The following interview was conjured with Filipino Black/Death Metal band, Asgardsrei. Some sentiments expressed here are quite far-fetched, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Death By Hammer. However, it’s probably better to make up your own mind. Having said that, this is by far the edgiest interview in the history of this webzine.
Hail. The whole project of Asgardsrei is shrouded in mystery, since I couldn’t really find much info other than a few reviews here and there. Are you content at keeping a low profile, especially considering the quality of your output?
More than content keeping the mystique of the project intact, considering it's supposed to be dark obscure music. I find that music is at least 1000x more interesting without knowledge of its creators, although this does not always apply since there are countless bands with anonymous members that make crap music like this trend of cringe occult black/death bands with shrouds over their stupid faces. It's lame and I sincerely hope the trend dies soon, with its fans and creators. Hopefully it is a painful and messy death as to overshadow the transgressions they have committed on good taste.
In the case of Asgardsrei it's not so much a marketing ploy as it is unwillingness to tarnish the music with vapid posing. I would prefer that the music is received as coming from a supernatural source, as it is the essence and true source of the music, the goal of which seems to be the rousing of strange uneasy thoughts in the listener's imagination.
Can you give us a little background on Asgardsrei and tell us how the project was conceived? Did you already have a clear idea in your mind about the musical direction when you started the project?
It began around the time an unearthly presence had taken up residence in a deep recess of my subconscious, after which it eventually spread out to the living world as a semi-incarnated entity that radiated strange assemblies of sound that were audible only to my ear. The recordings you hear are my frenzied attempts to remember these sequences and to record them as I heard them. In that regard I see it as a great failure as the recordings bear little to no resemblance to the things I have heard and witnessed. The music that I hear in itself is of a profoundly fleeting nature, thus impossible to translate accurately into physical form. As a result it is heavily warped by my own compositional tendencies and the music I listened to at the time.
As I indulge in this interrogation the entity continues its quest to cross over to the other side, so to speak; to complete its fleshbound form for reasons I have yet to determine. Its malignant music grows louder and clearer by the day, but for now I can keep it in check. For how much longer I do not know.
As you can probably surmise from my predicament there was no clear musical direction for the project. I am only a conduit for this force. Many sleepless nights were spent attempting to capture this music, until the recording of the first release seemed to placate the spirit. Before the first release there were recordings of various styles: some soundscapes, messings about with effects units, some ambitious pieces that utilize various instruments and noise. These recordings were lost to time however and I can guarantee that no ear will ever hear them from here to eternity.
The reviews I’ve read for your albums so far indicate high praise. Are you satisfied with the overall feedback you've received so far?
I've read a few and it's quite amusing seeing how some people get it and how some completely miss the point. It's cool that there are people that genuinely like it -- maybe they are unwittingly afflicted by the same force. Almost all reviews attribute certain aspects of the sound to bands that I have never listened to or don't like at all.
The state of music reviews these days is pathetic. No one is adequately attentive nor endowed with great discernment as to be a reliable source of music journalism. In fact most reviewers seem to treat the activity as a micropenis measuring contest to see who can cite the most obscure bands to compare a certain release to, even if said bands have absolutely nothing to do with the review material.
I see basic bitch reviews littered with nonsensical buzzwords and dumbass phrases about morbid percussion, skullcrushing riffs, complete blasphemous perversion etc. This kind of mass-produced review tells me nothing about the music and is tantamount to literally performing fellatio on the band themselves.
Some try to be smart and put in all these pseudo-technical bits of analysis when it's clear that they don't know a lick of music. These people should be shot in the kneecaps, flayed alive and dismembered.
An honest lucid review is hard to come by these days, but ultimately it doesn't matter, as it is not the review but the music that I am after.
Your last album, “Dark Fears Behind The Doors” got reissued through HESSIAN FIRM from France. How did you get in touch with them, and how does it feel getting renewed interest after all these years? How was the album received back in 2013?
It was a result of necessity that I had gotten in touch with Hessian Firm. There was a long period of inactivity after the recordings of 2013, and this led to the intensification of psychic upheaval, reprieve from which I thought could only come from spreading this music to the world at large.
I decided on Hessian Firm partly because the daemon had exhibited a particular affinity for the label, the reason for which probably is because it had a fairly high barrier of entry that only a few bands deemed worthy could get a release through it. In addition HF released some music that I enjoyed listening to so it was the best choice.
It's surprising to me that there are people who like it enough to purchase a copy, as I don't think too highly of the music myself. In any case I hope that time spent with it by others proves to be a rewarding experience.
Very minimal effort was spent on spreading this music in 2013. Mostly it was just sent to close friends so there was no buzz about it at the time. Not that I know of.
Can you please highlight some of your biggest influences and tell us how that moulds into your sound?
JP video game soundtracks, anime music, vaporwave, drum n bass, jp music in general, fern planet etc... bladee, Zomby, Burial, weird electronic music
These have no influence on my music nowadays as that would mean that I have been making any music at all, which I have not done for years. There is no point anymore in making metal for reasons I will disclose later on.
It sounded like you were listening to Beherit quite obsessively when writing your last album, "Dark Secrets Behind The Door," but managed to craft a distinct sound superior to most bands of this style. Do you have a preference for bestial black/death metal?
Yes I was listening to Beherit but I don't like bestial black/death at all. It's a joke.
That style should have never existed in the first place as it is the most pathetic excuse for dark music I have ever had the displeasure of hearing, next to noise and dark ambient. Every single bestial black/death/war band, in fact any band that propagates the "first wave black metal" sound should be rounded up, tortured, and be left alive as quadruple amputees.
That style is an abomination created by and made for middle aged burnouts trying to relive teenage years that passed them by due to them being incompetent retards. Every single record in that style is just another piece with which some chinless balding nerd can pad out his record collection or even worse, AOTY list which he can then parade around his fellow soyboy war metal maniac friends online.
Every band that plays this style should be killed in the most violent way and their bloodlines should be erased. These include black/speed/heavy/thrash retard bands that in reality just sound like monkeys with lissencephaly trying to ape early Bathory or whatever Motorhead (a band that sucks ass) derived shit from the 80s. For them I have a great piece of advice: sell your instruments, stop playing music, learn to appreciate the finer points of having a heroin addiction and die of either an overdose or shooting. Have your filthy jackets arranged for incineration at the time of your death.
Every single member of Ross Bay Cult should have eaten a coathanger at birth and everyone who supports that "horde" of dumb pampered canucks roleplaying as bestial warriors ought to get sterilized, castrated and then murdered anyway. Same goes for the pathetic Asian funderground scene that worships that crap. Singahell lmao. Another group of 1st world retards pretending they are real battle hardened satanik warriors. Wake up bro, you are muslim. Put your bullet belts to good use and shoot your friends before offing yourselves. On second thought since those aren't even live bullets might as well just go straight to the killing of yourselves.
In a perfect world, everything that is called black metal and isn't from Norway is met with derisive laughter and forgotten immediately. 1st wave BM, Greek BM, Finnish BM, USBM etc all belong in the trash. A perfect world is one without bullet belts and patch jackets. No metal "community".
What is the correlation between Norse mythology and your music? Furthermore, what kind of themes are you exploring with Asgardsrei?
Asgardsrei has nothing to do with Norse mythology. That would be dumb as I do not even have Nordic ancestry nor do I live in a Nordic country.
The music revolves only around dark surreal thoughts, hallucinogenic mind's eye-exclusive traumatic voyages through unknown psychic places. It is the music of ghosts, things you would hear on a particularly silent night out alone at the graveyard. It is a transmission from a place so unfathomable that even I do not know what it is.
Do you think a raw production in black/death metal band can add more depth to the music?
It ultimately depends on how the music is written. If it's heavily layered music with numerous parts, it would make sense for it to be presented with some refinement, so that the notes are heard.
In the case of simple music, raw production does lend it a rough charm, as in early Darkthrone. The production on those albums matters as much as the songs.
For metal made after the 90s the only appropriate production is one where all tracks are muted for maximum headroom.
Can you give us a little overview on the underground scene in the Philippines? Are there any bands from your country that you find worthy of support?
I have not been in touch with the local scene for years, but I can say I made some good friends within it. The Filipino metal scene is better for the quality of drinking sessions than the music it has produced, although there are a handful exceptions.
Pathogen is cool, and the rest of the San Pablo bands are leagues beyond anything else. My favourite band from here is Karimlan, who I sincerely think smoke everyone else because they make highly original music. It's feral naturalistic music with intense spirit that I could say had a profound influence on my own music. Other than that it's all derivative trash for dumb record collectors.
Deiphago...
...suck and should be aborted as soon as possible. Wiped off the face of the earth. Nothing good has come from those Costa Retards. Only very rarely have I come across a band so profoundly untalented that they cannot even play the simplest riffs properly nor play a note vomit guitar solo right. The realization upon finding that this band is well-regarded by a lot of people around the world has led me to think that something cataclysmic happened around the 90s that destroyed many individuals' sense of hearing. HHR must be run by a mentally challenged man since he bothered to publish this band's nonsense. This might be new knowledge to most but people who bought their records and paid to see them live are eligible for a persons with disabilities card since they have proven themselves mentally retarded.
Stylistically, how do you perceive the development between your first and second album?
Between those albums not much changed. The songs became shorter and better written but they are pretty much cut from the same cloth. Dark Fears was slightly recorded better and had better guitar tone. The musical detours from the previous album were cut out.
If I may ask, why haven't you released anything new since 2013? The world needs new Asgardsrei material!
Believe me when I tell you that the world needs no more Asgardsrei material, or any metal for that matter. The music had run its course and was dead by the 90s. By that time the metal style had been codified to the point that one could whip up a checklist of things to put in an album for it to count as metal. Essentially, it died when bands started writing metal instead of music. That's when it metamorphosed into the joke we know as metal today.
The fact that there are people peddling "metal" today as if it were alive and breathing is a mockery of it. People who sincerely believe that metal lives are posers of the worst kind because they are deluding themselves that it was ever alive beyond the 90s in the first place. Metal was a product of its time and there is no way to resuscitate it. No attempt at "progressing" the musical language of metal will keep it from the grave. People who continue to tune in and contribute to this pathetic zombie industry of new "metal" releases are cringe and should be culled from the human race. Their collections should be dismantled and recycled to make objects that hold more value, like toilet seats.
Practitioners and fans of OSDM revival should be locked away in a vault beneath the ocean and the raw material used for the manufacturing of their tasteless wares should be recycled. Same goes for nu-trad metal, thrash and everything else.
People who push for progression in metal, as in Zealotry, Ctheilist or whatever pale imitation of Gorguts/Finnish DM it is should be eradicated with bioweapons perhaps as a touch of irony being the infections they are. Death in opposition my ass lmao gtfo nerd
And despite what a certain egghead charlatan would tell you, metal will not be revived by improving composition or by leaving out the guitar altogether. Nor will it be reinvigorated with the incorporation of grandpa music ie. Romantic classical forms and structure. As you can see the death of metal traumatized some people to the point of senility. Therefore it is only an act of benevolence that they be put out of their misery.
I would also wish death on trad bands and fans. That shit wasn't even metal in the 80s.
I thank you for your time! I wish you and your project all the best. The last words are yours.
Thanks for the time as well.
RIP METAL 1985-1996
