Withering Worlds/Interview with Wanderer and Void

Interview by Jay Parker

1) Tell us about Withering Worlds? where are you from? When was the band formed? Who is in the current line up?

Wanderer: Hi Inside the Darkness, thanks for your interest. Withering Worlds is a melodic/ atmospheric black metal studio project currently based in the Netherlands. I started Withering Worlds in late 2014. At the time, I was based in the United States but later moved to Western Europe. I wrote the album in many different places both in Europe and North America, each of which influenced me to an extent, I guess. During the 2014-2019 period, I worked alone on the music, lyrics and production. In late 2019, Void joined the project as lead vocalist, and lent his beautiful, versatile voice on the music. Withering Worlds solely consists of Void and I. Void: I’m from an extremely small and rural area called Townley, Alabama in the United States.

2) Describe your sound in 5 words.

Atmospheric, intense, aggressive, melancholic, honest.

3) Your album, The Long Goodbye, has just been released... an epic cascading symphony of raging riffs, heinous harmonies, driving drums, perfectly balanced with clean vocals and some fine NWOBH style solos and drumbeats....and dramatic classical interludes... It’s a real pleasure for the ears.... Tell us about the album? When and where was it recorded? Run us through the tracks...

Wanderer: Thank you. We are honored by your kind words. All the music except Void’s vocals was recorded in the “Den”, my home studio, which is a small portable studio that followed me in the various places where I lived and composed the album. Everything was composed and arranged earlier, but most of the actual recording (including Void’s vocals) took place in the 2018-2020 period. Void: My vocals were recorded at my home studio, Bedroom Studios, where I record all my other projects. Wanderer: The album consists of 7 tracks, and has somewhat of a classical structure with an opening track, two long metal tracks, a middling interlude, two long metal tracks again and a closing track. The album opener, “In Search of the Withering Worlds”, serves as an introduction to our sound, aesthetics, and the overall journey the album takes the listener on. It is instrumental and heavily orchestral, and is the very first song I composed over some months in the late 2014, early 2015 period. “Hour of Trial” is the first heavy song on the record, and incidentally also the first heavy song I finished writing in late 2015. The song is about loneliness and hope in times of personal trouble. It is quite progressive, with multiple sections and has some neoclassical influence, especially in the lead keyboards sections. It also features a kinda 80s metal solo and some clean choir sections. “The Long Goodbye” is the title track of the album, and is probably my favorite song on it. It is more markedly in the atmospheric black metal tradition in terms of sound and arrangement than “Hour of Trial”, and is also darker in spirit. Stylistically, it features prominent orchestral arrangements, especially around heavy strings in the orchestral bridges later in the track. I got a friend who is a trained classical singer to lend her wonderful soprano voice on some portions of the track, and I like the final result we got. It also features a spoken poem in the final section. This song is about loss and the inescapable passage of time when worlds, persons, places we once knew inescapably wither away. It was written between 2015 and 2018. “Memories” is a short instrumental with woodwind leads that provides a breather between the heavy and dense songs around it. It is a song about the bygone era of one’s youth. “Transcendence” is the more “doomy”, slower track on the record, without any blast beats. It was written between 2016 and 2018. It is also quite progressive in its structure, with several distinct “peak” moments such as a long and slow guitar solo and another fully orchestral break with brass and wind lead sections towards the end of the song. “Journey Through The Black Winter” has more straightforwardly atmospheric black metal undertones, with faster tempos and dyadic tremolo riffing and overall a rawer, simpler sound, mixing raging lead vocals with clean choir-like choruses, as well as a long, ambient break in the middle. It is a song about solitude. I wrote it in early 2018. Finally, “Watcher of Fading Stars” is the concluding track – a very slow, dreamy song evoking feelings of drifting away in space, and away from the warmth and light of familiar stars. It as a somewhat simple chord progression that is heavily layered upon with various orchestral sections, and some distant guitar leads. Then everything slowly fade away to silence. I wrote this last track between mid-2017 and mid-2018.

4) What is the inspiration behind the music? How do you write the songs? Do you use different guitar tunings?

The raw inspiration for the music comes from my personal life and experiences. In many ways, this music is like a soundtrack to my soul if it makes sense, but it deals with universal themes and my hope is that it resonates with others. That’s why I generally do not wish to reveal too much about the meaning of the songs, simply because I wish others to put their own personal stories and find meaning in the music. In terms of composition, I try to translate raw feelings into compelling but simple riffs or chord progressions, which I often come up just on the guitar or the keyboard. I then build them up and arrange them in large wall of sounds made up of many different layers. The songs are rather long and consists of many sections, each of which may take a long time to write and progressively build up. I never set a time limit of when a particular song needs to be finished, and I find inspiration to be very elusive, so I have learned to be patient. I am typically willing to wait months to have something I am happy with, writing wise or arrangement wise. In terms of tunings, the album is written in D and Drop D tunings.

5) What bands did you listen to growing up and what bands do you listen to now?

Wanderer: I have been listening to metal for most of my life. I think I was truly awakened to melodic yet extreme guitar and vocal sounds by Children of Bodom, especially the Hate Crew Deathroll album. I have had a long love story with Finnish metal bands more generally, including more mellow stuff like Sonata Arctica. Ensiferum, Amorphis, Moonsorrow, Wintersun and many other Finnish bands have been important at various points in my own musical journey and growing up, as have been some classic epic/melodic black metal acts like Summoning and Windir. These days, I like listening to bands focused on layering multiple keyboard and guitar lines in massive sounding arrangements, like Summoning, Woods of Desolation, Aquilus or While Heaven Wept to cite a few different bands in different genres that have influenced our sound, including black metal-identified bands but not only. However, I think these days I spend more time listening to non-metal music, especially contemporary classical / orchestral stuff, old 19th century composers associated with Romanticism in various European countries as well as lots of film music. Void: Until I became a teenager I was forced to listen to modern country and r&b. The first taste of metal I got was The Blair Witch 2 and Dracula 2000 soundtracks. Those movies introduced me to bands like Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, System of a Down, Slayer, and other heavy artists. These days I have a very broad taste in music, mostly metal, rock, and orchestral, I can’t really narrow it down but suffice to say all subgenres of those three styles.

6) Why did you choose to play black metal?

Wanderer: Well, I did not necessarily choose, nor was I ever exclusively into black metal. To me, black metal stands for artistic freedom and a viscerally personal approach to creativity – that is, being unaffected by commercial concerns, but also other concerns, such as “what will others think? It is too raw, or is it too simple, too technical enough, too kitschy or cheesy, or this or that?”. In its very nature, black metal blows away these types of mental constraints on what counts as good music and I think this is very valuable. Black metal has to be one of the richest subgenres in terms of sub-sub genres, it’s just incredibly fertile as a scene. It just sticks to one cardinal rule in my view, which is “be honest in the music you put out”. I think this is very powerful. Black metal also has a rich tradition of one-man metal composers working away silently on their craft, producing compelling records with very little resources, which is very inspiring to the independent musician who has no money but emotionally honest music to give and a story to tell. Black metal allows the ordinary, resourceless, underprivileged artist to shine at the margins and possibly propose something unique or new by disregarding conventions established by more powerful players within the music industry. Void: Black metal, in my opinion, is probably the most versatile genre of music. It has so many subgenres; you can mix black metal with practically any other form of music. Blackened death metal, melodic black metal, raw black metal, I’ve even heard what i could only describe as “blackened circus metal”.

7) Tell us about the metal scene in Holland... recommend some bands for our readers...

Wanderer: Well, I am not so well acquainted with the local scene just yet as I only recently moved here. I am aware of some great Dutch metal acts though, like Carach Angren and Ayreon, so there’s a definitely a tradition of epic, orchestrated metal in the Netherlands. Ask me again a few years (if I am still around that is, I tend to move often).

8) If you could play with any musician or band, live or dead, who would it be and why?

Wanderer: Mmmh…that’s a tough one. Probably Jari Maenpaa from Wintersun and Hans Zimmer. I regard both of them as musical masterminds, telling great, moving stories with massive sounding music, and they’ve influenced WW’s music a lot. Void: I would absolutely love to be part of a project with Attila Csihar or Mayhem in general. I think Csihar has the most sickening and inhuman vocals in any form of metal today. His live performance of Deathcrush from a few years ago when Mayhem became a 5-piece... Haunting and disturbing.

9) What are your palns for the future? Are you recording?

Wanderer: We have a multiple album deal with Northern Silence Productions, and we plan to keep releasing records in the future, hopefully in a somewhat faster fashion than how it was during that first album, which was a challenging but valuable experience for me – hence taking a very long time to complete. I am already working on new material and have ideas for where I want to take our sound in the future, but I also want to take a bit of a breather for now because the last couple of years have been very intense in terms of work involved in the final aspects of mixing, production and release for The Long Goodbye. Right now, I am happy to get back to working at a leisurely pace and noodling around on my guitars and keyboards, which I feel like I could not really do for a long time once things were locked in place for the first record and I was just working on production. But you will surely hear more from us in the future. Void: I’m looking extremely forward to our next album. Wanderer is a brilliant composer; I can’t imagine what he will come up with next. I have multiple albums for multiple projects in the works right now in my studio, only one if which is black metal. Anyone interested can check most of my other projects out https://thebedroomstudios.bandcamp.com

10) Do you have anything to add for our readers?

Wanderer: Thanks to everyone who has taken a listen to our music, and showed support in any way either by liking, commenting, sharing, or writing to us. This means the world to me. Others who have not heard of us, check us out if you want more epic melodic black metal in your life. We hope you like what you hear! Void: Thanks to everyone who has supported us in even the slightest way. Whether you pre-ordered the album or simply left a kind comment or a “like” on Youtube or Facebook, thank you. It means a lot.