Interview
Delmer Darion Satan finally pivots from metal to IDM and ambient, by Alex Francis. Photography by Jody Evans
If you were setting out to find the Devil’s birthplace, the first place you should go is an air-conditioned room in Stockholm. This is the National Library of Sweden, where the vast illuminated manuscript Codex Gigas is kept. If you were to somehow get past the reinforced glass and turn the musty pages, darkened with centuries of light exposure, you could get to page 290 recto – a vast image of Satan, horns dripping with blood and twin tongues writhing around his neat white teeth. This is where the Devil begins, if you ask Tom Lenton of electronic duo Delmer Darion. “While the Devil dates back a lot further than that, from my research [the 14th through 17th centuries] is the period where the average person had the most acute sense of the devil as a physical agent who could intervene in daily lives. That was always the most interesting place to start, I think. It partly speaks to why the page 290 recto in the Codex is so interesting, because it feels like a symbolic starting point in the history of the devil.” The duo’s debut album, after five years spent recording, is due to be formally announced in the next couple of months. It traces the history of Satan, filtering medieval dread and 1980s paranoia into a beguiling mixture of IDM, shoegaze and ambient music. Their newly released track ‘Wildering’ shows off the IDM and ambient influences to great effect, all shattered vocals and hypnotic guitar building to a terrifying noise climax. The record as a whole, though, feels closer to the more out-there explorations of Boards of Canada, especially the shoegaze and psych selected for last year’s Societas X Tape. It makes similar stylistic leaps between genres and styles, but – like Boards of Canada – Delmer Darion never lose their own identity to the concept or to the genres they choose to work in. — Early evils — The birthplace of this duo isn’t quite as beautiful as the Bohemian monastery where the Codex Gigas was first written and illuminated. The Benn Hall is a sturdy chunk of 1960s municipal concrete just off a roundabout on the A426, squatting awkwardly between the Rugby Borough Council offices and
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Newbold Road Car Park. It was here where Delmer Darion first met, at a preteen Battle of the Bands. “We were in Year 6,” says Oliver Jack, grinning at Lenton, who has his head in his hands. “Tom was playing in the Battle of the Bands, and I was a viewer, so obviously he’s the rock god doing Enter Shikari covers.” The pair got to know each other better at secondary school and their early experiments in Ableton began. “We’d hang out for an afternoon and make something,” says Jack. “And it was never a complete song, some of them are so bad.” It surely couldn’t be that bad, I say. It’s now his turn to be embarrassed. “I… this, this is on me,” he says. “I did a Fatboy Slimstyle remix of Adele so it’s got these big Fatboy Slim drums and this little synth line that’s like doo doot de doot doot. That’s the worst, by far.” Years of late school nights making beats and mucking around in Ableton followed. “It’s now been nearly 15 years of most weeks sending each other something.” says Jack. Eventually things became more serious for the pair, with a smattering of Bandcamp releases surfacing in their late teens and university years. The duo also cultivated an interest with film, taking their name from a surreal death in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. This eventually surfaced as a recurring fascination with weaving concept and story into their music: “Even when we were like 14 or 15 I remember having visions of putting together an album with quite a heavy sense of concept and some sense of narrative and really dedicating time to it.” says Lenton. “Obviously it’s quite difficult though, so we didn’t.” Eventually, those teenage fantasies came to fruition. Lenton’s long fascination with literature and the occult merged with Jack’s interests in obscure hardware and a self-confessed need for a project on the go to start the five-year process of creating a concept record about Satan. “The place that the idea came from originally was a Wallace Stevens poem, where he writes about the death of Satan as a tragedy for the imagination.” says Lenton. “Part of what [Stevens] is getting at is that for most of human history we’ve had grand, overarching narratives which help us to understand the world and our place in it – what kind of narratives does humanity need now that religion is dying? While
