NILE Karl Sanders track by track interview for ‘Vile Nilotic Rites’

Karl Sanders from NILE sat down with us for a special track by track interview!

It feels like NILE have been teasing their follow up to 2015’s What Should Not Be Unearthed for years. But finally, after a long wait, Vile Nilotic Rites is almost upon us; and what an album it is. In the build up to the release of their ninth full length, founding member and band mastermind Karl Sanders sat down with Distorted Sound Magazine in a special interview to give us his run down on the songwriting process for Vile Nilotic Rites, and a track by track guide of the record!

Speaking about the upcoming album, Karl tells us, “I think the songwriting on this record I think is unique amongst NILE albums in that there was more collaboration, cooperation, teamwork, brotherhood, trust and respect going on between the contributing writers than we’ve had in years, maybe even going back as far as the Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka days. Everybody got involved this time. Our new guitarist, Brian [Kingsland] brought music for four songs. We were so stoked about the quality of material Brian was writing that we just kept encouraging him, and I think that is to everyone’s benefit. Also, our bass player, Brad [Parris] contributed riffs in several songs, even George Kollias wrote music for a track. I didn’t have to do it all by myself this time. I do the majority of the writing; I’ve always done it and I probably always will. But this time, I had some real fucking solid cooperation and collaboration with my band mates.”

Long Shadows of Dread

Karl: Long Shadows Of Dread was born after I had been watching a BBC documentary on Netflix called Long Shadow by David Reynolds. He’s a Cambridge University historian. He wrote a book that the documentary is based on called The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century where he talks about the First World War and its far reaching consequences over the decades, even going as far as the next hundred years and how it really shaped everything in ways that aren’t necessarily immediately evident. I had some ideas I was wrestling around with about the long, slow decline of the Egyptian civilisation. They were on the decline already before they were conquered by the Greeks, then the Romans and then the Arabs dealt them the death blow. I started wondering, did the Egyptians know that they were doomed? In those last few generations as things are on the decline, could they see it? [And that was] completely at odds with most of the fundamentals of Egyptian culture where the universe and the cosmos was an ordered thing. The gods were daily propitiated as a means of keeping order in the universe, they wanted shit to stay the same, they weren’t interested in change. But here change was upon them. Was this frightening to them? Did this fill them with unease? Well, I don’t know. It’s speculation, of course. But that’s really where Long Shadows of Dread is coming fr om, feeling the slow encroachment of evil upon the order of the universe in the time of the ancient Egyptians, as they were inevitably headed for the death of their civilisation.

[Musically], it pretty much starts with a big bang. I wanted it to go first because when people put this record on and are giving it their first listen, I wanted it to go bang, right out the gate, and leave no doubt in the mind of the listener that this is a fucking metal album. It’s heavy, it’s crushing, and it is the end of the world. Then after that, after we all realise that this NILE album is the end of the world, now we can take it a few other places. But right out of the gate, I wanted it to be cataclysmic, apocalyptic. This one didn’t have the same level of being passed around and changed a whole lot. I brought it to the table and shared it with George and the very first version that he came back with showed me he really understood the song and knew what to do with it. So it didn’t have to go back and forth eight or nine times like some of the other songs. This one pretty much came together right away exactly as intended. It didn’t really need to be fucked with.

Oxford Handbook of Savage Genocidal Warfare

Karl: Again, I was watching Netflix and there was a black and white documentary about the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi death squads that carried out the extermination in Nazi occupied territories in World War Two. Genocidal warfare is of course a respectable topic for a death metal album but it’s not really a new idea. The Nazis didn’t invent it. It’s been around since Biblical times, and probably before that. In the first couple of chapters of the Bible when the ancient Hebrews were trying to take the Promised Land, every little city state, they went in and they slaughtered every man, woman and child. Ancient genocidal warfare, it’s not a new idea. Therefore, I thought, “Man, this will make a great topic for a NILE song.” I just typed into Google, ‘ancient genocide warfare’ and wow, you should have seen the amount of shit that came back. Holy fucking crap. I have pages and pages of notes and quotes about genocide and war atrocities in ancient times, by a whole bunch of different people from a whole bunch of different countries. There was a lot of stuff from Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Sargon the Second, Agamemnon, Homer and a Greek historian named Thucydides. But then I stumbled upon a book called The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. This was the motherlode! There was so much stuff that was exactly perfect for the song I was trying to write, so I had to name the song something that paid homage to this book.

Here’s what was so twisted about this. I knew this song needed to be fast. In my mind, I pictured something like ANGEL CORPSE – very old school, blazing guitar, blast beats, double bass – but I was busy working on something else. George had mentioned wanting to write something, so I sent the words to George but he didn’t do anything with it. And then one day Brian came by the house and I said, “I gave George the song you know, check it out. I’m still waiting on him to do something.” Brian read the words and snatched the paper out of my hand. He comes back a couple days later with this totally abusive, fast and brutal fucking song with impossible guitar parts. I mean, guitar parts that fucking hurt your hands to play. It was a challenging song to learn, to rehearse, to record. This is right up there with all the toughest NILE songs ever written.

Vile Nilotic Rites

Karl: It comes from the HBO series Rome; I think its episode eight of the second season. Every day the newsreader would read the news, current events, public service announcements, political propaganda, you know, whatever was going on. Well, on that day, his job was to read this thing about Mark Antony, because Octavian wanted to go to war. But the public still loved Mark Antony so Octavian had to turn around public opinion – he had to demonise Mark Antony, because the Roman citizenry was not going to support going to war against their beloved Mark Antony. It wasn’t going to fucking happen, so it was necessary to slander and demonise them. The newsreader reads this thing in the Forum right there, he says “He worships dogs and reptiles. He blackens his eyes with soot like a prostitute. He dances and plays the cymbals in vile Nilotic rites.” I was sitting watching this with my wife and we both looked each other went “Oh my god, if that isn’t a fucking NILE song I don’t know what the fuck is!” How could I not write this song? If the metal gods just hand me this on a silver platter, and I don’t take it that’s really bad karma, I have to write a song. There’s no way I cannot write this song. But that’s the just first verse… It took me months to figure out exactly where the song was going to go. It didn’t really come together until I found the book by Jerry Toner, Homer’s Turk. What Toner was saying was that Mark Antony and Alexander the Great might have been great, disciplined military conquerors from Western nations (Rome and Greece respectively) but according to popular opinion and the classical take on this; their taking on of Eastern ways had a corrupting influence and that’s when they fell prey to all manner of spiritual and moral degradation. Their drugged and drunken debaucheries is the stuff of legend, and that’s the beginning and end for those guys. It seemed to me that what one worships, one becomes. If you spend all your time drinking, drugging, sleeping with prostitutes and doing all manner of stuff, eventually you’re going to become a drunken, drugged prostitute monger. That’s just the way it goes. It’s time tested, that’s just the way human beings are built. What one worships, one becomes.

This is the one that anybody can listen to. It’s got a mid-paced kind of groove, it’s got some slow stuff and only a little bit of fast stuff. It’s a metal song but it’s the big catchy one, and it’s even got a sing along chorus that works pretty goddamn well live. I think we established beyond a shadow of doubt within the first two tracks that this is a fucking savage metal record. But this one, it’s really song-oriented in the phraseology and the melodic hints of the first and second verses. It was a lot of work, a lot of songwriting lessons were brought into play. Both Brian and I are students of THE BEATLES, master songwriters. I think that if you write songs in this modern day and age, if you don’t know THE BEATLES or don’t understand or have not bothered to learn any lessons from THE BEATLES, then you’re not playing with a full deck. You’re missing the fucking benefit of learning from the masters.

Seven Horns of War

Karl: The Holy Books of Thelema, by Aleister Crowley. This book is a lot like H.P. Lovecraft‘s work in that it’s literature that is somehow so in tune with death metal ideology that it actually became endless fodder for countless metal bands to recycle, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. It’s almost like the writings of Lovecraft and the Thelema are already death metal lyrics exactly as they are. You don’t even need to fuck with them much to work as a death metal lyric. So, I was reading a passage just seeing what I might come across and I discovered that it all sounds like a death metal song! When I came across the line “abomination of desolation” in the Thelema, I was like “oh, shit!” as that was the name of the aborted first MORBID ANGEL album that became a demo, Abominations of Desolation. That’s a classic. Any self-respecting metal fan knows this name. So I’ve seen this, obviously it was some sort of fate; I open a book and here this is, maybe this is the song I’m supposed to write.

I was working through it, and it seemed a lot like this particular passage at least, was an exhortation towards some sort of war of extermination. And when I thought about that for a few minutes, it seemed a lot like Christopher Lee as Saruman, exhorting masses of Uruk-Hai to go out and destroy the world of men. It just seemed to have that tone. So, I wrote the words and I really fucking liked them, but the words sat around for a couple months because I didn’t know what the fuck to do with it. I eventually got my Lord of the Rings soundtrack by Howard Shore and gave it a listen to see what’s in there. There was a horn bit that stood out to me, it didn’t really have any accompaniment with it (it was like a solo French horn) but when I heard it I thought; what if underneath the horns we did something like KRISIUN, something really fast and really militant? But that wasn’t enough for a whole song either. I mean, that was just one fucking section. So then I starting trying to pinpoint a movie which is just full of completely over the top destruction, where it’s hopeless and mankind is being destroyed hopelessly. It came to me: the 1954 Godzilla and the composer, Akira Ifukube! There was a shitload of stuff in there so I started mining that, and that really helped. There was also a lot of Rusty Cooley-isms in the guitar parts for this. He is, in my opinion, one of the greatest shredders on planet Earth. He’s does a lot of things that are uniquely his own – well now they’re uniquely in a NILE song!

That Which is Forbidden

Karl: This one will take a minute to explain but once I get there, it’ll make sense. Aristotle wrote that Egyptians and the Babylonians studied astronomy since the beginning of civilisation, and it’s through them that we have many reliable reports about each of the stars. The ancient Egyptians were greatly concerned with the night sky and the mystery that it holds – for example, there were priests who did nothing but look at stars, that’s what they did. That’s what their job was, to record the movements of the stars. So, these guys were really concerned with looking up at the night sky and stargazing, but it’s also kind of considered that the Egyptians might have had advanced technologies which we don’t even possess today. These guys also are the forefathers of magic, all “magic” today is descended from ancient Egyptian magic. I’m thinking about this, and I came across this line in the Qur’an commandments about that which is forbidden. It’s something sacred to which access is forbidden to people who are not in a state of purity, who are not initiated into the sacred knowledge. It also refers to evil and sinful acts that are forbidden – there’s some shit you just cannot do. So, I started thinking about all this, what kind of stuff was forbidden to these ancient occult, stargazing guys? What was forbidden to them? What were they not allowed to do? It seemed to me that maybe they weren’t allowed to leave our earthly astral plane, or space travel or time travel? Maybe that’s been forbidden to mankind for some pretty fucking good reasons?

I thought a little bit more about this, and I started focusing on the Ronnie James Dio song Stargazer from the RAINBOW album. He talks about slaves building a tower, so the wizard, the Stargazer, can go up to the top of the tower to try to fly. And that’s why that shit is forbidden. It’s an exercise in ego, of monstrous, maniacal ego, to sacrifice a whole bunch of people so one guy can do some fancy flying around or travel to the moon or travel to the other side of the cosmos or anything else the occult guys were talking about back then. In That Which is Forbidden, the character in there wants to defy the natural order, to defy the will of the gods; he wants to command the universe, to enslave untold worlds.

I gave this one to Brian, because he’s got a lot of black metal influence. His band ENTHEAN, there’s a lot of blackened death with a lot of bizarre and dark chords that are exactly, to my ear, what these lyrics needed. So I gave it to him and he kept it for a while. It took him a while to work some stuff out and then he went back and forth with George a lot, and there’s some other instrumentation in there that had to be figured out which was my contribution. This one is definitely to Brian‘s credit. The musical journey that the song goes on is always interesting, and it’s a new thing for NILE. There’s a lot of different influences going on in the song. If you ask me “Karl, what is your secret favourite song on this record?” It would be this one, just because of all the subtly interesting guitar things that are going on.

Snake Pit Mating Frenzy

Karl: This one had a couple of impetuses. Brad had come over and we were playing some guitar, we had some riffs that we were bouncing back and forth that had a real serpentine, cult-like, Middle Eastern sounding kind of thing. The Indiana Jones scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where he falls into the snake pit – that was the first thing that came to my mind. So I started digging around trying to look for some stuff to work with some lyrics for that, but it was a dismal failure… It was just not going to fucking work. But then I stumbled across some videos about the Narcisse snake pits in Canada, where every year about 75-80,000 snakes come for this great big get together where it’s basically a giant mating ball. The snakes will tangle themselves up, 100 or so at a time – it’ll be 100 male snakes all trying to mate with one female, one big swirling mass with all these snakes getting all fucking wacky. It started reminding me a lot of mosh pits at extreme metal shows where you see everybody in this tangled, swirling frenzy all crashing into each other. Plus, the fact that extreme metal audiences are often 95% male really kind of cemented this comparison in my mind, a mosh pit is kind of like a primitive animal mating ritual, just minus the mating part. But all the other animal behaviour is right in there.

This is the fun song. It’s meant to just get you in the pit and slam with your metal brothers and sisters. It’s not got a terribly deep meaning; we’re talking about snakes doing wacky shit. There’s nothing profound about it, but I don’t think songs always have to be laden with patience-testing deep meaning or explain the mysteries of cosmic existence, or make fucking tiresome profound philosophical statements. Sometimes you just want to bang your head or get in a mosh pit. That’s what this song is for.

Revel in Their Suffering

Karl: This song could be thought of as one half of a thematic pair of songs dealing with a singular idea but from opposing viewpoints. Revel in Their Suffering and We Are Cursed both examine what could have easily been the social attitudes on the living conditions of the people who lived through the great famine and ruin at the end of the Old Kingdom, similar to the track Age of Famine from What Should Not Be Unearthed when they had to resort to cannibalism because there’d been 40 years of drought. All there was to eat was each other, the country had descended into chaos and cannibalism. Age of Famine was really just telling the stuff that happened, but Revel in Their Suffering and We Are Cursed are looking at it from the viewpoints of common people. We Are Cursed is about the Egyptians who had to deal with it, but Revel in Their Suffering is told from the perspective of Egypt’s neighbours, the Hittites, the Nubians, the Syrians, the Babylonians, Canaanites, a whole bunch of these neighbours. So when that shit was happening to the Egyptians, all these other little countries had been conquered, subjugated and exploited by the Egyptians for hundreds, if not thousands of years, at one time or another. So, I had to ask myself, what are the neighbours going to think when the people who’ve been abusing them for years finally get their fucking bad day from the gods? Are they going to feel sorry for him? Or are they going to say, “You know what, fuck you, you deserve it, go ahead and fucking suffer.” Back then there was no national foreign aid, without modern technology it’s just logistically impossible. At that time in Egypt there’s no International Red Cross, Oxfam, or World Food Programme, that shit just didn’t exist back then. And you know what, even if it did, I kind of doubt that the Hittites would have said “Hey, you guys are having a bad time. We’ll forget about all the bad shit you did to us for the last couple of hundred years. We’re going to help you guys and everything’s going to work out just fine.” History doesn’t record anything like that! That shit did not happen. No, the Egyptians suffered and their neighbours probably said, “Fuck you.”

It was Brian with a little help from Brad [that brought Revel in Their Suffering to the table]. They worked together, then the song went to George and then it really started going back and forth as a lot of rearranging happened. This one was originally about nine minutes long; the last four minutes of the song were a solo Brian wrote that was so goddamn good. It was probably the best thing he’s ever played his life. I was so in love with it, he put his heart and soul into this fucking guitar solo. He wrote this four minutes of fucking incredible music. The problem was that the solo section was so good that you completely forgot the incredible song that came before it. Your brain is only capable of holding X amount in immediate memory, so it was like a great big song eraser, it was so fucking good. Brian had to sacrifice the best guitar solo he’s ever played in his life for the sake of the betterment of the song. It is a testament to how much everybody was willing to pay the price to work together as a team and do the right thing for the songs.

Thus Sayeth the Parasites of the Mind

Karl: Originally, Brad had come over and he played this thing on the guitar. It was a really cool, minor key kind of riff; deceptively simple. It was very IMMOLATION-like; there wasn’t a lot of notes, but it was a very complex idea because of the timing involved, but also it had this restless and hypnotic, or insidious quality. But that’s all we had. I was thinking, is this an intro to a song? It’s just one guitar riff, it’s not enough to make an instrumental with, what do we do with it? So it just sat there on my hard drive for a while until I came across a video about zombie ants; the name of the zombie ant video is a science video called Mind Controlling Insect Overlords. There’s a species of ants in tropical South America and Southeast Asia that gets infected with this fungus, and the fungus takes control of their minds in order to spread more fungus. It’s an incredible parasitic thing. After I saw this video and how fucking horrifying it was, I knew what to do. I had all these other riff ideas to go along with this thing that Brad had written, and it turned into an instrumental.

Where is the Wrathful Sky

Karl: Where is the Wrathful Sky is another one in which I wrote the words after the music, which is not how NILE normally does things, but George had written some music, and had not written any words. He sent me the guitar riffs and a mock-up arrangement with his drum ideas. I wrote the words based on where he was taking things musically. They’re kind of Nietzsche derived and influenced but there’s also some Malthus influence, with a dread of an overpopulated, self-destructive future humanity, weary of life and yearning for an apocalyptic ending to their suffering.

The Imperishable Stars are Sickened

Karl: The words for this came first and what I was talking about was that, in modern times, there is a phenomenon called the movement of the stars. The universe is expanding; therefore, stars are measurably moving away from a centre point. Viewed from planet Earth, over time, you can see that stars are moving beyond the regular night procession. The astronomers of ancient Egypt spent a lot of time observing, studying and recording all the movements of the stars. Did they have advanced technology back then? If so, how did they interpret the movement of stars moving away as the universe is expanding? Well, if we look at Egyptian mythology and religion, one might come to look at it like the stars are moving away from Earth specifically, not from the centre of the Big Bang, but from Earth because that is the point of reference of anybody living here. How did this observation impact their view? They saw the universe as immutable, unchanging, there was a divinely regulated order of the heavens – they wanted this to stay the same. That was the purpose of their religion, to keep order in the cosmos. So if the stars are moving away, what’s going on here? Is this a theological conflict? I think the answer would have been clear. The stars as the physical embodiment of the celestial gods are fucking sick and weary of humanity. They are sick of our shit. They have borne witness to every single despicable act of mankind since time began, and they’re fucking sick of us. They don’t want anything to do us. They’re moving away, because they don’t want anything to do with mankind whatsoever. We are a heart-breaking failure of the hopes and dreams of the creators. That’s why the stars are moving away. They’re fucking sick of our shit.

This was another one that I really wanted Brian to do because he’s got a lot of these black metal influences with the discordant melodies and the other side of the universe – black metal kind of stuff that he loves. So I really thought there was a lot of possibility there and I was absolutely right. He took it and came up with some incredible riffing and put it all together in a way that really tells this big epic story. I think Brad and I contributed here and there, but for the most part, this is Brian‘s baby.

We Are Cursed

Karl: This song is inspired by my trip to Egypt, to work with Nader Sadek. We went out on various expeditions to different places, and on one of the days, we were in Saqqara. Right next to Saqqara there’s a place called Abusir, which is home to some of the oldest pyramids in Egypt – but they’re not famous pyramids. They’re little, ruined, falling apart, broken down and incredibly decayed pyramids that barely look like pyramids anymore. It’s not open to the public, but Nader knows a lot of people, he knew who to bribe. We went there and on the way back we had to go a different route to Cairo, so we went through this incredibly poverty stricken area. I mean, mind-boggling poverty. I’ve seen some fucking poverty throughout my travels in Malaysia and some places in South America that are really poor, but this took the cake. I remember this behind me; I could see the shadows of the Great Pyramids, and in front of me, I could see the skyscrapers of downtown Cairo, but immediately around me to my left and right outside of my transport, was all kinds of poverty. I had all three things around me at the same time and it occurred to me that you know what? Human beings are fucked. If 5000 years ago they built these pyramids, and today they’re building skyscrapers why am I looking at all these destitute people? Why haven’t we bothered to solve the problem of poor people and world hunger? We are fucking despicable. Mankind deserves to fucking die. We are cursed. We’re cursed with some sort of fundamental, essential and elemental flaw as human beings. That really was my frame of mind when I was writing this. Tying back into the downfall of the Egyptian Old Kingdom I have to think that some of those people probably thought, “We are just fucked. We’re fucking cursed. Our country’s falling apart there’s been famine and drought for 40 years – we’ve got nothing to eat, the gods don’t give a shit. We’re fucking cursed.”

It is the closing track, you just can’t have this song and have something come after it; it’s too dark, it’s too epic. It’s a fucking closer. I knew as soon as it was written that it was going to be the album closer. Me and George went back and forth a little bit on the arrangement, where the drums fit in and all that. But it’s pretty much me and George on this one.

Vile Nilotic Rites is set for release November 1st via Nuclear Blast Records.

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