Where’s Mortiis?: Our author feels the weight of his playlist
On the eve of his September U.S. headlining tour where he’ll perform his groundbreaking 1993 album, Født Til Å Herske, in its entirety, dungeon synth progenitor Mortiis took time to serenade Decibel with 40—that’s right, 40—albums that shaped his musical trajectory. From Rick Wakeman to Witchfinder General, Decibel’s favorite pointy-eared Renaissance man provides an exhaustive guide to your next DJ night holding down the turntable. Read on and then get Mortiis tickets here!
Vangelis
Blade Runner Original Soundtrack
I always loved the noir vibes of Blade Runner, the movie, as much younger human being, but I didn’t realize until years later, that the soundtrack was made by Vangelis. An artist I have greatly admired for many years now. His mastery of music, and making synthesizers and reverbs come alive, is possibly second to none, in my opinion. I find his synth sounds and atmospheres extremely inspiring, and I have spent many hours pondering how he made those synths sound the way they did. For the learned that may be reading this: Yes, I am aware of the CS80 and the System 100 and all the other cool gear he used!
Uriah Heep
Demons & Wizards
This album is a great example of an album that didn’t affect the way I made music in any way, but resonated with me in so many other ways… It’s a fantastic seventies hard rock album with that “typical” ’70s fascination with, well, demons and wizards. There was a lot of it going about at the time, and I really connected with it. I suppose in the light of “retrospective wisdom”, it was cartoonish, and naive… But incredibly charming, and, at least to me, it felt genuine, and let’s not forget the fantastical artwork, the clearly obligatory gatefold sleeve. It was a total package immersed in the kind of music they just don’t make anymore. It was all very inspiring to me.
Ultravox
Rage In Eden
Back in 1992, Ultravox was one of my so called “guilty pleasures.” I shared an affinity for synth-based music with Euronymous, when at a time, not very many others did. That doesn’t change anything of course, but I often think back at those times with a slight grin on my face… We were listening to Ultravox in the middle of the craziest times black metal ever had. The thing about Ultravox, to me, was that they were more than a synth pop band… They had amazing songs, they had an amazing singer in Midge Ure (and before that, as a slightly more post-punk style band, a very cool and interesting front man in John Foxx) and they had so much substance, and melancholy. My favorite Ultravox song was always “The Voice” off this album, but they had so many great songs…
Landberk
Riktigt Äkta
Landberk was one of those bands I was introduced to while living in Sweden, and I ended up meeting a couple of the members on a drunken Stockholm trip a while later. The atmospheres on this album, is hard to beat. It’s folkish-fairytale-ish, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was recorded in 1970 or so. But it wasn’t. It was made in the early ’90s. This is THE record that opened my eyes to the phenomenon called Mellotron. I never acquired a Mellotron, of course, but this album served as the gateway for me to really appreciate the dusty sounds of the Mellotron, and later the Chamberlin (the Mellotron´s older brother, so to speak) which I would use quite extensively (samples, not the actual thing, unfortunately) on a couple of albums, many years later.
Manowar
Defender
I was still building Lego with my brother when I heard Manowar the first time. It was “Fighting the World,” and the song “Defender” blew my 12-year-old mind. I was an avid metal and hard rock fan, but that spoken word with the largely instrumental metal soundtrack backing it up was something new. The voice was incredible. Not taking anything away from Eric Adams, but Orson Wells voice, was mesmerizing. Spellbinding, and so different from everything else going on in 1987. It left a footprint on my psyche, about spoken word over music. When done well, it’s fucking alright!
Thule
Natt
This is a Norwegian band, one of the most northern bands of all time. Hailing from Honningsvåg, a small island right outside one of the most northern points of Norway. Their music often has topics about living in the absence of light, in the cold, and in isolation…Immersed in a cold and melancholic kind of seventies prog rock. This specific album always hit me hard, maybe because it’s the first Thule album I heard, or maybe because they are, arguably. The “truest band of all time” singing about the misery of being cold, isolated and living in darkness for long periods of time. Don’t forget where they come from. Oh, and “Natt” means “Night”. Ps, when I was self-releasing one of my albums, I brought the printer my copy of the Natt LP (gatefold sleeve, of course) and the fuckers took it apart, to understand how to print a gatefold sleeve. I never got my copy back. Years later it was bothering me so much, I bought another copy. It was always a collectors item, and I think paid about $100 to get my second copy.
Tangering Dream
Hyperborea
While this album, in my opinion, is probably among their Top 5 best (and hardcore TD fans will argue this!), I say it only because I have a nostalgic relationship with this album. If I hadn’t, I’d still put it in the top 10, but frankly, albums like Exit (musically, probably my favorite TD album), Cyclone (major contender to Exit, again, fans will argue), Stratosphere, Force Majeure, etc.
Now, TD is probably the main reason I got into synths, together with Klaus Schulze (who was on the first TD album).
Hyperborea, an ass-kicking title for an album, by the way, the way it ended up in my hands, and I have to make a sort of long story short: There used to live a mentally disturbed man not too far from our house, and me and brother and our friends, would hang out at his house for a few weeks during one summer… Mostly because he had porn mags all over the place, but he also had a massive record collection. The guy was mental, which in hindsight is sad, he should have received some kind of care. He’d walk down the street with a blind man’s cane, even though his eyes were totally fine (he pretended or thought he couldn’t see). I ended up not going to the house anymore, my brother kept going, and one day, I see this stack of records in my brothers room…I check them out, there’s a bunch of Zappa and Mothers of Invention… probably worth a million today…and then this weird record that says Hyperboera on it…I nick it from my brother, who had nicked it of the mental guy anyway, don’t ask me how he had just walked out of there with about 20 LPs, but he did, and the rest is history.
Klaus Schulze
Moondawn
Klaus Schulze (RIP) probably never made a bad album. I can’t remember how I got into Klaus Schulze, but I remember the first KS album I bought, was 1989’s Mediterranean Pads while on holiday with my parents. This was around 1991 or 1992, when record stores were slowly starting to phase out vinyl, and turn into the lamest experience ever, so it was becoming increasingly difficult to find cool records at random in record stores. So, this one store, try as I might, couldn’t find a damn thing, until I found my first KS vinyl. As opposed to say TD, and Kraftwerk, who you could actually find quite often in secondhand stores at the time, KS records were harder to come by then. I picked Moondawn, not only because it’s a great Klaus Schulze record, but also because the pressing I have, have his face inside a circle, very seventies looking, and it served as the direct inspiration for me to frame the John Bauer artwork on my “Keiser Av En Dimension Ukjent” album inside the circular Ouroboros (also a Bauer design).
Skinny Puppy
Too Dark Park
I heard this album, and it was the first SP album I heard, at a time when I had started to get into stuff like Ministry, but in my somewhat narrow mindedness, was still a bit on the fence about the sort of “hybrid” industrial electronic acts like Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails made (although I had seen the “Head Like a Hole” video on TV around 1991, and it was clear it was something very special…. a bit like seeing the “Smack My Bitch Up’ video by Prodigy when that was new… it was obvious this was special—I just didn’t know how to connect with it at the time)… Too Dark Park was like being thrown into a dark and terrible dream. The sounds, and layers and the moods were out of this world. I adored this album almost right away, and Skinny Puppy definitely opened my eyes and ears to the “hybrid industrial” world of music. The whole thing is sort of odd, though, because I was already in the Cold Meat Industry world, and was listening to their entire roaster, as well as ancient industrial music like Throbbing Gristle/Coil/Psychic TV, NON, Einsturzende Neubauten, etc. So why on god’s green earth I was holding out on the somewhat more commercial Americans, are a mystery to me. Maybe I tried to be special, haha!
Manilla Road
Crystal Logic
One of my all-time favorite albums. This was a band I “shared” with, perhaps Mayhem’s most obscure singer, Cultoculus. Also known as the editor of one of Norway’s most cult-like fanzines, Sepulchral Noise. Culto was always great at discovering more or less quite obscure acts around the world. I can’t recall exactly how I discovered Manilla Road, but I remember getting “Crystal Logic” on blue vinyl, the Black Dragon (whenever I see that logo on a record, I want that record!) pressing, in the mail, and that’s the one I still have in my collection to this day. Incredible artwork, well written fantastical/historical lyrics, a lead vocal that just the right kind of nasal to sound very metal. Synth people wouldn’t understand.
The Sisters of Mercy
“Body and Soul” 12-inch
To a degree, this is a randomly chosen release by the Sisters for me. While excellent in itself, I really loved everything they released up to and including Vision Thing. I guess you could argue about their third album (Vision Thing) is “too hard rock” or whatever. I don’t care, I really like it. The reason I picked one of their earlier 12-inches, was because I always had thing for their uniform artwork—all their 12-inches, especially the early ones, had this very simple, but effective, and uniform layout. It inspired me, aesthetically, to the point where I made a decision to make a series of 12-inches myself, just so I could check one of my own “to do before I die” boxes. And I did, I made five 12-inch EPs between 1996 and 1997 and released them as a “comp” album called Crypt of the Wizard. Honorable mention goes to The Mission, for also putting out really cool 12-inches, even putting the Roman numerals on them, which was an idea I stole for those Crypt 12-inch EPs.
Rotting Christ
Passage to Arcturo
When I ordered the Deathcrush demo, from an address I had seen in Damage Inc magazine. I was quite late to the party. The demo was released in 1987, and I sent my order in sometime 1989. I just took a chance. Euronymous wrote back, with a copy of the demo, and he had taped a whole lot of songs on the B-side. Bands he was going to release on his new label, Deathlike Silence Productions. Rotting Christ was one of the bands in the B-side. I remember I thought the drums were so cool, in my memory, there were no crash cymbals, no rock ‘n’ roll, they just backed up the music, absolutely zero bullshit. Later on, when I got my copy of it (sadly, not the first edition, with the awesome gatefold sleeve, but a second edition, still pretty cool) I was impressed with the atmosphere of the band—they seemed genuinely into the occult, which of course added greatly to their authenticity in my book). I had always been a sucker for a good melodic band, and even though I didn’t know it at the time, I was connecting with the proto-sound of the Greek black metal scene.
Repulsion
Horrified
Repulsion was a late ’80s discovery for me. At a time when you’d start seeing the early Napalm Death, Carcass and maybe Unseen Terror LPs in Oslo record stores—if you got lucky, that is. This was a time when you could afford to buy an album based on cover artwork alone, there just weren’t that many extreme looking albums available in Norway. The meters on the tape machine when this album was recorded, must have been on fire, because everything just sounds like it’s ready to melt! This album is distorted, gritty, dirty and just grim! I don’t know if there’s any better example of an album that ties grindcore and death metal together than Horrified. Horrified is without a doubt the reason I like early Autopsy and Nihilist so much as well.
Rainbow
Ritchie Blackmoore’s Rainbow
I needed to expand my vision a bit before I was ready for seventies hard rock, but by 1992 or so, I was digging my way back in time, getting to know the discographies of several of those “old man bands.” This might be my favorite Rainbow album, although Rising is a hard contender. I think I just connected with the medieval vibe of this album, and I recall it being on almost constant repeat while I was writing those early Mortiis lyrics in the summer of 1992, while I was still in Emperor, and I thought I was writing the lyrics for our debut album. If you have albums that you listened to at times in your life, times that were profound and character shaping, you’ll know what I mean when I say that certain songs, or even just passages in songs, will transport you back to that time and place in an instant. I have a few of those songs, and “The Temple of The King” and “Sixteenth Century Greensleeves” are two of them.
Pink Floyd
Wish You Were Here
Strangely Pink Floyd was a band I got into slightly later than say Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, but not by that far. I think I had tagged them a bit (unfairly so) with the “old man’s band” label, so I was on the fence a little longer. Once I got into them, there was no turning back. Even though I went out and bought as many LPs as I could find (more or less all of them!) I was always into the slightly more structured sound as opposed to the psychedelic sound of their early days. Every time I think about Pink Floyd, Richard Wright’s fluty Mini-Moog (I am assuming, perhaps wrongly) start playing in my head. Songs like “Have a Cigar” and “Welcome to the Machine” made their mark on me in different ways. “Have a Cigar” because it was just weird, and in later years, it’s merciless satire (I presume, again) about the deceitful recording industry, and its’ many sharks and vampires.
Ozzy Osbourne
Blizzard of Oz
Would believe me if I said I was listening to Ozzy for years, as a kid, thinking Diary of a Madman was his first album? Naturally, this was many years before we had access to any kind of info, apart from whatever the owner of the local record store would put in his store. He was a religious man, so naturally it would be a bit limited. I didn’t hear this album until the very beginning of the ’90s, by the time we were consuming anything occult, and satanic and weird, so hearing Ozzy Osbourne belt out “Mr Crowley” following one of the coolest intros in heavy metal history, was pretty fucking profound. It’s another one of those songs that just transports me back in time and space.
Paul Chain
Alkahest
I had been fascinated by, and become a fan of Paul Chains old band, Death SS (you have no idea how obscure and mystical they were, for a couple of young teenagers in the beginning of the ’90s, when we heard about them, and eventually heard a few songs, probably the “Evil Metal” 7-inch, on a degraded tape, there was just zero info about them, except they were from Italy, and had apparently been around forever) for a few years, by the time I realized he had gone solo. Paul Chain’s music was, if even possible, even more obscure. This LP came into my possession by the time I was living in Sweden, and running the Static Age mail-order with Paolo Staver from Primitive Art Records. Even though the music is awesome, really heavy doom stuff, it was the use of “phonetic vocals” that really made this album stand out, to me… I stole that trick, or, well, was “inspired” by it, for some vocal sections on the album I am working on now. I was just messing around, trying to come up with vocal melodies but had no lyrics to go with it, and just started forming sounds, and it sounded cool, and I was instantly reminded about how Paul Chain did that on this killer LP. So I thought “Hey, if Paul Chain can do it, so can I”—or something like that, haha!
Omen
Battle Cry
Did you know that around 1983-1984 no less than three American metal bands wrote songs called “Death Rider?” (Anthrax on Fistful of Metal, Overkill on the Power in Black demo, and Omen). Better yet, all three songs are absolute killers. I discovered Omen (and others, like Tyrant and Bitch) on the massive double compilation The Best of Metal Blade (best comp ever together with Speed Kills, Speed Metal Hell and Metal Inferno). I always liked U.S. metal; they sung about fantastical, and medieval themes a lot, which resonated with me, I also always appreciated a good melody. I rank this album up there with Manilla Road’s best stuff. Honorable mentions are label mates Warlord, whom I would listen to a lot a little later on.
Onslaught
Power from Hell
This album really went the round on my group of metal friends, back in the late ’80s. It was another discovery though the venerable Speed Kills compilation series. This was one of those albums that really roped me in, because it was murky, dark and seemed evil and felt genuine as hell. As in, “I think this band actually might conjure demons for real.” Hey, I was a very imaginative kid—I think it was the fact that it was mysterious, with that whole “Bathory-style” back cover (just a pentagram, and song titles) and no band photos, so at the time, all we could do was imagine what sort of a band it was… Years later, I found out Onslaught used to be a sort of crust punk band in their early days, which would explain their murky and in retrospect, grinding, British sound. Their follow up album, The Force, was great, too, but this album had the atmosphere and mood around it, that has made it remain a black/thrash metal favorite of mine.
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors
Original 1922 Soundtrack
Of course, as black metal kids in the early ’90s, we were always looking for any sort of extremes. Be it music, movies or otherwise. I came across a VHS with this movie on it, and I really got into the atmosphere of the movie, and its “monotony” (seen through eyes, some 70 years after it was originally released, at the time, 100+ years by now) to me, was part of the experience. This movie, and its organ based soundtrack, directly inspired me when I made my first solo music ever, my 1993 demo The Song of a Long Forgotten Ghost. I was even planning on making a video for the song (it’s over 50 minutes long) and it was going to be an absolute test of people’s patience. An ordeal, most likely. The idea was to film me sitting in a chair, in a dark room, a burning candle, and me doing absolutely nothing but stare into the camera. Hey, it’s art, man! Haha! I guess it’s just as well it never happened.
Necrophagia
Season of the Dead
Season of the Dead might well be the first ever, proper death metal LP I ever laid eyes on in a record store. I was going to my local record store, probably at least twice a week, and it would usually be the same old Bon Jovi and Def Leppard crap in the shelves, but one day this monster sat there, glaring at me in all its zombie gore glory! I had never seen a splatter movie, I didn’t know they existed, and the most brutal album sleeve I knew at the time was probably Fistful of Metal by Anthrax. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to buy it. It was 1987, I was 12 years old and never had any money, and this was a U.S. Import, so it was way more expensive than the other LPs, too. I did later on read more about Necrophagia, when I discovered the cult fanzine Damage Inc (by Maniac, ex-Mayhem singer), and I eventually heard the album, and their numerous demos, though tape trading. When I wrote the lyrics for Emperor’s “Night of the Graveless Souls,” I had Necrophagia in mind throughout the whole process. I don’t know why, exactly, but it was inspiring, and in my mind, I was “doing a Necrophagia.” I exchanged a few messages with Killjoy later on down the line—real nice guy, and I was saddened to hear of his passing a few years ago.
Basil Pouledouris
Conan the Barbarian Soundtrack
First time I heard this, I was flicking through channels in my parents living room. I was still living at home, and I guess it was around 1992, or even early 1993. My mom was sitting on the phone next to me, so I had the sound on low, and as I’m flicking, this obscure Italian channel comes on, showing one of the scenes where Conan chops someone’s arm off, and it’s really graphic, and I wasn’t expecting it, and I recognized Arnold, and the fact it was dubbed into Italian, with some godawful room-reverb on top, so it sounded unbelievably fake. But the music was incredible. I noticed right away how little dialogue Arnold/Conan had, and how music-driven the movie was. I had also just started to make music on my own, and I just knew that this was what I wanted my music to sound like. Of course, I was inspired by so many things at the time, it never really happened (though I would argue I made a “decent” attempt on The Stargate, many years later). This was one of those combos of music and film I liked so much, I went out and bought the movie poster (still have it). Honorable mention here is the Excalibur movie, with all that Orff and Wagner music, a movie that arguably looks a lot better than Conan the Barbarian, has better acting and great dialogue—I will freely admit that I later on sampled extensively from Excalibur, but there was something incredibly charming about Conan the Barbarian, not just the superior music, and besides, it’s fucking CONAN. Did I mention I was an avid Conan the Barbarian comic reader for years? I’d wait for the new issue every second week and scrape the money together to buy it.
Celtic Frost
Emperor’s Return
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Yes, this is where I got the band name from. After a couple of other, weaker band name ideas, that I don’t think I ever even suggested (thank god), I saw this in my collection, and figured that would be a really good band name.
Secondly, the lyrics for “My Empire’s Doom” are totally modelled after Tom Warrior… I mean if nothing else, I was doing my best to write a Tom Warrior style of lyric, which was less occult themed, and more epic/fantastical, which was an element I always found myself returning to in those days.
Emperors Return was one of the early mailorder experiments of mine. To get hold of really cool records, I had to order them from a mail order company in Sweden, based in ads with really small photos of the albums, and some short descriptions. That’s all we had to go on. We weren’t really aware of demos and underground bands yet, at the time, so most of the time, we just took our chances, with what little money we had, and ordered away, hoping for the best. Man, did I score on this one. The cover artwork, (I heard Tom Warrior wasn’t happy with it, or the music on it, not sure if it’s true, but I always loved it!) I still consider to the some of the coolest metal artwork to come out of the ’80s (and I had to hide it from my parents!). To this day, the music and the artwork of Emperor’s Return, stands head and shoulders above most anything else in metal. People will disagree, but that’s the way I look at it. Oh, and the late Martin Eric Ain’s obvious nod to the goth scene (he would fit right into an early incarnation of Christian Death!) is a reminder of just how experimental and groundbreaking Celtic Frost really were.
John Carpenter/Alan Howarth
The Prince of Darkness Soundtrack
Here’s another case of liking the movie and soundtrack so much, I went out and bought the movie poster as well—still have it!
I was already a fan of Escape From New York and The Thing (and to a lesser degree, believe it or not, The Fog and Halloween—both awesome movies, and by the way, Adrienne Barbeau deserves a lot more recognition, in my opinion) and I was picking up VHS of movies I really liked back in the mid-’90s, and decided to check out Prince of Darkness. I had never seen it, only seen ads for it since I was a kid. Man, that ominous opening synth line, that sort of evolves into this dark, somber and haunting landscape really did something for me, and years later, I was openly influenced by that specific piece of music for the intro/opening of my song “Mental Maelstrom.” Even though, I’m afraid Alan Howarth and John Carpenter did a better job than I did. I wasn’t yet aware that all synths have their own personality and sound, and you can’t really expect a Nord Lead to sound like an Oberheim 4 Voice or a Prophet-10. Maybe some people can, but I certainly can’t. Either way, you can’t beat the originals, and you probably shouldn’t try.
Honorable mention of course must go to Escape From New York. In some ways, a better soundtrack, and definitely more iconic. It has inspired me greatly on some parts of the new album I’m working on now.
Blue Öyster Cult
Fire of Unknown Origin
BÖC was one of perhaps two or three bands, that had me totally sold that they just might be some kind of truly occult organization. It was my imagination, of course, but there was something about them, at least for a period in the seventies, and into the eighties, that just seemed so real and genuine. Like the lyrics were real stories and hints and what they were really doing, beyond the music. “Fire of Unknown Origin,” “Veteran of the Psychic Wars,” I mean you don’t come up with titles like that unless you’re into some real magic shit, right?
Well at least my brain wanted that to be true.
Songs like “Burnin’ for You” and “Sole Survivor” are fantastic though, and this might be my favorite BÖC album, and there’s some stiff competition there. As a little PS, the song “Sole Survivor” inspired the title of my own song, many years later, called “Sole Defeat” (sort of a silly word play on “Soul Defeat”—I never really told anyone until now)
Black Widow
Black Widow III
Black Widow was another band that drew in me in, based equally on their sort of hypnotic and charismatic ’70s rock/folky type of music, and their “occult mystique,” years before the internet “confirmed” my beliefs that this band was really dabbling in the occult (turns out they had faux sacrifices and rituals on stage back in the day, so that’s something). As a teenager, I was absolutely convinced that this band was more than just music.
I know fans of Black Widow will debate and tell me that albums like Sacrifice are better (“Come To The Sabbath!”) and I agree, but I just have a deeper relationship with Black Widow III, and here are two of the reasons why: One being it was the first full album by Black Widow I heard, and I absolutely love the song “Lonely Man.” I think it is sad and beautiful at the same time. Reason number two is, this album made its way into my life the same way Tangerine Dream’s Hyperborea did: Some of my friends stole records from the mentally ill person in the yellow house not too far from where I lived, and this was one of them, and it somehow crept into my collection, and I’m pretty sure the copy I have here, is the same one.
Bel Canto
White-Out Conditions
Bel Canto, from north of Norway, was another completely random thing that came into my life, in the early nineties. Thinking back real hard, I vaguely remember someone telling me that since I was listening to stuff like Dead Can Dance, I’d really like Bel Canto as well. Boy was that true. They do sound a bit like Dead Can Dance at times, but like a Dead Can Dance mixed with early Coil. Bel Canto was part of my early years of discovering electronic and hybrid music such as Dead Can Dance, and later on, Enigma (which was weird, because they/he were huge by this time). The song “Baltic Ice-Breaker,” from this album, is a monster, by the way. Geir Jenssen, who was with the band early on, left to form Biosphere, and I just remembered, that I bought my Roland SH-5 from him, a few years ago, and it’s being used on that new album I seem to keep plugging, haha!
Amebix
The Power Remains
Here’s another example where some people might argue that their early singles were better, or that the album Monolith is better. I always thought that there was some kind of weird, primal, dystopian future kind of link between Amebix and the post-war landscapes their early material conjure in my head, and the adventures of Korgüll, the strange entity that followed Canadian Voivod for many years…That grim, dark and primal thrash metal band (later on way more progressive), to me at least, shared many connections with Amebix. Perhaps all in my head, but still…
I thought both bands were great at world-building, whether deliberate or not, this is how I experienced them, and world-building has been a major concept for me for 30 years or so now, in one way or another.
Oh, and my copy comes with a massive poster, that used to hang in the kitchen of my apartment in Sweden for years back in the ’90s.
Witchfinder General
Death Penalty
Gone are the days when you could walk into a used record store and get LPs like this for $10 or less. All because no-one gave a shit about vinyl anymore. I’m glad I was there. The first Angel Witch album for $8? Yes, please. Besides being a total kick ass NWOBHM/Doom album, believe it or not, I actually borrowed a riff or two from Witchfinder General. “Synthified” them and put them on, I think, The Stargate album, somewhere. I did it with Deep Purple, too, haha!
Rick Wakeman
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Remember I talked about albums you listened to at profoundly important times in your life, and hearing just a few notes of them, will transport you back to that time and place? This album is one of them. Back in 1993, a guy (he happened to actually be married to one of our neighbors, but I guess they had moved away, since I never saw him in our street) from my little town was selling his record collection and a few synths (I got an original Roland 330 Vocoder from him, that I stupidly sold later) and he actually rented a store space in the middle of the city, and started selling it. I was of course an avid customer. I bought a great many synth and other strange records from him. This was the first Rick Wakeman I bought, and possibly my favorite of the Wakeman albums I’ve heard. Once again, it proves that you can achieve any crazy thing if you just set your mind to it, because this is pretty much that ’70s madness manifest. Again, it also proves that well done spoken word over music really works. Did I mention it has a very cool and psychedelic fold out sleeve AND stapled in multi-page booklet? Yeah, I stole that idea from this album for one or two albums I did many years later.
Clannad
Macalla
The early ’90s was a time of endless discovery for me, once I got my head out of the “only metal is real” bullshit. I mean, metal is great, but it’s not everything. At some point between 1990 and 1992 I came across a series on TV, a re-run of the British series Robin of Sherwood. It was actually really fucking good, and I started watching it regularly. Once in a while, during the show, this incredibly choral and atmospheric music would just sort of wash across the scene, and I was just enthralled. I had never heard anything like it. Back in those days, there was no Shazam app, so your only option was to glue your face to the screen, and wait for the end credits, and there it was: Clannad. I had another one on the list when record hunting. Personally, I think perhaps albums like “Magical Ring” are even better, but Macalla means a lot, especially because I freely admit to sampling bits off of “Caislean Oir”—creating a very nice choral sounding pad, or drone, if you will. If you ever listened to my album The Unraveling Mind, you probably heard it, albeit most likely layered together with other sounds.
Jethro Tull
Broadsword and the Beast
Once again, hardened Tull fans will yell Aqualung or Heavy Horses or Too Young To Rock ‘n’ Roll… But I fucking love Broadsword. Several reasons: I have a lovely memory of buying it at the same store as the Rick Wakeman album… the store this guy opened just to sell off his record collection. I also love the artwork so much, I had it tattooed on my back. Yeah, no, no one really ever saw that, but it’s there… The elf guy with the sword anyway. I heard hardcore Tull fans don’t like this album, because it was made with synths and other tech. Maybe that’s why I like it so much.
Genocide
Submit to Genocide
How did a fairly mediocre punk/hardcore band from New Jersey bear any impact on my musical life, you might ask? Well, have you seen this album? Have you seen what these dudes looked like? For a 12-year-old kid in 1987-1988, these guys looked fucking insane! They looked certifiably fucking dangerous, and very, very cool! It was a bit like being 9 years old in 1984 and discovering W.A.S.P. for the first time… Genocide just took image to the next level, at least in my world, they did, and that’s the thing that stuck. The music was actually really cool, but it was the overkill of spiky hair, studs, nails, makeup and more nails that nailed it for me. Take shit to the next level.
Oh, and if you ever saw that bit of video footage, where GG Allin walks down the New York street, naked, and full of shit, apparently one of the dudes with him there, is Bobby Ebz, singer of Genocide, but don’t take my word for it.
Their bass player, Bobb Sexton went on to become a successful video director, apparently.
Peter Gabriel
Security
Try as I might, I can’t remember when I started listening to Peter Gabriel. I wasn’t really into Genesis—I did discover some amazing music they made later on though, and besides, it’s not really possible to dislike Phil Collins!—so it sorted of happened independently of that. I think I just started to dig the “Sledgehammer” song, and started buying his albums… Lo and behold, some of his earlier output is incredible in its creativity and experimentalism. It’s pretty ballsy to come out of a hugely successful band, and just do really anti-commercial stuff like releasing strange albums with no names… I can respect that! The song “Rhythm of the Heat” is one of my all-time favorite songs and inspired a song I made called “This Absolution” (okay, Genesis’ “Mama” played a big role in that song too!).
G.G.F.H.
Eclipse
G.G.F.H. was, for some reason, an industrial electro band that was accepted in our metal circles…It seemed a bit random, maybe because Dreamtime Records was a sub label to Peaceville, who were putting out some great metal and grindcore at the time.
Regardless, as a black metal kid, I could connect with G.G.F.H., because their content was so fucking dark, and they’d have cool spoken word samples over this grim electro music, grinding away. It was dark, as in really dark. I never forgot about this band or this record. I tried to connect with them when I did the The Great Corrupter remix album but couldn’t figure out how to get in touch. Maybe in the future. I think my favorite track on this album is “Dead Inside”—it’s just fucking bleak.
Fairport Convention
Full House
Another album from the mentally ill person down the street, stolen by my brother’s criminal friends and somehow ended up in my collection. I still have that very copy right here, and I still love the song “Sir Patrick Spens” off of this album. This is about as folk rocky as it gets in my collection, but it resonates with me and I’m glad bands like this are still carrying on till this day. Of course, the cover art, beat Dungeon Synth cover art by about 45 years 😉
Death SS
Heavy Demons
As I already mentioned, talking about Paul Chain’s Alkahest album, Death SS had become known to us through some very narrow and long forgotten underground channels… I think we had somehow acquired a couple of xeroxed flyers, advertising a fan club, and then there was a tape with three or four songs on it… probably like 4th generation copy, as it sounded like it was playing from the moon. In hindsight, I can’t believe these fucking awesome looking Death SS (and Paul Chain, and other very cool Italian occult metal albums like Black Hole) LPs were floating around in Italy, but apparently nowhere else…we could barely get a listenable tape trading copy up in Norway, but such were the times, we might as well have been living on different planets.
Once we started getting hold of some photos of Death SS, they looked incredible… Especially for the Heavy Demons LP, they were using prosthetics to achieve new levels of visual impact. Suffice it to say, the young Mortiis did NOT forget about that little trick.
The fact that Death SS (or at least Steve Sylvester) were actual practitioners of occult rituals, didn’t make things any less cool, haha!
Dead Can Dance
Aion
If we wanted to get hold of import records like Dead Can Dance, or Diamanda Galás (another artists we listened to extensively in the black metal days) we’d have to go into Oslo, and maybe luck out at the one or two specialty record stores that existed there. However, in the earliest days, we didn’t even know those stores existed, so Dead Can Dance, was another one of those incredibly obscure entities that we only heard on a tape someone had acquired through tape trading.
When I think of Dead Can Dance, I think of how one of music’s main jobs (if not the main job) is to create a mood that makes you believe what you’re hearing. Not just sonically, but also emotionally. If Dead Can Dance aren’t the masters of conveying this mood, then I don’t know who is. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard “Saltarello” and thought “This is the best thing I’ve ever heard,” but of course, and not to take anything away from DCD, all really, really, well written/produced music has this effect on me—and thank god for that.
Coil
Horse Rotorvator
When came to “proper industrial music” I was sort of alone in my journeys into that field, from a black metal standpoint. There were people that would listen to Diamanda Galás, Dead Can Dance, Klaus Schulze and so on, but I really can’t recall anyone down my way talking about Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Lustmord or any of that stuff. Strange but true. I might be wrong here, but this is how I recall it. I was very curious at the time, and had gotten quite open minded, so once those floodgates were open, there was no closing them.
I experienced this Coil album as quite atmospheric, and disturbing, and I still really like their use of samples to this day. Not to mention, Coil might win the gold medal for the world’s most unsettling AND fascinating song title of all time: “The First Five Minutes After Death.” That shit really makes you think.
