Eerder dit jaar wisten de Amerikanen van Cormorant mij zeer aangenaam te verassen met hun debuut album 'Metazoa'. Deze band laat zich niet beperken door allerlei (ongeschreven) regels en komt op hun debuut met een zeer eigenwijze combinatie van uiteenlopende muziekstijlen, metal extreme metal als hoofdingrediënt. Nou ben ik over het algemeen niet snel onder de indruk van bands die niet snel in een hokje te plaatsen zijn en ga ik meestal voor rechttoe rechtaan metal, maar als een band verschillende muziekstijlen zo overtuigend kan combineren en met een volstrekt eigen geluid komt, kan ook ik de kwaliteiten van Cormorant niet laten voor wat het is. Deze maand proberen we de heren even in het zonnetje te zetten, middels een interview met zanger/bassist Arthur von Nagel, die ons voorziet van de nodige info over de band en het album.
First of all; congratulations with your fantastic debut album ‘Metazoa’! But before we get more into that, could you please introduce the band and tell us a bit about your background? After all, Cormorant is a quite new band… Thank you for the kind words about ‘Metazoa’. Cormorant formed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007 as a trio, with Brennan Kunkel on drums, Nick Cohon on guitars, and myself on vocals and bass. Within a year, we had self-recorded a live rehearsal room demo and released our EP ‘The Last Tree’. ‘The Last Tree’ was recorded by Matthew Wilenchik at Studio D in Sausalito, California, where Faith No More tracked ‘The Real Thing’ and Soundgarden recorded ‘Badmotorfinger’. This EP showed us at our most raw, with a sound leaning toward thrashy melodic death metal. At this stage we were still learning our craft and tracking and mixing on a tight three-day schedule. In retrospect I would have liked to improve upon my vocals, which I later did with ‘Metazoa’. Apart from the uncommon presence of fretless bass and the doomy nine-minute closer ‘Ballad of the Beast’ (complete with beautiful operatic vocals courtesy of Deborah Spake, and Brennan’s haunting outro piano line), we hadn’t fully embraced our progressive tendencies.
We started seeking out a second guitarist to compliment Nick’s earthy style and to help further develop the harmonies and textures hinted at on ‘Ballad of the Beast’. We met guitarist/vocalist Matt Solis while passing out demos at an Enslaved gig. In his audition, everything just “clicked”. He had learned almost all the material on our EP, and not only played the songs skilfully, but composed extra harmonies and flourishes to create more depth. This was the guy. So we set to work composing a full-length album that would filter all our disparate influences into an original and cohesive result. ‘Metazoa’ was tracked and mixed over the course of ten days at Sharkbite Studios in Oakland, with legendary producer Billy Anderson (Neurosis, Mr. Bungle, Melvins, Sleep, Primordial) at the helm. We released ‘Metazoa’ independently on the autumnal equinox, September 22nd, 2009. Sales and critical reception far surpassed our expectations, and we quickly began writing a follow-up. We hope to record this next full-length in late 2010.
The first point striking about ‘Metazoa’ is the highly professional impression makes a on the outside. The digipack show eye for quality, but also lots of faith in the product, seeing that the band is still unsigned. Looking at the musical effort the album shows, I’m wondering if releasing the album at your own strength was a conscious decision! Because I can’t imagine that no labels showed interest in the band… I’m very glad you enjoy our album design. A brilliant artist named Julie Dillon worked very closely with us to create the ‘Metazoa’ cover, and we couldn’t be happier with the results. We were offered several record contracts to release ‘Metazoa’. The attention was flattering but we had to politely decline the labels, and I’m glad we did. We take great pride in managing our own business affairs and in remaining independent. Barring the obvious lack of an advertising budget, I see no reason for most small metal bands to sign a record contract anymore, especially with the industry in shambles. Recording and mixing are only becoming easier and less expensive, printing costs are negligible when split across four people, and promotion and distribution networks are free thanks to the web. Beyond the irrational public validation provided by a label’s branding, why sign away your rights as musicians when you have direct access to your fans already? Instead of submitting to a label’s rules, we licensed out ‘Metazoa’ to Relapse Records and The End Records to distribute on their websites non-exclusively, with iTunes handling digital downloads. But the bulk of our sales come from fans buying directly from us at our personal webstore. Music lovers are clever in the Internet age. They understand that signed artists are only receiving 10% to 15% of wholesale for albums (and that’s only after recoupment!). When presented with the opportunity to very directly support an independent band, and comfortable in the knowledge that every penny is going towards the musicians, I think most people are more likely to actually buy physical music. Especially when the band puts the effort into creating attractive packaging.
Let’s talk about the band’s musical path; it’s impossible to put a label on the music (which is a good thing if you ask me) and you use many different influences from progressive rock to extreme black metal and folk music obviously! But you also use even influences from jazz for example! One thing that cannot be denied is the avant-garde atmosphere that the music summons; what can you tell us about the musical direction? I understand why someone would think so, but I don’t consider our music particularly avant-garde. Metal bands like Portal, Khanate, Ved Buens Ende, Gorguts, and Deathspell Omega delve into truly exotic realms of pummelling dissonance that I view as significantly more unpalatable to mainstream sensibilities than our material. Our music, at least as it is presented on our album ‘Metazoa’, is fiercely melodic. If our sound strikes some as alien, it’s not my intention. I can’t speak for my band mates, but my original goals were twofold: to distil the music I grew up listening to through the filter of extreme metal, and to tell stories through music. What I heard as a child was mostly folk, classic rock, classical, jazz, and French traditionals. I didn’t listen to any metal until my mid-teens. The musical direction is whatever we feel like writing at the time. Who knows, there might be an ambient, neo-folk, or old-time country album in the future. I don’t think any of us care about how we’re identified, or about even necessarily being a metal band at all.
Some people refer to your music as “Pagan Metal”. I personally think that is one of the most vague ways to describe a band’s music. How would you describe Cormorant’s music? Interesting, that’s the first I’ve heard of anyone referring to our music as “pagan metal,” and I agree with you that I have no idea what the genre name actually means. If the title refers to lyrical content, it wouldn’t make any sense to me because we’ve written no songs at all about Vikings, Nordic religion, fjords or cultural pride. On the contrary, I tend to compose lyrics about the histories and cultures of other countries none of which have anything to do with Scandinavian mythology. When I do write about America (a slave uprising in ‘Blood On The Cornfields’, immigration in ‘The Crossing’ or the deception of Midwest farmers in ‘Rain Follows The Plow’) it’s in the form of social criticism, very much in the punk spirit of protest. This couldn’t be further from the nostalgic, quasi-nationalistic tone employed by some so-called “pagan metal” groups. The only reason I can imagine for the pagan metal tag would be that we performed at Paganfest alongside the likes of Primordial, Moonsorrow, Korpiklaani and Blackguard.
Musically, we certainly do have some strong folk elements, but we’re also referencing black metal, death metal, prog, classic rock, jazz, doom, old-school traditional metal, post-rock… As you stated, we have no overriding genre. An excited fan came up to me after our recent gig with Suidakra and told me he felt we sounded like “Agalloch covering Rush”, which made me smile, even if it’s not totally accurate. I can see where he’s coming from though: we do utilize a lot of pastoral, psychedelic, atmospheric, and acoustic passages, but we’re just as comfortable exploding into crushing early 80s heavy metal anthems. We justify these mood shifts with a song-writing style very much built around effective storytelling. We try to compose the music in a very cinematic, almost visual way, with swells of different emotions to communicate a story with sound. Then I marry the lyrics very closely to the music.
Since we’re having fun inventing nonsense genres, how about “Hippie Metal”? Let’s see…. we’re from San Francisco, a lot of our music stems from improvisational jams, many of our riffs would comfortably find a home on an old prog rock album, almost all of us work in the green sector for our day jobs, and our politics are certainly on the socially liberal end of the spectrum. Voila: Hippie Metal. You see how all these made-up labels like “Viking Metal” and “Alternative Metal” can grow ridiculous, though in my mind nothing could ever top Dissection’s hilariously self-assigned “Anti-Cosmic Metal of Death”. A lot of our online fans make fun of attempts to classify us into genre categories, and thus have jokingly dubbed us “Tiberian Ass-Bastard Folk”. Don’t ask me to explain it, because I haven’t a clue.
Regardless of how one might label the music, because of the album’s complicated nature and also its long playing time I think that there will be a lot of people that will, unfortunately, not take the time to really get into the album. The fact that music is becoming more of a product and loosing its sense as art is of course no secret…Your opinion please! I can’t worry about casual listeners not “getting it”. Our job is to remain true to ourselves and compose the music we would like to hear. Writing in any other way is dishonest. For those people inclined to take the time and delve into the strange little world presented on ‘Metazoa,, I urge them to listen to the music while following along with the lyrics. While I feel that the lyrics and especially the music stand on their own, they’re designed to inform one another. Appreciating them in tandem paints a much fuller picture of each song’s meaning, or its “sense as art” as you say. In a way I’m glad you considered our last album complicated because our next one will evolve even further into realms of strange dissonance and untraditional time signatures.
As to the commercialisation of music, I must disagree with you that this is a new phenomenon. Opportunistic labels were shovelling out trendy garbage in the 1950s and 60s, they’re shovelling it out now, and as long as there is a music industry (hopefully not long) they will continue to shovel it out. I think it’s a fallacy that there was an artistic golden age of music. Time is the ultimate quality filter, since no one’s interested in terrible music after its moment has passed. Eventually history erodes the mountains of rubbish and all that remains are the rare diamonds that last through the elements. This is why when we think of 18th century classical music, the same names always crop up: Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Hadyn, but consider that there were thousands upon thousands of composers all over the world who all but vanished. Certainly a classical music historian can refer philistines such as us to some woefully under-appreciated genius composers who slipped past common knowledge due to poor self-promotion, unfortunate politics, artistic inaccessibility, or just plain bad luck; but the reason we haven’t heard of the majority of these writers is simply because their music was shit. Likewise I have to laugh at teenagers with their rose-tinted glasses yearning for the mystical rock of the 1970s and bemoaning the state of modern music. It’s inevitable that 25 years from now, their own kids will be waxing nostalgic for the “authentic sounds” of the late-90s and deriding whatever genre is dominant in 2035.
What can you tell us about the writing process and what it takes to complete a song? I mean, it’s obvious that each musician in Cormorant has his/her own inspiration and musical background… Our writing process is completely different for each song. Sometimes one member will come in to practice with a riff gallery ready to go and the band will arrange it together. Sometimes the song will originate organically from a jam session, as was the case on ‘Hole in the Sea”. Sometimes we’ll build a song around lyrics (‘Hanging Gardens’) and other times I’ll marry the words closely to existing material (‘Blood On The Cornfields’). There’s no formula. All of us compose the music more or less equally, and if you really study everything you can tell which member wrote which section, as we all have our own styles. Apologies to my band mates for my reductionism, but in general, Nick will tend toward driving, hard-hitting rock riffing that will make you pump your first, Matt usually contributes thought provoking off-time and experimental parts, Brennan has great ear for very beautiful, ultra-layered sections with strongly defined rhythms, and I lean toward highly structured old-school prog riffs with lots of chordal movement. But it’s not like we have defined roles, it’s all very organic. As to our musical backgrounds, Matt has played in all kinds of grind, power metal and prog bands, Brennan has long loved reggae and hip-hop, Nick is an accomplished old-time country player with great skills on the banjo, mandolin and fiddle, and I studied several years with a jazz contrabassist devoted to Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
I can also imagine that it must be one hell of a job to get the song sound right, seeing that there are so many varied and totally different elements that need to be merged into one whole. How long does it usually take to get a song done? I know a lot of journalists makes a big deal about how varied our sound is, but we don’t think of it that way. We’re just writing what comes naturally to us. We get bored easily and wouldn’t tolerate an hour’s worth of music with the same tone and feel. So I don’t think we take any longer than any normal band does to write material. In fact we’re already pretty far into the composition of our follow-up album to ‘Metazoa’ right now. If you mean the time it takes to record, we tracked our whole 70-minute full-length in about a week. My understanding is that most bands are in the studio a month or more. I have no idea what they’re spending all that time on. We came into the session last time highly rehearsed, and then we tracked all the instruments live. Most songs only needed a few takes. What takes a long time is the preparation.
What can you tell us about the lyrical themes your songs deal with? They’re folk music lyrics. They’re about the oppressed rising up to slaughter the ruling classes; about cycles of tyranny; about the destruction and rebirth of a single life and of whole civilizations, and how through all our vain human struggles for dominance, Mother Nature expresses nothing but indifference. I frame these stories through the prisms of history, mythology, and my own personal life, often all three at once. ‘Uneasy Lies The Head’ depicts the decapitation of Maximilien Robespierre, the architect of France’s post-Revolution Reign of Terror. ‘Salt Of The Earth’ explores the inevitable outcome of all rebellions from the perspective of the despot. ‘Blood On The Cornfields’ tells the story of an 1831 Virginia slave uprising. ‘Hanging Gardens’ is a Kafkaesque fairy tale inspired by a suicide note my father left me. ‘The Crossing’ is about a Mexican immigrant breaching the border into the deserts of the Southern US. ‘Hole In The Sea’ is a psychedelic creation myth involving a cosmic whale, ending with the Jonas figure narrator assuming the consciousness of a planet. ‘The Emigrant’s Wake’ involves an old man visiting a beach he loved as a child and contemplating his lack of importance before the abyss of history, then calling to the waves for higher meaning and finding none.
I also can’t help getting the feeling that ‘Metazoa’ is a concept album, or that there is at least a connection between the songs… It’s not quite a concept album, but it is a thematic one. The term “metazoa” refers to all the world’s multi-cellular animals. Every single lyric on the album features an animal, serving the role of judge, observer, or even active participant in the story. While most of the tracks don’t connect, ‘Scavengers Feast’ and ‘Sky Burial’ are sister songs, as they both present death and nature from opposite viewpoints. ‘Scavengers Feast’ suggests a nihilistic view, the vultures depicted as unfeeling, great equalizers, devouring the flesh of saint and murderer alike. ‘Sky Burial’ however offers a more spiritual interpretation, the vultures playing the role of angels or Valkyries, preparing the souls of the dead for their next life. Like the reincarnation proposed in ‘Sky Burial’ the album itself is cyclical. The last note of ‘Voices Of The Mountain’ is the first note of ‘Scavengers Feast’.
Listening to your music and also a bit in combination with the lyrics, one might think the band’s roots are in Scandinavia! What I’m wondering is if you can tell us a bit about your environment and if it influences your music in anyway… The San Francisco Bay Area has a unique tension between the urban and the rural. While the city itself is every bit the sprawling metropolis, it’s immediately surrounded by the ocean, the mountains, the forests. A tourist could visit the massive Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco’s downtown, and within an hour’s drive stand among ancient sequoia trees in Muir Woods. From there, the Pacific is mere miles away, and there’s always the shadow of beautiful Mount Tamalpais. I don’t see the connection between Scandinavia and our music, beyond the obvious inclusion of elements of Norwegian black metal and Swedish death metal. Aside from these unavoidable stylistic reference points, I feel Cormorant is very much a product of the Bay Area. The eclecticism of our sound, our tendency towards 70s rock and prog music, our jam-based composition style, our love of American folk, our lyrical preoccupations with social injustice, nature, mythology and psychedelia, our immediate environment clearly is in our DNA.
Something different then; I wonder about how you bring your music across live! I mean, at some points your music is not the type that would come across right on a live audience, especially due to the use of different instruments for example. How does that work for you? I mean, can you approach the deepness and the atmosphere of the music live? To ensure an honest recording on ‘Metazoa’, we opted to capture all the instruments live as a full band rather than tracking everything individually to a click track, as is common practice in metal music currently. So what you’re hearing on ‘Metazoa’ is the sound of a whole group together in a room jamming. No Pro-Tools trickery. We only overdubbed vocals, guitar leads/harmonies, and non-traditional instrumentation like Lewis Patzner’s cello. So the core instruments you’re hearing on the record are what we sound like live. It’s true that when we perform some songs we’re missing the cello and keyboard, additional guitar layering, as well as the great guest vocals of Aaron Gregory of Giant Squid and Deborah Spake of Kungfu Vampire, but I like to think we make up for it with energy. There are a few sections in ‘Hole In The Sea’ and ‘Sky Burial’ that don’t quite translate live without bringing in additional musicians, so we modify them slightly. It hasn’t been a problem thus far.
Speaking of live shows: you haven’t got any gigs planned for this year… Is it difficult for a band like Cormorant to get more dates? Of course playing overseas might even be a bit impossible at the moment… Actually we’ve played quite a few gigs this year, so I’m not sure where you saw we weren’t performing. Jello Biafra (singer of The Dead Kennedys) brought us in as support at the legendary Phoenix Theater; we had a great show with Suidakra from Germany and our friends in Ashkira at Thee Parkside; we played a show with the great atmospheric band Atomic Bomb Audition; and just last week we headlined an outdoor music festival in the mountains of beautiful Weaverville, CA. It’s not particularly hard to secure gigs, no. We just don’t really seek them out very actively. We all hold down day jobs, some of us more than one, so it’s not easy for us to play live more than once or twice a month. It’s especially true right now when we’re balancing set rehearsals with the writing of the next album. As to international touring, as much as I love Europe, there’s no way we can afford it at this time. Hell, we can barely afford national touring without getting fired. I don’t see us being able to take a couple months off from the grind without becoming homeless. However, weekend and festival dates are always extremely attractive to us, since they only last a few days and you’re not playing dive bars in front of ten wasted regulars. The Weaverville fest for example was a total pleasure.
And finally, what are you guys up to at the moment? What can we expect from Cormorant within the next months? We will be hard at work writing the next album. To tide fans over in the meantime, we purchased an 8-track digital recorder, and we’ve started capturing our jams and rehearsals on tape. We plan to release these online for free. Some of the improvisational jams we play to warm up last half an hour or more, and explore strange territory like post-rock, jazz, country, ambience…. even surf rock and ska. I feel some fans will appreciate hearing us at our most raw and unstructured. As to the release of the next record, we have some great ideas to bring fans more directly into the creative process, but we’re going to be keeping that a secret for now.
Well then, I guess we can warp it up for this. The famous “last words” are of course for you… I wanted to speak a bit about the under-appreciated Dutch metal scene. I feel The Netherlands have produced some incredible bands that are often overlooked. Of course you have the unparalleled death metal classics like Asphyx and Pestilence (can Martin van Drunen do any wrong?), but there were some real gems in that scene too, like Gorefest, Consolation, Nembrionic, Thanatos, and the female-fronted Unknown Shadows. On the more melodic side of the spectrum, it’s hard to match the power of Pagan’s Mind and The Gathering. The Dutch NWOBHM-worship band Dark Wizard released an absolutely fantastic album named ‘Reign of Evil’ back in 1985, buoyed by some totally unhinged vocals. And even though it’s not really my cup of tea, Ayreon certainly has a unique charm. I’m sure I’m missing some great bands from your country, and I haven’t even touched on your underground black metal scene. I feel like while Sweden and Finland snatched up most of the early 90s death metal glory, a lot of the Dutch material was just as good, if not better in some respects. So you have a lot to be proud of. Thank you so much for the interview. It was a pleasure answering your questions.
Let’s talk about the band’s musical path; it’s impossible to put a label on the music (which is a good thing if you ask me) and you use many different influences from progressive rock to extreme black metal and folk music obviously! But you also use even influences from jazz for example! One thing that cannot be denied is the avant-garde atmosphere that the music summons; what can you tell us about the musical direction?
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