Night Gaunt interview

 Hi! You describe Rupture as an album born from “erosion rather than accumulation”, with songs repeatedly stripped apart and rebuilt until only what mattered remained. What did you actually remove? Entire songs, riffs, arrangements, instruments, lyrics - or were you mainly cutting away things that sounded good but didn't serve the emotional core?

Hey!

It depends on the song we are talking about. I would say that for the pre-existing songs, the ones born before 2022, it was a proper process of demolition, re-thinking and re-expressing properly what I'we were trying to say. For the brand new songs, erosion consisted in stripping down the tune down to its core and work on its foundations other than adding layers upon layers made with non-solid materials. Ultimately, we did both the things you are mentioning in your question, as long as we preserved the emotional core, the intentions of each song and, most of all, creative freedom.

“Only what truly mattered remained” is a dangerous sentence for a musician to write, because it suggests you now know exactly what matters. What did you discover you could live without?

It’s like when you learn how to say something properly with the adequate vocabulary and the right amount of words. I can live without songs going on for 9 minutes just for the sake of the riff, or a bombastic, super heavy sound “no matter what”. All these things we could define as simple dogmas dictated by this or that subculture. We can live happily without the dogmas and military-style standards imposed by a mindset that made sense when you were in your twenties.

Night Gaunt began in 2013. After more than a decade, do you think Rupture sounds like a band becoming more confident, or a band becoming increasingly suspicious of its own habits?

Probably both. We are more confident precisely because we are less afraid of questioning our habits. Creative process itself is based on questioning what you’re doing and continuous self-doubt. You can feel as confident as you want but there will always be that tiny presence in your brain asking “are you sure about that?”.

I would just say that Rupture sounds more contextual and closer to the people we are today.

The album supposedly moves between doom, dark folk, post-punk and industrial music, yet doom remains “its beating heart”. Was there ever a point during the writing where one of those other elements started taking over and you had to pull Night Gaunt back toward doom?

No. If anything, the opposite happened. Rupture is literally what I had envisioned for Night Gaunt in terms of sound but for seven thousand reasons including our technical abilities, self-imposed dogmas, and what we felt as “this is us”, we always kept everything in the heavier spectrum, even though you can still spot some of those influences even in the ST album (or demo in disguise, as I like to define it). I would also love to add that artists like Portishead are a heavy influence on the way I (and former members) used to write, yet you can’t hear anything remotely close to them.

If we’re talking about a doomy beating heart, it’s because, as Paul Chain said once in an interview, Doom Metal itself allows you a nice, wide range of action that other genres in the metal miniverse can’t offer you.

Plus, I don’t even feel really comfortable using words like doom, industrial or post-punk to describe what we’re doing. I see them much more as useful contextual references that feel pretty “phisically” restrictive.

One should always acknowledge the presence of prominent influences and accept them but it’s also nice to let things go.

Post-punk and industrial music can bring rhythm, repetition and movement into doom, while doom traditionally asks the listener to sit inside a riff for a long time. How do you decide when a song needs to move and when it needs to stay still?

It depends on the purpose of the song. Once you accept that a song is not just structure and strict rules, but a vehicle for delivering an emotion, you can start slipping things into the cracks of those rules and, possibly, make the whole structure collapse in a functional way. Especially if we are talking about the aforementioned aesthetic and sonic rules (or dogmas). I can’t keep things slow if I want to express urgency, hence I have to break some rules if I want that feel to be conveyed. Music is an extension of your own language, so you have to extend the dynamics of the real world into the dynamics of a song. In The Deer and The Hunter there’s a break at the exact moment when I say Stop! for this very reason, the soft vocals at the beginning of The Antagonist are literally how I feel when something hideous is snaking in my life and so forth.

You describe darkness as “an honest language rather than an aesthetic choice”. What makes darkness honest? At what point does a band start using melancholy, loss and decay simply because those things look good around a press photo and an album cover?

Making people feel sad and miserable is easier than it sounds if you know which scales and harmonies to use. To me, at least, there’s always a certain degree of authenticity that arises from a songwriter, a photographer, or any kind of creative person that emerges from its works. The soul, the guts, the feeling, whatever we want to call this x factor, will always arise if the person creating is being true with itself and its creation whilst shaping it. I don’t really know when someone decides to “do that because it looks good”. I can usually tell when something moves me and when it doesn't, but I can't really know why someone else made it.

Rupture is supposedly built around loss, transformation and resilience. Did those themes exist before the music, or did you only understand what the album was about after years of rewriting it?

Loss is behind everything NG has ever published. The Room deals with the stages of grief, the S/T it’s a messy set of coping mechanisms that can be easily found in the lyrics. One of the first songs I wrote for Rupture is Ordeal, which is the story of a man refusing to bury his wife’s coffin because he can’t cope with the grief arising from her death; he goes completely nuts and decides to leave the house they lived with her coffin and carrying it through his roamings. It’s like Django but with a proper corpse in the casket instead of a machinegun.

However, I noticed that, for me, writing it’s part of a broader process of acceptance, that fuels ideas, suggestions and anything that could be good for the making of the record and for the emotional disposal of the garbage in my brain, guts and whatever other organ you want.

The title suggests something breaking apart, while the album's concept is apparently about what survives after everything familiar has fallen apart. Is Rupture ultimately a record about destruction, or about whatever refuses to disappear afterwards?

Rupture is about destroying the already existing ruins and then playing with them like a child would do with Lego. A child will give you a weird looking construction and tell you that it’s a starship. Even though it doesn’t look like that at all, it’s the child’s imagination making both you and him see an actual starship there. If you do this with your emotional ruins, you can turn a disaster into a starship. Or a record you feel happy with.

You call the album a complete and uninterrupted journey rather than a collection of songs. Does that mean the individual tracks are deliberately less important than their position within the whole? Could you remove one song without breaking the narrative, or are all the pieces structurally necessary?

It’s not a concept album so each song has a reason to be taken and liked (or disliked) individually because they all deal with different things. I don’t think there are less important songs, it’s all about your personal taste. The only narrative that I would recognise it’s based on dynamics: the tracklist was assembled following mostly gut-feelings and a little bit of technical considerations. It doesen’t mean that I expect the listener to feel my gut feelings, it’s just the kind of dynamics that worked better with my ears. I don’t know if I would take a part of those guts away.

“Cinematic cohesion” can mean two very different things: carefully controlling the listener's emotional journey, or simply making everything sound atmospheric. How much control did you actually want over how the listener experiences this album?

No control. There’s not such thing as controlling your listener’s experience, you can’t be in people’s head. We can’t even control the events of our lives, I would never expect to be able to do such a thing with my songs. You try to shape the experience, but not to dictate its meaning. Then you just expect that there could be some chemistry taking place between your songs and your listeners. You’re sharing something with them. Trying to assert any kind of control, if we transplant that into a dialogue, would feel much less like sharing and more like telling that other person what to think, subtly or directly.

There is a lot of language here about silence, fragility, stillness and texture. Was restraint actually harder to achieve than heaviness? It's easy to make doom sound enormous; it's much harder to make a quiet passage carry the same weight.

The weight of silence is unbearable and beautiful and it’s still part of the whole yapping about dynamics. If you strip things down it’s even easier to see all the flaws, the imperfections, all that is slightly wrong, which is what makes things beautiful, to me. It’s like when you listen to one of your favourite records and you realise that some things are off, some things are out of tune, the singer sucks etc etc… yet you love that record. Most of the time, in my personal experience, all the best things (records, books, whatever media) have flaws so evident that make the whole work wonderful.

After years of reworking these songs, how did you know when to stop? Was there a moment where another round of stripping things back would have improved the album, or would it simply have killed what was left alive in it?

When they felt more organic and less over the place. Most of the older songs that were rearranged were a little bit more chaotic and some of the most important parts were sacrificed because of a bad placement or wrong timing. What you hear in this record is what we feel worked best. Alongside all the stripping down and demolition, we wanted to feel completely free to do whatever we wanted.

Night Gaunt has existed long enough to have accumulated its own identity and expectations. Did you ever deliberately write something that sounded “wrong” for Night Gaunt just to escape the band's established vocabulary?

It depends what you mean by “wrong”. To a certain extent, even Night Gaunt and The Room are different in terms of sound and feeling, yet they’re driven by the same energy that lies behind Rupture. I suppose that you’re not bound to repeat yourself over and over when you have a certain kind of attitude. You are who you are and this is always contextual. We are not the same people we were 5 years ago, the only things that are still the same are probably just our eyes and our teeth, Why force ourselves into an old idea of coherence when it’s more interesting to see who we are now?

Then, I like to think that the people who follow NG already know that we like to change things from record to record, so I don’t feel there’s some escapism in the way songwriting has been approached. It’s just pure and sheer desire to share some other parts of ourselves.

The album deals heavily with absence and memory. Is there anything from the band's own past that you consciously wanted to leave behind with Rupture rather than carry into the next phase?

Wounds.

One phrase in the description caught my attention: “everything familiar has fallen apart”. If that's genuinely the emotional starting point of the album, what still feels familiar when you listen to it? Is there anything left that you recognize as the old Night Gaunt?

NG is still NG even when there’s no correspondence of sounds between all of the records. The familiar things falling apart are probably the context in which all these songs where rearranged, so we could see that sentence as the drive behind Rupture. When I listen to the record I still recognize us, with our energy, burden of whatever has contaminated all the notes and words you hear, and our style of playing. It’s not another entity that has nothing to do with the previous material, it’s something that is trying to talk eight years after a prolonged and semi self-imposed silence.

After spending years dismantling and rebuilding these songs, do you actually feel that you've found the most complete version of Night Gaunt - or does calling an album your “most complete artistic statement” immediately make you want to destroy it and start again?

I think that it’s a contextual statement. It feels complete, satisfying and real now that we’re talking about it and that there’s nothing that should be demolished. Once it’s out, it’s done and gone. Like, I can’t destroy The Room sonically because it’s there, it’s gone. It’s part of 2016/2018. It’s lost.

However, the embryos that became Rupture were still somewhere in their gestation. They were pliable, with no identity, stillborn, collapsed from the get-go despite them being somehow “full songs” that we were ready to record in 2020 already. It would be interesting to answer this question again in five years from now, though. Everything is so unpredictable.

https://nightgaunt.bandcamp.com/album/rupture