Snares of Sixes Interview: What If The Moon Was Alive?
Since the dissolution of folk metal legends Agalloch in 2016, multi-instrumentalist Jason Walton has kept busy, forming and disbanding KHôRADA and reforming experimental metal band Sculptured, among his many other groups. Then there’s Snares of Sixes, the collective unlike any other. It started as a MIDI-focused project with a debut EP in 2017 called Yeast Mother: An Electroacoustic Mass, literally about kombucha, and featuring many of his past collaborators from Agalloch, Sculptured, Dolven, and Self Spiller. Today, Walton finally reveals the follow-up, this time expanding the project to its fuller potential with MoonBladder (Nefarious Industries/Transcending Records), a single 30-minute track. Recorded globally with some familiar Snares of Sixes faces--Agalloch’s Don Anderson, Sculptured’s Marius Sjøli--and some new ones--Kayo Dot’s Toby Driver and Ron Varod--but driven, arranged, and constructed by Walton, MoonBladder combines electronic and acoustic elements to create a more wondrous world. It starts with pulsating synths, expected enough considering its predecessor, before electric guitars follow the synth melody, one of a few metal-adjacent callbacks on the record. Skittering electronic beats and ghostly, faint vocals--samples of number stations as well as recorded voices--trade in and out, as do beautiful guitar and piano. At one point, there’s even some jazz drums, one of many out-of-the-ordinary items that appear momentarily and disappear without notice.
Earlier this week, Decibel Magazine premiered a video for the record made by Walton’s publicist Dave Brenner, a mix of natural footage and studio recordings submitted by many of the record’s musicians, with various color hues superimposed over the imagery. I spoke with Walton over the phone last month about the making of the album and the video. Read the interview below, edited for length and clarity.
Since I Left You: How would you say MoonBladder is unique as compared to Yeast Mother?
Jason Walton: [laughs] It’s a night and day difference in a lot of ways. It’s hard for me to really put my finger on it because I’m so close to the material. It was written in the same way; the way I write is kind of strange. But the output is completely different. The first record is very schizophrenic, tons of MIDI, layers upon layers of trying to make a cross between Mr. Bungle and The Locust. I’ve always wanted to make something kind of like that, but completely electronic. In retrospect, I’m pretty happy with the record, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted in the end. It never really is--you’re never 100% happy with a record.
This one is much more organic sounding. I think this one is better on every single level. MoonBladder is a much more mature record, not nearly as schizophrenic, for better or for worse. I took a lot more care with the sounds. The first one is a lot of plugins...and weird synths. This one, I took care to have some acoustic elements, some actual guitars. There’s a lot of MIDI, but actual analog synths and field recordings. I was trying to mix acoustic and electronic elements to give it a bigger sound. It’s mixed a lot better. The performance is a lot better. I think it’s a way more engaging album, and so far, the response has been 100% positive, whereas the first record, Yeast Mother, was a hard pill for people to swallow. There are parts of that record I’m really proud of. I think “Retroperistalsis”, the last track on it, is one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. But still, its intent was to be grating. MoonBladder, that’s not the intent. With MoonBladder, I feel like I melded a few different things the way I had never done before. It’s got ambient to it, but it’s also like this mid-period Ulver-esque electronic thing. It’s a lot of different themes that are melded a lot better than the first record. That’s probably the biggest difference. The first record, Yeast Mother, was me trying to get my feet wet, trying to figure out what I’m trying to do with this project. With MoonBladder, I think I finally figured out what I’m trying to do.
SILY: At first, were you trying to make MoonBladder, too, sound like “tons of MIDI?”
JW: Usually, the creative process for me is very convoluted, and I never know what I’m doing or what I’m looking for. I really like to just toy with ideas and see what happens. After Yeast Mother, I thought it would be fun to do a cover and put it up on Bandcamp as a fun exercise. I was searching online for MIDI files I could just download and manipulate, and I came across Rush’s “Red Barchetta” file and downloaded it. MoonBladder started out as a 25-minute doom metal version of a Rush song. I started working on it, and it was really cool, and I started to layer instruments, but then I thought, “This is stupid, I don’t want to spend my time on this! I don’t want to do a cover, I want to write something new.” MoonBladder started as a cover, but I ended up putting so much stuff on top of each layer, and then I’d delete the foundational layer, and put more stuff on top of that, and delete those foundational layers. It just morphed and evolved. Hundreds and hundreds of tracks later, I had MoonBladder.
I tend to do that a lot. I’m doing something for fun, think, “Why am I wasting my time on this stupid thing, I should be doing something more important and more serious?” I kept one little piece of “Red Barchetta” in there. You can hear one little synth line. [Peter Lee] from Lawnmower Deth, if you listen really closely, you can hear him reciting the lyrics. The funny thing is I don’t even really like Rush, honestly. I like Hemispheres and a couple tracks here and there, and I definitely respect and admire them a lot, but they’re not a band I listen to. It was a silly idea that I made into way more of a silly idea.
SILY: With the acoustic and electric guitars, it’s almost like there are some metal-adjacent sounds. You could think those elements are a callback to the projects you’ve been involved in over the years.
JW: I definitely know what you mean. That wasn’t intentional. Don Anderson is my best friend. When I’m working on a record, I send him something and say, “Add some guitar.” It’s gonna be kind of metal-ish and there will be elements that evoke Agalloch or something similar. But it wasn’t a conscious decision to put things in there evocative of previous things, or any metal elements. I asked Don to put guitar in there, and that’s what he did. There are moments that are kind of metally. At first, when he’d send me these tracks, I thought, “This is not what I was going for.” It took me a minute to become comfortable with it. I was able to listen with open ears and accept it. Don does a few different guitar parts on there. He’ll always be a part of every music I do in one form or the other. It harkens back to the older material because of what we’ve been influenced by and created over the years.
SILY: I like how the voices on the record start out very faint. When I first listened to it, I was wondering whether it was actually a voice or an instrument. It became more and more clear by the end that these were voices.
JW: For more ambient sections, I really like to have the human voice on there, but I really love when you can’t really hear it, when it’s kind of mumbling in the background. I find it somewhat unsettling when you can tell somebody’s speaking but you can’t understand what they’re saying. Towards the beginning of the record, you have Pete reciting lyrics to “Red Barchetta”. Towards the middle of the record, you have my good friend Ramin Hosseinabad sharing an Iranian poem that was a favorite of his growing up in Iran. Three-quarters through the record I have some samples from different number stations. At the very end, you have Marius and Toby Driver from Kayo Dot singing at the end. I wanted to build how the vocals come in, starting with these very audible whispers and mumblings to very focused singing at the end.
SILY: There are little moments of things that within the context of the record are out of the ordinary and end pretty quickly, like that tiny section of jazz drumming.
JW: There’s an interesting story behind that. That section I pulled from the new Sculptured record. It was actually Martti Hill, the drummer from Sculptured, and Billy Anderson and I in the studio recording drums for Sculptured. We were getting weird tones and sounds, and Martti was drumming, and Billy decided to grab a couple of microphones and swing them around his head by the cord while Martti was drumming, and record that. We didn’t use it on the Sculptured record, so I imported it into MoonBladder. I just took a little tiny section of it because I wanted to get some more acoustic instrumentation in there. It’s a nod to the first Secret Chiefs 3 record because we did a lot of weird percussion things like that that went nowhere and stopped. I don’t think Don even knows that. I like to incorporate little things like that. That one was a little out of left field even for me. It was hard for me to listen to and didn’t sit quite right. When I asked Don to record guitar he added this little jazz lick over the top of it, and that was just way too much for me. I deleted his jazz lick and was like, “Okay, it sounds good now. I’m gonna leave it as is.” It’s a little abrasive. There are a couple hits that are a bit louder than they should be, and it brings you out of your comfort zone a little bit but it lulls you back in afterwards. That was a weird section to deal with, for sure.
SILY: Are the three of you jazz fans?
JW: Yeah. I would say I am but it’s not a focus for me. There are albums I like a lot. I’m a huge Herbie Hancock nerd. Don listens to a lot of jazz, on a daily basis while doing whatever. That’s not me, but we all definitely appreciate jazz to different levels and degrees.
SILY: It sounds natural in the record even though it’s out of the blue.
JW: Yeah, I’ve gotten used to it. The record wouldn’t be quite the same without it.
SILY: How much input did you have in the video Dave Brenner created for MoonBladder?
JW: That was cool. The hard part about releasing a record that’s only one song is nobody wants to premiere a section of a song. We were brainstorming ways to handle this. Dave is my PR agent and friend and videographer. As a PR agent, he was like, “We need to deal with this; let’s brainstorm.” As a videographer, he was like, “I can just make you a 30-minute video for the whole damn thing.” When I work with people, whether Don or Marius or Robert [Hunter of Occulted Sound] or whoever, I want to give them a blank slate and then guide them. Snares of Sixes is definitely the vehicle I drive, and I know in the end what it should be, but I try to give people free reign.
In this case, after Dave and I decided to do the video, I thought it would be great to get video from all the different people involved in this record and Dave could assemble it and make it all fucked up and weird. A lot of the footage is from Dave over in New York, footage from me, inside my studio, mostly, and footage in the woods in Norway, outside of Oslo, from Marius, and also him playing keyboards in certain parts, and then Don playing guitar. My friend Cody is not on the record, but he’s my video and photo friend who gave me a bunch of drone footage he’s taken on the Oregon coast. I gave all that shit to Dave and he was able to meld it together and effect it. The video was mostly Dave’s creation--I just guided him here and there--because I wanted to give him as much free reign as possible. I had seen his work before so I knew what he wanted to do would be perfect for how I wanted to represent MoonBladder. Some of the scenes in there are absolutely perfect.
SILY: Watching the video and not knowing exactly how it was put together, I wanted to decipher whether there might have been a relationship between certain color hues and sounds, or imagery and sounds. Is that something you or Dave were trying to establish?
JW: No, but I wish! Maybe Dave was. Visuals are really hard for me. It’s not something that makes sense to me. I’m not a visual person. I know what I like, but I can’t express it. I kind of know what I want, but I can’t express that either. I told Dave the feelings and emotions and concepts I was going for. I gave him some stuff to work with and said, “Just make it unsettling and uncomfortable.” The scenes that were the drone footage of the Oregon coast, he turned it this weird crimson red color. That was perfect. I’m trying to illustrate this link between the moon and the earth and how this affects people. I don’t know whether he had any inkling or concept other than “let’s just fuck this shit up,” because that’s what I told him to do.
SILY: When did you first become interested in the concept behind this record, our relationship with the moon?
JW: I had this weird fascination that I delved into a little bit with Yeast Mother, which is all about kombucha and the process of how it’s made. It got me down the thought process--since in kombucha you have the mother, the scobee--what if a human body turned into a scoby, this life source for kombucha. It got me towards this body horror--celestial bodies theme. I had this shirt made for Yeast Mother that was different body parts around this planet. That was 5 or 6 years ago. With MoonBladder, I went further down that path. Everybody has a relationship with the moon in one way or another in a much more powerful way than everything else in the sky other than the sun. It affects the tides. Some people say it affects people’s moods. It can affect all these things, but people don’t really think about it that much. Then I thought about the nature of relationships: What if it was like your relationship with a pet? What if the moon had body parts and was alive? What if we discovered one day that the moon has internal organs and was a creature at some time? These things sound really ridiculous and silly, but I got really into these thoughts about the moon being alive at one point and now this corpse floating in the sky. Just these weird things that occupy my brain. Now, I’m writing a companion piece to MoonBladder that’s in the early stages, but by the time it gets done it could be something completely different. I tend to do that a lot.
SILY: The idea is not that ludicrous. There’s the idea of the man on the moon, or the film A Trip To The Moon, which is kind of a gnarly movie.
JW: I guess it’s more feasible than the moon being made out of cheese. My whole life, I’ve really wanted something to happen that completely rocked the world, like discovering that dinosaurs didn’t exist, or proving the existence of God, that would completely revolutionize the way people thought on a daily basis. That would be fascinating! Or if we absolutely, 100% prove that aliens exist. It kind of goes with that same concept. It would be absolutely incredible if they found this decaying heart in the middle of the moon. It’s one of those concepts. When I have something like that in my head, it helps guide me as part of the writing and visual process. The cover was painted by my friend Bridget [Bellavia]; I told her, “I need some celestial moon thing--do your thing!” That’s how I work best. I’ll probably move on from that concept eventually, but it’s what I was thinking.
SILY: Are you a sci-fi fan?
JW: Strangely enough, no. I love Star Wars, or at least the first few movies the most. But I’m really not a sci-fi fan. Growing up, I was more into it, but now I just have no interest in it. I honestly have very little interest in fiction these days. I’m sure some of that has informed what I was thinking about here, though, and I did read some Ray Bradbury very recently I liked a lot. But it’s not something I pursue.
SILY: Is there any way you’d perform this material live?
JW: No. It would be amazing and I’d love it, but I don’t know how it would be feasible. We could use a ton of backing tracks, but logistically, it’s hard. I would never do a Snares performance without Marius, and he lives in Oslo, for fucks sake. We’re spread out all over the world. It would be awesome, and I won’t say never, but I’ve thought about it in the past, and it would be really, really hard. What I could see happening is doing a Snares show but not performing the material from the records, something else more suited for a live performance. Performing MoonBladder would be really hard. There are 13 people on this record. We wouldn’t need all of them, but it would still be too cumbersome to pull off.
SILY: What else are you working on in the short and long-term future?
JW: This is what I always do with Snares: I tell people “I’m writing an EP.” Right now, I’ve got three songs underway I’m thinking I’ll be a companion piece. We just released the new Sculptured record on BMG, first in 13 years. I have a new band: I was asked by Andy Whale of Bolt Thrower to play bass in his new death metal band. We’re recording an EP starting the end of this month. I grew up with Bolt Thrower, so I’m blown away I might get to work with Andy Whale. We have a new Dolven record coming out in the fall. I’m really happy about that. I have a couple other projects, one with Joy Von Spain of Eye Of Nix called Poisoning Wave. Another band called Sleep Chains that’s kind of an electronic Godflesh thing. Lots and lots of music. We’re already writing a new Sculptured record. I also have my podcast and t-shirt company. I have a lot of stuff on my plate.
SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, reading, or watching that’s caught your attention?
JW: I’m currently reading the USBM book that Decibel put out. It’s always been a dream of mine to be included in a book like that, and it’s really cool that Agalloch got 14 pages in it. It’s one of those milestones you have in a career. It’s a well-written book, and it’s really fun to read about these bands you’ve been a fan of or people you know. A lot of my good friends are in there, too. I just started watching that show Travel Man a couple days ago, with Richard Ayoade. It’s a cool, comedy-based travel show. I love travel shows. High on the Hog on Netflix, about how African culture and cuisine has informed American culture and cuisine. Musically, I’ve been on a death metal kick. I’ve been listening to the new Cannibal Corpse record, which I’m really excited about. Having Erik Rutan on the record just put new life in it. Cannibal’s always been solid, but this is leagues beyond what they’ve done for quite a while. The new Thief record on Prophecy is album of the year. That shit’s amazing. I love that band so much. The new Kayo Dot on Prophecy is also phenomenal. The new Billie Eilish--I really love her. She definitely has some moments here and there that are maybe a plateau and not my thing and a little boring, but overall, when she nails it, she does things that are really revolutionary, inventive, engaging, challenging. I think she’s the best thing to come out of the pop world in forever. Oh, and the new Carcass, too. If you go into it knowing it’s not going to be as good as Necroticism, it’s a fun listen. Bill [Steer]’s doing his deep guttural growls on there. There are hints of old Carcass. It’s a good listen. It’s not gonna blow you away, but it’s fun. The artwork’s awesome. I’m stoked on it.
