CVLT Nation Interviews:
LUSTMORD

CVLT Nation has always been all about everything dark, so it should come as no surprise that we decided to sit down and talk with the master of darkness himself, Lustmord.

Hi Brian,  you just released a brand new album after some time of silence. What else do you have planned for the rest of the year now that it’s out?

I’m off to Europe in a couple of weeks to do some some shows, so that’s going to keep me busy. I’m doing a show in London in two weeks. Haven’t been back to my hometown of the UK in twenty years so I’m looking forward to it. Also going to play a show in Den Haag in the Netherlands and one in Latvia. While in Britain I will also take time to visit my family. Supposedly there will also be a couple of shows in Russia in October, but the russian consulate can be a real pain in the ass with visas and all, so we’ll see how that goes. My biggest current project though is mixing, mastering and releasing a huge amount of my earlier work for a vinyl box, a triple vinyl or something, we’ll see. A famous movie director is also preparing a TV show and he asked me to use my music in it. It’s a big deal which I’m really excited about, but that’s all I can say about that for now. He’s also going to use my music in his next movie, but again, I can’t say much more right now. I’m also working on a major video game score that I was asked to work on a bout a year ago. Some annoying politics have gotten in the middle of that too, but it’s in the works.

Twenty years away from the UK. Wow. What kept you away from your motherland for so long?

Nothing major really, I was just too busy living life and exploring other places. And America, well, it is so big, I have been here for so long and feel like there is still so much of it I haven’t seen to worry about going back to the UK. I like to take trips with offroad vehicles into the californian desert and explore. No real reason really for such a long absence. I just feel like there so much to see outside of the UK to see still, and that has kept me elsewhere for the past two decades.

You recently got back from a show on the East Coast with Neurosis. How was it? Did you know those guys prior?

I didn’t know them very well. Just went back and forth by email with Steve years ago about possibly doing some shows together, but that never materialized. I would say I know more of them than know them personally. We just happened to be playing the same show and that is all we had in common till today. We didn’t really have time to hang out at the show either or get to know each other since we were so busy setting up our respective shows and we all kind of left in a hurry after that to catch our flights and return to our everyday lives. I’m definitely aware of them and know they have been around for a long time and have a following, but that’s pretty much it.

Were you invited to play the show by them?

No, by the show’s organizer, we happened to be playing the same show by coincidence I believe.

What did you think of their show? It’s true they have a massive following and are hugely influential…

They are okay, metal isn’t really my thing, so that genre doesn’t really make me tick. I never really got the rock stuff. I can appreciate some things about it, and some obvious landmarks of it, like Zeppelin and early Cream and so on. I also enjoy the Melvins. I get what rock music is aiming for, the riffs and all that, but it’s just not my world, and besides that I just don’t think enough rock is that interesting to get more excited about it. Neurosis definitely have their own thing going on though, that seems obvious, but again, it’s not my thing, and I have a hard time appreciating that style of vocals they use. It’s pretty obvious though that what they do they do pretty well, I can tell enough of that!

Regarding your new album The Word As Power, how did it come along? Was it an easy album to make or hard one?

No, it was easy, very easy. It took a lot of time to make, but not cause it was hard, mainly just because of time issues, and so many other things going on in my life. When I work on an album I’m not just workin on an album, I’m also doing a million other things at the same time, working, doing projects on commission for other people and so on, and even working on multiple projects of mine at the same time. I don’t just lock my self in in a room and work away at a new record till it’s done. I work on it when I can and feel like it. I’m just so busy doing other things that sometimes my albums don’t have room to develop fast.

How are you albums born on a technical level? How do you compose and where do you get ideas from and what sources of inspiration do you have?

There is no simple answer to that or a way to answer the question in one word. There is a very broad spectrum of elements that need to be considered to explain how my albums come together. I take inspiration from anything that surrounds me that strikes me in some way. Books, films, anything really. Also conversations I have with other people sometimes strike me, philosophies, or random facts or unexpected life events. Could be anything really. Small things that happen, then stick, then coalesce and so on. Inspiration comes rom friends and human interaction. From conversations and so on. Also from just being mentally active and stimulated. Throwing ideas around both outward and inward with my self. I don’t have a normal musician routine album – tour – album – tour like many musicians do, so I just work on stuff when it feels right and I feel compelled to do so and it feels like I have something to say. My albums are planned from the beginning and and take shape in my head first and that could take some time. Then when I’m ready I sit down and compose it, and that itself could take some time as well.

How important is the conceptual sphere of your music? Is it more about the sound or more about the meanings for you?

The concept is extremely important to me and a big part of the music. Sometimes it’s there but not even clear or mentioned at all. I’m most definitely a conceptual person and musician. That’s what really excites me about making music, the whole story line and the ideas and concept behind it. The sound is more a result of that than anything.

The Word As Power seems more focused on more legendary and epic sounds than on the evil and more demonic sounds of your work prior to this one. Do you agree?

Not really. The “demonic” sounds you mention are not an intent but only the result of how people maybe perceived that work. I don’t have any problem with that but for me the issue is on a totally different level. For me this album is just a natural evolution of the rest of my work. Actually, a lot of the music on this album is years old and from the same period if not antecedent to my older work. So even on a temporal standpoint the description doesn’t really apply. Some parts of this album are sixteen or seventeen years old. My next album has been planned for twenty years now and is not ready yet. I started working on it eighteen years ago and it’s still not finished. As I said earlier I just got side tracked with other projects and it will be finished when I have the time to put into it. I don’t make money to pay bills from my work so for the most part I need to work on the music and projects that do pay my bills, and that could even lead to an album being twenty years in the making in my world. I need to work so I can make my music, but then sometimes I have no time for my music because of work. It’s a vicious cycle, but I’m fine with it. There are also other technical aspects that slow things down even more. For instance this last album was ready to roll a long time ago, but it took me years to find the the right vocalists for it and to add the final touch to it in the way that I had it planned in my head. I needed a whole array of hard to find things, that took years to obtain in the end. Not only the right voices but also the right attitudes and so on. I found the voices in the span of the last three years and that finally made it possible to finish the record after all these years.

Can you tell us about these guests on the albums? Jarboe, Maynard from Tool and so on…

Jaroboe and I go way back. I did some remix work for her a while back, and we talk and meet from time to time. She’s a friend and we appreciate each other’s work. In this instance she kind of owed me a favor from way back, so I told her that there was the chance to return the favor for my album and it all worked out. Maynard actually suggested it himself to be on my next album. He wanted to do it. I worked with him on lots of stuff, Puscifer, some Tool stuff and lots of remixes, so I am very familiar with his voice and I knew it would work out perfectly. We just know each other too well and we know each other artistically, it was quite natural. Maynard is a very skilled artist and his style and work ethic were perfect for my needs. If you listen to a Tool album you can tell the vocals are great, but if you listen to Tool’s multitracks, there you get the full scope of the depth of his work. He has a lot of things going on that are imperceptible on the final product but with which without the final result would not be as you hear it. His vocal work is very complex in the backend of Tool’s music but most people don’t know it or don’t perceive that. I needed all that complexity of his for my layers and sonic structures of vocals, and he is the perfect artist to bring that to the table. And then there is my friend Aina, who is the main voice on the album who I have been working with for some time now. She’s just a huge fan of all things Lustmord and knows my music very well, and of course has a great voice and is a dear friend so she was a spontaneous choice as well. She just had the perfect attitude and skills for the project.

The predominance of such epic and structured female vocals in this album reminded us a bit of Dead Can Dance, what do you think?

I get it, I can see that. I’m a bit weary of such comparisons cause Dead Can Dance can tend to be a bit too dramatic for my tastes, but I can see how such a comparison could arise. I’ve known Lisa and Brendan for years, we used to live around the corner from each other and I would spend a lot of time at their house. I haven’t spoken to them for years, I think the last phone call I has with Lisa was over a decade ago, and I don’t think our music has any point of contact any more, but the comparison makes sense I guess.

Regarding you live element, you went from not perfoming live at all for decades to all of a sudden performing sporadicly but regularly, how did that happen?

True, I hadn’t played for nearly twenty five years. My last live gig was in 1981. But then in 2006 my twentyfifth anniversary as Lustmord came along and it felt like maybe I should have some sort celebrative event happen so the live thing came into mind. There are also other elements that have shaped my absence from live activity though. Lack of time due to work, the fact that for me the studio became an instrument so that I was not sure of how to bring that to a stage and so on. It also took me some time to figure out how I was going to do it without it being boring or ineffective. The advent of laptops and the fact they had become so powerful suddenly made the live thing a possibility again in my world. I needed portable studio power for my shows that had been absent from the world for the most part of the last decades. Then I thought that a dude playing live with his laptop would just be weird though, so that halted things again till I could figure out more interesting ways to make it happen. When I saw Kraftwerk live, that perception all changed for me. I love Kraftwerk and I was blown away by their set, but all they used were laptops, so I realized there really wasn’t an issue there with the extremely minimalistic instrumentation, and that having just a laptop was not a limit at all, as long as a really good sound and really powerful visuals were studied in the right way as to fill the void. Then around the same time I get this phone call from the guys from the Church of Satan and they had this public ritual scheduled to celebrate their forty year anniversary and they asked me to do the music for it, and I thought it would be fun. It was supposed to be on 06/06/06 of course, so I realized that after twentyfive years of not playing live I had the occasion to do it on such an unique – and frankly funny – date, so that was it, I realized I could not miss out on the symbolic timing that was, so I offically made a comeback live on that occasion. I thought to myself “if I don’t play a show on 06/06/06 I’m never going to play ever again”, so I went for it. So then I did it with just a laptop and a great software called Ableton Live and it worked out great and I was really impressed with the turnout so that kept me going with the live thing and it helped me realise that the live things was feasible and even enjoyable. After that I was inactive for a bit till a festival in Poland called Unsound really wanted me to play there about two years later, so once again I resumed the live thing for a sporadic and selected event. In the meantime I developed the visual aspect of things and also started to work with the really loud and big sound systems which took the experience to next level. Now I just want to play live shows that can count on great projection gear and huge sound systems. The Neurosis show was a bit disappointing in that because the screen was shitty and the experience overall was a bit below my expectations. I just want people to have the most powerful experience possible when they come to my shows.

You make all you visuals as well?

For the most part, I would say about 90% of them. I’m completely self taught with After Effects but some friends working in the entertainment industry have also helped me in the years with that, but yeah, for the most part it’s all me.

How did you cope with the quick change in technologies happening in your realm of things – electronic music? In rock and roll for the most part musicians have been using electric guitars and amps for the past forty years, but in your world however things have changed dramatically and we went from analog synths to powerful laptops in less than twenty years…

In the beginning I didn’t own any gear and borrowed what I could or used stuff I found laying around, pipes, rocks, anything that could make a sound. I didn’t know anything about technologies or gear when I started. So for me the transition from analog synths to computers was natural and fluid since I had never been restrained by anything before. My first computer was an Atari with about 500 KB of RAM. Incredible. But still then such a primitive machine for the times allowed you to manipulate things quite fast and easely. I had actually been waiting for such a versatile and fast tool to come along for such a long time. I actually found synths boring and restraining. Big bulky machines basically trying to mimic and replicate the sound of real instruments.

Can you see going back to analog synths one day?

I’ve always been more of an audio guy than a synth guy and I’ve also never been an analog VS digital kind of guy. For me they are all tools and I just use what is more convenient. What counts for me is the end result, the medium is secondary, so I will just use whatever can make my ideas happen in the most efficient and natural way possible. Also, synths just sound like synths. I mean the analog synth sound is so recognizable that it would impair what I’m aiming for at this point. I’m currently aiming at sounds and textures that you just can’t achieve with those old synths. I don’t want my music to be recognizable or traced back to the sound of the instrument it was created with. I also want my music to be timeless so it must never be restrained within the capabilities of current technologies. Go and listen to that electronic music from the eighties, you can totally tell it’s from the eighties. Well, I never want that to show in my music. If you hear my stuff from the eighties, good luck on pigeonholing it. You can’t. When you listen to it you could argue that it could be from the eighties or even from the future for all that you will know. That’s how I like things to be. I’m also going for the whole primal thing and and in that too technology even the most recent one can impair that aspect of my music as it tends to be too clean and polished. For me the more chaotic, primal and organic sounds are what count the most.

How did you get into the ambient and dark realm of things back in the day?

I listen to many kinds of music, and most of the one that I like has a groove or a beat actually. But there was this type of music that I wanted to listen to as well, which didn’t exist, so I was basically forced to create it on my own for myself to listen to. That’s how it started. I’m also a big dub guy, and will always enjoy doing dub mixes and all that, so I’m pretty sure that played a key role in it.

So the whole good VS. evil thing has no role in your creative process?

Oh no, that is just what I have come to be known for and why people come to me professionally as well, cause I make these kinds of sounds, but I’m a good guy, definitely not evil. I just have fun making this type of sounds, that’s all, I find it enjoyable. I’m not in a dark place or anything. Some people like to hear dark or fucked up sounds or they needed it for whatever their needs are so they come to me for that. I like doing it and have enjoyed so for quite some years now, so I ended up being able to do it quite well, but the story ends there.

You mentioned Zeppelin and Kraftwerk as influences, any contemporary artist that you have come to appreciate in recent time?

Oh yeah, there are lots of them. But right now I can’t think of anything in particular. Let me see… Shackelton live was quite interesting. Code Nine are very good live as well. Fever Ray made a great album recently as well. I like a lot of dub-techno stuff as well. I run into lots of good stuff here and there that I appreciate but it continuously comes and goes. There just is so much stuff out there now, the majority of it is shit but rarely something really good comes along, but it’s just too much to keep track of sometimes. The reason I like to play festivals for instance is to also because they allow me to discover new musicians I didn’t know of, since you always end up on a bill with other folks playing. That’s how I found out about Rain, another techno kind of project, and I was really happy I did. The new Atom album is great too.

Going back to our initial chat,  could you elaborate more on why you decided to leave England twenty years go to never go back again for over twenty years?

Well, I first came to the US back in the day with Chris and Cosey, from Throbbing Gristle. We were very close friends back then and they were on a tour of the States and I tagged along to just hang out with them. We landed in New York and then drove around the country for the six weeks of the tour and covered over ten thousand miles. We saw Canada, Texas, New Mexico, Boston, Chicago and so on, and I realized how big and vast the country was and how much to see there was. I fell in love with the US pretty fast. You know how Europeans are, they love the US but are a bit weary of the culture, but then when they get here they actually see things differently. I particularly fell in love with the West of the USA cause it feels even more vast and wild. I especially loved, and still do, California, a place that always felt like home from the start. It’s not easy to actually move here and certainly was not back then either but there was an offer from a friend of mine of the time, a film score composer, to work in the film industry so that brought me from San Francisco to my current location, Los Angeles where I ended up getting a work visa. I seldom see my family in the UK, but it’s all good. British culture can be a bit negative about the whole follow your heart and dreams kind of thing so I really wasn’t drawn back to the country after i discovered the USA, I don’t think it would have been stimulating to go back there. Here it’s more refreshing, there is more positivity and people are more encouraging and stimulating in my opinion.