It is a weird sensation to switch the computer on, connect to the web, check the e-mail and being struck by a message about the opportunity to interview none less than Stephen O’Malley! I guess the man does not need much introduction, although envisaging him “simply” as one of the two sinister cloaked minds and supreme entities of mythical and megalithic SunnO))) is correct but reductive. You can spend actually long hours, when not days, while plunging into Stephen O’Malley’s impressive and widely branched-out artistic activity. As a matter of fact (… take a deep breath …) the man writes and plays music, experiments, collaborated and collaborates with a biiig amount of musicians in a big number of projects and bands, has an intense touring activity, when he goes to Roadburn the huge hall of the Main Stage is overflowing, was actively writing about extreme metal back in the 90’s, is a highly appreciated graphic artist, studies and listens to music at 360°, is the curator of a particular label called Ideologic Organ, is artistic director of international cultural and musical festivals (like the Transmissions Festival, in Ravenna, Italy), etc. …Just think about the number of cool past and present-day bands variably involving Stephen O’Malley beside SunnO))): e.g., KTL, Æthenor, Gravetemple, Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine, Burning Witch, Khanate, Lotus Eaters, Fungal Hex, Pentemple, Thorr's Hammer, etc. … Please consider that Stephen O’Malley is not even 40 years old and doesn’t look like a “boring” posh intellectual but like a metaller!!! With an excellent taste for jackets, by the way …
Anyway, I got this amazing opportunity of interviewing Stephen O’Malley with the precious help of my mates Michele Giorgi and Fabrizio Garau out at
The New Noise webzine and their friend who arranged for the rendez-vous. I got hold of Stephen by phone on last April 3rd 2013, when Stephen had just come back to France, where he lives, after ashort trip overseas. With an artist like Stephen O’Malley and with a forcibly limited time available at the telephone, one cannot obviously speak about everything. This time we concentrated on a few recent, present-day and imminent activities and events involving Stephen and some of his mates and artistic collaborators: notably Stephen’s label Ideologic Organ and the imminent release of Gravetemple’s new LP plus their gig at Roadburn on friday April 18th 2013. Although Stephen’s friendly and sociable attitude invariably lead the chat into exploring curious and nice features of the past …
Here is the trascription of that chat. Enjoy!
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Mari – Hi Stephen, thanks for accepting the interview. There would be so many things to speak about with a person, musician and artist like you but I know that in this occasion we are going to focus on two main topics, your label and the new release by your band Gravetemple, which will also be playing at the Roadburn Festival in Tilburg shortly. So let's start by speaking about your label, Ideologic Organ, and your collaboration with Edition Mego, run by Peter Pita Rehberg, who is also your mate in KTL. (HERE) Why did you start a label and what are the elements of, let’s say, human and artistic affinity linking you and Pita in this particular type of activity?
Stephen O’Malley (SOMA) – Hello! Well, yes, let’s start with the label! Peter and I have been working together for about 6-7 years by now making music. He also played in some live shows of SunnO))) many years ago, about 10 years ago now. But we started composing music together for a theater work for a French director named Gisèle Vienne. And over the past three years we wrote quite a lot of music together, for her, for Gisèle Vienne, for various theater pieces, and also for KTL, the band which we ended up creating out of that collaboration..
Editions Mego sort of had a resurgence in the past 5 years. During that period of time Peter started working with John (Elliott) from the band Emeralds at a sort of imprint label called Spectral Spools. And that was really positive for both of them. And also John, you know, his taste, his curating and the way he was developing the identity of Spectral Spools ... So Pita continued to develop some imprints. And one of those imprints was also working with the GRM, which is the studio started by Pierre Schaeffer in the Maison de Radio France in the late 50s and which became quite a centre for concrete/contemporary electronic and experimental music in the 60's and 70s in France and in Europe. So … Peter, as Edition Mego, had a lot of connections with experimental musicians related to that studio. The GRM is still around, it is a society, sort of. And so they developed a label called the R-GRM (= Recollection-GRM), as an imprint, and this is also part of the Editions Mego sort of family of labels, or whatever you want to call it. They released a couple of pieces from the archive ... It is pretty astounding actually what has been done there. The other imprint, or one of the other imprints (there's a few other too) was my imprint, Ideologic Organ. It was decided I would be the curator of this small vynil edition label basically. And, you know, that's a great idea. Personally I don't have the infrastructure set up for really run a company right now and I'm not sure I would like to have the chance to do it right now, you know. But partnering with Editions Mego it is possible for me to still curate a label in this way and enjoy selection. Well, first of all the music is very interesting and pleasurable to listen to; second of all the conceptual sort-out I'm behind, about either the pieces on their albums I'm publishing, who are the musicians themselves or their history,and so on. This is very interesting. So we do the label, and Edition Mego is the company that handles all the distribution, mail order, printing, or it is my partner involved in this. So maybe it is a sort of viewpoint on music that I find interesting .. But the label is still young, it is still very young and finding its identity, I feel.
Mari – Well, I would say there is already a nice variety of releases through Ideologic Organ. Also … about the variety of musical offer gained from your label, I was thinking this: thanks to your music and to your multifaceted offer via the label, do you think that more metallers discover experimental and avantgarde music or things went the other way round, with more aficionados of avantgarde music evaluating extreme metal. I mean, this is also involving not only your label but also your activity as a musician ... Also, I ask this because it may be almost a natural question to do/pose to a label manager who is pairing up black noise like in Wold and Sir Richard Bishop, for example. So what is the idea behind your plan or programs for the release of such heterogeneous albums? Do you want to draw people from different scenes together?
SOMA - I don't know if I could say that this may bring people into different types of music, by “genre” so much ... I believe “genre” is something more interesting as a younger person when it's all like using genre as a form of identity, at least for my generation. You know, I'm almost 40 years old. I can think of “genre” like an identity, a group you can associate with and become one of, and then genre that becomes a restriction because of course everyone grows and changes their identity over time. And then now for me it doesn't really matter, genre is now simply a sort of mental categorizing tool. I means there are many ways to look at genres. I can explain genres for as conceptual music. That is genre. So maybe all the albums that are released on Ideologic Organ can be considered like this too. Well, that's my viewpoint of course, but maybe it has something to do with the generational factor as well because for people of the younger generations, people who are 20-21 right now, maybe “genre” is so important because the access to music is so much more than when I was 20-21. Now it is really possible to be exposed to and to be able to access many, many, many kinds of music of all sort of popularity and distribution. Very quickly just by the internet, of course. You can even find recordings from the early 1900, you know, those recordings on wax, you can find them in the internet in ten minutes! Eh eh .. It must be incredible for someone to come into the joy of exploring music today, to be able to do that. On the other hand, how do you categorize your record collection? Eh eh… Do you do that hypothetically or do you put it "ok this is my jazz section, this is my black metal section, this is my black music, here are my black-coloured albums,..." eh eh ...", you know ... it's all a matter of self-organization ... But you know I think I always ... I never personally felt so inside of a group, like I never felt too deep into the black metal scene or in the electronic music scene or whatever, doom metal scene ... I never really ... I've always ... I liked to see what’s on but from outside, as an outsider and I enjoyed that too. For me there is a restriction of being caught up with the identity of others to the point when your identity is gone ... I think there is a lot of re-interpretation of the music. And if you are a very big fan of music whose pleasure is the discovery anyway, why put restrictions on it?
Mari – Yes, you’re definitely right. By the way, this temporal issue that you have been mentioning now reminds me of the fact that you have posted the digital versions of your old fanzine Descent on your personal website
SOMA - Yeah!
Mari - A sort of look into the roots of everything. It is a nice pairing of your label now with all the influences and, let's say, different worlds coming together and … your roots! I found it quite interesting.
SOMA - Yeah, I don't know if it is a good idea to expose your roots, I don't know if it is a good idea to show my fanzine of when I was 18 years old, you know. It is not exactly “open-minded”, maybe it is a little bit embarassing! But on the other hand anyone made choices back in time that may not gonna be the same twenty years later … to me it is interesting to see it in a linear trend. For me that activity was more like an exercise of alchemy, almost, because creating that fanzine took so much effort ...
Mari - I can only imagine!
SOMA - … to even discover how to print, to discover how to organize things into a lay-out, to discover what paper to use, how to find the way to promote the fanzine, how to find people to sell it for me or to mailorder. Everything was a continuous discovery. And now I can do the same in two hours! Two hours scanning the fanzine, printing a pdf and posting it on my website. And I swear there would be more downloads of that fanzine than I ever printed, maybe by a factor of ten. In just two months! It is pretty amazing! Eh eh eh …The internet doesn't tell you about time so much. It is not like finding an ancient book and really feeling the history of time in the pages as you turn and read them, view, feel them. The internet is always simply quite ... eh eh eh ... so ... you know, that sense of time does not always has the same feeling. I mean you can find the wax recordings of the early 1900 like in ten minutes. So what is that? Is that a time capsule or a representation that time does not exist? I mean ...
Mari - I see what you mean. However I think it was a nice thing to see the very physical roots of a musician, you, that is considered, maybe in a superficial way, connected to electronic music, that is something a bit more "abstract" than metal or so. Maybe some peope think about you as an experimental musician who is somehow into metal. But when you see those "physical", solid roots, like the fanzine, old-school fanzines, it is a cool way of seeing you “physically”!
SOMA - Yeah, everyone has an history, I mean ... I was reading an interview with the singer of, the other day. And he was talking about all sorts of influences! This guy is an incredible pop musician but he was talking about thr Bad Brains, how Bad Brains and hardcore had changed his life, and stuff like that. So everyone has one's own history. For me my history was growing up in the suburbs of Seattle and discovering geography and music through tape trading and making a fanzine. Consider that in the first issue of the fanzine the front cover is Burzum! In 1994, you know … I interviewed Varg something like a couple of months after he went into prison. He is out now after serving almost 20 years in jail. Eh, it was 1994, crazy! But everyone has this type of roots. I was talking with the singer of Lungfish hardcore band, Daniel Higgs. You know now Daniel Higgs is a great solo musician, incredible singer, and is also playing banjos most of the times, and plays carnatic music, or else his own version of carnatic music. He is a beautiful musician, but also, during the 80s, he was the singer of one of the most crazy hardcore bands in Washington DC, Lungfish. I was talking to him before he was doing his raga show actually in Ravenna, at the Transmission festival, in there. And I was talking about playing Lungfish gigs, and being on punk rock shows. Well, he was telling me so much about how much LSD was very important in the Washington DC hardcore scene. This is a scene very much like into straight-edge, it is where the idea of straight-edge was born. . He was telling me that as much as straight edge was important, there was also a huge amount of people taking LSD at these concerts, … and the bands too! So you have all these stories … It could be pretty interesting, you know. But then everyone has one’s own life to think about, so … which is way more than enough for almost everyone, so … It is really the present, when you view other people, you really focus on their present, and the history you discover, well, it’s history, it doesn’t exist any more.
Mari – Yeah, I can see your point. Well, speaking about present-day things, let’s speak about Gravetemple and the album that is about to be released, Ambient/Ruin (*), out on the end of April, isn’t it? After Roadburn. Or will it be actually out before?
[see the review of Ambient/Ruin
HERE]
SOMA - Yeah, we were trying to make it for that set of shows we are going to do this month …Gravetemple group is a kind of spin-off of my band SunnO))). There was a moment when SunnO))) were offered to do some things and some people didn’t want to do them and some people did. So we did a couple of spin-offs, or different versions, in a way. One is called Gravetemple and the other one was called Burial Chamber Trio. Yeah, some people were in either one or the other or so. And in Gravetemple we started doing a few things in 2006. Gravetemple was made up by Oren Ambarchi and myself and Attila Csihar, all of whome were in SunnO))) at that period. And Burial Chamber Trio ended up being Oren Ambarchi, Attila Csihar and Greg Anderson, and also another guy, a drummer from Hungary. Anyway Gravetemple came back together in that trio, sometimes wit a couple of other people a few times, and did small tours and even single shows, sort of very very experimental and very improvised, but also with the pleasure of being together. Because being together was not only to have great meals and spend time together but also to make music together. This is the way we enjoy each other’s time. So the album we are releasing was actually the demo that we made in 2007-2008 to sort of prepare ourselves to a small tour we did together in 2008. This demo was made as small edition on CD at that time. Now it is kind of unavailable. So we decided to make a proper edition on vinyl. So that’s what that record is.
Mari – Yes, I had read about the story of the demo. Well, probably that was also the most appropriate release for turning it into a double LP because it is not a single track/pièces as the other albums you did (The Holy Down and Les Vampires de Paris). Or maybe not?
SOMA - Well, that doesn’t really matter in mastering. Actually both of those pièces have several “stages”. It’s just that maybe with Ambient/Ruin we made different tracks by cutting off the stages. But, I mean, Ambient/Ruin is a faux album, it is a type of thing where you don’t listen to each track separately, otherwise it is out of context, in my opinion. It is something about … well, now with the vinyl you can listen to a side only, but, well, I would suggest … well, people have different ways for listening to music, of course …It may be that in the future we make some more vinyls for the other releases too, because, for example, they all show some interesting features or points in the history of Oren Ambarchi’s music. Like what happened to Oren after the Black One record, or what was his involvement with SunnO))), or with people in SunnO))), etc. He was performing in album Monolith and Dimensions, recording it, but he didn’t tour with the band at that time. So Gravetemple continue to do a few things together too. It is also my own history with things, you know. Yeah, I mean, how everyone is gonna listen to it it’s fine for me, if you are looking to the music in the first place, I am on it. So … Do as thou wilt! …
Mari – Did you change something, did you do some exrtra work on the original 2008 tracks for the new edition on LP?
SOMA – Well, they had to be remastered for the vinyl, of course, but to say that a demo was remastered sounds kind of silly, eh eh eh …, so let’s say the demo was “mastered”. And it was taken care of by a great sound engineer.
Mari – Cool! By the way, year 2008 was also the year when Grave Temple incorporated a new member. You were a trio and became a quartet with the drummer Matt “Skitz” Sanders (a.k.a. Matt “Skitz” Sanders). Is he now a stable member of the line-up?
SOMA - Skitz? His name is Skitz, like “schizophrenic”, hahahaha! No no, he joined us for one tour and for some studio drumming. He is on the album and we did some touring with him. I’d love to play some more with him. That man is incredible indeed, and it was a real honour for me to play with him. But on this coming tour we are a trio. Also Oren is playing drums in the group, at times.
Mari – I see! Was it difficult to convince a black-death metal drummer to be involved into your projects or not?
SOMA – Well, Matt Sanders is an open-minded person. Oren had worked with him several times. You know, Matt Sanders is from Australia, as Oren Ambarchi is. They worked together in a few experimental projects in Australia either playing together or Matt playing with another drummer or playing with an opera singer. He is an open-minded musician. Not that his style is like that, but matt is a bit like Dave Lombardo. Dave Lombardo didn’t play only and always with Slayer, but he play also with a lot of experimental musicians on a lot of other projects. He is open-minded and pushing himself. Matt Skitz Sanders has that kind of mentality too. I mean, convincing him to play, the idea of it, was not and is not a problem. The only problem ends up being logistical. Now during this tour we franlkly could not afford to pay for him to come over, so this is what happens.
Mari – Eh, it is a real pity … Ok, I see my time is finished. For my last question I would like to ask you about Oren Ambarchi. How did your interaction with this musician start? I mean, what are the common grounds for your combined research? Is it something related to how you both use guitar in a non-rock/non-metal way or what?
SOMA - I actually want to tell you a story, a kind of funny one. I used to live in Manhattan time ago and I was DJ-ing sometimes in different events. On one event back in 2003 or so I was Djing and decided to play one of Oren’s tracks a second albumI came out on touch, Grapes from the Estate. There’s a track called Corkscrew, that for me is kind of … that album and that track, for me it’s classic Oren Ambarchi for composition. So I was playing that track at the club, and the bass was so insane that it set off the fire alarms in the club! All the sirens went off and everything, people evacuated the club and seven (!!) fire department trucks came to the club! It was a big mess, because the bass on that track was so strong that triggered the fire alarm. So, evacuation, fire department people, it was kind of disaster. But I wrote an e-mail to Oren the next day telling him the story. He simply wrote back and just said: “ We must work together”. Hahahahah! And then when SunnO))) were invited to Australia we had an incredible experience and it started all. Now, well, it’s almost ten years ago!
Mari – Hahaha … thanks, nice story indeed! And, well, a cool way for finishing this much pleasant chat with you, Stephen. Thanks for everything, all the best for the release, the band and the tour, and, well, see you at Roadburn!
SOMA – Thank for the interview and, yeah, see you and the people there at Roadburn or around!
Words:
Marilena Moroni & Stephen O’Malley
Special thanks to: Michele Giorgi & Fabrizio Garau of The New Noise, and our contact with Stephen O’Malley.
Credits of Gravetemple’s live photos go to Tom Medwell
Stephen O'Malley's Official WebsiteIdeologic OrganGravetemple | FacebookGravetemple | Ambient Ruin Double Lp - HEREGravetemple | Soundcloud