Alda’s album ‘Tahoma’ opens with a dark earthy acoustic feral folk piece. Beneath the surface is soporific chanting which has a mystic quality until it builds into an intense blackened tremolo picked riff played faster than fast, then breaking off into a steady tribal rhythm. Tahoma is built up around this dark neofolk-style melted by layers of epic black metal. Giving an immense inevitable ruin like atmosphere interwoven with nature-inspired ambience. Enough of the homage, let Michael Korchonnoff from Alda do the talking.
Could you give a background to Alda? What bands, writers or movies inspire you?
Our origin lies in the town of Eatonville in Washington State where we all went to high school together. Jace and Michael had formed a Punk-influenced Black Metal band called Satus in 2004 while living in Eatonville and in 2007 following the official dissolution of this project we regrouped and re-vitalized ourselves with Tim and Stephanie as contributing members, re-christening ourselves as Alda.
Our first influences in relation to the music we’re making were really the early Scandinavian Black Metal bands with bands Ulver, Darkthrone, Burzum and Windir being the some of the most esteemed among us. Agalloch‘s The Mantle was also very influential on us. In our alienated, rural youth we were very inspired by this piece of local music that seemed to be a reflection of the land itself and identified with our yearnings to transcend the modern world. We’re drawn in particular to music that combines the fury and rawness of electrified music with organic, acoustic sounds. We have also been influenced profoundly by folk music in its various forms: roots country, delta blues, traditional European folk music and the Post-Industrial music currents sometimes referred to as “Neofolk“.
Although there are many pieces of literature and cinema that we love and resonate with, no piece of media has truly been the source of our inspiration. What moves us is our search for awakening, a trueness of purpose and Being in a world bent on cannibalizing itself through neurotic and pointless obssessions. When we read a text or view a narrative that inspires us it is because there is something resident within it that relates it to what we’ve experienced, observed or seek out in our lives. This being said, some recommendable works are the book Heartsblood by David Petersen, the film Dersu Uzala directed by Akira Kurosawa and the documentary Alone in the Wilderness about Richard Proenneke.
What is it like living in Tacoma, Washington gig wise etc?
We all lived in house together here with some of friends for several years and as transplants from a rural area we were pretty shocked by the change and adjusted badly to this city, which might seem silly to folks who live in truly urban environments, but that’s how we experienced it. We’ve had little relationship to the artistic and musical community of this town and we spent most of our time in our little enclave loosely trying to formate an intentional community, practicing archery and gardening in our backyard, writing and performing music together, as often as we could getting out to the wilderness outside of the city. There are some beautiful things surrounding and integrated with Tacoma. There is an Old-Growth Forest bordering the water called Point Defiance, there are the surrounding waters of the Puget Sound, and the Cascade and Olympic ranges as well as Mount Tahoma are visible from the city on a clear day.
We very seldomly perform in Tacoma. There is a house called the 5th Dimension that hosts shows here who have been supportive of us, and we’ve hosted a few shows of our own, but otherwise we end up keeping to ourselves.
What do you think of the Cascadian Black Metal tag given to you and Wolves in the Throne Room, Skagos, Ash Borer, Wake etc? I know it’s a region but do you think it has separated you more as environmentalist bands?
This is kind of a complicated subject to talk about. The term “Cascadia” refers to bioregional boundaries rather than political ones, which would suggest an ecologically-oriented stance that challenges modern attitudes of land-ownership. But not everyone who is assumed to be “Cascadian Black Metal” is necessarily in agreement about this, and part of this is probably because some outside music enthusiasts have been connecting the dots based on aesthetics and sound rather than content. One of the weird things about all of this however is that most of these artists really began this journey independent of one another, were later associated with each other and then later became friends and collaborators, and there is definitely a tribalistic undercurrent in the relationships between some of them. This is something a lot of outside spectators and online information-warriors don’t recognize, and make assumptions about us all just being a bunch of pretentious hipsters (or hippies, depending on who you ask) chasing the next derivative trend. This bioregional terminology in association with Black Metal (which originated with Echtra in the early 2000’s) has been around for nearly a decade and at its heart has nothing to do with any kind of music trend. The word Cascadia is just the tip of an iceberg. This land is a single family amongst a greater family.
Does Alda have a collective ideology? As I notice you do a lot of benefit gigs and of course lyrically there there is the nature theme? What are the lyrics about generally?
Alda’s collective point of view could be summed up thusly: We are animals, and as animals we are composites of natural forces. We are descended from an ancestry of integration with the cycles and patterns of nature. All notions of separation or dominion over nature are illusory – we’ve merely built a mental labyrinth to temporarily insulate our egos from the terror of death and the acknowledgement of the impersonal natural forces that both sustain us and destroy us. Despite the recognition that we are born into civilization and the games of civilization are meaningless, there’s no true justification to lapse into lazy nihilism. In recognizing the disparity between the life that is our birthright as animals and this bland cage we are forced to live in, we are compelled for the sake of honor to at least in some fashion attempt to manifest the world we want to exist in. You could say it’s a kind of fatalistic idealism that we hold up, and frequently fall short of.
We have performed at and helped organized several benefit shows as well as contributed work and energy to certain causes and activities that are connected to our values. We’ve undertaken these actions because we have always felt it extremely important to pursue direct action related to our passions and what we address in our art, because to merely display important and real issues and not engage them somehow is to become a spectacle, and we’re not interested in being entertainers by trade. This is a risky thing to do as artists though, because it’s easy to set yourself up for failure and confrontation when you get really hard-core about ideology. And at the end of the day these activities are just accessories to our lifestyles rather than integrated parts of our lives, as in a practical sense we’re still just modern people who work jobs and buy shit at stores to survive. It’s a work in progress for us though, and much of this may change if we stay focused.
Our lyrics are reference points for the journeys of our lives. They are brief verses of wrath and longing, meditations on parable myths and memories. Ruminations on our relationships with natural forces, and with each other.
What do you think is the worlds or where you live, biggest potential threat at present?
The Earth is a matrix of interconnected living systems, so in a sense it’s unwise to say one threat is greater than the other, at least on the surface of the planet. But to throw out a few local issues worth considering… the overfishing of the oceans and the diminishing return of the sacrificial Salmon runs. The encroaching logging operations on the few old-growth forests left in our region. Suburban sprawl and the related runoff. The absence of the balancing influence of apex predators. Ecosystem-destroying invasive plant species (Knotweed being a great example). The devastating stupidity of industrial materialism which should be obvious to pretty much every living being on the planet. And so on…
What is your opinion on the black metal scene in general? Due to your unusual style of music, I’d imagine you get a very mixed audience?
There isn’t really a single unified Black Metal scene, merely pockets of subcultures manipulating the oppositional stance of Black Metal to suit their own ends. The all-encompassing oppositional stance of this art is really the only unifying factor, and a big part of what makes it attractive to so many people outside of specific affinities to genre’s sound. The bummed-out nihilist and the atavistic Pagan are both proclaiming through their music that this reality we’re living in isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
Our audience are typically made up of people who have pretty diverse musical interests, although they all tend to like aggressive music. We tend to have mixed reactions from the die-hard metalheads though, and often we get much more appreciation and understanding from those coming from a Punk background.
What is your preferred release format? Do you think cassette only releases limits listenership?
We don’t really have a preferred format nor do we intend to limit ourselves to cassette, although we do have a great appreciation for that format. In general cassettes are only inaccessible to those who don’t want to invest in a tape deck, which is understandable since most folks have their music organized into digital libraries and there is less focus on albums as physical and visually conceptual objects than in the past.
Alda and Addaura are involved in the band Oakenheart is this more a project band or does it co-exist along with Alda? Have Oakenheart anything released?
Oakenheart is the project of Matt Godsey, who at one time was the drummer for Addaura and is no longer involved with that project. This band was reinvented as a full atmospheric Black/Doom project during the time Matt was living in the Alda house, and this project has had multiple lineups that have included various members of Alda at different times. Oakenheart has a full-length planned, but there is no certainty at this point when it will be recorded nor who will be collaborating on it.
What are the next plans for Alda?
Despite the passion we hold we are not the most organized of people and there is no certainty as to how prolific of artists we are likely to be. But our friendship and bond is likely to endure for a long time, and our music is part of that – in whatever form it may take.
http://www.myspace.com/aldacascadia
http://www.eternalwarfare.org
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