Experimental black metal project Agonanist, a one-man band headed by multi-instrumentalist Tyler Henthorn, break their six years of silence with their new album, The Spirit of Gravity, in August. Picking up where he left off on Agonanist’s first record, The Cynicism of Solitude, Henthorn uses microtonal guitars to create dissonant, enveloping songs, like “Effacement,” which you can stream below.
“Effacement” starts off running, blasting the listener with an atonal wall of sound and screams, a dissonant riff rearing its head out through the chaos and giving the listener a path through the song. Around the halfway point, Henthorn injects the song with bright guitars, taking the song in a new direction. Throughout the record, Henthorn recruited an impressive band to play alongside him: Andrew Lee on vocals, Kevin Paradis on drums and Colin Marston mixing and mastering the record.
In addition to a premiere of the new song, Decibel caught up with Henthorn to ask a few questions about The Spirit of Gravity (out August 28 on Transylvanian Recordings).
In 2017, I fretted a guitar and a bass to 17EDO using a jeweler’s saw, and lived nomadically with only these two instruments. I wanted to be free of distractions, and forced to look for solutions in this tuning. The Cynicism of Solitude happened during this time in London and in Ho Chi Minh City. I didn’t really feel like leaving Vietnam, so I stayed 8 years. I think I wrote enough music while living there to make multiple full length albums.
It happened the same way the previous album did. I met a local builder in Saigon who made instruments for me in different tunings. I experimented in 12EDO, 15EDO, 17EDO, 22EDO until I had enough interesting pieces to put an album together.
I write music with my ears. I try to observe the experience of listening, and I subtract a lot.
I approached Andrew, Kevin and Colin with recorded demos, and gave them the creative freedom to put themselves into it. I think the result is far more interesting and complex than if I had done it all myself.
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