Interview
with SIN NANNA of
THE HERMETIC ARDOUR
“The guitar is the mist, the cold frost and snow in autumn or winter.”
“Striborg really began when I started to become the cynical,
misanthropic and embittered bastard that I am today.”
Thanks to Displeased’s Ron Veltkamp, SIN NANNA the enigmatic, isolated
and forthright figure behind elusive Australasian black metal entity
STRIBORG agreed to make an exception to his ‘no contacts, no
interviews’ policy exclusively for Terrorizer. Hence a loose
conversation, conducted by e-mail by Olivier ‘Zoltar’ Badin over a
period of three months, to help us in solving this riddle: we may care
about Striborg but why should you?
HATE FOREST
If you’re reading this there’s a good chance you already hate Striborg
for involuntary personifying everything considered wrong with black
metal: shambolic musicianship, lo-fi production that reduces guitars to
an undefined buzzing drone, ambient interludes plagued by Fisher Price
keyboards and vocals that may sound like either Gollum or Donald Duck
on crack. But mark our words, Striborg does matter. Not only because
its sole member Sin Nanna (originally the name of a Sumerian moon god)
has been making waves in the underground by being so insanely
productive over the last four years with such an amount of available
material that it has become impossible to ignore him. Like black
metal’s other ‘accident’ Velvet Cacoon, Nanna’s music is a
love-it-or-hate-it affair. But as flawed and disturbing as it is, it’s
also one of a kind and worth investigating.
First you have to travel all the way his unusual birthplace and current
location, an island in the southern hemisphere seldom mentioned outside
of cartoons, 150 miles south-east of Australia to be precise, and known
as Tasmania. Granted with a population of less than half-a-million and
a good portion of the land classified as natural reserves, what was
initially known as Van Diemen’s Land almost make Norway look like a
overcrowded urban centre.
“Tasmania is a beautiful place with such a low population, not the kind
of place in which to live if you want the fast life but perfect for
hermetical sorts of person.,” explained Sin. “About a third of our
state is untouched wilderness of rainforests and even where I live is
only a couple of minutes walk on the same property to wonderful lush
rainforests and of course, such an environment is huge source of
influences and inspiration for Striborg. I live about a 50 kilometres
from Hobart City, our capital. Thing is, Tasmania ain’t nothing like
Australia as unlike over there, you only need to drive for few minutes
to be out of the city and into the wilderness. I live in a
not-so-conventional house that is closer to a shack really, on a
50-acre block surrounded by bushland, paddocks and rainforest. Overall,
it’s pretty isolated sure but isolated enough if you ask me as it is my
decision not to have a social life, except for snail-mailing some
people, mostly distros for ordering or trading.”
SOMEWHERE IN TIME
Then, there’s the music itself. It all started out in 1989 when Sin
Nanna joined his first band, Krucifior, a black/doom outfit for which
he was playing drums. But things got serious in 1994, when Darkthrone’s
‘A Blaze In The Northern Sky’ made such a big impression on him that he
started playing guitar and a launched solo project named after the
album’s opening track, Kathaaria, which in 1997 became Striborg.
“Striborg is Kathaaria. There’s no real difference between those two
entities besides the the name change that happened because I was
dissatisfied with the direction my music was taking. Kathaaria’s final
recording, ‘Isle Des Morts’, was too fast, claustrophobic and far too
musical. Since I wanted the whole thing to be much darker, uglier and
more primitive, I picked up a new band’s name to underline the opening
of a new chapter with ‘Cold Winter Moon’. Yet, Striborg really began at
the turn of the millennium. That’s when I started to become the
cynical, misanthropic and embittered bastard that I am today.”
If his first musical adventures were fuzzy and necro to the core, the
birth of a ‘black/ambient’ project, Veil Of Darkness, in 1997 soon had
such effect on Striborg that both entities became one the second he
realised “that both served the same purpose and achieved the same
feelings.”
By then, Sin Nanna had already stood by a firm set of values still
valid today. Beside recording and performing everything by himself, he
decided to form his own label, Finsternis, to distribute most of his
earlier stuff, with the few exceptions being handled by fellow BM
Tasmanian underground activists Asgard Musick. Even since signing with
Displeased Records - who’ve been released both fresh releases and
reissues at an impressive rate of eight albums in eighteen months! – in
late 2005, he’s still pretty much in charge of everything. The same
goes for his first ever DVD ‘Journey Of A Misanthrope’, a “no budget
film”, featuring eight tracks curled off various albums, directed by
Sin Nanna’s wife Phaedra and devoid of any “gay live shit, boring
interviews or pseudo[$italics]-documentaries”, it is the exact visual
extension of Striborg’s lo-fi sonic aesthetic.
“Right from the start I knew I would never be able to work with a
proper engineer, as he was bound not to understand my vision, and
therefore I decided to do everything by myself from day one. In
retrospect, the very first Kathaaria rehearsal tape in 1994 was a joke
since I only used a tape recorder, an acoustic guitar and a two-piece
drums! For my first ‘real’ recording, ‘A Tragic Journey Towards The
Light’ in early ‘95, I had to borrow an electric guitar and use a
crappy keyboard to do the drums since I couldn’t make any noise where I
was living. And to add insult to injury, the whole thing was recorded
in mono, dubbing tape deck to tape deck, without any bass guitar! I
improved my equipment step by step. I purchased my own four-track
portable studio in 1998. And since 2006 and ‘Ghostwoodlands’, I’ve been
recording everything in digital, using a Cubase LE software which makes
things much easier for me, although I’m still using cheap microphones
to keep a lo-fi sound.”
Over the last few years, Striborg has been spitting out albums at an
impressive rate. Even though Acid Mother Temple’s record has yet to be
broken, he’s got now more than fifteen official full-lengths out. And
there’s no sign of him slowing down
“Since I have all the required equipment at home, I can record what I
want, when I want it, recording the drums first, then guitar, bass,
keyboards and finally vocals. It’s however up to the labels to be ready
to release something and it’s usually months after I have recorded an
album. I don’t try to on purpose to be prolific, that is I don’t spend
ten hours a day doing Striborg, only what is needed to accomplish
something I’m working on. I spend too much time listening to black
metal and watching horror movies anyway, interspersed with reading
ghost stories and wandering around in nature. This being said, I can
spend a long course of time practising my guitar and drum parts to
tracks I’m working on, sometimes up to two or three hours a day if I’m
at the point of tackling an album. Actually, I sometimes tackle an
album in one go, like three days max, thanks to long recording that can
last for over ten hours at a time if I feel like it.”
EARTH CRISIS
Here we have for once a musician who isn’t ashamed of the tag he is
often linked to, the oh-so-subjective ‘depressive black metal’ category
everybody, from Shining to Xasthur, has been lumped into. But if this
proud black metaller shares with all his fellow co-workers a strong
misanthropy, he denies any form of spiritual affiliation with all those
goat worshippers, denouncing their Satanic obsession as “stupid and
immature”. As far away as possible from the long collection of
clichés
attached to that genre, his lyrics prove to be a figurative mix of
“animism, spiritual catharsis, oppression and paranormal”, Sin Nanna
states that his only “spiritual connection lies within Gaia”. If the
term originally designated a goddess in Greek mythology, it’s also
referring to the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ an ecological theory that appeared
in the ‘70s portraying our planet as a living system where living and
nonliving elements are heavily linked. Of course, Striborg’s mastermind
would rather leave out the human part of the equation.
“The true spirit of Mother Nature is my only source of enlightenment
and can only be felt when free of mankind. And I do not care if anybody
thinks I’m being politically or ecologically incorrect as this is the
way I perceive the world on a spiritual level. I’m not interested in
promoting anything: I despise the human race and I can’t help feeling
this way, that’s all. Read my lyrics and you’ll see I’m always
referring to humanity as some kind of parasite that gets in Nature’s
way.” His strong bound with his natural habitat appear even more
evident when asked about the feelings he’s going through during an
album’s preparation.
“Rehearsing the songs is almost like transcendental experience for me.
My astral body travels to cold desolate nightmare planes where I become
united with nature, as Striborg is merely a medium for which Gaia to
speak through, delivering the cold and embittered elements of nature.
For example, the guitar is the mist, the cold frost and snow in autumn
or winter. And if the drums are the trees in the forest, the vocals are
the haunting cries that lie within them. Of course, those mental
landscapes become very surreal and vast beyond any words, like a portal
to another dimension. It’s so much more than music really…”
SOUTHERN COMFORT
But let us not forget what really matters, of course, Sin Nanna
hates you, your mom and basically “99,9 per cent of the BM people who
are pathetically sociable”. And there’s those harsh critics who “love
to focus on my music’s flaws whereas it’s the overall atmosphere that
matters”. Besides his wife and only collaborator Phaedra, there are
only two exceptions to his wrath. First there’s the whole Southern Lord
clan. Greg Anderson has in the US released two Striborg albums and Sunn
O)))’s Oren Ambarchi named the ‘Black One’ opening track after him. To
return the favour, Sin Nanna agreed to take part in the band’s two
Melbourne shows in May 2007, the first being an all-improvised show by
impromptu five-piece ensemble Pentemple, which included Anderson,
Ambardi, Stephen O’Mally, Mayhem’s Attila Csihar and Sin Nanna on
drums, vocals and feedback.
Secondly and unsurprisingly, he’s also in regular contact with
like-minded Xasthur leader, Malefic. Both individuals have already
shared a split 7” and are working on a collaborative piece of wax
“which will be released under our old names, Zenoath and Kathaaria”.
But that’s it. As Sin Nanna steadily reminded during the entire
exchange, Striborg stands alone.
‘Journey Of A Misanthrope’ and ‘Autumnal Melancholy’ are out now on
Displeased Records www.displeasedrecords.com