Before we discuss the new Void album, I have to ask something slightly unrelated: Matt, you joined Dødheimsgard on stage in London, back in December 2019. That just sounds like a dream come true. Please tell us everything about that! How did that happen, and, more importantly, how did it feel to be on stage with such a legendary band? 
Matt: Legendary band indeed. I’m pleased that you share my views on Dødheimsgard. They have been a very important part of my life. In truth though, despite that, I did often feel like an imposter at that party. After all I’d only listened to ‘Kronet Til Konge’ and ‘Monumental Possession’ a few times, it’s not really my thing to be quite honest, and DHG shows are always as much about the past as the present, this one being no exception. Thankfully though it was a very ‘666 International’ heavy setlist, so there was plenty of material that was super close to my heart, and playing ‘Aphelion Void’ live? Wow. I’m still kicking myself that I pulled it off. Yusaf (Parvez, DHG main man) is quite humble about his guitar talents, but for me that performance was the absolute pinnacle of my technical ability. A dream come true indeed, but of course it was not one of divine providence, I had to work extremely hard to figure out the material, learn it, and raise my guitar playing standard to the level necessary to pull it off. No rehearsals, no tabs, nothing. Just an invite and a will of iron.

How I got involved was fairly cheeky I suppose. I heard from my friend Camille Giraudeau (Dreams Of The Drowned – and mix engineer for ‘The Hollow Man’) that whilst backstage at a Ved Buens Ende live show Yusaf had invited him to play live guitar for DHG on the night of the Paris show. I had been chatting to both Yusaf and Camille about production of The Hollow Man around that time and naturally pointed out to Yusaf how coooooool I thought it was that Camille was gonna play with them. I then cheekily added that I was gutted he hadn’t asked me… well… be careful what you joke about because he straight away invited me to play the London show! It was three months in advance of the night in question, I believe. I couldn’t think of a reasonable excuse not to do it and the rest is history. Sometime during the first month of practice I wavered, finding it quite beyond my reach, but on a rare night out in London with Mat McNerney (Kvohst), he set me straight, reassuring me that it was possible and that it would be a crying shame if I gave up the opportunity.

On stage I was in a sort of weird limbo of disbelief. I was actually there. The biggest gig of my life. Yusaf was being so larger than life on stage, dancing, grimacing, doing press ups on the monitors… he stood behind me and did that Kali arms thing. I opened my mouth in a savage snarl and maintained it for the entire show. Was that me? Did it really happen? Monumental Possession indeed.

I’m very pleased to add that the relationships I forged then with Lars Emil Måløy (Bass), Camille and George Anagnostopoulos (DHG live sound engineer) developed into another band, in which I am playing guitar and singing and that I’m looking forward to presenting to the world very soon. It kept me quite busy through lockdown I can tell you. Anyway, we are here to talk about Void so I’ll shut up about that for now.

Levi: Never head banged so hard in my life. The experience of witnessing a metal bro peak the fuck out was unreal and so super supremely well deserved.

Between releasing ‚The Unsearchable Riches Of Void’ and the upcoming album, many band pictures featured a sign that said ‘The End is nigh’. Also, even though you were already working on ‘The Hollow Man’ a few years ago, at the time of our previous interview, one can only feel a sense of dramatic irony considering that an album with such an apocalyptic theme is about to be released in the midst of a pandemic. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Gerardo: Around the time of the launch of the ‘Unsearchable Riches Of Void’ EP we created a character for each band member. We wore masks and costumes on stage, and we gave backstories to each of our characters. Mine was a plague doctor; a man from a different time who, running away from the epidemic killing his town, gets sucked without realising into a time portal and is catapulted into our present. There he sees a world that is so alien to him, that he can only make sense of it as a never-ending nightmarish vision, a prelude to the imminent end of the world. However, no one else seems to understand, or to see what he sees. So he makes it his only goal in life to share the burden of the truth that he alone seems to grasp, carrying that sign to spread awareness. Well, in retrospect none of this seems particularly well thought out. To cut a long story short, the ‘The End is Nigh’ placard was a prop for the plague doctor character. The cloak and the mask went (twice – the first when I forgot them on a train from London to Brighton, the second when we decided to stop wearing full costumes), the placard stayed. It was initially conceived as a homage to Walter Kovacs/Rorschach, my favourite character from Watchmen. When we were shooting the video for ‘Scumscrubber’, it was hilarious to stand outside Blackhorse Road tube station wearing the costume and carrying the sign, and observing people’s reactions to it. I wonder how different they would be if I did the same thing now…

Levi: Belonging to a band with several members The ‘End is Nigh’ philosophy or even writing this record to literally, an end of life as we know it, indeed may have been a sensitivity, then foresight into not so good days to come. We are all different folks & are extremely aware of our relative origins. The time building chemistry specifically with the additions of Elliott & Laura, the wisdom of the crowd prevailed in this instance.

‘Here lives a wealthy Man’ inspired somewhat to the elections in America between Donald Trump & Hilary Clinton. Whilst composing these songs the elections were still on. At a stage we had to go with someone so we chose Trump before he won, which was fun.

From history to politics there seems not a place that may escape the void… for sure at some point we knew a storm had been building and was approaching. Scariest thing, it is not here yet.

Matt: Of course we weren’t aware that our plan for a global pandemic would actually bear fruit but it has turned out to be rather ironic that an end of sorts was indeed on the cards. I suppose we could start standing around the tube station with a new placard reading “The beginning is imminent” now. Maybe we’ve unlocked a prophetic device. It was painted by my kids actually. I should ask them to do a few variations: “Bitcoin will crash!” – “Trump will get a sex change!” – “World economies to be replaced by barter system”… hmm, that last one would be a pretty large piece of cardboard, and we did have a lot of trouble with the old one blowing away in the wind. We chased it all around the reservoirs whilst shooting the ‘Scumscrubber’ DIY video on a particularly windy day. Anyway, all foolishness aside…

‘The Hollow Man’, like its near namesake muse ‘The Hollow Men’, despite all its apocalyptic rhetorical devices, is not about the End of the World at large at all really. It is about the complete collapse of an individual’s world. A personal apocalypse. A coming apart of the fabric of the mind. A descent into the Heart of Darkness. Sadly, this is probably even more apt than a literal apocalypse when held up to the reality of today’s events. We are likely experiencing a double whammy of pandemics, physical and mental, with many individuals, now cut off from their social lifelines, suffering a fate symbolically similar to that of our protagonist. So if your single male friends start behaving like they are trapped in a delusion of reincarnation as a battery hen, you’ll know you were warned by the Void.

I did wonder if it was uncouth to release the album at this time, but Gerardo surmised that metal fans will always go for this stuff.

In fact, the album’s release was delayed considerably due to said pandemic. This is hardly unique given how this crisis has affected the music business, unfortunately. Still, it must be frustrating and scary to have an album finished and having to wait and see whether it can be released. Was it a close call?
Matt: It did feel like a close call a few times yes, for various reasons, but mostly nothing to do with the pandemic. We spent a whole year in lukewarm discussion with a label who had agreed to release it but eventually walked away when we queried the contract sent. At that point it felt like it was over, but Einar from Duplicate stepped in and saved the album. Basically we should have gone to him first. Then when the pandemic did arrive there was another delay as Duplicate Records struggled to find its feet, but Einar stuck to his promise and the release is now imminent and by the time this is published the digital version will already be out. We are still waiting on the vinyl, since the pressing plant itself had to close for a while, but it is being pressed as we speak. It has been a very long road. It feels like an age since we were working on the album. There was a real sense of achievement upon completion of the writing and recording, we believed we’d created our masterpiece, but it seemed like we couldn’t get any traction in the industry for a long time. I completely understand of course. An album like ours is so out there, so far from convention, that any metal label would consider it a risk. We kept trying increasingly obscure corners of the metal world to get it noticed, without much luck. Eventually I began to think of the thing as unreleasable – irredeemably flawed. Thankfully the reviews so far have exposed that as a momentary crisis of confidence. Press has been great. We are back on track, confident again in our art.

Levi: Collective patience & some Ghandi level understanding had to be reached during that challenging period. Time was provided to complete works we could be satisfied with. If it was still in peace time, we would have naturally been fulfilling live performance obligations. Energy would have been taken away from completing post editing, promotional aspects & publishing the thing which ended up being salubrious.

It seemed that Void was gaining quite a bit of momentum before COVID hit the world. You got signed to Duplicate Records, and you were playing live on regular basis. The latter is completely impossible for the time being. How has that affected the band?
Matt: We have been able to meet only once since the first lockdown, somewhere in those summer months when things looked like they would return to normal. It was bizarre, we ripped through the album like we’d be rehearsing solidly all year, one of the best renditions ever. I guess the time away from the material had allowed it to settle in our collective subconscious. It was exhilarating. But yeah, outside of that there has been no live band at all. Luckily the pandemic’s timing has been pretty good for us, since, with the album getting its release we have been able to concentrate more fully on the admin, press, promotion stuff, which when you are rehearsing and gigging regularly usually takes a backseat – I mean who wants to type out a boring old interview when you can be shredding riffs live on stage? Only kidding. I love spouting this narcissistic nonsense. hahahaha

There was some turmoil in the line-up at the time of our previous interview. Your vocalist had just left the band, or he hadn’t, and at the same time there was talk of a new vocalist. Also, a second guitarist was added to the line-up. I have to admit that I am a little bit confused by the vocalist situation, and listening to ‘The Hollow Man’ doesn’t make it much easier given that sometimes it sounds like there are 20 vocalists on it. So… Help! Who did what, how, and why?
Matt: We had to grow thirty-two vocal elves in chrome plated vats of gluten free ale, and trained them in the spiritus of Voidianism, but none of that worked out unfortunately. Their performances on the album were too gelatinous, and lacking in humanity, so we went with human vocalists instead.

In reality, it’s true there was turmoil and I’m not really the right person to ask as I barely understand what happened myself, but it’s clear that Levi felt swamped by commitments and wanted to leave. His own music was having to too often take a backseat to his commitments in Cythraul and Void and he decided to move on after the cassette EP. For this reason we searched and found a new vocalist in Laura. There was a transition period however, that featured some rather shaky gigs, bearing in mind we had also drafted in a new guitarist in order to execute the new material live, which required a lot of work, and I lost confidence in the future of the band. I think Levi felt that by leaving the band he was in some way responsible for this and ultimately found the resolve to stay. Of course we’d already found a replacement. This was also during the period when we were writing the third album, on which Levi had already appeared. His shrieking, screeching vocal style had become intrinsic to the sound of the material that was already down and we strongly felt that songs like ‘On Reading: The Hollow Men’ would suffer greatly without it. To cut a long story short both Levi, Laura and indeed myself performed vocals on the record. We ran with it, adding layers, mixing textures… All Styles, All the Time –  such is the way of the Void.

By now it should be clear to most readers that ‘The Hollow Man’ was heavily inspired by the poem ‘The Hollow Men’ by T.S. Elliot. A poem which in turn was a key inspiration to ‘Apocalypse Now’. Could you give a brief description of the underlying themes, and explain how you came to the decision to build an entire album around the concept?
Matt: It began with Gerardo stating a desire to do a T.S.Eliot concept album, half in jest I believe, and not an idea that anyone else cared for at the time. Surely we want to express our own original feelings through our music? Not pay lip service to an already over-quoted household name. Upon writing the lyrics for the last song however, which was actually written first, Gerardo sent over an extract from the Hollow Men. I set these words to the music but was curious about the rest of the poem and since I believe we had already started toying with the idea of thematically linking the first and last songs I believe we discussed a possibility of using the whole poem over the first song. Let’s listen to some famous readings of the poem and see where inspiration takes us. I began to trawl the internet and came across Marlon Brando’s recital of the poem on the set of Apocalypse Now. Whilst the discussion continued outside (or as Gerardo’s monologue continued at least) as an experiment, not expecting any success, I hit play simultaneously on the untitled first song and on the Marlon Brando video, and something happened –

Gerardo: I’m indeed a huge T.S. Eliot fan ahah. On the other hand, ‘The Hollow Men’ is only the starting point of a journey that draws from a wider range of literary references. Some of the lyrics I wrote are inspired by Philip K. Dick and Albert Camus – but there’s also a reference to John’s Gospel. Nor was this just a literary game, or a formal choice. The combination of literary references and samples from movies, ads, etc., says something essential about the album’s main theme. Indeed, the hollow man’s worldview is an incoherent collage of eschatological tropes, half-digested movies, literary references – as he finds himself crushed by his own existential despair and the secret desire to see the end of it all. The album is meant to describe this bleakness – a bleakness beyond any aesthetic and spiritual redemption – which exhausts its search for meaning in this act of regurgitation. 

There is a version of ‘On Reading – The Hollow Men’ on YouTube which is markedly different than the album version. Instead of vocals, this version features a voiceover of Marlon Brando, in character as Colonel Kurtz, reading from ‘The Hollow Men’. When comparing both versions of the song, one can only notice the similarity between Brando’s lines and the final vocals; it’s not just the same words, but in terms of rhythm and timing it’s very similar. Was the entire song written around Marlon Brando’s scene?
Matt: Yes and no. As I’ve explained above, the music for that track was already written, however something magical happened when playing back the poem over the top. Perhaps I should whip up some pretentious lie about labouring for days trying to get the two elements to work together, but no, there is a guardian angel that originates in the Void… the hand is somehow guided by this invisible force. Coincidence? Happenstance? Dare I say plagiarism? Call it what you will. When you hear something so glorious, both a sum of and yet more than its parts, it is not for us mortals, foolish, arrogant narcissists, to object. Of course it wasn’t perfect. There were a few elements that clashed, and the voice was occasionally buried, plus the potential copyright issues cannot be scoffed at. So we decided to create our own version, but make the original Marlon Brando version available as well. In fact it was uploaded on the 40th anniversary of the release of the film at Cannes. There are elements in that version, from the sound design behind the poem (released as an extra on the Apocalypse Now DVD, but in our case simply ripped from YouTube) that created some exciting and bizarre effects when contrasted with the guitar riffs – rising choirs, strange clanging sounds, we wanted them to be heard outside of the record, hence the YouTube version. And so began our exploration of the Apocalypse Now aspect of our influence, a reference that was yet to see the most bizarre of coincidences to occur in the making of this album.