ILLWIND interview

Answered by Marcos Coifman, singer / bass player of Illwind

Hello! ILLWIND is described as a “heavy doom” band, but there’s clearly more contamination in the blood than that. Did you begin with doom as the foundation, or did the songs force that shape onto themselves?

- Cheers, thanks for the interview. There is a lot of contamination indeed! I think heavy doom fits, but we don’t really care for labels very much. I believe doom (or at least very heavy rock / metal) was at the foundation at first intent, but we let it go where it may, and that’s the way the music came to be. We all add our own backgrounds to it, for sure. I used to play and write songs in Reino Ermitaño (Doom Metal) for a couple of decades and so far I’ve been writing the core structure of the songs, so it’s only natural that heavy is the main language, but all the members add arrangements and their own musical feel to our repertoire, and they come from black metal, punk, stoner rock / doom and heavy metal, so that bleeds into the music too. Plus, as stated, we listen to a bunch of other stuff and that shows as well. I think that’s healthy for the songs. Listening to different genres and having good band synergy feeds the beast into its own new thing.

The phrase The Unfolding at the End of Light feels almost eschatological - like revelation through extinction. What does that title actually point toward?

- At the end of the day, as darkness sets in, all sorts of lovely somber energies run through us all and we feel their presence and rise through them. Have you not noticed?

As well as that, the dreaming world wakes, and roaming through that existential plane is also referred to in the title and some of the songs.

There’s an interesting tension in your sound: doom traditionally compresses time, while first-wave black metal often accelerates it violently. How do you reconcile those opposing instincts in your writing?

- Not theoretically. We just go with what we feel, with what we want to hear, with what works and cures a need. Let the opposing currents reconcile by themselves.

You pull from bands as different as Neurosis, Swans, Black Sabbath, YOB and The Cure. That’s a dangerous range - how do you stop influence from becoming fragmentation?

- We mention bands we dig and which somehow manage to make an influence in what we do, but the writing and the direction is very organic: we do not plan, we just search and allow and follow what we want. You can play a devastatingly crushing riff with a Beatles-influenced melody in it, believe it or not. We’re not trying to conduct an experiment here, just to get what we want from the music we make, and there’s no creative boundary, so we let whatever moves us, move us. The direction is pleasure, the direction is truthfulness, and the direction is heavy.

A lot of modern doom mistakes slowness for depth. What makes a slow riff actually say something?

- A riff says something when the musician who’s making it feels something. This will happen whether it’s acoustic or overdriven instruments, in slow or fast tempos. If one is writing songs with a pre-conceived musical notion, focusing only on structure and style, that song is dead in the water. Depth is in the ability to get as close to the feeling you are experiencing as possible, through your notes, your rhythm, your execution. The rest is just your preferred shape. Slow and crushing can be beautiful, for sure, it elicits wonderful emotions. But the depth is not in the tempo, it is in the honest rendition of an emotion through sound. No emotion = no depth. Slayer, for example, is quick as fuck and yet it’s full of anger and want and wonderful things, and you can connect with it because it was felt, Reign In Blood was not created just by going through some pragmatic formula of mixing hardcore and heavy metal. YOB is disarmingly crushing because it is full of heart, Swans is deep because they are playing in a fucking trance and you can feel it, Nick Cave can be heavy as death without a single guitar chord. Songs full of intent.

As for the second part of your question: a slow riff done right, given that it does indeed carry all the primordial ooze previously discussed, can drag you along in mindbending time through the substratta of the black earth, filling your lungs with a horrible kind of love and giving you an evil grin that will keep on smiling like an echo where your soul stood still, for a couple of generations. Hellhammer’s Triumph of Death taught us that at a very early age, you know. That dreadful fucking riff en Electric Wizard’s Return Trip and beasts like Aldebaran’s Pillars of Geph or YOB’s Grasping Air just made it unmistakable. And we heard it first on tracks like Cornucopia or Electric Funeral! Well, I did. Sure am glad I did. Thank you, Tony.

The gothic and shoegaze traces in the record feel important because they soften nothing - they make it colder. Was melancholy always central to ILLWIND, or did it emerge naturally?

- No, melancholy wasn’t a main part of the plan, that’s just the way music filters through our fucking guitarist Mauricio. His playing is so far from happiness you just become sad on general proximity with the dude. We thought it fit well though, and we ran with it. It just worked.

Peru has long had a strong death and black metal tradition, but doom has often remained more peripheral. Did being part of that broader South American extremity shape the heaviness here differently?

- Well, I agree about Peru’s death and black metal tradition, from Hadez to Anal Vomit, to the mighty Mortem and so many others - our drummer plays in Arcada, a top black metal band here - but we also have our heavy and doom history… before Reino Ermitaño, where I used to play, there was Mazo, Kranium, Oxido and well before that there were Pax and Tarkus, and alongside Reino as well as after us there’s been quite a lively scene of heavy, doom and stoner bands ranging from La Ira de Dios, Matus, Argul, El Jefazo, El Hijo de la Aurora, Satánicos Marihuanos, Tortuga, Cholo Visceral, Tlön, Rito Verdugo, Kurandera, Druida, Rifle, Reptil, Cuarzo, Paquidermo, Inmemorial, Psicorragia, En Las Espesas Nieblas, Caballo de Plomo, Titania and more… I’d say Peru and Chile are perhaps the South American countries with the most doom bands around, so…

The promo mentions “marching toward the darker side of existence”. That’s a loaded phrase. Is darkness for ILLWIND philosophical, emotional, spiritual - or all at once?

- It is a loaded phrase, true. I’m gonna’ say all at once. Sometimes you just realize early in life you belong to the dark side. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just what fuels you, draws you and empowers you the most. For some of us, anyway.

There’s a lot of “dark” music now that feels aesthetic rather than lived. How do you avoid turning suffering into style?

- That is a good question. First of all, darkness can be interpreted as suffering but also as cruelty… so there’s an evil energy lurking around, not just a sad one, when it comes to that term. While both are certainly sides of the same coin, they both refer to our thanatic nature, our relationship with death, mainly. About your question: The imprint that experiencing emotions leaves on you, becomes the emotion you want to paste into the art you make. Again, whether it’s visual aesthetics or sound, there is no formula here, no plan, no pose. We just do what we do the way we want to, the way we feel it, the way we desire IT to exist. It certainly is not about suffering and moaning and pseudo-gothic self-pity for the sake of style. God I hate those bands.

The bursts of first-wave black metal energy are unexpected. Were those moments written as ruptures in the atmosphere, or do they reflect another side of the band’s core identity?

- First-wave black metal is correct. I think we just love that energy and those sounds and thought they mixed well with the doom and added a new layer and a broader palette to our sound. And we reckoned it complemented the songs well.

There’s something almost ritualistic about repetition in doom. Do you see repetition as hypnosis, punishment, or revelation?

- Given those choices, seeing as the repetition of crushing riffs brings nothing but joy to me, I will go not with punishment but with pleasure. It is true that it can hint to a trance-like hypnotic state, too. I don’t think our music gets quite to that extreme, but I certainly don’t mind that effect when it happens. I love it in many bands I listen to, especially when I paint and my attention is divided but fully caught in the drone.

The analog production gives the album a physical weight that many modern records lack. Was preserving imperfection part of the goal?

- Thank you. We do not see it as preserving imperfection, but rather as preserving analog, warm, organic, human-pleasing, naturally distorted, wonderful heavy tones.

What’s one obscure doom, post-punk, or black metal record that left fingerprints on this album that listeners might not catch immediately?

- Damn, that’s a tough question. I am very seldom and hardly ever aware of my influences when I write. I’m afraid I’m gonna’ leave that to the listener, I’m probably too involved to notice. I can tell you that the second riff from God of Sleep comes from a Spanish lullaby that goes “duérmete niño, duérmete ya…”

Closing the record with I Wanna Be Your Dog is fascinating. That song is primitive, filthy, obsessive - but also strangely vulnerable. Why was that the right exit point? Does that choice suggest that beneath all the atmosphere and heaviness, punk remains the true root of ILLWIND?

- Well, that one we chose as a bonus track, as it probably won’t fit on a LP version. But yeah, we thought it was a nice corollary to the album. We have a couple of more songs set aside for later release, including a Smiths cover. About punk, well, we dig it, our drummer is currently touring Europe with DHK, a Hardcore band, and plays in a D-beat project called Vorágine as well, and I’ve been in Ataque Frontal and Necromongo, punk and hardcore bands, also… but the Stooges I love for its raw, in your face, truthful, hard-felt, defiant rock and roll and for their great songwriting. I don’t think punk is our one and only root, nah, but all of the music we dig is part of the melange; I think doom certainly dominates, and there are some folk and classical elements in there, too. The Stooges, despite the raw energy, they also have this trancey, hypnotic repetition in their writing, and this riff, Dog, it just stuck as an earworm in my head for days, in this tempo, and it had to be purged and allowed to live. I think the best version of this song is the one by Sonic Youth in the Confusion is Sex/Kill Your Idols EP, by the way.

Bands like Swans and Neurosis understand heaviness as psychological force, not genre. Is that closer to how you think about music?

- I think I approached this in an earlier question, in a way. Yeah, I agree with their take. I worship the heavy riff as much as the next doom-head, mind you, but certainly heaviness is a will, a force of intention, and it is amplified when the lyrics work with the music. It is because it all comes from the same center, you see? Painting, too. Lyrics, intention, it’s important, it’s part of the piece. That’s why I said without emotion you draw a blank. Heaviness is there, in the feel, in the will. That said, it goes quite well with tuning low, playing slow, tube amps and heavy riffs. Not mutually exclusive. That last Neurosis record is a beast, by the way. Love it.

Doom often gets trapped by tradition - Sabbath worship, endless repetition of established forms. Do you feel there’s still unexplored ground in doom, or are you working inside ruins?

- Perhaps to some extent we are all unconsciously recycling Iommi, sure. But as long as it’s genuine and has your personal imprint on it, it’s yours. If it comes from within, it’s your message, even if it’s somewhat familiar. So no, not working in ruins, I think. The Blues and Rock and Roll didn’t need or try to reinvent the wheel with every new artist, and they managed to produce a hefty sum of quality records, nonetheless. But honestly, I don’t care either way. To me it’s always new and exploratory, even if it doesn’t seem to break much new ground to the layman. That’s Ok. We make music for the sake of itself, not to make a point nor to please anyone, really.

When the album ends - after the descent, the melancholy, and that final primitive sneer - is the listener supposed to emerge changed, or simply more aware of what was already rotting inside?

- This I leave to you. When I’m done listening to it, I feel well spent. It’s not supposed to be all uplifting nor depressing, it is what it is on each of its parts. It’s a ride. The listener will have his own experience with it, and that’s how it’s supposed to be.

https://personal-records.bandcamp.com/album/the-unfolding-at-the-end-of-light