The Vision Bleak interview met Markus ‘Schwadorf’ Stock
Markus ‘Schwadorf’ Stock: “It really happened in the Summer of 2022, when I had this idea to try this one-track album. I felt so inspired by this idea that suddenly everything clicked and evolved and the album was written in two weeks. Sometimes you just need to wait for the right moment when things align and that is the main reason why it took eight years.”
Markus Stock alias Schwadorf geniet niet alleen wereldfaam als producer, maar hij is ook actief in meerdere bands, zoals Empyrium en Sun Of The Sleepless. The Vision Bleak laat echter het meest van zich horen. Samen met buddy Tobias ‘Konstanz’ Schönemann richtte hij omstreeks 2003 dit project op om hun gezamenlijke bewondering voor horrorverhalen te vieren in een gotische, romantische stijl. Het heeft een poosje geduurd, maar het nieuwe album ‘Weird Tales’ is dan ook erg speciaal. We praatten uitgebreid met Schwadorf over deze nieuwe brok kwaliteitsmuziek: een song van 41 minuten met 12 thema’s.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 12 april 2024
Markus, it has been strange times. The former album ‘The Unknown’ came out in 2016, that is a long hiatus for The Vision Bleak, since you mostly released albums every three years before that. In my eyes you have never been absent, due to your other bands and studio of course. Maybe you can resume a bit what happened after the release of ‘The Unknown’….
Okay. Indeed. ‘The Unknown’ was released in 2016 and after this album we already kind of knew that we would have to change with The Vision Bleak. That was actually why we called the album ‘The Unknown’. We knew back then already that we were going into a new direction and reinvent the band a little bit. Of course, also, we both had different projects as well. I released – I think – two albums with Sun Of The Sleepless in between, I released one album with Empyrium in between. Tobias released one album with his solo project Oul in between. So there was a lot of stuff going on, but the main reason why it took so long is because of the very famous ‘white piece of paper’, you know. You want to start writing, but somehow it does not click. It really happened in the Summer of 2022, when I had this idea to try this one-track album. I felt so inspired by this idea that suddenly everything clicked and evolved and the album was written in two weeks in 2022. A very short amount of time, very quick writing and I think it just needed to have this urgency. Sometimes it needs the moment in time, when things align and then it just works. Sometimes you just need to wait for the right moment and that is the main reason why it took eight years.
But it was a dream come true, because you considered writing a very long piece for a long time in the back of your head…
Absolutely. It was something that I wanted to do for a very, very long time and it is actually very much inspired by this Italian/Slovenian band Devil Doll. They released super beautiful albums in the early nineties. It were all one-track albums and I always wanted to do something like that. Actually I really thought after ‘The Unknown’ – right after it – that we could try it, but then I started… I always start to write new songs for The Vision Bleak and then I lay it aside. We could have released an album with The Vision Bleak that is more typical The Vision Bleak, just like before, but it just did not feel right. Whenever I tried to write a Vision Bleak song, like in 2018, I thought ‘this sounds like everything we did before’. I felt kind of bored by it. Then this one-track idea came back into my mind and from there on it was as easy as… it just happened from there. It was very easy to write the album.
I listened to the album and took some notes. It made me think of all sides of your personality (as far as I know you of course) (chuckles)…
Yeah you are absolutely right. That is what a lot of people told me, that you can really hear a little bit of my whole musical spectrum from all my music career in that album and I absolutely agree with that. It kind of felt like a kaleidoscope of what music I wrote before and of course who I am and that is super melancholic moments, it has these very metal moments, it has old school doom/gothic moments. I am really proud how it all fits together and how the album is composed. It was composed chronologically, just like it is on the album. It was the only way to write it, that way. It has many facets, facets of who I am, as a musician and also as a person.
You used another way of writing, almost like in classical music. What can you tell about that?
Yes. When you write an album that is full of songs, a song has restrictions. The song has a structure, you have the intro, you have the verse, you have the chorus, but this album is not written like that at all. It is written in themes. There is a musical theme that is progressing and progressing and progressing and then it goes again to the next musical theme. There is no restriction of the song in a way, although I think the song is kind of like a cage. With this we kind of freed ourselves from this cage and wrote themes like in classical music, you have themes that you build up and then you bring them into the next theme in a way that fits the composition and it fits exactly how this album was written. I did something like this before with Empyrium on ‘Where At Night The Wood Grouse Plays’ which is full of these themes. It is not real songs, it is full of themes. Not one song of course like on this album, but it is full of little themes and I think this way of writing suits me very well. It really fulfils me, because you can really give the musical theme a lot of space to develop and to breathe.
Now is the time we can go a bit deeper into the themes itself. It is all linked with horror and a very old magazine called ‘Weird Tales’. Can you go deeper into that?
Yeah. Once I made up my mind that this was going to be a one-track album, we needed a kind of lyrical framing. I thought it would be so cool to have the album as one track compromising themes, but at the same time all these themes are like little stories. It should be like when you read a collection of short stories. These typical collections of different writers, short stories that you read on a Sunday afternoon. I really wanted to evoke that feeling and then I thought it would be so cool to have one track that is compromised of this little short stories. Then ‘The Weird Tales’ magazines came to my mind which had a little collection of short stories in each of the magazines and a lot of writers that mean quite a lot to The Vision Bleak, to us personally, debuted their works in that magazine. So in a lot of ways it fitted so well. We already had a lot of lyrical themes before in this cosmos that is the ‘Weird Tales’ magazines and it fitted so well to this one track album concept. Also another thing that we both really love about it, is that all the writers who wrote for ‘Weird Tales’ magazine, they were kind of nerds and knowners in their time. They were not kind of respected writers when they released these magazines. There were kind of the outsiders and that is something I think that we can relate to on a lot of levels as well. On a more philosophical aspect, we are even a bit outsiders in the metal scene, because we are not the typical metal band or the typical gothic metal band or whatever. That aspect of the ‘Weird Tales’ magazines attracted us too and makes the concept on many different levels very fitting for us.
What struck me was that the first of those magazines came out in 1923. So that was exactly 100 years ago last year when you were working on it…
Yeah and that was not even planned, but when I realized that, I thought ‘oh all comes together so well!’. I didn’t know it when I picked up the concept, but when scoping into it, I discovered: ‘oh God, it is 100 years ago’ It is incredible how it works. It is almost like it is fate or destiny. Like I said in the beginning: sometimes you have to wait for the right moment in time. Maybe it was the ‘Weird Tales’ spirit crawling into my mind (laughs) you know, after 100 years.
They chose the right person to handle it haha. It is also cinematic, it should be perfect for visuals. Any idea where you want to go with that?
Yes on YouTube you can see the video we released for the second chapter ‘Rue d’Auseil’ which we released earlier. We will be playing some festivals now with the new material and we will play some excerpts from it, but in October we will do a proper tour where we will play the whole album and we will really focus on the theatrical aspect of the whole thing. When you go to the theatre, you get these little program books. We will do something like that, so every visitor of the gig will get this program book and there we will really focus on the theatrical aspect of the concept as well. Now, for the festival shows, it is a little bit harder to manifest all that in the live set. When we will do the tour, we will try to bring it on stages as good as possible.
These magazines you are speaking of, do they still exist in a physical way?
Yes, you can even still buy them, but the prices are of course horrible (laughs), because back then they were really cheap, but then some of the writers like Lovecraft or even Robert Bloch who wrote ‘Psycho’, he wrote stories for these magazines too, or Robert E. Howard who wrote ‘Conan The Barbarian’… these are all writers that debuted in ‘Weird Tales’, but all of them would become really famous afterwards, that is why the original magazines are super expensive, but you can still buy them. You can buy reprints, especially with the 100 year anniversary, I saw that you can buy the whole reprints of the magazine now. The originals are still there, but the prices are sky high. I don’t possess one original one, unfortunately. All these writers became famous afterwards, after their death more or less.
Can you give some examples of the inspiration you had for a particular song?
Every song, or every theme, on the album is kind of based on different writer’s work, but most striking is probably the writer Clark Ashton Smith who was also a ‘Weird Tales’ writer and on this album I think it is three or four lyrics are inspired by him. I can’t remember exactly which ones, but ‘Mother Of Toads’ is one of them. ‘The Witch With Eyes Of Amber’ is a Clark Ashton theme and also ‘In Gardens Red, Satanical’. There is a lot of Clark Ashton Smith going on on the album. Another writer who was super important for this album is Lafcadio Hearn and he wrote the story of ‘Once I Was A Flower’ which I read for the first time about two, three years ago. It is one of the most beautiful short stories I have ever read. It is written from the perspective of a flower that fills its life with beauty, with nature. It has grown close to a river. It hears the river every evening singing for it. Then it is picked up and put in the hair of a woman and that woman dies. Then the flower goes with that woman into the grave. I found that story so beautiful! I think it is the most gothic thing I ever read and I think when I read it for the first time, I read it three times in a row, because it is very short and this was the story that made me confident that we could do this concept with different short stories. Immediately when I wrote the musical theme for it, that story came to my mind. It was very symbiotic. I wrote it and that story fits so well to the musical theme and from there on it went on with the lyrics being put together to the music.
Wow it must be amazing if you can do things like that!
Yeah, like I said, I was so long before the black paper and then when I had the first click, it all came together like magic, without me doing anything. Sometimes it is so weird. You try to write something and you try so hard and then you fail and when you wait for the right moment, it just happens. Everything aligns and suddenly it all comes together in a very natural way without you putting in too much effort. It just happened. That’s what I really learned from this album, that you really need to wait for the right moment in time. Something that is really fulfilling.
Don’t force something…
Exactly. When you force it, you will come up… maybe you will come up with something, but it will never be so inspired I think… When I look back at my work that I did through all the years, I think all my best works were effortless. It was always when I felt like not doing anything, I am just opening myself and the music comes out of me like nothing. Whenever I worked like this, these are my best works. If you force something, you try to rely on what you did before and you kind of orient yourself on: ‘I wrote this song and maybe I can do it a little bit like that’, or whatever. It was not on this album, not at all. Like I said, I wrote it chronologically and you have this part before, you compose a good transition and then it just leads you automatically into the next thing and you just have to follow that path in a way. That felt so fluent and so inspired. I think it will not be the last time that I wrote like that. There might be a ‘Weird Tales part 2’ in the future.
Ah wow, that was one of my questions, because you were so inspired: Are there still other music and ideas for a second part?
I haven’t written anything yet, because it felt so effortless, this way of writing suits me so well. Maybe not the next album, but the album after that or whatever… I really feel that we can do this again and it will still feel fresh and effortless.
You and Tobias are the members of the band and in the studio you play all the instruments, but on this album Aline Deinert is mentioned on viola and violin…
She is a guest musician on the album, but we know her so well and so long now from Empyrium and she also played live with The Vision Bleak many times so that we really wanted to give her recognition on this album, because she has been a part of our inner circle for many years. She plays violins and viola on the album. What we did on the album was when we had synthesizer strings, we added her in as well. That gives the synth strings a more organic quality and of course we also have the solo violin parts, so it is quite an important aspect of the warmth and the feeling of the album I think, that we added the violin in a quite lot of parts.
I got a feeling of romanticism from the cover artwork…
Absolutely. That’s me, that’s only what I am. I am just a romantic person and the cover is actually based on that short story I mentioned earlier: ‘Once I Was A Flower’ with the woman dying and the flower going with her in the scent of the flower, not the flower itself, but the scent and the spirit of the flower that goes into the grave with the woman. I think that is such a beautiful image, that dead woman and the scent of the flower. Together they are in the grave forever. We really wanted to have this on the album cover, because it is a really central theme on the album. It is also a thankful theme, death and end of life on many albums and there are a lot of juxtapositions of that end life, ice and sun and glow and fire and stuff like that juxtapose to each other and that is also reflected on the cover which is mostly black and white and then you have the red flower like a symbol of life. Blood is red, that is a symbol of life and the black and white things are more symbolic for death.
Music-wise it works with contrasts… that is also important…
Absolutely, there is a lot of contrasts on the album. I think the two first themes we released from the album as a single before are super contrast-like. ‘Once I Was A Flower’ being so melancholic and quiet and introvert. And then you have ‘The Premature Burial’ which is like a Carcass homage in a way, like old school death metal almost and that is what the album is, working with a lot of these contrasts, quiet melancholic parts and then eruptions with brutal parts, later they flow into something very fragile. I love these kinds of contrasts, because when you have a quiet part, the heavy part gets heavier and the quiet part will again feel more fragile and elegant. These contrasts are just underlining the different themes so well.
The last part of the long track ‘To Drink From Lethe’ reminded me of Empyrium…
You are absolutely right. It is a super beautiful theme on this song lyrically, the mythology of Lethe, which is the river that runs through the netherworld in Greek mythology. The death arrives at this river and you have to drink from it to forget your earlier lives, so they can be reborn. So they can return as a new soul. They have to drink from this river to be able to be reborn and that was such a beautiful ending theme for this album and of course the music is very fitting: melancholic, very much Empyrium and also very much My Dying Bride which is a band we always love. Obviously the name Empyrium even comes from the first My Dying Bride EP, so that’s always been a very, very inspirational band for us and it is kind of a little bit of an homage to them.
The Vision Bleak will play at four festivals and the EU tour is mainly Germany…
I think there is one show in Belgium as well and then Austria, Switzerland, and one show we will play that isn’t announced yet because we have a festival agreement in that country, so we can only announce that after the festival, but it will also be a not German speaking country and then we thought maybe coming with more shows next year with this concept. We can cover maybe France, the Netherlands and the countries we could not include on this first run. It is hard right now to arrange tours, because in Autumn all the tours are booked already, so we will have to see what will work out. We will try to do another run in Spring 2025. Some countries we left out now in Europe and there will also be… it is not announced yet, but I think I can say it. We will also play Eindhoven Metal Meeting.
To occlude some thoughts about the tour for the first album ‘The Deathship Has A New Captain’ when it was ten years old, which was also celebrated at Prophecy Fest 2023…
Actually it is 20 years old now. It was released in 2004. On the tour that we will play in Autumn, we will play the whole new album as one set, from the beginning to the end, and there will be a band in between and then we will play another ‘best of set’ with the focus on ‘The Deathship’ because it is 20 years old. That is kind of the concept for this tour. We really like it that way, because we can do justice to the new album and play it as a whole and at the same time we can play the classic stuff and the fans will be happy to be able to listen to both sets.
That is a very interesting approach…
Yeah we were thinking: how can we do justice to the new album and at the same time people want to hear well-known songs to be not dissatisfied when they go home. When I go to see Iron Maiden and they only play new songs, I would have loved to hear some old classic ones too. We wanted to do something that fits to both. The new album and older stuff.
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