some places to continue your own exploration of his work:
https://anhistoricmusic.bandcamp.com/album/tell-me-what-im-like-out-there
https://www.instagram.com/anhistoricmusic/
Check out his new opera about the Tulsa Race Massacre, cowritten by Brian Slattery.
https://www.newhavenarts.org/arts-paper/articles/a-new-opera-takes-on-the-tulsa-race-massacre
I’m hoping to post some more work here sooner than later. I’ve got a few interviews in process and some others starting up~ we’ll see what comes of those! I’ll also have some announcements regarding new releases of my own.
If you ever have questions or ideas, feel free to reach out to me using the following email: continuousrevel@gmail.com
If you like what you see here, you can support my by buying music via
https://continuousrevelations.bandcamp.com
Or make direct donations/tips via buymeacoffee.com/continuous
Unfortunately, the website incurs some costs. Donations go towards that and funding the creation of music (and vice versa).
Also, letting people know about the website or interviews you enjoy is more than helpful. Share with abandon!
Be good to yourself and to the world.
Best,
Continuous Revelations