Ascetic is Saxon Jörgensen, August Skipper and Andrew Jigalin.
‘EVERYTHING IS BECOMING’ is the second album from the post punk dark wave three piece, following up from the 2013 release - Self-Initiation.
It is clear from song one, an evolution and unraveling has begun both poetical and musically from Ascetic's early release to their now new sonic exploration. There is a sense of awakening and a sense of exhilaration through what feels like the pain of realising... The internal struggle of darkness and redemption.
The soundtrack to what feels likes a visceral experience as much as a sonic one is rifled with your standard weapons of choice - guitar, bass, vocals and electronic drums, but like mine fields and dark pop symphonies littered through an empty gritty Berlin street. You find found sounds, voice memos, field recordings, synths and samples all woven into the fabric of each song with an aggressive and almost somber at times evocation of feeling.
The longing, the paranoia, the self destruction and the ultimate transcendence is what lyrically clings to you and was what resonated so much with me. Two songs in, I felt reinvigorated that dark wave/post punk/cold wave (or whatever "genre" we're using now) has finally risen to what I feel is a higher level beyond the audible but once again lighting that fire of the experience itself under my heels that a lot of this "genre" seems too afraid or maybe too restrained to expose.
"EVERYTHING IS BECOMING" is torment, depression, lament, gothic shoe gaze and industrial and synth pop all at once and it isn't afraid to show it and engage in the process it with the listener.
I briefly spoke with August Skipper of ASCETIC this evening and below is that conversation;
ASCETIC. How would you describe the band and the essential ethos of the band?
The heart of the band is really the
connection between Saxon and I, we’re family, and our families are historically
entwined in a strange, tragic and beautiful way, we’ve been writing together
for nearly ten years now. I think it’s
hard to put into words what we’re consciously trying to do, I don’t think there
is an objective goal in any sense, more of an organic development playing off
our respective aesthetics, the shape this has taken is the result of a long
evolution. I would say we are both drawn to finding beauty and the transcendent
in the grotesque, you’ll find that in nearly all the songs, it’s something more
aggressive than melancholia, Saxon fittingly described it as ‘bloom-gloom’,
raking the listener through the muck before you give them the moment in the
song. I think like the title of the
album suggests, we will continue changing and evolving, so will the sound, the
form and the ethos.
"EVERYTHING IS BECOMING" is a clear evolution in all forms. How would you describe the album? And would you say it was symbiotic of the inner struggle of you, yourself or is it something metaphorical?
The album comes out of an intense period of
change and struggle. During the European
tour for ‘Self-Initiation’, we were two weeks in and the thought of returning
to Australia didn’t seem right, we had no plans to stay, it just compellingly
felt like the right thing to do, it was both Saxon and my first time in Europe
and to experience it through tour was such an intense and potent way to get a
grasp of the continent, in a different city every night, the scale and the
history becomes so shockingly apparent when you’ve been living in this giant
desert country your entire life, to think you can fly for four hours from
Melbourne to Perth and you’ll pass only one city between, in the same country,
I think that’s singular, then the dislocated European heritage makes returning
to Europe feel like some part of your brain just switches on, something
uncanny, like a dream where everything feels kinetically familiar though people
may speak in alien tongues. So,
immigration was a big influence, half of the songs were written in some form in
Australia but all were completed in Berlin, they’ve had time themselves to
evolve. We’ve been through so much
personal change and so much aesthetic development that these songs could have
come out in so many different ways in the interim but the struggle of getting
things together here meant that it was only in the last six months that we’ve
had the stability to concertedly write, rehearse, compile and record, Andrew
was a big help in that regard, getting things together, finding a rehearsal
studio, recording studio, he got us in touch with James who produced the record
etc.
I
arranged the unfolding of the record in something of an ascent, with an
introduction and a conclusion, it is the exploration of the collapse and
restructuring of identity.
When it comes to composition and collaboration. Can you explain the dynamic between yourself, Saxon and Andrew? And what is it that makes it work?
Hard work.
This record was written between Saxon and I, it’s a typical
collaboration I think and fairly even in what we contributed to the record,
Saxon will write the arrangement for a song and I will write the lyrics, I will
write the chord structure / lyric for a song and Saxon will write lead, then
there are songs that I have written that I got stuck with or bored of or that
went under my radar and Saxon will re imagine them or point out the ones that
are worth keeping that I had abandoned.
I wrote Exegesis and Saxon really took it to another level with the
strange machine sounds that you can hear throughout, then sometimes I will just
have an empty chunk of a song which I have a mood or concept for which I’ll ask
Saxon to fill in, then we wrote Atheism out of a jam we had together which was
one of the last songs written for the record.
Lyrically, there is less a feeling of what is lost and more melancholia but more a move towards a more aggressive internal rebellion and defiance comparatively to the first album. Where did that come from and what do you think happened lyrically and poetically when working on this album?
The record is about this collapse and
restructure I mentioned, I think you describe it well, the transition, the
melancholia of the first record, it is a yearning, but what happens when the yearning
is quelled? I think that’s the
fundamental perspective of the record, what happens when you answer all your
great questions? It is set in the stars
that the seeker should devour their own image, they avow their own downfall, I
found this great philosophical/spiritual answer to the searching of my early
20’s and it cast me into a serious depression, walking around with this
untranslatable realization in my head.
One emerges from the ruin of their past self, one can fester there,
looking backward trying to regain something they have lost or they can head
forward and forge something anew, this is the aggression of the record, it’s
the summoning of all of one’s energy, it is the firing of the forge, it is
saying no to fate and yes to desire, yes to becoming.
If you had to sum up this album simply to someone who have never heard ASCETIC before what would you say?
Everything is becoming.
What can we expect from ASCETIC in 2016? What's next?
There is the Berlin launch on the 5th
of February and then touring Europe for the next couple of months, I would LOVE
to play Australia for this tour and we’ve not been back for nearly three years,
so it’s somewhat overdue.
We have a remix EP featuring Ancient Methods,
Phase Fatale, Elisabeth Dixon and Luna Violenta coming out on vinyl on
‘Instruments of Discipline’ in the months following the release.
We will then be self-recording an EP or a
single for release in the next six months, it should be something of a
departure from the traditional line up, relying more heavily on live sampling and
exploring more deconstructed arrangements.
"EVERYTHING IS BECOMING" was Recorded in Berlin at Vox Ton studios with James Masson producing and Nick Foglia as studio engineer, the record will be released through Paris’ Manic Depression Records.
