influences pt. 1

mat mcnerney
: nevena balalić
| y 2016

First among the equals in Hexvessel’s temple, also known as the singer of the band Grave Pleasures, and for his former activities in black metal projects Code and Dødheimsgard, was more than pleased to share his thoughts and ideological background with us.
About love, life and death - Mat McNerney.

Hexvessel could be described as more than just a band - it seems like one family bound by its common love for nature. How did you all gather around this kind of musical, and more important – life journey?

Mat: I just started recording under the name of Hexvessel, and I recorded the first album on my own. I was always looking for band members, and I had people coming to help me with some things, but I didn’t want to just grab the nearest people around, but to find the right people. People I was excited about. Then Marja and I had that wish for this one band to play on our wedding. It was Dark Buddha Rising, which was really an unknown band at that time, they just had like a demo, and they had been Marja’s friends when she was young. When I met them and saw them live it was an amazing experience for me. It had a lot to do with the feeling of them playing at our wedding and everything... And then I knew that I wanted them to be my backing band - I asked them and they agreed. It was a mutual thing of us all being excited about each other and most of the band came to play with us.

The missing fact was that we didn’t have a bass player. Then I met Niini and I was bewitched by her interesting character and I knew she would fit in very well. And Kimmo, our violin player, he grabbed me one day and said that I just need one violin player. And I believed him. He became really famous actually. He worked with Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead and made big soundtracks. So the whole story about the band was more about the intuition and the feeling, and not being the best musicians in the world.

Listening to “When We Are Death“ one gets the impression that there are less acoustic and folk things in comparison to your previous work, and more of psychedelic and progressive approach this time, although folk is still present in the atmosphere and in lyrical terms...

Mat: The way that sound is arranged has more of psychedelic flavor, I agree. But I would say that half of the record, like the songs “Green Gold”, “Cosmic Truth” or “Hunter’s Prayer”, are very folk in their bases, but they have other instrumentation that comes in. It’s true that we have turned the table a little bit and I feel it is like another aspect of the band, like another side of the coin, not necessarily a different direction, but more of exploring and opening up the boundaries of what the band can be. And I would love to be able to do a show where we bring acoustic instruments and have a section where we play folk songs, but it’s very hard to do it in this kind of concept, small club and everything… I think the idea would be to grow the band to the point where we can do really nice performances in some kind of a theatre for couple of hours… That is something we have always kept in mind. And we were doing similar things now on Roadburn with Arktau Eos – like one-off performance of the two bands featuring half of their first record “Mirrorion”, and half of our first record, “Dawnbearer”, in kind of unique ceremony called “Mirrordawn”… Also, Kimmo, our keyboard and violin player, and me did the folk soundtrack “The World Is Burning” for a short movie, and released it on Svart Records. I felt that we have done a lot of folk recently so we have put it a little bit aside, and I thought it would be really good idea to capture the live spirit of the band. And that’s what the record “When We Are Death” is for me, like the live side of Hexvessel.

What was the process of composing “When We Are Death” like, and how would you compare it to “Dawnbearer“ and “No Holier Temple“?  What is it that you have done differently this time?

Mat: With this one I was actually working with the musicians - we worked together as a band, while the other records were really me making those things, arranging them and putting them together. “No Holier Temple“ was quite a messy record. “Messy” is probably not a very nice word to describe it but it is very whimsical, and that’s the part of the charm of the record I am really proud of, but it wasn’t very focused. On the other hand, with this record we were really focused on things we are doing together, trying to make the songs the strongest that we could and the best that we could. We really worked hard on it, and we worked for about two years on the songs. We also have a lot of material which we didn’t use, and which would probably at the same time make the new album sound like “No Holier Tempe”. But this time we wanted to make a short record, concise and a very focused one… I also compare records in a way how they are arranged, how the songs order is, how the album closes… For I still believe in albums, not individual songs. I believe in records that put you on a journey from beginning to the end.

I would say that with the temper of the new songs in combination with the atmosphere of the old ones, on your live performances, one gets the full impression of what Hexvessel is.

Mat: Right, and that’s what I wanted the new record to be like – the most Hexvessel record we have done but also kind of a summary of the band, of what we’ve done before and bringing it together in one package. It is an important time as well because it’s our third record and we’ve done it with the new record label and people are just starting to get to know us… It is the album that brings the band together and hopefully get it a bit more known so that we can do some more interesting things. We definitely haven’t forgotten that side of the band, the experimental one, the folk side, the idea of playing in caves, in churches… That’s great but when nobody knows who you are, you can’t achieve these things. I think that doing a record which is very strong, and I think this one is, it’s going to help the band grow.

Perhaps, the strongest symbol of that record is death. What would be the significance of it throughout the songs, the album title, and its cover art? Because one gets the impression that the album is celebrating life, that it has an affirmative message, that, after all, Hexvessel is an affirmative band…

Mat: Yes, absolutely, and that‘s not something that I immediately thought of myself, and of the band - as an affirmative one. That’s the thing I have come to learn through the people who were watching and listening to us. They told me how it is. I think that’s really a beautiful thing – the listeners are part of what makes the band what it is. I think of Hexvessel not as a band but as a name for a group of people that experience what this is, the fans and the band being one and the same. And speaking of symbols of death I think that this idea was part of the old religions at one point – they thought of death as something not to be feared, but to be celebrated. Maybe at some point some of those religions have been like that, but they’ve lost it. And if you think of what brings that back, you think of paganism, of the celebration of the life and death cycle. You don’t really get much of these themes in music, although there are present great groups like Current 93 who are hooking around these things… But there are no really more exciting things in music to sing about than love and death, as basic fundaments of life. That’s what this album is about – celebration of life through death.

That story is experienced the most in the song “Cosmic Truth”.

Mat: Yes, and if you truly understand your place within that cycle, than you truly understand love. Modern society thinks that love isn’t real and that love is just a construct. We know what we like to believe in. It’s easy to be an atheist, to not believe in things. I’m also a little bit like that as well, but at the same time that’s so boring and life shouldn’t be like that. Life is about the enjoyment and celebration of it.

Hexvessel came up as a group with fresh stylistic concepts, and besides being involved with nature and the occult themes, I find the honesty the key reason why listeners get so easily connected to your world. What is your opinion regarding that and what do you find in your music the most powerful thing to identify with?

Mat: Honesty is something you are always working on. It’s strange but even when you are consciously honest, it is dishonesty somehow. There is also a kind of mysticism about that. The nature mysticism is the most important thing for me because it allows me to do something musically in the way that I would like to live. And it’s really nice to be on stage singing about something that I actually believe in and the people are singing along with the band as well. That’s really touching. I think that connection as well is a sort of a transaction between a listener and a performer. It is an invitation and everybody can put something in there. That’s why we hear a lot of things from a lot of different people, their connections to the songs, like you said the honesty is affecting people. And it affects people deeply, it is an important part of the music.

Regarding your history in Norwegian extreme metal scene, is there any part of it that you incorporated within Hexvessel?

Mat: I am not sure… Maybe the part of not really caring what other people think and just doing what I want to do. We don’t really fit into the scene, and we don’t actually have any band that we can play with, which I can think of right now…

Also, you are currently working with Grave Pleasures. How would you compare your experience as an artist and an author with this band on one, and with Hexvessel on the other hand?

Mat: That band for me is more of being a singer and collaborative songwriter; being on stage and enjoying it. But I’m not necessarily singing about my real life or always necessarily from the heart either. It’s not really my project, and Hexvessel is really my band. Grave Pleasures is more like shared thing where we write together and I am enjoying that different way of working, seeing things another way... If I’d only have Hexvessel, I would probably smother it, crush it. I would be too serious about it, wouldn’t like the fact that the other guys have bands and stuff like that… I think having other project to do chills you out, you let things be what they should be, and Hexvessel wouldn’t evolve without me going to another side.

As a deeply spiritual band, how do you see yourselves as touring musicians? In what way do you prepare your mindset before going onstage? 

Mat: It is a totally different state of mind. The feeling we are trying to evoke has to do with the work of magic. When I am working with Grave Pleasures it is much more about just getting up on the stage and rock out… But with Hexvessel, I think of what we are doing as a conjuration. As a summoning.

For the end, perhaps the most personal question – it’s about your EP “Iron Marsh“, and the song that carries it, “Masks of the Universe“. From this point of view, this song seems like an appropriate bridge in sense of the atmosphere between “No Holier Temple” and “When We Are Death”. And for me, the strongest signature of it may be the phrase “Reality is only what we make it“. How does Hexvessel see reality?

Mat: I am interested in the sort of the reality in fiction, actually in fiction of reality. Robert Anson wrote and talked about reality tunnels and that kind of ideas about what reality is. We are brought into this reality which is not really a reality, it’s just constructed mode of keeping things together, keeping society together. Terence McKenna said that it is very dangerous, in the way that government sees it, to let people use psychedelic drugs because they could see the world as it really is, and not the way that is supposed to be… I don't know, I've thought about it all a lot, the political side of it and conspiracy theories… But I think that it's really important to let your reality come off, to get out of that world, and to have some sense of being a human being. Alive on the Earth. To have some sense of moral. Not being guided by other people, or by some religion or whatever it may be… Your reality is what you make it. And that’s what “Masks of the Universe” is about. You only think about Cosmos or the Universe or the Planet as the things in the way you see them from a human perspective, like from the land the sky is blue because that’s the way we see it and that’s not the way it is. That’s really interesting to think about because every time you do, you get a deeper understanding of what moral is. Of what it is to love. And to be alive.

Hexvessel discography: Dawnbearer (2011) No Holier Temple (2012) When We Are Death (2016) All Tree (2019)