SpiritWorld: Unholy Passages

What do you want to be when you grow up? It’s a question we spend our whole lives chasing the answer to. And unless you’re winning the lottery or claiming the Nobel prize, it’s more than likely you’re running in the rat race. That’s where hobbies hit the spot; they scratch an itch and keep our sanity from slipping away. Of course, why settle for less than the world when you’ve already spent your life grinding away at the system. For Stu Folsom of SPIRITWORLD, it’s a way of letting off steam after work and manifesting childhood dreams.

“I don’t need to do a band. I have a house, I’ve got a fucking hot tub and a pool and I’ve worked my ass off, like I’ve grinded from nothing,” he exclaims from his office, taking a break from crunching numbers on spreadsheets to talk about the re-release of last year’s Pagan Rhythms. “So this is just to make great art and if it takes off and becomes something else, great, but it’s more exciting to go hang out with my friends and play these kinds of shows than anything else.”

Being in a band and having fun playing shows right now is a privilege. As the pandemic continues to scupper plans, SPIRITWORLD continue to benefit from good karma and healthy manifestation. Pagan Rhythms originally released exclusively in North America last year as the world went into lockdown. Now, Century Media Records are helping bring it’s spaghetti western-meets-horror hardcore-thrash to the rest of the world. And Stu’s having the last laugh. What were once jokes among friends are now realities.

“I do believe you can manifest whatever you want. There’s a lot of realities spinning around and you’ve just got to reach out and grab that shit” he says passionately. “We’re talking about playing shows with OBITUARY in a couple of months, and I straight up ripped one of their riffs off as a joke and if I would have thought for one second we’d be touring and playing shows with them, I would’ve been fucking mortified, but that was a reality I didn’t think was possible, so fuck it, dream big.”

Dreaming big is second nature for SPIRITWORLD. Stu’s imagination knows no bounds and has no limits; if he was in a competition with Willy Wonka, we’d wager he’d win. Pagan Rhythms is a concept album that owes as much to ROB ZOMBIE’s b-movie horror flicks as it does Louis L’Amour’s western frontier novels. Only, it’s not just an album, it’s a collection of short stories called Godlessness, too.

“I wrote all this work that’s based in the fictional old west where there’s occult elements, and the gates of hell are manifesting on the physical plane,” he beams, proud of pulling together the things he loves into one twisted tale. “So Pagan Rhythms is characters from that – I’m just expressing it sonically.”

And whilst the weird and wonderful western world Stu paints as SPIRITWORLD is fictional, not everything’s down to pure imagination. Throughout the album, there’s audio clippings taken from news reports and viral clips of pastors. Think MINISTRY or WHITE ZOMBIE. It’s even where the title Pagan Rhythms made itself known.

“My twin brother found this sample of this fucking obnoxious American preacher teeing off and he sent me it like ‘look at this motherfucker – this is gold’,” he laughs, emphasising just how accidental a lot of SPIRITWORLD really is, continuing, “in that preacher dude’s rant, he said Pagan Rhythms and suddenly I was like ‘fuck, there’s the title’ so on one hand, it’s a goof, like it doesn’t have a real sentimental or powerful meaning but it can be interpreted in so many ways – and it looks hard as fuck on the cover of an album.”

In many ways, you might assume that other than it’s title, everything about Pagan Rhythms has been meticulously planned and carefully thought out. You’d hazard a guess it’s been brewing in Stu’s brain for a long time, right?

“Fuck no, as far as my process goes, it’s called hanging on by the skin of your fingers about to fall off into the abyss the entire time and then hoping like hell that it works out,” he laughs, always walking a fine line between being completely serious or over-the-top funny. “It could’ve been a complete catastrophe, like I don’t know what I’m doing but I think it’s more important to go all in and try then it is to have a plan.”

Whilst the frenetic madness of Pagan Rhythm’s world comes from challenging yourself to do something different, it’s hellish soundscapes are a little more thought out. Listening to SPIRITWORLD has you climbing down an abyss of hardcore-punk, thrash metal and OSDM. At times, it’s maddening in the best sense of the word. And it’s something Stu really wanted to capture.

“I’m pulling from a lot of obscure thrash and hardcore I grew up on like those Cleveland bands, and stuff like HATEBREED, SLAYER, SEPULTURA, BOLT THROWER – so once I combined all of that together it becomes its own thing, like when you pull from a bunch of places you can put it together and it becomes its own fucking beast.”

Pagan Rhythms is it’s own beast. It’s a sleep paralysis demon chasing you through the night. It’ll haunt you long after it finishes, and that’s by design. Take a song like Unholy Passages; there’s black metal blast beats going back-to-back with thrash-metal riffs and hardcore-punk stomp. It comes from Stu’s personal taste and his attention span, or lack thereof.

“I don’t allow any wasted stuff, like I want this to be in your face as soon as it starts. I could spent a lot of time writing a riff and it’s perfectly fine, but if it doesn’t serve the song and elevate it, than it’s better to cut that shit out,” he exclaims. “I just hate when you hear a song and you know what the next two parts are before you’ve even heard it – I like to do things where it’s unique enough where two minutes into a song, somebody should be like ‘oh fuck, we’re at the best of the song’ and if you can do that multiple times, I think you’re writing some pretty cool shit.”

As much as it feels like SPIRITWORLD is just a hobby and a hangout for a whole bunch of riffs, the plan is for it to become something much bigger than that. If Stu won the lottery or the project suddenly took off, you’d find the world of Pagan Rhythms on the silver screen.

“I don’t have $20 million to go and make a horror-western film, but I can sit down for free on my laptop and write some short stories and set up a studio in my house and make a record,” he admits, the determination to one day make a movie clear in his voice. “In a couple of years, it’ll be two albums, a collection of short stories and a novel – if I had the money, you know shitloads of money, I’d make it all into a film series, but I’m just a working class guy, I drive a 2000 Dodge van and put on steel toed boots.”

Whether Pagan Rhythms and it’s follow-up becomes a major film franchise or not, one thing is for certain. SPIRITWORLD have come and they will conquer. After all, it’s the one thing Stu is fully in control of. “If you make a record that fucking bangs, it will cut through the noise. You may not be able to keep your band together and in 25 years your little work of art might become an underground classic, and you can’t capitalise on it, but I knew when I was writing this that it fucking rips. Not to toot my own horn, but I made sure it ripped and if it wasn’t something I thought was on the level, I never would have released it.”

Pagan Rhythms (re-release) is out now via Century Media Records. 

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