Russian Circles: The Bloom Of Cataclysmic Clarity
It seems extraordinary to think that RUSSIAN CIRCLES have been playing and creating music for nearly two decades. With seven studio albums and their debut EP going all the way back to 2004, the band have had an eighteen year career that feels like it’s gone by in the blink of an eye. In that time, there’s been a definite development of their style and sound, moulding their heavy, drone soundscapes into monstrous dirges that rage and consume. We caught up with Mike Sullivan about the mindset of the new record Gnosis and getting the barebones of creating music.
“It feels good to get the record out there!” Mike exclaims. “Excited to tour behind these songs.” The band, like so many others, have been without live performance over the past few years, so it’s understandable that RUSSIAN CIRCLES are also comping at the bit to get their music played. While the band have always had a consistent voice in the music scene, they’ve been mailable with their approach to making that music. “I’ve been eager to work on the follow up to Blood Year since it was released,” Mike explains. “The pandemic was a perfect opportunity to block out the thought of live shows and focus solely on writing. As a result, the songs on Gnosis became were more thought out. Each song got the proper attention from all of us. For the first time ever, we crafted proper demos of each song. Between COVID restrictions and us all living in three different cities, we had no choice but to familiarize ourselves with home recording for all the instruments.”
RUSSIAN CIRCLES are deft weavers of emotional, heavy ambiences that expand and retract into various extremes. As they’ve matured into their sound, they’ve realised more and more how much they enjoy the heavier side of what they do when they perform. “It always feels better to play heavier and more aggressive songs,” he tells us. “Also, there was a steady diet of metal during the pandemic. I’ve never listened to more metal than any other time of life. I think the heavy side of Gnosis comes more so from what we’re listening to than the state of the world during the pandemic.”
It’s interesting to hear the ways that influence takes precedent over circumstance. While it’s easy to hear the specific metal stimulus that has pushed the very aggressive sound of Gnosis, the overall honing in on what they wanted to achieve. “Gnosis was a different type of writing process than Blood Year,” Mike clarifies. “Blood Year didn’t come together as naturally, also different members had different approaches to the record. Gnosis feels like us playing to our strengths. All of us locked into what we wanted.”
The band have been looking to create records that can be reproduced accurately in a live setting for some time, and this record is no exception. The results have naturally become even more refined than ever before, the distillation of the more brutal and unforgiving sounds allowed for more liberation in the creative process. “It just felt natural to write heavier songs. Like I mentioned earlier, since lockdown began, I’ve been listening to more metal than ever before and I think that heavily affected the record’s sound. We all like playing heavy music but we write all types of songs. This time around though, it felt most honest and natural to focus on the heavier side of what we do.”
It’s of course not all been sunshine and smooth sailing through the pandemic, as rethinking the initial approach to collaboration and working together without being together. The dynamic change meant that things had to come together in a more fluid way than before. “The big difference is crafting songs vs riffs,” he recounts. “On previous records, I’d stock pile a huge amount of riffs and then Dave [Turncrantz] and I would sort through them all and start seeing which riffs could work together. This often times meant adjusting a time signature, key, or tuning, which takes the original riff another step away from its origin. Whereas with Gnosis, the songs were submitted as a whole, not just a collection of odd riffs. There seems to be more intention behind each riff because it was only intended to be in that one song.”
The record feels like a hurricane of sound; overcast, undeniable and thunderous, there’s a clear ebb and flow, like coming into the eye of the storm and then pushing into the even heavier tracks. “It was intentional to place Ó Braonáin immediately before one of the most aggressive songs on the record,” Mike gives the run down on that deliberate ordering of the album. “That song is mixed a little quieter too to make following song, Betrayal, feel even louder. The keys of each song just happened to be compatible too. Bloom oddly enough was the first song that was fully written for this record and it had been in the works for a few years. Since it’s such a mellow song, for some reason it felt appropriate for it to close out the album.”
With more focus and resolve to perform in a more streamlined way, taking the music and recreating it as directly as possible in a live setting, it appears that after eighteen years, RUSSIAN CIRCLES have plenty to delve into and explore. With the titanic sounds of Gnosis, we might be looking at the most musically assertive version of the band to date.
Gnosis is out now via Sargent House.
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