Pigeon Spins Featuring an Interview with Shadow Antlers

Shadow Antlers - Outside Belongings

Shadow Antlers is an exploration of darkwave territory by Jakob, also in the Swedish noise rock/post-punk band RAMN. Shadow Antlers is dark electronic post-punk with a raw edge, celebrating the outsider. Tales of escape and abandon. Stories about secret bridges and hidden places. Feral goth, avant-darkwave, electronic crooner infra-punk or something along those lines. Original and recognizable.

Interview with Shadow Antlers

(•)> Shadow Antlers channels a feral, untamed spirit through electronic and post-punk textures. What first inspired you to capture that wildness in sound?

That wildness is in nature, in the body and in everything that lives or even moves. It is in the nature of my cognitive functionality, and if I do not get my music to resonate with that wildness, I will not release it.

As modern darkwave most often have taken another path in sonic territories - the more anemic and sterile approach laid out by early French or German coldwave - it took me some time to find the right vibe after initiating the project. A certain relentlessness in the programming, a physicalness in the sounds used, the restlessness of my body flowing through the guitar playing. Drums and percussion driving the music rather than keeping time. The drums are not a watch, they are the beating, restless heart of the whole magic organism.

(•)> You’ve described the project as “feral goth” and “infra-punk.” How do you define those terms, and how do they reflect your artistic intent?

Well, yes, they are descriptions of something, and as most things I do they were popping out from stream of consciousness. God knows what I meant but if I may reflect upon them, I would say they express a frustration with genre names and conventions, but also a love for the spirit they convey when they are considered as tools rather than as limits.

Goth is not only elegant mansions, prefab plastic-wear BDSM/victorian imagery and Black Friday makeup. It is also the chaotic drama and godless, cosmic cataclysms be sung by Byron and the Shelleys, the wild and mindless creativity storms of psycho-tropes, trance-like conditions and lawless darkness. Darkness not as a pose but as a promise, nature crashing in and tearing oppressive social constraints to shreds.

And punk not as a bundle of worn-out aesthetic and musical features, but as a defiant, triumphant, creative and primeval ur-force underpinning and running through every such aesthetic regulation, eventually destined to also break every such constraint.

So when "goth" and "post-punk", the genre sounds that in my childhood to me signified freedom and adventure, was set out to be the cornerstones of the Shadow Antlers project, they were never meant to be conserving or confirming of them as genre conventions. They were instead tools to build with, ingredients to destill with. Each containing their own escape routes and pathways to mystery and out from the ordinary. Never limits or constraints, though. My god, I love those sounds!

(•)> The music evokes escape and rebellion :machines breaking, cities collapsing. What personal or cultural tension fuels that imagery?

I am a KCS person, what is commonly called ADHD. For such a person the tension between control mechanisms and everything's inner wildness - may it be within people, social structures, mechanical machines or the harmonic turmoil of nature - is always obvious. When you live the world through KCS, this becomes and existential condition, one that you spend your life trying to come to terms with.

The whole world is a wonderfully tumultuous explosion of creativity, which we humans try to curb, rein in and order according to our societal conventions. You yourself definitely are one such a thing, too. And within yourself, you may try and suppress that extra KCS x-factor wildness with medication and with stone cold, hard discipline routinization of your everyday drill. Or you may attempt to find ways to harness the force that a moving, searching and always improvising consciousness really is. Even to amplify it! Because creating and exploring is what it is there for.

My entire life have been a struggle to balance my wildness/creativity with the demands of discipline, control and structure posed by society. Of course, Shadow Antlers is also such a process, but one where I am the one posing the conditions.

On last december, i hit the wall at my place of work. My physician told me that he could tell that I was a free spirit and that I valued that freedom highly, but what if I for once tried to be just an ordinary person? And so he prescribed me some medicines that was supposed to make me into a citizen, instead of whatever it was that I was. Worked quite fine, too, and in a number of weeks, I was back at work.

In the weeks I spent away from work, I had (unknowingly) also started the Shadow Antlers project; found the right sonic components, the right level of aesthetic intensity, the right place in my body from which to sing and the right world of lyrical imagery. My partner Jessica, who also took the portrait photos I have used for the visuals, made me attentive to the fact that all the lyrics I had written lately seemed to deal with escape from constraints, revolting against normality, finding alternatives to the citizen form of life. The album Outside Belongings is an amplification of that process and a celebration of the pre-normality, the pre-humanity, the pre-culturedness that we all actually share, walking around pretending that social artifice is some kind of natural that it, in reality, is not.

(•)> Coming from RAMN’s noise rock world, how did shifting into dark electronic territory change your creative approach?

Apart from the obvious, that RAMN is sung in Swedish, which is my native language, there are similarities. They both move within the same post-punkey, mystical territory of austere Norseness. RAMN, though, is more of an upright in-your-face approach, exploiting the high end of the noise spectrum where the guitars act like a free-flowing plasma, bucking and bending and shooting off uncontrolled wildfire from the very stiff and archaic rhythms of the drum machine that we use. Shadow Antlers, on the other hand, is more about depth and space, painting pictures of the landscapes I see around me, all through the lens of my emotions.

So RAMN and Shadow Antlers are pretty much different perspectives on the tension between turmoil and structure, different ways of examining the ways of moving patterns around within the infinite, primordial field of creative chaos.

(•)> Shadow Antlers celebrates the outsider. What does “the bliss of otherness” mean to you?

Bliss itself is the transcendence of the ordinary, the breaking through the veil of artifice and touching something real and true. And as reality itself does not politely conform to the conceptions we have if it, a true encounter with something - anything, really - must transcend language, habit and convention.

That which manifests as difficult to align with such social or habitual criteria, though, also draws you closer to realness. That which is bliss can never be solely something that you fully recognize; to spark that extralevel thrill, there must also be something that you absolutely do not already recognize, and that also reaches out and touches something unknown within yourself. The recognition of differentness, but one of which that you yourself might affirm and become a part. You simply can not love that which is exactly like yourself; the recognition of that which is absolutely not like yourself is necessary for transcendence.

That also goes for your relation to the mystery of yourself - "one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star", as written by youknowwho - and it is most definitely true of human societies. Those individuals who do not conform are not something that should be hidden away or expelled, but instead a necessity for the organism of human society to breathe, develop, live and feel.

The different is a necessity and should be elevated, thanked, celebrated. Until that day comes, I call on every other outcast to flee normality with me and live on the outside instead, striding trails into the ontological wilderness, formulating something new and more suited to the endless fields of natural difference that is this world.

(•)> The production feels both raw and cinematic. What kind of tools or setups help you shape that atmosphere?

Putting it simple: computer, guitar, microphone and a room in which to make noise. That's the physical requirements. My rehearsal space - a collective space called Studio Chanslös, itself a place of outside belongings - also provides with some synthesizers and a very permitting and interesting social and sonic ambiance.

Speaking of the components in the music itself, I think it could be broken down into:

- EBM bass lines. Relentless repetition and the automatized, filter-based evolving of simple, one-note rhythmic themes that underlies almost every song;

- reeeeally dirty and assertive percussion, booming and smacking away through the forests and over the hills;

- synths and guitars and effects of those. The effects are of course important as they are what allows for constructing the universe in which the music happens. Reverberations and echoes which you do not hear the end of, that continues to resonate out into the universe long after they've left the here and now of you hearing the song.

That limitlessness, that they seem to continue until they're under the threshold of hearing, but they're still there - I think that's of importance to the whole aesthetic project of Shadow Antlers. Because the world has no end, it's both structured and tumultuous, both distinct and diffuse, both gritty and harmonic, and you only see the top of it. It always continues beyond your ability to comprehend it, never to come to an ending.

(•)> Your songs often sound untimely, neither retro nor futuristic. Is that sense of displacement something you aim for deliberately?

Well, yes! Absolutely central, too.

(•)> Storytelling seems central to your work — secret bridges, hidden places. How do you translate those narrative ideas into sound and rhythm?

I think it's the other way around, as the lyrics are always the last thing too appear in my composing. The bridges hidden under other bridges, the roads visible only in memories, the bay outside the city where you wash you clean off your self, they're all places where I am led by the music.

I think you're right by storytelling being important and integral to the project, though. All of the components - the sound itself, the music, the lyrics, the montage-based visuals constructed with portrait photos and ink drawings I made, the philosophy forming inside and around it - all form a weave of tales about our common world.

In one of my lives, I was (am) a cultural researcher. I studied tales and stories. Realized, though, that I could not really approach them with a scientifically neutral pretense; I always felt that to engage them in a proper and honest manner, I had to continue them, transform them into other tales, form from them new mythologies and stories.

That's how my creating works, also when I engage material I have created myself; by finding the patterns that interest me and intuitively expanding them, amplifying that in them which I am touched by. Sparks the bliss of otherness, if you will. This interview works like that, too - none of these answers given are thought out in advance, they are spontaneous explorations of the consequences of clues I apparently have laid out to be found within the Shadow Antlers project and that the questions point to.

(•)> There’s a tension in your music between collapse and liberation. Do you see Shadow Antlers as destructive, restorative, or both?

Never restorative. Don't know what's to restore. And I am not one that is much for conserving. Destructive it is, but not for the sake of destruction; what is created always alters or even destroys what was there before.

But definitely, Shadow Antlers points to those areas of human life and society that are underexposed, hidden away, forgotten or abjected, claiming: That must be where we should be heading, that's where we should build our leaderless empire; in the cracks where the old world is coming apart.

(•)> What direction do you see Shadow Antlers evolving toward next, deeper into electronic chaos, or further into wild organic spaces?

I'll just have to see where it leads me! I have an EP or maybe two to release after the album, with material that I felt wouldn't suit the Outside Belongings thing. And I have been thinking about using the Shadow Antlers approach for even more experimental instrumental excursions using more organic sounds and abstracted rhythms. As have I thought about doing Outside Belongings live in a minimalist band setting, eliminating the electronic components altogether; drums, bass, guitars, vocals. I'll just have to see where it leads me.

(•)> That's all, Folks! Check out Shadow Antlers on the Pigeon Spins Playlist