Satyricon is one of the leading bands in the Black Metal genre. For the vast majority of the band’s lifetime since it was formed in Oslo, Norway in 1991, the band has been a duo consisting of Satyr (Sigurd Wongraven) and Frost (Kjetil-Vidar Haraldstad), with several associated live and studio members over the years.
Deep Calleth Upon Deep is the name of their ninth studio album. It is also the name of the song that was the lead single from the album, launched digitally and on YouTube on 15 August 2017. The album would follow a week later on the 22nd.
The years leading up to that release were interesting ones for the band, filled with successes as well as challenges.
The band had released their eighth and self-titled Satyricon album in 2013, which was their first album to top the Norwegian album chart. Their mainstream success came as the band continued to test the borders of the conservative black metal genre, which they had been doing for two or three albums anyway at that point.
Over the years, Satyricon’s music has opened up and started including influences beyond their genre, in some ways edging closer to a rock based expression (albeit still within a Black Metal framework). Adding choirs, horn instruments, brutal disco beats, and guest vocalists from the rock world continued to add new elements to the music. Predictably, this has been scoffed at from some quarters, who feel the band no longer represents the genre they started out in. Others think the band’s open-mindedness makes the music, and the genre it primarily represents, much more interesting and exciting.
Borders were also pushed when Satyricon performed a show at the Norwegian National Opera in September 2013 (released on CD and DVD two years later on 4 May 2015) alongside 55 singers from the Chorus of the Norwegian Opera and Ballet.
The most dramatic turn of events was however when Sigurd Wongraven was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2015. In the end it proved not to be malign or cancerous, but not problem free, and ultimately hard and dangerous to remove. The experience gave him some perspectives, at one stage making him think that his career might be over.
“The health scare made me think ‘Wow, that’s it. I can’t do this anymore, I guess.’,” Wongraven told revolvermag.com. “Even when I found out it wasn’t so bad and I could still do this, you never know what’s around the next corner. It’s important to realize what a privilege it is to make a record. At times I felt like this could be the last record that we do.”
While this did not turn out to be the last record for the band, Wongraven took nothing for granted after his health scare, and was hell-bent on going out with a bang if that’s how it would turn out. “Approaching this release,” he told revolvermag.com, “what I always kept in mind is that either this is the beginning of something new or it’s gonna be my last record. If this is going to be the last, then it needs to be something special. If there are more records, then I’d better make sure that this is so different from the last one that it feels like a new beginning. I think it’s really, really dark, very spiritual and filled with confidence and energy.”
The album was recorded in Oslo as well as Vancouver, Canada during the early months of 2017. It seemed obvious that the band would yet again keep pushing, slightly changing, and go to some places we didn’t expect. The first song on the album, Midnight Serpent, delves into pulling up roots, setting that theme early. Not repeating the past and finding a unique way forward seemed to be a stronger mantra than ever before.
“I think that’s what the fans expect from us,” Wongraven told Kerrang. “It’s not like we try and reinvent ourselves or the genre, but what we try and do is to musically go somewhere we’ve not been before. That in itself, is an incredibly motivating and inspiring journey to be on. I like feeling like an artist, not an entertainer. […] When I sit down to make a record, I think, ‘What is it that I want to do? Where is it that I want to go? What’s going to make this exciting to work with?’ You have to make music that when you get up, you’re looking forward to rehearsals. That’s the most important thing. As you make music, your direction will unfold and slowly reveal itself to you. It will take time, not over the first five months. When the vision is in place, you have to stay true to it.”
Each of the songs on the album were created as a unique piece of music with its own identity, rather than as part of a whole. In a conversation with The Jasta Show, Frost aka. Haraldstad said “It’s all about getting the right expression for each and every song. It has never been anything that we’ve discussed in the band, but at least I personally feel that every song has a life of its own, a very strong and unique identity. This album is really about giving life to those eight songs that constitute it. I feel the songs, even if they fit extremely well together as a compilation of songs, each and every one, it’s very, very different from the others — almost like human beings are different from each other.”
The songwriting process, or eventual selection of ideas, was coloured by this end goal. Wongraven is not the type of songwriter who write finished songs and select the best ones for the album: “What I do is that I work on a different quarter of a song, half a song or 3⁄4 of a song, and then as we get closer to recording, there’s a process where I say what has to go and what is kept.”
A brutal pruning process saw even great song ideas left aside. They had ideas that other bands would consider themselves fortunate to have, but they weren’t the right kind of ideas. “When I was writing the album in the beginning,” Wongraven told Kerrang!, “I felt the songs we were making were really good. I listened to the demos recently and I asked myself why did we abandon them; they were good songs. But I remembered why; it was because I felt they were nothing more than good songs. They were lacking the spirituality and the sense of depth I was looking for.”
A lot of the early ideas had been really aggressive in nature, and a fair chunk of those were amongst the ones that were left behind. Wongraven reflected in Classic Rock: “Perhaps partially because of my health scare, I felt that maybe this album has to have a stronger spirituality. Maybe it felt a little superficial just to do something fast and aggressive, and I needed to have something with a more substantial depth. And that made me not too keen on pursuing a couple of things that to me seemed a little senseless because of my new perspective.”
This is the mindset that allowed a song like Deep Calleth Upon Deep to materialise. The press release when the track was launched as the first single from the album mentions that it “contains a number of profound statements about the essence of Satyricon’s music and the value of art itself.” Wongraven explains: “The way that I see it is that for any art with substance, in order for you to be able to inhale and completely understand it, it will take a little bit of you as well. If you get it all after a couple of listens, you know that it probably won’t stay with you. So the title is saying, ‘From the depth of the people making this record to the depth of the listener…’ If you want to take part in this journey, you should be prepared to dig deep down in the darkest corner of your soul with us.”
In the darkest storm through the cold of night
We hear the wolves cry at my chamber door
The path of evermore from the dawn of time
In the rain alone with your demons claw
Now, let your brother help if the palace falls
And the dragon dies we’ll let the mothers mourn
In the forest old when the moon rises
And the shadows fall
Deep Calleth upon deep
And in the forest old
Deep Calleth upon deep
The song certainly offers a bit of everything. At first it settles into a cool, slow groove in the intro, only to turn around and break into a much higher sense of urgency in the verses. All along, there is an almost otherworldly feeling at play.
As the chorus begins the song gets even more expansive. The guitar delivers a dramatic guitar riff over a backdrop which includes operatic backing vocals, skilfully mixed to add shade to it all rather than steal the attention.
There are several examples of undercurrents of classical instrumentation, and more instruments jumping in at various points than I’m sure we’re aware. The song makes us sense elements rather than outright pinpoint them, which is an amazing experience.
At times, the song has both tremendous momentum on the outside, yet a huge calm at its core. There are subtle progressive elements with the song going through several movements and offbeat instrumentation and playing. The song is certainly taking listeners through the scenic route.
For a song that has so much going on, it still contains traces of the somewhat minimalistic approach that has occasionally been found on recent albums. There are sections where the use of power chords are restrained in favour of single-string picking, which makes for an appealing, almost laid-back approach. At the same time, the song’s main riff is sharp, cutting through it all with an eerie quality, and other elements might sometimes compensate. Every second is planned. Paying attention yields immense musical rewards.
“The track came together in a strange way, really,” Wongraven said when discussing the song on the band’s official YouTube channel. “We had that opening theme and everything surrounding it for a long time but couldn’t really connect parts. I remember how basically out of the blue, after staying awake for 24 hours or so, I came up with the melody line for the chorus. That really opened the gates, and from that point on it was a pretty seamless effort to finish that song. I think it has a great groove, great melodies, but more than anything else I enjoy the journey, the feeling of the song. The atmosphere is the most important part of the song.”
The track was chosen to represent the album – not just by them sharing a title, but also by being the lead single. The choice was not as obvious as you’d think. Wongraven told Kerrang!, “When picking a single, I try to find a song that will say a lot about what people can expect from the record. It’s difficult when you have a record which has great variety. For me, this song is melodic, dynamic, it has a great groove, I think it’s catchy. I’ve felt it has something else; it has a spiritual feel to it. When we were making this song, Frost said that it’s like being on a journey to somewhere.”
It may well be that people unfamiliar with Black Metal are surprised to learn how important the ambience and atmosphere is in the genre. In Classic Rock Magazine, Wongraven reflected upon Deep Calleth Upon Deep as a whole: “What I appreciate the most about listening to it is that to me it doesn’t feel earthly, if you know what I mean. It always takes me to another place. There are some exercises that I’ve been doing. I listen to the album [while doing them] and immediately drift off into the world of Deep Calleth Upon Deep. It’s the same thing when I drive around in my car. Yesterday I was picking up my son at his uncle’s place, just listening to the album driving, and I realised that I’d missed my exit, haha! It has an effect on me when I get drawn into its world. That’s really the best way I can feel about anything.”
Asking artists to pick their favourite song on their album will usually make them complain that they might as well pick their favourite child. Distorted Sound Magazine did however not have too much difficulty making Frost pick his: “I have felt a little extra for the title song Deep Calleth Upon Deep, actually. As soon as I heard the finished song, with everything placed, the vocals and all the textures, with all the lines in place and the mixing was done and all that, there was just something magical about the Deep Calleth Upon Deep song. It made my blood freeze at moments, and at other times, you know, it would cause excitement and there was something kind of mysterious and weird, almost ritualistic going on. And the song also turned out with extra energy and extra depth from what we’d done to it, but the addition of textures and the production, there’s just this ‘x factor’. It has something that creates an enthusiasm that’s hard to pinpoint.”
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