Korperschwache Interview; The Blood on your Hands is Colder and Darker than the Blood on my HandsKorperschwache, formed in 1995, is the solo project of Austin, Texas-based musician RKF, with a sound that encompasses noise, black metal, drone, and dark ambient. RKF is also known for his now-inactive projects Autodidact and Unholydeathmachine, for running the label Monotremata Records (also now inactive), and for his music-reviewing webzine The One True Dead Angel.
Early Korperschwache releases (up to 1997) tended towards noise and power electronics. At this point, there was a hiatus, due to RKF developing hearing problems. When Korperschwache resumed activity in 2001, the noise elements were largely discarded, with greater prominence being given to layers of guitar drone, with or without programmed beats. Since the 2005 release of Temple Of The Devil Kitty, Korperschwache’s music has mainly been an experimental blend of noise-rock, drone doom, sludge and black metal. The project has produced a plethora of limited-edition CD-Rs and cassettes, with the latest release being A Way Dark, a double-CD collaboration with the Irish project To Blacken The Pages, released in November 2009 by Colony Records.
Heathen Harvest: Hello, RKF. Perhaps we could begin by talking about your new album A Way Dark. Can you tell me something about when and how you hooked up with To Blacken The Pages, and how the album was created? Presumably there was a lot of transatlantic file-swapping involved.
RKF: In the fall of 2007, Paul McAree -- a visual artist and guitarist for his solo drone / noise band To Blacken the Pages -- sent me copies of his first two CDs, The Urgency and And We Started Again, As If Nothing Had Happened Before, to review in The One True Dead Angel. I was really impressed with the dark, tripped-out vibe on them, a sound like a doom-drone version of Skullflower. He continued to send new stuff as it came out, and we started corresponding. At some point in late 2008, he suggested the idea of collaborating and sent me a series of backing tracks consisting of drums and guitar. I dumped the tracks into the 16-track KORG machine I use for recording, added more guitars, and recorded some backing tracks of my own for him to record over. We sent stuff back and forth like this for nearly a year, adding and subtracting and tweaking until we arrived at the final track listing represented on the double-CD. It was a really different way for me to work, and took a lot longer than I had expected, but I'm really pleased with the way the project turned out.
HH: I believe A Way Dark is your first CD release, after numerous CD-Rs and cassettes - does this make a big difference to you?
RKF: It is, and it was a big surprise to me, as I thought Paul at Colony Records was going to put it out as a CD-R. I don't know that it makes a lot of difference to me one way or the other, although it should theoretically be easier for him to get distribution for them and sell them, since that bypasses the problem a lot of retailers have with CD-Rs. I'm just happy that somebody wants to put out my work, regardless of the format.
HH: You're based in Austin, Texas, which promotes itself as 'The Live Music Capital of the World', famed for the SXSW Festival among other things. Do you find your local scene inspiring and supportive? Do you have much interaction with other local musicians or bands?
RKF: Well, the music scene in Austin is wide and fragmented; it's actually more like several different scenes that don't generally overlap, although it's not unusual to see people involved in more than one scene. Most of the more visible music in Austin is centered around country or punk / pop music, and then there is a huge psychedelic / experimental underground scene that is largely invisible to most of the music-going public. The attention in the music press usually goes more toward figures like Willie Nelson, Asleep at the Wheel, Alejandro Escobedo, Los Lonely Boys, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Billy Joe Shaver, and more rock acts like Spoon, The Black Angels, and so on. The truly underground scene that I'm part of gets very little media attention, even though there's a lot of it going on at any given time. Bands like Venison Whirled (an offshoot of ST-37), Book of Shadows, The Abrasion Ensemble, Brekekekexkoaxkoax, The Gates Ensemble, Devil Bat's Daughter, Rick Reed, Douglas Ferguson, and many other even more obscure bands tend to play frequently but at smaller, lesser-known venues, or at places especially receptive to them, like Church of the Friendly Ghost and in-stores at End of an Ear, one of the city's best (and my favorite) record stores.
As for metal, the metal scene in Austin is really dominated more by stoner rock. If that's become a passé genre, somebody forgot to tell Austin, because there are plenty such bands here, my favorite being Super Heavy Goat Ass. The extreme metal scene in Austin is so small that you could probably count the significant extreme metal bands on two hands -- they would include the recently disbanded Brown Jenkins, Averse Sefira, and maybe Absu (I can't remember if they're still in Austin or not).
There's no question that Texas loves metal, but I think from a professional standpoint, Texas is probably not the best place to be for an extreme metal band. For one thing, there are only really three big cities with a serious infrastructure for bands to play and be paid well -- San Antonio, the Dallas / Fort Worth area, and Houston. Austin's venues are designed either for very small or very large audiences; the only handful of venues in the middle do not generally book metal bands at all, much less extreme ones. It's real problematic for bands big enough to tour nationally and have a large audience, since they're too big for the usual Austin clubs and not big enough to play the arena (Frank Erwin Center).
The other big problem is that the sheer number of bands in Texas, especially the major cities, means that promoters can get away with paying them peanuts, on the grounds that if the bands don't like the shitty money being offered, there's always a dozen other bands standing in line willing to pay for less, or even for free. So I get the feeling that even when extreme metal bands form here, they quickly discover they need to go somewhere else if they're going to make any kind of money at all. It also doesn't help that touring in Texas requires driving hundreds of miles from city to city, an expensive proposition in these days of high gas prices.
HH: Is living in Texas in general conducive to the creation of extreme music? I get the impression that the rest of America regards Texas as pretty extreme in a number of ways. Does living in a Bible Belt state with high gun ownership, use of the death penalty, and conservative social mores affect your work, or is Austin more cosmopolitan than most of Texas?
RKF: That's an interesting question. I'm not sure how much of the environment in which I live has affected what goes into Korperschwache -- I'm a bit too close to the subject -- but I'm sure it has. Certainly, growing up in the Bible belt has had an impact on some of Korperschwache's lyrical and conceptual themes regarding religion. I was a teenage hoodlum who ran around with people dealing drugs and carrying guns, and I've had a loaded gun held to my head twice and been shot at once, so I've developed a healthy dislike of guns, although the subject has shown up periodically in Korperschwache songs. Drugs and guns are the subject of one of the songs on my next album Evil Walks, as it happens.
As for the death penalty, it's kind of like background noise here -- it's a regular subject in the newspaper, but a remote reality for most people. Texas has thousands of people in prison but only a few hundred on death row, so even in the criminal world it's a pretty remote concept (except, of course, for the relative handful who manage to end up there). Oddly enough, I actually know someone whose brother was executed several years ago for going on a killing spree, but that's the closest I've ever gotten personally to the subject.
HH: I was wondering about your relationship with Skullflower, which seems to be pretty close, given that you run the Skullflower website as part of www.korperschwache.com, and you wrote the liner notes for the 2007 Crucial Blast reissue of IIIrd Gatekeeper?
RKF: It's not as close as it looks; I ended up being the webmaster of the semi-official site simply because nobody else was interested. I stumbled onto Skullflower in the early 90s when I became enamored of the early Gravitar albums, and Mason Jones -- on whose label, Charnel Music, all those albums appeared -- recommended I check out Skullflower. IIIrd Gatekeeper was the first album of theirs I heard (indeed, that album appears to be the album that introduced them to the US in general). I ended up establishing the Skullflower site because there was no information about them on the internet at the time and nobody else appeared to be crazy enough to want to keep track of and post all that information. My association with the website has led to meeting various members of the band and corresponding infrequently with them over the years, but it would be a stretch to claim our relationship as ‘close.’
HH: How important were Skullflower as an influence on the early days of Korperschwache?
RKF: They were actually a bigger influence on my earlier band, Autodidact (along with K. K. Null / Zeni Geva, Band of Susans, Godflesh, and the Pain Teens). Korperschwache was originally a side-project in relation to that band, and only became a full-time venture when Autodidact folded in 2003. Skullflower is definitely one of the influences on Korperschwache, although the earlier, noisier albums were influenced considerably more by the likes of Whitehouse, Merzbow, and Hijokaidan. At this point the band's biggest influences are probably Skullflower, Hijokaidan, Abruptum, Burzum, and Khanate.
HH: Has there been any discussion about a collaboration or split release featuring Skullflower and Korperschwache?
RKF: No, although I came very close to putting out the album that became Exquisite Fucking Boredom on my label, Monotremata Records, until it became obvious the label was going down in flames for fiscal reasons. (It eventually came out on tUMULt instead.) That's certainly a possibility to think about for the future, though.
HH: And what do you make of the fact that Korperschwache's music seems to have evolved in pretty much the opposite direction to Skullflower's, given that Skullflower's early stuff is more structured and rock-oriented, but since Matthew Bower reformed the band in 2003, the band's output has been much more inclined towards freeform guitar-based noise, whereas Korperschwache started out as a kind of power electronics / noise project, but has developed into a beat-driven industrial metal / noise rock hybrid, with a heavy doom and black metal influence?
RKF: I hadn't thought about that, but you're right, and it's kind of interesting. Skullflower's change in direction has more to do with the dwindling number of members in the band and Bower's growing interest in black metal and pure noise; with Korperschwache, the shift came about because I got tired of making albums that were purely noise and became more interested in combining elements of noise, black metal, industrial, and psychedelic music. The problem with doing albums that are strictly built around noise is that they all start to sound alike after a while, which is what prodded me to expand the band's boundaries of sound.
HH: I'm particularly interested in the black metal influence on Korperschwache. Can you remember when you first encountered black metal, and what it was about black metal that piqued your interest?
RKF: Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss was probably the first black metal album I heard, around 2000 or so -- I was very late to the black metal party, as it happens. It took me a while to get into it, but once I did I realized this was the kind of guitar sound I'd been waiting to hear all my life, a fact that was confirmed by listening to more albums in the genre. I also really appreciated the minimalism of the classic black metal sound. At this point I'd consider the most influential black metal albums (at least to me) to be the aforementioned Burzum album, all of the early Abruptum material (up through their second full-length album), the Manes album Under Ein Blodraud Maane, and the Ruins of Beverast album Unlock The Shrine.
HH: Before we started doing this interview, our correspondence initially began when I contacted you to ask for information in order to put together an entry for Korperschwache on the Encyclopaedia Metallum. That entry was eventually rejected on the grounds that Korperschwache ‘weren’t metal’, and thus didn’t belong in the Encyclopaedia. Were you surprised by that, or did you feel that it was a just decision? From my point of view, there are a growing number of bands on the noise / metal periphery who should be included in the Encyclopaedia Metallum and aren’t, including Vennt, Locrian and Horseback, as well as Korperschwache.
RKF: Well, metal is kind of a conservative genre to begin with, so I wasn't terribly surprised by that. I do find it kind of interesting that they include bands like Khanate, Sunn O))), and Gnaw Their Tongues, especially the latter. I can see the first Khanate album being classified as metal, but the rest of their catalog has more to do with drone than metal, and Sunn O))) have never been what I'd call a metal band, while Gnaw Their Tongues is closer to free-form noise most of the time than anything remotely resembling metal. Their classification system seems awfully arbitrary, but it's not something I'm going to lose sleep over.
HH: What about your more general musical background? What kind of stuff did you grow up listening to?
RKF: Perversely enough, I grew up listening to folk, country, and gospel music -- lots of Johnny Cash, Melanie, New Christy Minstrels, Peter, Paul and Mary, John Denver, country gospel records, things of that nature. The only rock band I listened to with any regularity before I was a teenager was The Beatles. As a teenager, I started listening to new wave (Blondie, Devo, The Cars), prog rock (Pink Floyd, Genesis) and metal (Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Motörhead). By the time I got to college I was also listening to stuff like The Sisters of Mercy, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Skinny Puppy, and Joy Division, along with way too much thrash and death metal, particularly Metallica, Slayer, Celtic Frost, and Dark Angel. My listening habits have just expanded outward from there…
HH: It's interesting that you mention country music. People who don't listen to country often dismiss it as saccharine and sentimental, but as you know, it ain't necessarily so. Johnny Cash, for example, made some awesomely dark music. I haven't heard all of your work by any means, so maybe you've already done this, but have you thought about trying to incorporate elements of country into Korperschwache at all? I could imagine steel guitar, for instance, being put to vicious use. Jarboe's Mahakali album has some interesting hillbilly licks stirred into what's basically doom metal.
RKF: People who think that aren't listening to the right stuff. Ha! My interest in country music is pretty much confined to the early stuff; I largely gave up on country music after about 1978, when it started turning into pop music with fiddles and banjos played by pretty boys and girls in black hats. People like Garth Brooks have ruined country music. I prefer the work of people like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Jimmie Rodgers, Waylon Jennings, Townes Van Zandt, and other old-school players, most of whom sang largely about troubled people leading hard lives. The only country musicians who are even remotely ‘new’ that I like are Steve Earle, who was basically a criminal with a guitar until he cleaned up his act, and Matraca Berg, a brilliant songwriter who has written dozens of top-ten hits for other people but whose solo albums have tanked because she won't toe the line and do what she's told by the people who run the Nashville music business.
I've actually borrowed bits and pieces from country songs here and there. They're just so submerged under all the noise that it's pretty much impossible to tell unless you know where to look. I would like to make that a little more obvious at some point, but I suspect that takes more talent than I actually have. It's definitely something I'm working toward on some future release, that's for sure, although how to incorporate that into the framework of white noise will be an interesting question.
HH: When did you start making music yourself?
RKF: I actually started playing guitar when I was 18, in the early 80s, but didn't do it seriously until the mid-90s. By that point, I was listening to a lot of no-wave and noise rock bands, where it was obvious that you didn't have to be a guitar virtuoso to do something interesting, so I started recording droning noise / art rock as Autodidact and junk noise sound collages as Korperschwache. When Autodidact ceased to exist in 2003, that band's sound eventually became part of Korperschwache's sound, especially with the addition of Doktor Omega (Korperschwache was largely beatless up to that point).
I still like to listen to lots of different music -- stuff I've been listening to over the past couple of weeks alone include albums by Gossip, Melvins, Christina Kubisch, Albert King, Howlin' Wolf, Townes Van Zandt, Swans, Bassholes, Locrian, Slayer, Ut, Jack Rose, Fugazi, Black Sun, Ruins of Beverast, Kristin Hersh, Six Organs of Admittance, and Poi Dog Pondering.
HH: When you started out with Autodidact and Korperschwache, was there ever any question of you forming a group, or joining a group, or did you always
envisage them as solo projects?
RKF: Autodidact was intended to be a real band with real people, but for various reasons that never materialized. I invited various people to join at different times, but either they couldn't see playing the music, or it wasn't their thing, or this or that. Part of the problem is that Autodidact had a sound that overlapped several genres, and so players from the experimental scene didn't like the presence of guitars, metal players didn't like the drum machine, and so on. After a while, I gave up on the idea of doing it as a band, although I did play live twice (once with an additional player on guitar, once by myself backed by the drum machine and tapes).
Korperschwache, on the other hand, was never intended to be a band or to play live, and while I'm interested now in doing live shows (and have played live several times as a solo guitarist or using tapes as well), most of Korperschwache's material was not really designed to be played live. I am giving serious consideration to finding another player for live shows, but so far that's only in the thinking stages. I don't like the idea of bringing in any more than one other person, and after fifteen years of doing everything myself, my way, I'm ambivalent about the idea of having another ego in the mix. So we'll see what happens.
HH: Well, of course, you’ve hooked up with Doktor Omega in recent years. How is she?
RKF: Doktor Omega and I have known each other for a long time; she was the third (and final) drummer for Autodidact, joining around 2001. After Autodidact folded, she took some time off to rest and do other things before joining Korperschwache in 2004 to appear on material that eventually ended up becoming the Ouroboros trilogy. Her mysterious personal life and schedule has caused her to miss a few of the albums since then, but not many. She's currently working on beats for the forthcoming album Evil Walks, and taking her time about it, I might add.
HH: What else can you tell me about this upcoming album Evil Walks - what state of completion is it in, who's going to be releasing it, which previous releases does it sound most like, and so on? And do you have any other Korperschwache releases in the pipeline?
RKF: It's still in the early stages; I recorded several songs that didn't meet with my satisfaction and I'm going to tear them down to just the drum tracks and start over, with the original mixes destined for a really limited CD-R release (just for friends to hear) called Evil Crawls. This one is going to be more heavy than noisy -- when it's finished it will probably most closely resemble the Ouroboros discs. In fact, one of the tracks is a shorter version of the first track from Voice Of The Ouroboros. I'm kind of concerned that a lot of the more recent releases have sounded a little bit too similar, and I'd like to step up the quality control, so I'll be working on this one a lot longer and more intensely than I have in the past. The idea is to end up with something really heavy; we'll see if that actually happens. When it's finished, this one will hopefully end up on Crucial Blast, as the follow-up to Broken Blades Of Steel Scattered Across The Narrow Way.
As for other stuff in the pipeline -- I'm close to finishing an album I started last year, As The Colors Fade From The Dying Petals, which is tentatively intended to go to Inam Records. I recorded all of it back in April or May of last year, but one track has had issues that I keep coming back to work on. This is one of my favorite albums, and I'd really like it to be perfect, so it's still not finished yet. I hope to finish it within the next couple of weeks, and ideally be in a position to send it to Inam Records around the end of January. The finished album A Host Of Bad Vibes will be coming out soon on Rokot, a subsidiary of the Russian drone label Abgurd, and at some point this year Colony Records will release Black Dust, which was finished early last year. So I'm just waiting for all of this to be finished and / or materialize as actual releases.
HH: You've maintained a pretty hectic recording and release schedule over the last 15 years – 36 releases by my count, as well as a few splits and compilation appearances. What keeps you going?
RKF: I like doing this, although I have to admit that the past year's schedule kind of burned me out. I've barely touched my guitar for the past six months, and most of my Korperschwache activity has been solely in remixing and communicating with labels about stuff that's already finished and in the pipeline. I hope to get rolling again soon, though, and I expect to spend a lot of time over the next few months focused on Evil Walks. After that I'll probably go back to more noise / drone releases for a while, starting with Ignore The Need.
HH: Which Korperschwache releases are you most pleased with? And where would you recommend that someone who was unfamiliar with your work began? Would that depend on whether they were more interested in noise or metal?
RKF: It's hard to pick a favorite out of such a large catalog, but the ones I'm still happiest with are probably Tumescent Love Songs For Psychotic Drifters (currently unreleased, although I'm hoping that situation will change soon), Temple Of The Devil Kitty, and Voice Of The Ouroboros. Unfortunately, none of those are currently in print, so the best (and easiest) place to start would be with Brotherhood Of The Bowl (on Inam Records) or Broken Blades Scattered Across The Narrow Way (on Crucial Blast). Most of what's currently in print -- the more recent material of the past five years -- is pretty even in its mix of noise to metal. The earliest stuff (which is currently impossible to find anyway) is more overtly noise and considerably less related to metal. I'm hoping that a lot of this material will become available to the public one way or the other over the next year, but we'll see if and when that actually happens.
http://www.korperschwache.com/
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http://www.heathenharvest.com/article.php?story=20100130184423175
Тема: Korperschwache Interview 
Ср Июл 07, 2010 7:06 am
