Dark Fortress: Coalesced In Deepest Time

In spite of being twenty-six years and eight full-length releases into their career, DARK FORTRESS have so far remained something of an enigma in the anglophone world. While black metal groups tend to ally themselves with obscurity more than most, Bavaria’s DARK FORTRESS has so far remained concealed behind acts whom many would consider their peers.

Seminal albums from DIMMU BORGIR, CRADLE OF FILTH and ROTTING CHRIST have, for instance, become rites of passage for many a black metal initiate, while DARK FORTRESS’ classic Stab Wounds remains something of an underground relic. This must, at least in part, come down to their stylistic substance. After all, DARK FORTRESS do not eschew technicality; they celebrate clarity and precision in production, and never shy away from incorporating progressive elements into their music, all while remaining as ferocious and emotively raw as their contemporaries. All of these distinctive elements have been refined on their latest full-length release, Spectres From The Old World, whose icy-cold mechanical sound was set upon the world six years after the critically acclaimed Venereal Dawn. Distorted Sound sat down with guitarist and lead songwriter V. Santura to unpack this long-anticipated, highly intricate body of work.

While Spectres From The Old World comes a lengthy six years after Venereal Dawn, as V. Santura elucidates, the albums are more closely associated conceptually than temporally. “[The ‘Old World’] is a reference to where the lyrics end on Venereal Dawn,” explains Santura. “The protagonist of that album gets transformed into a being of pure light,” he enthuses, “and that is where the new album starts and develops into something completely new.” Although, as he quickly adds, “The title track is still related to the consciousness of the protagonist from the previous album. That, in a way, is the ‘Spectre’ from the ‘Old World’.”

Conceptually and lyrically Spectres From The Old World represents the band’s most ambitious album to date, broaching topics as nuanced as particle physics, the laws of nature and the heat death of the universe. “What’s going on in our vocalist’s mind is sometimes very hard to understand,” admits Santura, once pressed on the details of the album’s themes, “some of his thoughts and background thinking is very complicated and rooted in string theory and physical theories which I don’t know very much about, to be honest.” Nevertheless, he offers his interpretation: “There’s one aspect of the album in which you could say that nature is personified and observes the rise and decline of humanity. That is, at least, the topic of the songs Pazuzu or Pulling At Threads.” Concluding, he concedes “I know that’s not exactly what Morean intended with this title, though.”

The lengthy gap between releases, in this case, is to be explained by something as mundane as logistics. After all, the DARK FORTRESS garrison have a diverse set of duties and interests beyond the band. V. Santura has been preoccupied with his other band TRIPTYKON, as well with his technical duties at Woodshed Studio. Vocalist Morean, meanwhile, is also a classical composer, heads up ALKALOID, as well as performing in NONEUCLID alongside V. Santura and DARK FORTRESS drummer Seraph. One envisages a torturous and strung-out writing process for the album, in snatched moments between projects, but as V. Santura recalls, this was markedly not the case. “For me personally the song writing process was much easier than the previous two or three albums. In 2015 I had a couple of weeks or months where, all of a sudden, I was totally inspired out of the blue, out of nowhere. I basically wrote the music for about two thirds of the album in that time.” Wryly, he adds “The thing is, being inspired to compose music doesn’t mean you’re inspired to record it!” The audio engineer has a vast and accomplished portfolio for his studio work but, sighing, declares “recording your own music is never business as usual.”

Considered from a purely musical perspective, Spectres From The Old World is quite a departure from it’s predecessor. “I wanted to do something different with Spectres and not follow the path that we pursued with Venereal Dawn. I didn’t want to go further down that road,” explains Santura. Ever his own worst critic, he continues, “with Venereal Dawn and Eidolon, we got more progressive in a way, but also less aggressive. The songs were long and epic, but they took a lot of time to develop.” Reflectingly, Santura elaborates. “You had to be relatively patient as a listener. That’s my small critique, or rather the thing I wasn’t 100% satisfied with, and so it was my explicit wish to write an album that was way more direct, gets to the point faster, and is also more aggressive. With our older albums, I think the balance between the progressive and rather mellow stuff and the aggressive stuff was lacking a little bit and that’s something I wanted to get right on the new album.” Even a cursory first listen will show that he has surpassed himself in this regard. The opening pair Nascence/Coalescence wastes little time in delivering the immediacy Santura promises, and the album as a whole provides sparse reprieve from DARK FORTRESS’ icy, mechanical onslaught. That sound is reflected in the album’s chilling and exquisite artwork which, it turns out, is one of Morean’s holiday pictures from Chile – specifically the Pali-Aike National Park. “All of the pictures we used in the booklet are unedited photos, it’s just how they are,” explains Santura. “If you look at the cover, you ask ‘OK, what is it?’ It provokes a lot of interpretation, but it’s something real. That was a conscious decision.”

Six years is a long time between albums, especially for an active band who are not on hiatus. Is this gap indicative of a long, difficult writing and recording process?

V. Santura: Not at all. I’m working in the studio all the time and recording bands all the time and mixing and mastering them. After being in the studio for 8-9 hours, I ask myself: “What do I want to do now? More of the same?” No. I sit down, have my guitar in my hands, and have some ideas. I keep the arrangements in my head. I kept them there for two years. Keeping all this music present in your head all the time gets on your nerves. Finally, in September 2017, our new keyboardist Phenex said, “We have to sit down now and record your ideas and make a proper pre-production so we can get this album rolling.” We booked some studio time and recorded all the ideas I’d had and worked on keyboard arrangements at the same time. It was a good session. We had seven songs done, from which one looked as though it wasn’t going to be good enough, so we had six – but then again, being really into that DARK FORTRESS cosm resulted in another song writing session, so directly after that I wrote Isa and Pulling At Threads. I knew that Asvargr had some very good riffs lying around, so we wrote Swansong and basically somewhere in spring 2018 the song writing was finished. It took another few months to really coordinate all the time schedules so we could start the recording. That’s a normal thing, it takes a while. And as you know, record companies have deadlines and you have to deliver your master ahead of release. That’s why it’s always such a long process from the day you go to the studio to when its released. It takes almost a year these days. We needed a lot of time for this album. It was in my head the whole time. I’m really relieved that we’re getting it out now and that I can let it go.

Do you find yourself fretting over arrangements and other details in the course of recording?

V. Santura: Not really because in the two years after I’d written the songs to when I’d recorded them the songs didn’t really change. That’s the thing. I think that when I write a song, I have the feeling: “Now, it is finished,” and it is finished. It hardly ever changes. I know for a lot of people they drive themselves crazy and cannot finish something – but I am happy not to have this disease! I’m very self-critical while I’m writing, but once everything has gone past my own quality check, I don’t question it again. And that’s good for me.

Can you tell us more about the recording process? Did you do anything unusual or different this time around?

V. Santura: There’s one thing which is quite unusual, and we didn’t talk about it, and I’m rather curious if people would even recognise it, but as a matter of fact we have two drummers on that record. Half of the songs were recorded by Seraph, our actual drummer, and the other half were recorded by Hannes Grossmann, the TRIPTYKON drummer. I don’t know, would you have recognised that?

Not at all.

V. Santura: Good. I think it’s a weird approach. If we talked about this a lot, some people would instantly have this bias, but I think it gave each song the perfect character because each song was performed by the perfect drummer. It was mostly just a clash of schedules, but also a position our drummer makes. He’s kind of moved away from the genre we’re playing. “If I record for DARK FOTRESS I want to either do it with full commitment or not at all. I cannot fake DARK FORTRESS, this music is too emotional. I want to do it for real or not at all.” And he couldn’t identify with many of the songs on the album as a musician. He’s a fantastic pop and rock drummer, but he’s not interested so much with extreme metal drumming. He’s a fantastic drummer. But his musical taste has gone in a different direction, and he doesn’t appreciate the physical element of extreme metal drumming very much. He’d say: “You know what? I don’t want to record that. Let’s just ask Hannes to record it.” That’s why we have two drummers on the album.

It sounds as if there’s a sense of space on this album. Not drenched in reverb or anything, but some quite subtle uses of effects.

V. Santura: Exactly! Good that you hear it. It’s purely my guitar into the Engl, but there’s always a little bit of delay and also on the rhythm guitars. It’s not something I normally do, but it tweaks the sound to give it more space. If I did it with reverb it would sound a little bit more further away but with delay you get that sense of space but keep the presence. That’s something I did for the whole album. You heard absolutely right.

If you had to describe the atmosphere of Spectres From The Old World in three words, what would they be?

V. Santura: It’s icy. That’s the most important word. If you had to use three I’d say icy, blue – because that’s the colour association I have – and also black. I’m so glad that this time we had artwork that reflected the sound of the album. It’s not that I hated any of our previous artworks, I always like them – but previous ones were often related to the lyrics. This time it was very important to me to find pictures that I can associate purely musically. You have a certain picture in mind when you write a song. And we found them. Each song is represented by a photo where I can feel an emotional connection to the song. That also goes for the cover.

Are there any external influences on the music? Anything you were listening to at the time – or reading, or watching – which you feel had an effect on the writing process?

V. Santura: Personally, the answer is no. I don’t think that any music or stuff I was watching or reading had any influence on the album. Not really. Maybe at the time I’d been involved in a couple of productions that had a lot of tracks which were very symphonic. My only inspiration from that was “I want to do the exact opposite!” I want to make an album that’s very direct and where you can hear every element. I wanted very clear, clean and open arrangements. Most of the time it’s just us. Sometimes keyboards, sometimes lead, but that’s it. And I like that. It sounds relatively complex and rich but being achieved without having a track overkill. I mean, the things that really influenced me when I started writing were just classics like SLAYER and METALLICA. And of course, some early black metal. If you listen to SLAYER it’s very clear and clean arrangements. That’s it, and It works. The thing you have to have then is a really good riff. You cannot mask it with big arrangements. I still like listening to Reign In Blood over a lot of other stuff!

What songs from the album are you looking forward to playing live?

V. Santura: I’m sure we’ll play Pali Aike live, It’s groovy and heavy. Then it really depends, because now it’s also that we play some shows with Seraph on drums. So, when he doesn’t have time we play with Hannes. It’s probably also depends on who is playing drums what songs we’re going to play. I’d love to play Isa. It’s one of my favourite tracks and it’s very heavy. I’d love to play Pulling At Threads and also the opening tracks, Nascence/Coalescence. Those would be my first choices for a live show.

And finally, are there any plans underway for a follow up to Spectres From The Old World?

V. Santura: We’ll see about that. I’m not sure there will be a next album. Who knows? That is something we had in mind. I don’t want to talk about that yet.

Spectres From The Old World is out now via Century Media Records.

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