American black metal horde Nachtmystium have been garnering heaps of praise from both fans and the press for their latest release, Instinct:Decay. I got the chance to sit down with affable frontman Blake Judd to discuss the new album, his record label (Batle Kommand), and the state of black metal as we know it. For this being only his second-ever in-person interview, Blake proved extremely willing to talk and full of interesting ideas, so this interview is being run as a two-part piece.

Could you tell me a little about the history of Nachtmystium, for those who aren’t yet familiar with your band?

We formed in 2000, did two demos, a live demo, then put out our first full-length with the original lineup, which was me and a guy I went to high school with playing drums. We’ve reformed a bunch of times since then, and done a couple records in the earlier part of this decade,; the newest one is Instinct: Decay, and it’s our 3rd full-length.

It’s rare to see a black metal band of your stature playing a Philly show; we generally get passed by and overlooked as some sort of no-man’s-land between B.B.King’s [NY] and Jaxx [VA]. How did you end up playing here at the Khyber?

Oh, well, Thomas Pasquale, who’s an old Metal Maniacs writer from New York, has been helping us out with some booking lately; we’ve been wanting to play here for a long time now, so he booked the show, and this is where we wound up. It’s cool – it’s like an intimate club. I’d rather play here than some other places, like a VFW hall or something; we had to do that the other night, and it wasn’t so flattering. This is cool though; I like shit like this, it’s sort of what it’s all about.

It’s both surprising and unexpected to see you on such a doom-centric bill, going on both your previous work and your most recent release, Instinct: Decay. Do you feel that you fit more with traditional raw black metal bands or with more experimental doomy bands these days?

I fit in with these guys better than I do with black metal bands. Maybe we’re growing up, but nobody in this band has the black metal “evil guy” attitude. I did that for years and honestly, I met so many people that I didn’t like, and that I couldn’t respect. I met all these hardcore die-hard guys that were all into Satanism, the kvlt guys, and like nine out of ten of them – I mean, I’m sure there are legit people out there who are just whacked and really like black metal and are really into it, but most of them? They rip on Christians and shit for being “followers” and being “sheep”, but really, they’re the sheep. They learn what they like on forums, and they fight with each other and everyone else; because of the shit that happened in Norway years ago, these kids have this idea that black metal is supposed to be this everlasting battle. It’s only because the battle is incestuous. People aren’t out there burning churches anymore, they’re online being pussies, not doing anything face-to-face with people. Like I said, it’s not everybody, but it’s just kind of embarrassing, and I don’t want to be affiliated with it, because we’re nice guys. We like to play music, we like what we do, we have no problem smiling and saying hello to an audience -  there’s no front, and the music is still what it is, regardless. It’s the real deal. We’re not trying to be a black metal band, either. Our next record is very doomy – not in a stoner kind of way, though you could probably get stoned and listen to the last one, it has that psych-rock influence and everything – but I don’t want to be labeled as anything. I don’t want to be a doom band, I don’t want to be a black metal band; we obviously fall into the one genre due to the history of everything, but we ‘ve kind of abandoned all of that, and have spoken out against it for so long that it’s kind of funny that the tag’s still there! Some people pick up on it, like how Decibel said we put out the best “anti-black metal” record ever, as they put it, and I’m glad that somebody got that. Not that it’s good or bad, but that it kind of was that, a fuckin’ middle finger in the face of everybody who thinks you have to have these limitations, these Satanists…I think a Satanist sees god when he looks in the mirror, not his buddies that liked Watain a year before he did and that he follows around and sniffs their asses to see what’s cool this week. It’s like any music scene, it just happens to be that this one packs a really bad attitude a lot of the time. So yeah, to answer your question, I still like a lot of black metal bands, I respect a lot of black metal bands, and there are cool people out there within it, like Cold Northern Vengeance - we played with them last night. They’re great; no one was acting like an asshole, they’re a fuckin’ good band, they’re very into what they’re doin’, and they’re very much into the black metal thing, and it works for them. But, you now, we only run into a Cold Northern Vengeance every ten or so bands we play with oftentimes. I feel that we can fit into that, and on a bill like this, and I think it’s cool.

The release of Instinct: Decay has begun a new chapter in Nachtmystium’s progression. Many bands are content to release identical albums, but Nachtmystium has always seemed to push it further. While it’s still undeniably Nachtmystium, there have been noticeable changes in the music, such as a heavy Pink Floyd psychedelic kind of influence, and your solo work in particular stands out. How was it possible to draw influence from music that’s so very different from black metal?

I listen to both a lot. I’ve been listening to Pink Floyd since I was a kid. My parents raised me on them; they’re my favorite band of all time, the first band I ever saw live. They’re just a massively huge influence on why I like music at all, and out of all the bands that my parents played me – the Beatles, Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Allman Brothers – I liked all that stuff, but Pink Floyd had a little bit of darkness in them. Songs like “Welcome to the Machine,” a lot of it had a real obscurity to it, and they weren’t real pompous, they weren’t putting pictures of themselves all over everything and being a “70s rock band” – they were very much that, but at the same time, they were incorporating more art into their music visually, they had themes, lyrical themes that followed the jacket covers, and it all made sense to me. I’d never seen anything that extreme - that was the most extreme that my 30-year-old parents in 1986, when I was four or five and getting my first records, that’s what they had. So naturally, it probably would have been there a long time ago if I were capable of it, playing-wise, because I was an amateur when I started. I’m still not a good guitar player by guitar player standards, but I figured out how to do more of that sort of stuff. I stopped being afraid of upsetting the sort of people that I mentioned before, being afraid of losing the crowd – you know, when we made Instinct: Decay, we thought no one would like it. We didn’t like it at first, because we were like, “This is going a little...further…”
I mean, we liked it, I liked it. The guys I was working with were very unsure of it - not in terms of performance quality, but how it changes up, and is all weird, and has these obvious elements; we wanted everyone to know that what you're getting here is not a Darkthrone ripoff band. Hopefully you can hear that, underlying there at some points. We got over the whole idea that it might bum some people out, and we released it, and it’s done really well, and changed everything. Nobody gave a shit about us before, I mean there were some people that were into underground shit that knew us, but now, we see people that come out, like preppy high school kids – not that its everybody, but you see one or two, you see the hippie-looking guy and the people with dreadlocks. It’s not a purely metal audience. The expansion’s happened. We’ve lost a lot of that underground black metal fan base at the same time, but we kind of like that – I don’t like skinheads coming to my shows, for example...

The NSBM element.

I like a lot of NSBM bands musically. I mean, you can’t deny that there's some great music to be heard there.

Once in awhile you’ll see Nachtmystium mentioned in the same breath as bands that are associated with that scene; I saw an article in which you totally denied involvement with it, though..

Oh, no. We did a repress of “Reign of the Malicious” on Unholy Records, and they have ties to Resistance Records. We knew that there was a connection, and at first we said no. I was like 19 when I made that decision, and back then I was the black metal guy, you know, very much so, but I didn’t want the affiliation then because I had very high expectations for what I was going to do with this, and as long as people are listening its going to go on. The last thing I wanted was to have Instinct: Decay happen four or five years later and have that bite me in the ass. They told me that they had no affiliation with Resistance Records and were completely independent, but to this day, Resistance Records is the place where that CD comes from, and it's on their website as a release that’s completely, obviously associated with them. So, when Jay Bennett from Decibel Magazine did his big NSBM article a few month ago, that sparked a lot of controversy; he emailed me and asked if I wanted to talk about it, and I wrote back to him saying no. I know he’s a journalist and wants to get that edge in and be that guy, which he definitely is; he’s a good writer though, and some people like to read that. I enjoy his writing; some of it can come off as a little pretentious or obnoxious at times but that’s what he does, and he does it well obviously because he writes for Decibel and Revolver and Alternative Press, but he asked me about it, I said no, and he said he was going to have to write about it anyway.


Could you tell me a bit about Instinct: Decay – preparation, the songwriting process, writing/recording, the concepts behind the record…

I did all the music first. I’d just basically written all the riffs on my guitar and the drummer who played on that record learned the songs the day we recorded them – he’d never heard them before in his life. That’s how we recorded everything with that Wargoat guy – dude from Cult of Daath. He’s not available as a live member, but we’ve always recorded with him because our live drummers until now (the guy we’ll be playing with tonight has replaced him permanently as a studio and live guy, full-time) never really cut it in some shape or form. Either we didn’t like the way they played or they weren’t into it enough, or you know, we had one guy who was in a bunch of other bands that he thought were going to do better than this was, and he kept blowing us off. Long story short, recording was always interesting because Wargoat is a machine.  We just kind of rolled the dice with him, which was a funny time to roll the ice because that’s when we were working with Akhenaten from Judas Iscariot -  we were in my parents’ basement with this 4-track and shit, and we were like 18. It was awesome. He came over and we taught him the songs and he just belted 'em out and he was able to do it quickly.

    But, anyway, to answer your question, our drummer had never heard the tracks before, so we just belted them out in about a day and a half, and I laid the rhythm guitar tracks down because I had that all figured out. We did the arrangement once he was there, I kind of just showed up with a bunch of riffs, and we jammed 'em and fused 'em together and made the record, kind of on the spot. It was weird. So he did his thing, I put my rhythm tracks down, then I sat on it for 5 months and fucked around – all the shit you hear over it is months and months of me sitting around getting stoned with my guitar, listening to that record.

    We’ve never worked like a regular band; we don’t rehearse for four months and then go in the studio and record. We get together, teach the shit to each other, and then we go and jam it and record it ourselves. It’s so DIY – it’s kind of funny that there’s seemingly been such an impact all of a sudden, because we shouldn’t have any success at all, considering how things operate! So, it’s weird. Our drummer situation is still weird; that guy lives in California, we fly him around and get him out to tour – he’s been living on my couch since the Pelican tour, pretty much, which was in September. So, now it’s a little more structured, but it’s still kind of wacky.

So, I've got a pretty clear picture of your opinion of the current black metal scene, but do you have anything to add to your previous statements?

That answer answers how I feel about it. I like some bands; I like what Deathspell Omega’s doing, I like all the stuff that’s actually pretty trendy right now, and it’s trendy for a reason - because it’s good. I pay attention to most of the Southern Lord black metal stuff. I’m really into all my friends’ bands basically; I love Krieg, I like Leviathan a lot – that’s all I’m really into. Occasionally I’ll get a demo from somebody or something, but unless it’s like obscure South American Beherit-worshipping nasty necro shit, I don’t want anything to do with it. As far as black metal goes, I like really harsh bands like Blasphemy, Profanatica – that’s my favorite black metal band of all time.

[N.Imperial, of legendary USBM band Krieg, is playing the show tonight with his latest project, March into the Sea, and happened to wander in during our interview, just in time to offer some insight into the (in)famous Twilight project…]

Speaking of Leviathan, I know you two worked with Wrest on the Twilight project; can you tell me how that came about?

Blake: Ah, the infamous Twilight question!

N. Imperial: He gave me a call and said they were going to be recording an album in two weeks, and asked if I wanted to be a part of it. I booked my plane ticket while I was on the phone with him; that’s how I got involved with it.

Blake: I had this brilliant idea one night in 2002 – middle of the night, sitting at my computer – that I should email Wrest and Malefic – and be like “Let’s do an album together,” because we had all known each other for quite awhile, and everybody’s like “Cool” and then for a year it didn’t even come up in conversation. One day  I got a phone call from Wrest, like “Hey, let’s do that record,” so we pitched it to Total Holocaust, because we were all working with Haakon at the time, and he was like, “Oh, that sounds like a great idea!” and he send us one thousand dollars; that’s a very small amount of money to try and do something like that with. We ended up spending like 6 or 7 grand out of our own pockets just being there. Basically, we just flew out there; we had no game plan. Wrest had recorded some tracks and sent those to us, and Imperial and I went out there with a couple riffs, and were like, “Fuck it, let’s see what happens.” Malefic from Xasthur did his shit through the mail, which is why the song that he wrote, that sounds like Xasthur, is like that – he pretty much had to think a song up to be included in the group. We didn’t want to, you know, not have him involved, but we had wanted more of a team kind of thing. Basically, the record was Neil, myself, and Wrest. Hildolf from Draugar just happened to be there. He works in the same tattoo shop as Wrest; we didn’t know him at all, and we hadn't heard his band either, so we weren’t just all like, “Oh, you like black metal too, come be in our band!” Wrest wanted to involve him, so he did vocals, that was it. At its core, it really was just the three of us. We just did it to see what it'd sound like, and we told Haakon too that there was a chance that we could come out of this with something that we don’t want released, and if it didn’t work out we were sorry that he’d lost his investment. He was confident that something would come out of it that we would let him put out, and it did! Southern Lord called one day -  out of nowhere, Greg Anderson calls and was like, “Hi, I’m Greg Anderson, I own Southern Lord,” and everything changed for all of us – bam, instantly. So that’s where that affiliation comes from.

Was Twilight a one-off experiment, or do you plan to record another album?

Oh, we talk about it. I’m sure we will eventually. I have a feeling there’ll be some things that’ll be different about it, and if there’s any internal restructuring within the band, we’re going to call it something else. It was a total experiment – we think it’s kind of funny that people have this high expectation, because if you’re really into this music and you know anything about the bands you’re listening to, you know that we all work almost exclusively on our own; N. Imperial and I have always utilized other musicians in a recording environment, but we’re very dominant; what they’re doing is what we want them to be doing. Not in some asshole sort of way, but it’s not really a democracy. So naturally, when you put five people like that together and try to be creative as a group, it’s something that none of us was really used to. The fact that it is what it is, I’m personally very proud of it, because we made that in like a week. We just got together and busted it out. It is what it is; it gets a C, if you ask me, in terms of being a good record.

N. Imperial: As far as being a memorable experience, though…

Blake: Yeah, for us it’s like, “Eh, I don’t care if anyone likes it,” because it was a chance to go do that, and where we did it – I’d personally never been to California before, and I’d always wanted to go. Someone like me really likes it in San Francisco, because there are drugs everywhere…everywhere there are things to do!

N. Imperial: They give ‘em to you in your coffee.


Blake, what do you think of the American black metal scene? I think people are finally beginning to realize how much we have to offer.

It’s kind of weird, man; it’s become enough of a presence to have its own little separate cliques, and all the subgenres within it. You’ve got all your real brutal bands, you got your weird little pack of the Twilight bands, you’ve got...hell just a lot of bands that are emerging almost daily now. I remember like seven or eight years ago when you’d go see local bands playing and if you saw a “black metal” band, you were seeing a band that would have the keyboards and be doing the Emperor thing – it might have been fruity, it might have been decent. But now, the necro thing is so popular – and it’s so easy too. If you know how to play power chords, and you’ve got a guy who can kind of play drums, you can get away with making some raunchy black metal. So  I think it’s cool, I'm glad that people are doing it, and like I said I've got a lot of feelings about the people in the scene and where it’s at in that regard, but you know if they’re making music, then good for them. I like that there are a few bands that are getting some love from the “real press” too.



(To be continued.)