Napalm Flesh: Krieg Interview

The place to be for black metal fans, extreme metal fans, worshipers of darkness and all those other clichéd terms this Saturday Jan. 21 is Bar Deluxe. Krieg is headlining with locals Winterlore, Blood Purge and the debut of Odium Totus, containing members of Utah’s black metal hordes. This is Krieg’s first show in Salt Lake City, and the (somewhat) one-man project helmed by Imperial will be back by a live band containing notorious Utah musicians who haven’t played live together for a long time. Tickets are still available for advance purchase for $7 at Raunch Records, or tickets at the door are $10. The show gets underway this Saturday at 8 p.m. For your reading pleasure, I interviewed Imperial of Krieg about his endeavors, US Black Metal and everything in between. As expected, we also have your weekly event rundown as well as reviews of Abysmal Dawn and Loincloth.

Thursday Jan. 19, Burt’s hosts some dark acoustic tunes with “Acoustic Subversion,” featuring Jesus or Genome (Mike Cundick of Loom), Bill Kincaid (ex-Parallax) The Stillborn King (acoustic black metal) and The Delpihc Quorum (avant-garde acoustic). $3 gets you in, music at 9 p.m.

Also at Burt’s on Sat. Jan. 21, YOB headlines with locals Oldtimer, Top Dead Celebrity and Dwellers. $10 gets you in, music at 9 p.m.

Krieg Interview
SLUG: A good chunk of people who may be reading this interview may have little to no idea of who Krieg is. How would you describe it to people who are probably familiar with black metal but haven’t heard anything you’ve done?
Imperial: Fuck, I’m going to sound pretentious anyway, but I‘ll go with this: it’s an honest expression of who I am and what my experiences are. It’s raw, very primitive, a lot of different influences all over the place with things outside black metal, but it still retains the core values of what black metal was founded on. I like to think that I have a fair amount of experimentation and various things going on. Then other people hear it and say like this doesn’t sound like whatever the flavor of the month is who went out and recorded a record in the woods with ukuleles or whatnot. It’s really difficult for me to describe because I think I hear differently than anyone else really—I’ve got a lot of pride going into it. Where the common person who has a passing knowledge of black metal [might say] “This sounds like Immortal or Darkthrone,” sounding like Darkthrone isn’t a bad thing—I don’t see that as a putdown. I don’t know if we really are doing anything different than anyone else and I really don’t care—I’m just doing what’s important to me.

SLUG: I’ve seen the naysayers say that there is a lack of originality in what you do, but I don’t think there is any new music that is vastly, uniquely original these days.
Imperial: Nothing is new under the sun. Anybody who is looking for originality, that thing can’t be forced. When you try to force something innovative and original, you’ve got a 50/50 shot either sounding like a complete moron playing at a carnival or you’re going to do something amazing. All great works of art and music aren’t done with the idea behind it to do something different, to be this top tier band or painter or author or whatever. All the best expression at all is just honesty and that’s it. I’m apparently a very polarizing figure in the underground—that’s fine with me. I look at people who ride my dick around or they shit on me no matter what I do, I could come out and do a record that sounds exactly like what they want to hear, I could solve fucking world hunger, I could put a hundred dollars in everybody’s pocket in the planet and their would still be a group of assholes that would be like, fuck that guy, he’s fat or he’s unoriginal. That’s just a byproduct of the availability for people to express their feelings everywhere, especially when the people who are the loudest with their opinions have the least amount to say.

SLUG: Krieg is known in the underground for being one of the longer standing US black metal bands. Experience is obviously not a stranger to you. Do you think USBM has evolved throughout the years, positively, negatively or somewhere in between?
Imperial: I’d say there are positives and negatives. It’s a lot different from when I started out. When I started, there was only a handful of bands, doing just basic tape trading. No one really got spread too far, Europe didn’t really take us very seriously. There was just a few dedicated people in Europe that we stayed in touch with and just a kind of circuit around the states. Over the years once the internet became bigger and easier to access, it started blowing up, and once Myspace hit and everyone could post rehearsal recordings or shit, they recorded on the computer, bands were popping up left and right. It seemed that the people had a lot less to say, which is odd considering there were more people. I guess that tends to happen and it got really watered down. Then within the last few years with bands like Liturgy and Wolves in the Throne Room really catching more mainstream attention, it’s kind of blown u,p but it’s a different crowd now. You’ll go to shows and you won’t see people you saw five years ago, you’ll see—I don’t really want use the term hipster—but there is a lot of that. And then there is a lot of cross over with fucking hardcore now. You see bands wearing Darkthrone shirts that a few years ago they probably wouldn’t be caught dead wearing.

Those are the negative aspects. It no longer feels as personal. I guess for some of the older people it feels like you’ve either passed it on to those who are younger or just with more people finding out about it it’s not as special.

There are definite positives. Now we’re able to get our music heard worldwide a lot more easily. People are taking it a little more seriously—it’s no longer a bunch of corpse painted dorks hanging around in their parents’ basement talking about Dungeons & Dragons kind of shit. Now they’re moving more onto realistic factors—there are always going to be bands interested in goats and blasphemy and that sort of thing, and that’s fine ,that’s part of the roots of the genre and the movement. As you get older, I’m in my mid 30s now, so that sort of thing just isn’t as appealing now as it was.

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