Dear friends, we have reached the fourth installment of our coverage regarding the upcoming Czech edition of "USBM: A Revolution of Identity in American Black Metal" by Daniel Lake. Last time we, among other things, delved in more detail into the contents of the book; today, we are following up with an excerpt!
Specifically, the sample in question comes from chapter eight, which is entitled "The Sockets' Red Glare - New Eruptions from New York" and considers (of course) the black metal scene of the Big Apple.
That means the stories of such bands as Krallice, Black Anvil, Tombs, Mutilation Rites, Liturgy or the avant-garde collective of Imperial Triumphant and its is them that our sample is about.
As usual, the whole excerpt is presented as it will appear in the Czech translation when printed.
The English original text is as follows:
Another New York entity that has used black metal as a springboard into a more holistic mode of personal creation is Imperial Triumphant, led by Zachary “Ilya” Ezrin. From the band’s earliest emanations, Ezrin found ways to wed discordance and speed to outré melodic sensibilities far from black metal’s ice-locked origins.
“Black metal was important,” Ezrin suggests, “for the sole purpose that its focus is on the atmosphere of the music. It’s really the only subgenre where the goal is pure darkness. Darkthrone and Deathspell Omega are miles apart in terms of production quality and technical ability, yet they both produce the same air of terror. While we may not be very ‘black metal’ on the surface of our music, we still stay true to the idea of generating an intentionally horrific sound. Black metal isn’t just tremolopicking and blast beats and 100 percent intensity the whole time. It can have moments that sound fragile or soft or weak, while still maintainin a sinister atmosphere. I truly believe that bringing the vibe to a quieter o slower place makes the wilder sections feel even stronger.”
Imperial Triumphant grew directly out of Ezrin’s desire to give voice to one particular creative mode, though he mentions that the band’s members are steeped in a wider NYC music scene, earning money by “playing jazz, blues and swing gigs in restaurants/hotels/weddings in NYC. Non-metal music plays an enormous role in our compositions. I encourage anyone who wants to write forward-thinking metal music to listen to styles outside the genre. We bring in ideas and influences from 20th century classical to West African drum rhythms. There’s so much out there that, if you limit yourself to just metal, you will just sound like another copy.“
“My goal has always been to do something unique,” he continues. “I don’t believe that anyone is ever going to play Norwegian black metal better than Norwegian black metal bands. Our chord combinations are a reflection of the sounds and sights of New York City. We’re merely playing the notes that need to be played. The fact that my rhythm section has a long history with jazz and Latin music certainly influences our creative process as well. I have a music composition degree, so my focus is always on the song’s overall structure rather than just guitar riffs.”
“They were fucking young,” recalls Krallice’s Colin Marston, who has recorded Imperial Triumphant since the very beginning. “They had a full-time cellist in the band, and I remember when they first wrote me, being like, ‘What is this?’ I really like working with them, but they really were a head-scratcher. Their first album is pretty diatonic black metal—not very dissonant, not very weird, not very prog except for the fact that it had cello… but there’s been orchestral aspects to black metal for its whole existence.”
Imperial Triumphant was born as a solo project, and Ezrin mostly remained at the helm through some short recordings and a full-length album called Abominamentvm. Ezrin calls the record “a simple recording. It was a mostly smooth process, tracking to a click one instrument at a time. At that moment, Abominamentvm was my sole project, and Pyrrhon’s rhythm section—Erik Malave [bass] and Alex Cohen [drums]—were merely helping me to realize my vision. It was the first step towards a grander vision.”
Even though Abominamentvm was entirely written by Ezrin, the result sounds a lot like what would happen if tech-death weirdos Pyrrhon turned out a black metal record. The inclusion of Pyrrhon band members makes perfect sense, in context. The bass work is meaty, lending the twisting guitar parts a muscularity that rarely shows up in purer black metal brews. Blast beats are relatively scant, as songs coil around nimbler rhythms and less staid guitar riffs.
After Ezrin self-released Abominamentvm and the two-song Goliath EP, the avant-garde Italian label Code666 released the pair as a single compilation CD called Shrine to the Trident Throne. By then, Imperial Triumphant were morphing again into a configuration that would become more stable and band-oriented. Through the transition, the Abyssal Gods album was ushered through a somewhat difficult birth, and became much more of a death metal record with blackened tendencies than the other way around.
“Abyssal Gods was a very difficult recording,” Ezrin admits, though he says that “writing it was quite easy. I had a lot of ideas. As a young writer, and the sole writer for that album, my only goal was to make the most disgusting music I could. At this point I was able to wrangle [drummer] Kenny Grohowski to record half the songs, with Alex Cohen on the other half. I saw Kenny play with Alekhine’s Gun around 2013, and I remember thinking, ‘This is the guy I need in my band.’” Grohowski is also an accomplished jazz drummer in NYC’s downtown scene, playing with a vast array of other musicians, including as member of John Zorn’s Simulacrum rock ensemble and as a touring member of puzzling world music deconstructionists Secret Chiefs 3.
Ezrin calls the recording of Abyssal Gods “stressful, as we tracked every instrument at a different studio. Piecing it all together at Colin Marston’s studio, Menegroth, was a laborious process.”
“The recording of Abyssal Gods was kind of fucked-up and weird,” Marston agrees, “so we just decided to make it fucked-up and uglysounding on purpose, because it was already kind [headed] of in that direction. I was like, ‘I’m not going to be able to make this sound pleasant, so we might as well make it more unpleasant.’ I really like that record because of that: Even though I feel like I got a very compromised thing to work on, I feel like we were able to do something artistically cool with it.”
Ezrin, likewise, is proud of the outcome: “I’m glad we were able to persevere and put out Abyssal Gods. It’s a good album to represent my creative ability at that time in my life.”
In the months after Abyssal Gods was completed and released by Code666 in February 2015, Ezrin struggled to tap new musical veins. “I remember feeling sort of empty after releasing Abyssal Gods,” he admits. “It felt like I didn’t quite have another full-length of material in me. However, a mini concept album felt manageable. I found the works of Marquis de Sade were a great clay to sculpt. It would be challenging to make it terrifying and not gimmicky, which excited me.”
That clay was fired into form with 2016’s Inceste EP, one of the most brazenly strange chunks of black/death you are ever likely to hear. In a review at the time of its release, I compared the chord choices to “notes yanked from disparate weight classes and hurled into an unsupervised mud wrestling pit,” the tempo to “a half-dozen drum kits played by an industrial-sized washing machine,” and the saxophone lines to “Michael Clarke Duncan’s ghost sodomizing a hedgehog.” I dredge those descriptions up here because they remain a valid portrayal of the emotional plotlines that appear to slice through the record’s 20 fleshrending minutes. Interestingly, Ezrin seems not yet to have settled on the band lineup that would move forward. Drums are credited to both Cohen and Grohowski, and bass duties appear to have been shared by Malave and recent recruit Steven Blanco.
“Steven Blanco actually responded to a Craigslist ad I posted about looking for a touring bass player back in 2015,” Ezrin reveals. “He ended up being a more perfect fit than I could ever imagine, and helped to elevate Imperial Triumphant to the level we are at now. I’m quite proud of the quality and atmosphere we created on that record. It also features the first song not written by me (‘Oblivion in Morsels’ by Kenny Grohowski), which would eventually lead to a more collaborative relationship. Now that the lineup is a solidified permanent unit, the creation process has changed quite a bit. We share equal responsibility in the development of our songs. With the musical experience and knowledge of Kenny and Steven, we have shaped a much darker and more original sound for ourselves, one that we feel very comfortable in.”
That relationship persisted to yield 2018’s lumbering behemoth, Vile Luxury. With this record—and with the costuming and music videos that have surrounded it—Imperial Triumphant truly appear to have found a voice all their own. The music grows into longer, even gnarlier song structures. They play as a confident trio, diving and swerving through complicated music together as a unit. And there’s a brass quintet laid into the material, giving the album an anachronistic charm that wars with its eviler qualities.
“Vile Luxury is the first Imperial Triumphant record written by the band as a whole,” Ezrin boasts, clearly proud of his talented bandmates and the art they have produced. “That recording process was very different. We tracked live together—no click tracks, just capturing the trio playing in the moment. Then vocals and overdubs and thousands of guest musicians were laid over that. We never worked like that before, and it made for a vastly different outcome.”
“I was stoked that they decided to come back and record in my studio again with the new lineup,” says Marston. “Their playing and their tones are so developed at this point, they don’t need a weird recording to sound weird. There’s not a lot of funny business with the mixing; it’s just the way it sounded. With their current lineup, there’s much more of a nuanced approach to the drums, much more freeform and a little more actual jazz in the playing. And they switched from corpsepaint to masks, and they have these crazy costumes now.”
Imperial Triumphant has continued touring relatively frequently, right up until the COVID-19 pandemic that stalled all activity in America (and elsewhere) for much of 2020. In the middle of that year, Imperial Triumphant released their fourth full-length, Alphaville, a jazz-derived, death-indebted beast of a record in which each musician involved flexes his least obvious compositional muscles and reaches toward the most technically absurd fringes of angular heavy music. Collaborative improvisation reigned in the creative process that yielded these songs. Trey Spruance, of Mr. Bungle and Secret Chiefs 3, produced the record; Meshuggah’s Tomas Haake contributed some drum work; Bloody Panda’s banshee Yoshiko Ohara provided some vocal tracks; Marston again added some of his own guitar sensibilities. Alphaville is galaxies removed from the band’s black metal roots, and still several orbital pathways distant from Abyssal Gods or even most of Vile Luxury. It is an incredible feat and worth every second, many times over.
“I love any form of creation,” Ezrin asserts. “A band like this allows me to explore and develop new and unique concepts; whether that be through [the] live stage show or album art or music videos, it’s all exciting and fresh. The voice of Imperial Triumphant has been a slow development towards a standout sound. We will always be pushing the boundaries and thinking outside the box.”
So, enjoy and more next time!