Hand Of Kalliach: Unleashing The Corryvreckan
Swirling around the summit of an underwater mountain, three seas meet to create the demonic whirlpool where an archaic being – the Corryvreckan – resides. This haunting creature of Scottish folklore was the inspiration for husband and wife duo Sophie and John Fraser, also known as the melodic death metal outfit HAND OF KALLIACH. Having recently signed to big US label Prosthetic Records the Scottish duo unleashed the Corryvreckan in all her fury and have received an incredible number of plaudits from across the land and beyond.
When discussing about how the band got signed to Prosthetic, John says, “Steve [A&R at Prosthetic] had actually picked up one of the first and only 50 CDs that ever got made of the EP so actually picked that up straight from Dan [the band’s previous PR] and it made its way across the pond and missing is collection or in the states and even quietly unbeknownst to us.”
After Prosthetic had received the band’s sophomore album Corryvreckan, John continues “they did everything by sort of committee over at Prosthetic so they’d have to go and like circulate the new album and see if everyone was on board with it, which thankfully they all were and it was just like super super fast. Like two weeks later, I think not even maybe like a week later. We’d signed and that was it!” HAND OF KALLIACH couldn’t quite believe what they achieved with Sophie exclaiming “we had to check the email about six times to see if it was if it was real!”
The Corryvreckan album is one steeped in mysticism and magic, blending the elegant melodies of Scottish folk music with the brutal ferocity of melodic death metal. A perfect mix when expressing the band’s subject matter, but the stories themselves took some time to find, hidden in the depths of written sources. “Some of the fun we’ve had with the project has been actually discovering a lot of these aspects of folklore and the ties to the landscape ourselves. To be honest, even in Scotland, there’s not necessarily a huge amount of knowledge about these stories,” John explains. “The Corryvreckan is actually the third biggest whirlpool in the world, it lies off the west coast of Scotland in between the Isle of Jura and Scarba. It’s caused by a huge underwater mountain in between the two islands and so when the tides changing, and particularly in winter, when you get a lot of the temperature changes, it can become a real violent monster of a whirlpool and it’s actually referenced in some really old Irish texts.”
The Correyvreckan herself “rises from the depths of the whirlpool where she rests over summer, and arises to usher in winter by washing her cloak in the waters until they’re white and then she cast them over the land where they where the it coats the land in snow and she sort of rains over the world for six months until Beltane, which says the Scottish fire festival,” John continues.
HAND OF KALLIACH also utilise Scots Gaelic in a few of their songs; “I’ve gone from doing the odd passage here and there. Now I’m actually trying to do more of a full songs and using some of the phonetics and some of the sounds that come with it, which are quite unique in some of the pronunciations and the gutturals work really well with death growls.” Cirein-cròin sees the duo utilise it for an entire song, John continues, “[Cirein-cròin] is an old Scots Gallic nursery rhyme about a giant sea monster, because they’ve got this fantastic metal, horrendous, sort of Lovecraftian beasts. And it was fun to bring the sounds of the language into the music through that story.”
Working in Scottish folk music was also an interesting process for HAND OF KALLIACH, with active and intricate melodies John explains the band’s process. “So a lot of the way that we write is that we’ll start with a lead on the guitar that takes a scale or a rhythm or a tune that you might hear on a Scottish fiddle, bagpipes, or accordion, Then we transpose that tune and sit it relatively high up the fretboard on a guitar. So you’re still getting that high energy and sometimes frantic sort of rhythm and speed at a reasonably high pitch, which is quite unique and commonly associated with Scottish folk music, but within the context of the typical death metal melody of instrumentation. We obviously still do use the odd bit of strings or pipe choir or other sort of atmospherics just add flavour.”
It was the band’s “long suffering” sound engineer Winter helped take the band’s sound to the next level on Corryvreckan, John explains, “he’s been absolutely fantastic. He was the same guy that we got to do Samhainn as well. We tried a couple of engineers prior to him, and no offence to the other engineers, because we left everything on good terms, but we just wasn’t working with the density of the tracks.” and it shows, as Corryvreckan takes you on an immersive journey through Scottish myth and folklore.
Moving forward HAND OF KALLIACH are looking to take the band into the live arena and are currently rehearsing with a guitarist and a drummer. With the power of the Correyvreckan behind them the duo are poised to unleash her wintery fury upon the rest of the world.
Corryvreckan is out now via Prosthetic Records.
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