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.
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...
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.
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)
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