Through a dignified injuring melancholy… Interview with Willhelm Grasslich from Blind Ruler Cursed Land

 

 

Through a dignified injuring melancholy…

 

Interview with Willhelm Grasslich from Blind Ruler Cursed Land, a drone/martial industrial project, about the creation of an artistic concept, a newly released EP “Chysantheme delirium” and a recent internet stream.

Willhelm is a member of several experimental music bands, among which the most prominent are Uncle Grasha´s Flying Circus, Surfin´ Bazooka and Karel Braun and The Black Magic.

Bawagan is a punk radio, open to all art. After a break of several months, it returns to a series of interviews about experimental music, which will definitely be the last one.

 

 

What was the impulse for you to create BRCL? And when did it happen?

 

Blind Ruler Cursed Land was launched quite instinctively. By a move or even a crash, so by an act often attributed to divine forces, if I may use this daring and thematically fitting terminology. Or to put it in another way, a personal way - last spring I experienced some kind of mental collapse and when I tried to fight it, something from deep within myself disappeared in the process. I felt it that way. And something else arose without my knowing what exactly it was. Anyway, some of the acknowledgment of myself, or a “life-status” in some sense, is gone forever. Some life desires and the needs of the physical person and material slave to my personal “world of ideas” are gone. And something like vacuum filled it instead. Probably. Most probably. This undoubtedly must have influenced how I accept and make art, and how the ideas behind are brought to life. The stories have now more “magical realism” and “mythology” in them, the emphasis is put on general values probably gone forever (society as we know it and are forced to live in it). And well, to conclude the answer with a similar vibe as before - pompous but true - it is also a way of my personal preparations for death. 

 

 

https://www.facebook.com/Blindrulercursedland

 

 

Was it clear to you that these new ideas will not be used on another album (with a different sound) for your other projects? Was it clear that this was to go on its own unique way?

 

    To be honest, I had some ideas already, but just in the state of solely music” at that time. There were sounds and composition of mine neither fitting the UGFC, nor any other project. There is of course a lot of crossfade - for example in the collab recording with Il Vuoto. The vibes present on the upcoming “Ost album” by UGFC, which is also some kind of soulmate to BRCL. It’s logical, because both are “powerful music” projects. But in the future, I want to avoid such permeation. I would like to get UGFC back to strict PE/noise vibes and use ambience (purely in sonic meaning) just to help it breathe, not to be the main component.

 

The distance from the UGFC stuff is naturally the key issue.

 

Something needed to be done concerning this, because as UGFC I have a long and winding road behind me. From “amateurism” of the very beginnings, then playing as a duo, experiencing dozens of hours spent at gigs and parties where nobody wanted to listen us... One day you realise that you have become too sensitive to carry on like this and you need to create some reasonable border between such past experiences. Moreover, UGFC is probably “ignored/boycotted/blacklisted” at certain venues and by certain promotion groups. I also found out that some particular people with whom I collaborated in the past, and some groups/collectives with which I was in touch in hope of having a “soulmate” spirit, in fact never liked it and I am not sure what kind of attitude I should take concerning that. All of this is soaked in that mask and no potential plan/need is free from that. And it’s fine to be freed from such depreciating issues sometimes, don’t you think?

 

 

https://blindrulercursedland.bandcamp.com/?fbclid=IwAR2kaJOairC_bD5244VdF7M7o_xSrvXYycyM3w4gYqYM0hOargg75TFvPiw

 

 

Do you use any instruments never used before in this project? Are your compositions processes different compared to others during your entire artistic creation? Based on the few live gigs you managed to play before the lockdown, it seems like the live performance has a different choreography as well...

 

Well, the instruments used here are not substantially different from my “typical stuff”, but... yeah, and you will hear it on the recordings as well, Blind Ruler Cursed Land is based more on synths and percussions. I usually compose in response to some idea that comes to my mind, most of BRCL tracks are not the result of jamming or live-setting experiments. That is different from my other projects in fact. Live performance is more sophisticated and needs more concentration than before. Thus, one can hardly swing into improvisations, which were favoured in the past and with which I grew up as a musician. And to appreciate the choreography, you need your own mind and feelings, not my words.

 

 

 

On Good Friday, around a month ago, you had an online stream that featured a distinctive song with vocals. Do you plan to sing more?

 

Oh yeah, this one is the “fifth” song of the Chrysantheme Delirium concept in some sense, or of the Japan chapter, to be more precise. I plan to release this one as a split with Italian musician Matteo Gruppi, with whom I have been collaborating since 2015, formerly as UGFC. Concerning singing, in fact it is the first time I use such clean vocals, so far, I have never recognised myself as a “singer”, mostly my voice was some kind of “other” instrument. But I don’t think this is an issue that needs some particular statement or explanation, moreover in my upcoming material there are not so many tracks based on distinctive singing.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKek2Rj5jZg

 

 

Can you explain or clarify all this Japanese imperial inspiration?

 

As mentioned above, Japan is first of all just one chapter in Blind Ruler Cursed Land. The initial one indeed, but not the key one, more has to come. Concerning this particular issue, generally speaking, we often see some value or virtue innate to some other culture as something that may be appropriate for us as well, especially in the times when we feel we’ve lost such kind of feature. Honour, dignity, a “better” behaviour to the mother land? 

 

But we often forget that some particular culture is so distant and far from our thinking that the very inner sense of such kind of virtue is thus unreachable and non-transferable. In this case, there is the Yamato-damashii prism, the spirit that the non-Japanese does not have, cannot get, from its very sense. It is rooted in the meaning of the term itself… and well, something unreachable is naturally the most desired thing for restless and smugly soul of the living man. 

 

 

 

Or we can have another example – the “noble savage” concept, the admiration of the unspoiled free uncivilised man, the ancestral culture. A celebrated being, but in the name of unstoppable progress it must be destroyed, despite all sympathies for it. These sympathies made the destruction even faster, in fact. Such almost annihilated societies/cultures live their seemingly never-ending post-defeat phase - they will never live as before, according to their nature. Moreover, they are again and again seen as “noble savages”, this time within a perverted pop culture symbolism. Rich, “end–of-history” kids leave their parents and roots, trying to live like them... Such a cynical wheel of history.

 

  

Japan is interesting, because it has, at least seemingly, overcome this blind alley of modernity. Its industrialisation and modernisation in some ways successfully incorporated the old “samurai” values. But what happened next? The countries conquered by the Imperial Japanese army were handled with brutality so typical for the old samurai period of Sengoku Jidai. And it all ended in a defeat so heavy that it was almost unimaginable for many Japanese people how they should live on. 

 

A general question – how hard a fall must be so that life is unbearable from then on? And how do we explain to ourselves why we remained alive, while the very sense of that life is dead? Is there anything that may live forever? Yes, maybe Earth... nature... both threatened as if we wished to destroy them as quickly as possible… Everyone knows what is behind meat production, but how many really do stop eating it? “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment?!” Buddha was wrong...

 

 

Interesting, now I begin to understand why the debut release – “Chysantheme delirium” – is partly inspired by the work of director and writer Toshio Masuda…

 

Toshio Masuda is appreciated primarily as a storyteller, a myth-creator and a magnificent epic director. His historical movie work is breathtaking. Some scenes in his movies, for example the moment when general Maresuke Nogi from the Port Arthur siege cries when reporting to the emperor, how his soldiers had suffered so many losses, are a magnificent example of how to create historical as well as magical rendition of how it may have happened. He was also known for his WWII revisionism, presenting the justifications for the role of Japan during the war.

 

 

https://blindrulercursedland.bandcamp.com/album/chrysantheme-delirium

 

 

The EP and then the tape were released on February 22, 2021 - did you choose this date deliberately?

 

The date – actually, with UGFC I went so far that I had a symbolic date for almost all releases. I could say that this particular one is the date when Joan of Arc persuaded the dauphin of France that she had been chosen by a divine force to wage a war.

 

But it would not be true... Although it may seem surprising in my case. It was simply chosen by the label as an efficient date scheduled for my release.

 

 

 

Photos: dreadlock.fibijane:

https://www.instagram.com/dreadlock.fibijane/

 

English proofreading support: Markéta Pokorná

Questions: Karolina Válová 

 

(The original interview for radio Bawagan is from May 11, 2021)