
Limerence Interview
Q: Can you talk about your history as an artist?
A: It always feels strange answering a question like that. It is rather difficult to answer that question and consider myself an artist without feeling in some sense pretentious. Obviously, I have written music and performed it, so in that technical sense I suppose I am an artist. I don’t like using that term because it implies that I am some sort of elevated person or something dumb like that, whereas I’m just a dude who recorded some music that some people like.
That said, if y'all would like a "short" oral history of sorts, hold onto your butts.
I grew up In the Bay Area and met two amazing brothers, Paul and Evan Carr, great musicians in their own respective right, playing "lead" guitar (badly) as an early member of their band Undergone. Paul’s an amazing drummer and I credit him with getting me into playing music, as I originally wasn’t too much of a musical person when I was younger. Evan's also an incredible songwriter and has his own series of projects, including some great post-rock stuff.
I kind of just started dicking around with my guitar after that, playing in Jazz Band in school, learning an intensive amount of music theory and writing my own bog-standard heavy metal riffs and stuff. I started jamming with people in college, but I didn’t really get anywhere until I had to move back home and started recording my own one-man black metal project called Yuggoth, using Logic Pro X/Drumkit From Hell-programmed blast beats and layers and layers of guitar tracks. It saved my sanity after graduating college right on the cusp of an economic meltdown, failing to get a job and living with my parents. Things didn't really kick off with live music until I moved to the Greater Los Angeles area and met an individual who founded a noise rock/experimental music collective that shall remain nameless, which I "joined." Suffice it to say it was an interesting, intensely educational, and eventually positive experience, in that I met my current bandmates and friends, nay, brothers, in my main black metal project Skyeater through that vale of tears, but that’s about the extent of the positives I can recollect.
WIth Skyeater, I got to know a lot of really awesome people in the LA black metal/doom metal/death metal/extreme metal scene and they are all an amazing group of people, musicians and event promoters alike. Everyone reading this should check out the promoters Omniscient Fest, Church of the 8th Day, Midnight Collective, etc. and all of the bands that have been on their roster of shows throughout the Southland. These guys are all incredible and real guys, gals and non-binary pals. It takes a great deal of gumption to be able to put on shows especially now. They all believe in what they do and it's beautiful.
Skyeater itself has had two albums mixed by the amazing Greg Wilkinson of Earhammer Studios, another incredible and hardworking guy. Look at his body of work producing albums and also his bands Brainoil and Deathgrave. Seriously, look at it.
So, in short, I guess you could say that I’ve primarily been writing scary, dark, heavy, extreme metal music, but I've been experimenting with softer sounds, making movie soundtracks/scores for some short films some of my friends have made etc.
Most of my "history as an artist" has been within the metal scene, but I’ve written some softer, more poignant post-rock tracks in the past when I’ve been feeling melancholic and stuffed them away for later use.
I’d say that I’ve kind of gained a healthy respect for a variety of different sounds and methods of musical expression, despite the fact that my main projects are of the loud and nasty variety.
Q: I was reading about some of your influences like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Mogwai? How do you think post-rock has evolved and changed since those bands first came on the scene?
A: I don’t necessarily keep up with a lot of the musical trends in the post-rock genre other than just listening to music I really like. Honestly, I’m more into the older music like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but also Popul Vuh, music that has the same transcendent power and thematic resonance as post-rock, but employs different methods of expression.
I find that there is a large component of post-rock that contains within it a variance of sound: You have stuff like that is much more peaceful or ethereal, like Hammock or MONO versus the more driving and aggressive sounds of Explosions in the Sky or If These Trees Could Talk, versus the more cinematic, like GIlmore Trail (their cover of Angelo Badalamenti's "Theme from Twin Peaks/"Laura Palmer's Theme" is a revelation, by the way).
Again, I don’t necessarily know exactly how things have changed, but I will say that I have seen some interesting experimentation and many things that bleed over into other genres. I guess the obvious example is Agalloch, specifically their album The Mantle. I know that album is almost 20 years old but it's, to date, still the best encapsulation of this phenomenon, as it's almost just a post-rock album with a few black metal elements and then some neofolk in there too. What I like is the fact that a lot of metal has allowed itself to glom onto certain aspects of post-rock and certain post-rock has gotten heavier, depending on the group or band, of course. Generally, I prefer if a band is able to find a balance between those two sounds without it sounding schizophrenic, and Agalloch managed to do that perfectly.
But there’s also legendary bands like Neurosis, which essentially just took the post-rock aesthetic and applied it to hardcore and sludge/doom metal. I think the evolution in post-rock is that it’s just become much more of an accessible type of music, and incorporating bombastic and orchestral soundscapes has become more and more influential. I think it being less exclusive is actually a positive thing, because I crave that type of songwriting. Of course, that also lends itself to everybody using certain tropes and then running with them, which kind of dilutes the quality or power of the sound, but I think the influence post-rock has had, particularly on the metal scene, is actually really, really kind of neat.
Q: What is your recording process like for Ghost Kingdom?
A: It’s kind of a funny story. I broke my collarbone biking after buying a mountain bike a week previously, like somebody’s dad with a midlife crisis. It really fucking sucked because I couldn’t work, I couldn’t exercise the way I wanted to, I couldn’t really go hiking and worst of all, I couldn’t play guitar, at least not normally.
It put my main musical project on a temporary hiatus, so naturally, I got really, really depressed. But one thing that it allowed me to do was to go through a lot of my digital projects and organize them. I started working on several projects I had placed on the proverbial back burner, including a documentary I'm making about my dad, his traumatic brain injury from when he was a teenager, and his lifelong disability. I was finally able to make a trailer for it for Father’s Day and he really, really appreciated it.
So, I guess my biking injury had a couple silver linings, Ghost Kingdom simply being one of them.
I took many of my previously recorded post-rock tracks and essentially filtered them, listening to as many as I could (because what the hell else was I going to do, other than remain on hold with EDD forever?) and I narrowed them down to a couple of tracks. One of these tracks, in particular, I agonized over because it was originally written for a friend of mine. I wasn’t sure if I would be diluting its specialness by including it in something that I would put on Bandcamp, but eventually I relented because I’m honestly quite proud of it.
Additionally, I was able to muster up some strength to play some very lightly plucked guitar and also with an EBow, adding some digitally programmed drums. I layered these guitar parts over and over again to create sweet, somber melodies that envelop each other. I essentially took the recordings I had made with Logic Pro X and gussied them up as much as I could without physically hurting myself.
I then took a bunch of photos of the tree on my patio outside the third floor of my apartment complex, a note settled between two branches, with the project's name "Limerence" scrawled upon it. If I couldn’t go to a forest, and I couldn’t record new tracks as much as I wanted to, I was at the very least going to make an EP, damn it, complete with album art.
Considering how long it took to recover and the limitations I was forced to work within, I honestly think it came out pretty great.
Q: Can you talk about your history as an artist?
A: It always feels strange answering a question like that. It is rather difficult to answer that question and consider myself an artist without feeling in some sense pretentious. Obviously, I have written music and performed it, so in that technical sense I suppose I am an artist. I don’t like using that term because it implies that I am some sort of elevated person or something dumb like that, whereas I’m just a dude who recorded some music that some people like.
That said, if y'all would like a "short" oral history of sorts, hold onto your butts.
I grew up In the Bay Area and met two amazing brothers, Paul and Evan Carr, great musicians in their own respective right, playing "lead" guitar (badly) as an early member of their band Undergone. Paul’s an amazing drummer and I credit him with getting me into playing music, as I originally wasn’t too much of a musical person when I was younger. Evan's also an incredible songwriter and has his own series of projects, including some great post-rock stuff.
I kind of just started dicking around with my guitar after that, playing in Jazz Band in school, learning an intensive amount of music theory and writing my own bog-standard heavy metal riffs and stuff. I started jamming with people in college, but I didn’t really get anywhere until I had to move back home and started recording my own one-man black metal project called Yuggoth, using Logic Pro X/Drumkit From Hell-programmed blast beats and layers and layers of guitar tracks. It saved my sanity after graduating college right on the cusp of an economic meltdown, failing to get a job and living with my parents. Things didn't really kick off with live music until I moved to the Greater Los Angeles area and met an individual who founded a noise rock/experimental music collective that shall remain nameless, which I "joined." Suffice it to say it was an interesting, intensely educational, and eventually positive experience, in that I met my current bandmates and friends, nay, brothers, in my main black metal project Skyeater through that vale of tears, but that’s about the extent of the positives I can recollect.
WIth Skyeater, I got to know a lot of really awesome people in the LA black metal/doom metal/death metal/extreme metal scene and they are all an amazing group of people, musicians and event promoters alike. Everyone reading this should check out the promoters Omniscient Fest, Church of the 8th Day, Midnight Collective, etc. and all of the bands that have been on their roster of shows throughout the Southland. These guys are all incredible and real guys, gals and non-binary pals. It takes a great deal of gumption to be able to put on shows especially now. They all believe in what they do and it's beautiful.
Skyeater itself has had two albums mixed by the amazing Greg Wilkinson of Earhammer Studios, another incredible and hardworking guy. Look at his body of work producing albums and also his bands Brainoil and Deathgrave. Seriously, look at it.
So, in short, I guess you could say that I’ve primarily been writing scary, dark, heavy, extreme metal music, but I've been experimenting with softer sounds, making movie soundtracks/scores for some short films some of my friends have made etc.
Most of my "history as an artist" has been within the metal scene, but I’ve written some softer, more poignant post-rock tracks in the past when I’ve been feeling melancholic and stuffed them away for later use.
I’d say that I’ve kind of gained a healthy respect for a variety of different sounds and methods of musical expression, despite the fact that my main projects are of the loud and nasty variety.
Q: I was reading about some of your influences like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Mogwai? How do you think post-rock has evolved and changed since those bands first came on the scene?
A: I don’t necessarily keep up with a lot of the musical trends in the post-rock genre other than just listening to music I really like. Honestly, I’m more into the older music like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but also Popul Vuh, music that has the same transcendent power and thematic resonance as post-rock, but employs different methods of expression.
I find that there is a large component of post-rock that contains within it a variance of sound: You have stuff like that is much more peaceful or ethereal, like Hammock or MONO versus the more driving and aggressive sounds of Explosions in the Sky or If These Trees Could Talk, versus the more cinematic, like GIlmore Trail (their cover of Angelo Badalamenti's "Theme from Twin Peaks/"Laura Palmer's Theme" is a revelation, by the way).
Again, I don’t necessarily know exactly how things have changed, but I will say that I have seen some interesting experimentation and many things that bleed over into other genres. I guess the obvious example is Agalloch, specifically their album The Mantle. I know that album is almost 20 years old but it's, to date, still the best encapsulation of this phenomenon, as it's almost just a post-rock album with a few black metal elements and then some neofolk in there too. What I like is the fact that a lot of metal has allowed itself to glom onto certain aspects of post-rock and certain post-rock has gotten heavier, depending on the group or band, of course. Generally, I prefer if a band is able to find a balance between those two sounds without it sounding schizophrenic, and Agalloch managed to do that perfectly.
But there’s also legendary bands like Neurosis, which essentially just took the post-rock aesthetic and applied it to hardcore and sludge/doom metal. I think the evolution in post-rock is that it’s just become much more of an accessible type of music, and incorporating bombastic and orchestral soundscapes has become more and more influential. I think it being less exclusive is actually a positive thing, because I crave that type of songwriting. Of course, that also lends itself to everybody using certain tropes and then running with them, which kind of dilutes the quality or power of the sound, but I think the influence post-rock has had, particularly on the metal scene, is actually really, really kind of neat.
Q: What is your recording process like for Ghost Kingdom?
A: It’s kind of a funny story. I broke my collarbone biking after buying a mountain bike a week previously, like somebody’s dad with a midlife crisis. It really fucking sucked because I couldn’t work, I couldn’t exercise the way I wanted to, I couldn’t really go hiking and worst of all, I couldn’t play guitar, at least not normally.
It put my main musical project on a temporary hiatus, so naturally, I got really, really depressed. But one thing that it allowed me to do was to go through a lot of my digital projects and organize them. I started working on several projects I had placed on the proverbial back burner, including a documentary I'm making about my dad, his traumatic brain injury from when he was a teenager, and his lifelong disability. I was finally able to make a trailer for it for Father’s Day and he really, really appreciated it.
So, I guess my biking injury had a couple silver linings, Ghost Kingdom simply being one of them.
I took many of my previously recorded post-rock tracks and essentially filtered them, listening to as many as I could (because what the hell else was I going to do, other than remain on hold with EDD forever?) and I narrowed them down to a couple of tracks. One of these tracks, in particular, I agonized over because it was originally written for a friend of mine. I wasn’t sure if I would be diluting its specialness by including it in something that I would put on Bandcamp, but eventually I relented because I’m honestly quite proud of it.
Additionally, I was able to muster up some strength to play some very lightly plucked guitar and also with an EBow, adding some digitally programmed drums. I layered these guitar parts over and over again to create sweet, somber melodies that envelop each other. I essentially took the recordings I had made with Logic Pro X and gussied them up as much as I could without physically hurting myself.
I then took a bunch of photos of the tree on my patio outside the third floor of my apartment complex, a note settled between two branches, with the project's name "Limerence" scrawled upon it. If I couldn’t go to a forest, and I couldn’t record new tracks as much as I wanted to, I was at the very least going to make an EP, damn it, complete with album art.
Considering how long it took to recover and the limitations I was forced to work within, I honestly think it came out pretty great.
Q: What is your creative process like?
A: My creative process is usually playing something in a minor key on my E standard electric guitar with a ridiculous amount of reverb, messing around with how pretty but also sad I can make something sound. I’ll then record another melody on top of it, then another melody, another melody... And eventually, I’ll settle on something, then rerecord that and alter it later. In fact, a good chunk of what I do is kind of made up on the spot and I’ll paste it together later.
Sometimes, I will relearn everything to make sure I have it down. But honestly, I couldn’t tell you how to play half the stuff on the album.
It’s kind of a snapshot in time, representing feelings that, while intense, are transient until they arise furiously once again, hence the project's name.
Q: What are some of themes that are touched upon your release Ghost Kingdom?
A: The entire project is a reflection on feelings I’ve been processing for the better part of a decade. The project was essentially a way for me to deal with some feelings I have for a friend whom I love very deeply.
Sometimes, nay, often, I don’t know how to deal with those feelings. It causes me to break down emotionally in a mostly unexpected and intense fashion. It got really rough during that period of recovery. The most positive way I have to deal with it is to make music. All excessive displays of emotion do is make people concerned, and they will pay exactly the wrong kind of attention to you: the type of embarrassing concern that you do not want.
If you write music instead, you end up with something that you can listen to. It might create an emotional reaction, but it has an essential utility, much unlike just being a messy little Sad Boi.
I am a very big believer in taking things that hurt you, shaping them and molding them into your strength. I would not wish this type of emotional turmoil, romantic confusion and involuntary thoughts on my worst enemy. But I think if you can use it to create art (I feel pretentious saying that, but I'm going to anyway. Fuck it.) you can create a spirit in a spiritless situation, a heart in a heartless world, to paraphrase Karl Marx.
The longest track, "Unspoken" is something that I wrote for this friend. its title is a representation of all of the things that I haven’t said, or feel that I cannot say, what I cannot express without causing a massive rupture in our friendship or burdening her with my bullshit.
I wrote the first part for her several years ago. I think this original one is lost to the ages due to a hard drive mishap, but I might resurrect it in the future. I composed a sequel a few years more recently, and that became the basis for the version that's now on the EP. It expresses more than I could possibly say in words, half-decent though I am at writing and speaking.
"Ghost kingdom" is a term meaning an edifice one builds within one's mind of an imagined life, typically referring to the life adopted children imagine they would have had with their birth parents. It's often idealized or fictionalized. My ghost kingdom is the imagined reality where my love for this person may be reciprocated, a somewhat plausible, yet altogether unlikely scenario. The kingdom lies outside the titular fields in "Through the Fields I'll Follow," my unyielding and sometimes absurdly fierce loyalty compels me to follow her, where one hopes, the kingdom will materialize.
I feel that it's rather fitting that the EP ends with "Unspoken." Having traversed the fields and following where she leads, it's altogether uncertain whether such a declaration of love will be heard, or even if it will be spoken, for the kingdom, as if a ghost, will eventually vanish.
Wow. I unintentionally made a concept album. That's actually kinda wild/neat.
Q: Have you started playing shows or virtual shows?
A: I have not. However, I'm starting the process of getting people together to play this live, and round it out into something a little more robust.
Q: What else should we know about your music?
A: This project is an aural record of intense, yet manageable sadness, a cloud occasionally broken by tiny rays of hope. Limerence is a feeling that envelops the greatest joy, even at its climax, in a yearning lamentation for an irretrievable loss.
(That's a paraphrase of Nietzsche, so I'm being pretentious again, but I no longer give a fuck)
It's a feeling of intense and unrealized love that has the capacity to severely damage the one who loves, but you keep loving anyway, because the object of your affection deserves your love, and because it makes life worth living.
A: My creative process is usually playing something in a minor key on my E standard electric guitar with a ridiculous amount of reverb, messing around with how pretty but also sad I can make something sound. I’ll then record another melody on top of it, then another melody, another melody... And eventually, I’ll settle on something, then rerecord that and alter it later. In fact, a good chunk of what I do is kind of made up on the spot and I’ll paste it together later.
Sometimes, I will relearn everything to make sure I have it down. But honestly, I couldn’t tell you how to play half the stuff on the album.
It’s kind of a snapshot in time, representing feelings that, while intense, are transient until they arise furiously once again, hence the project's name.
Q: What are some of themes that are touched upon your release Ghost Kingdom?
A: The entire project is a reflection on feelings I’ve been processing for the better part of a decade. The project was essentially a way for me to deal with some feelings I have for a friend whom I love very deeply.
Sometimes, nay, often, I don’t know how to deal with those feelings. It causes me to break down emotionally in a mostly unexpected and intense fashion. It got really rough during that period of recovery. The most positive way I have to deal with it is to make music. All excessive displays of emotion do is make people concerned, and they will pay exactly the wrong kind of attention to you: the type of embarrassing concern that you do not want.
If you write music instead, you end up with something that you can listen to. It might create an emotional reaction, but it has an essential utility, much unlike just being a messy little Sad Boi.
I am a very big believer in taking things that hurt you, shaping them and molding them into your strength. I would not wish this type of emotional turmoil, romantic confusion and involuntary thoughts on my worst enemy. But I think if you can use it to create art (I feel pretentious saying that, but I'm going to anyway. Fuck it.) you can create a spirit in a spiritless situation, a heart in a heartless world, to paraphrase Karl Marx.
The longest track, "Unspoken" is something that I wrote for this friend. its title is a representation of all of the things that I haven’t said, or feel that I cannot say, what I cannot express without causing a massive rupture in our friendship or burdening her with my bullshit.
I wrote the first part for her several years ago. I think this original one is lost to the ages due to a hard drive mishap, but I might resurrect it in the future. I composed a sequel a few years more recently, and that became the basis for the version that's now on the EP. It expresses more than I could possibly say in words, half-decent though I am at writing and speaking.
"Ghost kingdom" is a term meaning an edifice one builds within one's mind of an imagined life, typically referring to the life adopted children imagine they would have had with their birth parents. It's often idealized or fictionalized. My ghost kingdom is the imagined reality where my love for this person may be reciprocated, a somewhat plausible, yet altogether unlikely scenario. The kingdom lies outside the titular fields in "Through the Fields I'll Follow," my unyielding and sometimes absurdly fierce loyalty compels me to follow her, where one hopes, the kingdom will materialize.
I feel that it's rather fitting that the EP ends with "Unspoken." Having traversed the fields and following where she leads, it's altogether uncertain whether such a declaration of love will be heard, or even if it will be spoken, for the kingdom, as if a ghost, will eventually vanish.
Wow. I unintentionally made a concept album. That's actually kinda wild/neat.
Q: Have you started playing shows or virtual shows?
A: I have not. However, I'm starting the process of getting people together to play this live, and round it out into something a little more robust.
Q: What else should we know about your music?
A: This project is an aural record of intense, yet manageable sadness, a cloud occasionally broken by tiny rays of hope. Limerence is a feeling that envelops the greatest joy, even at its climax, in a yearning lamentation for an irretrievable loss.
(That's a paraphrase of Nietzsche, so I'm being pretentious again, but I no longer give a fuck)
It's a feeling of intense and unrealized love that has the capacity to severely damage the one who loves, but you keep loving anyway, because the object of your affection deserves your love, and because it makes life worth living.