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Daring to chose new musical paths, <code>’s new album, by their own admission, sounds a little bit like King Crimson. Perhaps it was the heavy medication in the studio that helped… Words: José Carlos Santos Photo: Julie Cottrell
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specially when it comes to extreme and/or heavy music there are often great big fusses thrown over changes of musical direction by bands, regardless of the quality of the new material. You can surely think of half a dozen of these cases without us naming any names. Perhaps it’s because we care about our favourite bands more than most people in other genres, so it comes from a good place at least? But there’s a good way to avoid this, which is to establish at some point that everyone can just expect the unexpected, and that if you’re not confused at every release, you’re listening to something else by mistake. This works, even within genres with the most punishingly orthodox of fans like black metal. Solefald or even Ulver (from a certain point on, at least) have mastered this perfectly, and <code> seem ready to join this restrict bunch. Not that their first albums with a radically different line-up were obvious black metal by any stretch of the imagination, but nowhere is this freeing of expectations more visible than in the outrageously beautiful new album, ‘Mut’. An even more daring departure than 2013’s ‘Augur Nox’, it raises eyebrows in a wide arch at first for its dreamlike quality, especially as, unlike its predecessor, it doesn’t have the “excuse” of there being a whole new line-up at work. Nope, these are the same people that did ‘Augur Nox’, and they’re still being restlessly creative and exploratory, but ‘Mut’ will quickly work its charms over the listener, so there aren’t any big shocks. Old or new line-up, <code> have never really done the same album twice, why should they now? “The last one was a prog album, it wasn’t a post rock album, it had a concept and I stuck quite rigidly to it to try to make it cohesive,” muses delightfully eloquent vocalist Wacian, juggling the two <code> records he has been a part of in a very interesting comparison. “This one is not so clearly defined, it’s much dreamier than that. I enjoyed it more, too. I was actually heavily medicated during the recording, due to some health problems, but we had already booked the studio, and it happened to work. Taking lots of mind-bending drugs and trying to write an album – it works, and other people have proved it before us,” he says with a laugh. But regardless of any substances, it’s clear what
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this is. All those angular sharp turns, the vocal harmonies, the surprising twists, the post-rockthrown-into-a-black-hole environment of the whole thing, you know what that is? It’s the sound of a band breaking free from itself. “The two albums that came before ‘Augur Nox’ were done by different line-ups, and we’d been fans of those two albums,” reasons bassist Syhr, who also joined <code> in 2011 with Wacian, both of them members of rock band Alternative Carpark. “With ‘Augur Nox’ there was this element of, while wanting it to of course be different from the other two, there was a kind of bracket that we thought we should fit. And that happened for everyone whether they were in the band or not before. A certain element of playing up to being <code>, you could say. But by now we’ve been together long enough and played together long enough to not give a monkey’s about that. It was more just wanting to make a good record. Just because of that, it would be my favourite <code> record already. I think it stands out.” Stand out it does. For starters, we just described it as “beautiful” up there, that wouldn’t fly with any of the others, no matter how brilliant they all were. It’s still a skewed and decidedly non-obvious beauty, but beauty it is. Is the strange otherworldliness in the writing the true mark of <code>, then? “There was never any obligation to be weird or avant-garde, really,” Wacian replies earnestly. “We came in without there being any rules, and that was quite nice. The only things we couldn’t escape from was the shadow of the reputation, and that wasn’t about being weird, it was about being incredibly accomplished. Because we both came from a rock band, or a band with a rock background, but in any case certainly not an extreme band, it was nice for us to not be forced into anything. No one was saying ‘that’s not black metal!’, to put it like that.”
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ne interesting thing the press release mentions is that the writing was done “without any musical reference points”. How does that happen? Is that even a possible? “There was a degree of chaos to the whole writing year, ” the vocalist explains. “There were things going on, life events and whatnot, that allowed this to work as a release. It was able to be
something that we could escape to,” he says. Syhr picks up the conversation moving more towards the aim of the question: “I don’t think it was a conscious decision to write music without any reference points as a starter, it was just more a case of, well, we’re writing the new album, so it must come out of us now. I think that with the previous album, most of the songs were a sort of combination of a few years where we tweaked and changed them and played with them to make them, over the years, sound a bit more like the previous albums, whereas this one was just like, we’re going to write this now and try it out. That feeling of freedom, and that we didn’t need to please anybody, was a comfort.” Wacian then quips something really important because of this not needing to please anybody business: “There was a certain sense within the band that the people who weren’t enjoying ‘Augur Nox’ weren’t going to enjoy anything else we did now, so we just thought fuck it. We’re not making it for anyone else but us. And if we’re not going to have any fun doing it, what’s the point?” How many times do you hear bands say this, and then spin the record and it’s exactly like any of the other 400 records you already own? <code> walk the walk however, and for that alone they’d be a very precious commodity. Such is the healthy way they approach their music that they even have no trouble coming up with musical reference points now, when it’s all on disc, as if they’re regular listeners like you and me. “These last two albums have really made me think of King Crimson’s ‘Red’,” Wacian says with disarming sincerity. “Particularly ‘Augur Nox’, but this one certainly too. The flair of the guitar and everything. It’s not an evil album, but it’s not trying for it.” It’s actually not trying to be anything, right? “There was in fact an overall simplification of things,” he confesses. “‘Augur Nox' has a lot of four-syllable words, that sort of stuff, and the idea was to simplify everything, and that included the singing. To get breathy and up close, trying to be the dialogue inside someone’s head.” And it’s a fascinating conversation. ‘Mut’ is out now on Agonia www.Facebook.com/CodeBlackMetal