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“The link between spirituality, beauty, and uniqueness is at the center of the experience of chaos in music.
The voice acknowledges itself as a truly unique sound, as an event, and as matter. And the listener ends up in the position to encounter and discover rather than know and understand.”
Théo Lessour, Chaosphonies

The music of Aluk Todolo is hard to place. It spills over categorizations and escapes like quicksilver: psychedelic rock, krautrock, black metal, jazz, and noise are all somewhat accurate, but they don’t quite fit. The trio chose two words to describe it: occult rock. As they celebrate their twentieth birthday and the release of their fifth album, Lux, I finally took the time to unearth and translate into English this interview made in 2016.

Before a concert they played in Lyon with Sum Of R and Neige Morte, I caught up with Shantidas Riedacker (guitar) and Matthieu Canaguier (bass), and we talked about the album they had just released, Voix. From the dark, primordial source of the music to its manifestation in several forms and in several places, here’s a glimpse of the spiritual and material core of the project, and of the many voices that speak through it.

Go to part. 2 (2024)

This interview took place in June 2016 and was first published on Radio Metal.
A slightly ‘augmented’ version was was posted here as well.

At first glance, your music seems very improvised, but in interviews, you often insist on the fact that it’s more written than it seems, even if you describe your writing process as almost mediumnic. Is it a collective effort? And how do you translate it live? I would guess there is still room for improvisation at some point…

Shantidas Riedacker [guitar]: There is indeed a part of improvisation. When we are on stage, we know in which direction we want to go, we have markers and moments of freedom, but at that time, we don’t invent anymore. We know where we’re going to end up, but we keep some leeway for our interpretation and the freedom to stretch certain parts, for instance.

Unlike in our previous bands where we mostly wrote on the guitar, composing for Aluk Todolo happens during phases of improvisation. Certain things, often rhythmic, coming from the drums, will stabilize and others will develop around it progressively, in strata, in a way that’s different from a composition written by just one person…

Matthieu Canaguier [bass]: Live, we approach our compositions differently depending on the mood of the moment. Everything is written but open: for each section, we have a starting point, an ending point, and in the path that leads from one to the other, there is some leeway that allows for the development of some inflections or a specific dynamic. One evening, we can play a certain part very wildly, and much more quietly the next day. It’s what Jason Van Gulick, the drummer from Sum of R with whom we play on this tour. He saw us every evening and he was impressed by this: each concert had a different feel without it being purely improvisation. The composition allows for different interpretations.

The three of you must be exactly on the same wavelength…

Shantidas: Yes! The location plays a big part in this. We have to tune ourselves: an instrument needs time to adjust to the temperature of a place… It’s the same for us: the acoustics of the place will push us in a certain direction, and we don’t necessarily need to talk about it to feel these vibrations.

Matthieu: And the band has been going on for twelve years, and we’ve been playing together for even longer: twenty for the two of us, and with the drummer [Antoine Hadjioannou], just a little less, maybe eighteen. It helps, and we work on how we get along and listen to each instrument when we rehearse.

When you write, do you intellectualize and put what you do into words or is it an instinctive process?

Matthieu: We think about it a lot, we talk about it all the time, whether in the studio or in the van when we tour. We have our own way of talking about it, our own language that is also expressed through playing together… Voix took us a long time. We composed many things, we discarded some of them. We rewrote the structure of the album many times. And this word, “voix” [“voice” or “voices”], was there from the beginning, which helped us redefine our music through its prism.

Most of the time, we share the same perception of the music. For instance, it’s really uncommon that for one gig, we have completely different impressions. Sometimes, one of us is lost and the two others are absolutely tripping, but on this tour, that has been very rare. Most of the time, we share the same feeling when we leave the stage.

How did you manage to fit a collaboration with Der Blutharsch and the Infinite Church of the Leading Hand within this tight bond you share?

Matthieu: We’d never done that before. We met Der Blutharsch because we had them play in Paris in 2009. We’ve been fans of that band since their beginnings and The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud, so when they suggested this project, we were extremely enthusiastic. But it turned out to be very complex. This experience taught us a lot about our own methods, about how we compose together; we really passed a milestone at that moment because we had to agree with each other so that we could stand in front of another band that was offering different things. It was a very enriching experience in that respect. However, for now, we aren’t thinking about reiterating the experience.

Shantidas: It was very demanding and necessitated some compromises, and on top of that we had to communicate in English, remotely…

Matthieu: That being said, these compromises weren’t necessarily a negative thing, we reworked one of the compositions of this Collaboration for Occult Rock, for instance, and I’m still a fan of the record’s ending. Every time we prepare for a new album, we turn back on our whole discography and look for things we could reinterpret in order to go on. For me, it’s a whole, really.

It’s interesting because each of your albums has a strong, singular identity…

Matthieu: While we were working on Voix, I really had in mind our first album, Descension. We recovered something of its textures, its grain, and it took a different shape because we recorded completely differently, but we really positioned ourselves in regard to Descension and Finsternis. Voix was really born out of all the precedent records. There are also things that we had tested during the recording of Occult Rock. It was the first time we recorded live, together in a studio, in these conditions, the three of us in the same room… Every time, we take everything from the beginning, it’s like a big wave, and from there, we launch the new album. Personally, I regularly listen to our full discography. Not all the time, I don’t spend my time listening to my own music [laughs], but I love all the records that we made.

I guess the way you see your albums changed through the years?

Shantidas: The tracks of the first 7-inch, Aluk Todolo, were remolded on Occult Rock, for instance. We played them a lot, it’s the tracks we played the most live. But when we listen to our first 7-inch (which is actually played at 33 rpm), we are always surprised and we wonder if it’s playing at the right speed [laughs].

How do you choose your set lists? Do you only play full albums? It’s hard to envision the tracks of your records independently from the others…

Matthieu: This evening, we’ll play Voix. For a year now, it’s almost the only thing we play on stage. It can’t be divided, we can’t play just a part of it; it’s a whole piece, a composition, a single track.

When we have the time, we also play parts of Occult Rock—the two tracks of the D side, they work together. Occult Rock is much more adjustable, it was made of different tracks, whereas Voix has been written as a whole. There is an internal logic: when we start playing it, we can’t stop.

Shantidas: There was a bit of this already in Occult Rock in the sense that we never played the tracks of the A side last, nor the tracks of the D side first. There’s an order, even if some parts can be shortened. There are eight tracks: even if you remove some of them, the overall trajectory of the album is still respected.

Since your music is very meditative, I was wondering if you needed to be in a certain frame of mind, to focus, and maybe to take some time on your own before getting on stage…

Shantidas: Ideally, yes, we dream of that kind of situation, but for now we often have to do it in a few seconds.

Matthieu: On this tour, we didn’t really get to do this, we didn’t have much time, it was a difficult tour in that respect. But the best concerts we ever did happened when we had the time to focus just the three of us on the music, the place, what we were going to play, how we were going to play it… I think the best concert we ever played in that respect was at the Stella Natura Festival in 2012. It was in the United States, in the mountains. And the whole day before the concert was a preparation for it: we went swimming in a wild river, all the elements were there, we played at dusk… These are the best conditions: a whole day of preparation! Currently, things are more rock’n’roll: unload the van, build the stage, play, load the van, get back on the road.

Shantidas: During this tour, we played at the Funkenflug Festival in Abtenau, Austria, a solstice celebration. It was a bit like Stella Natura, in the mountains; we played in a barn opened on the landscape… We didn’t have much time to set our things up because there were a lot of bands and only one stage. But since we’d had the whole day to soak up the place, it was very exciting to translate all of it on stage.

You also played in the Church of Saint-Merry in Paris a few months ago during the Sonic Protest Festival. Was it something special for you to play in a church, especially this one, which has a very peculiar history related to occultism? I think that Occult Rock was inspired by alchemical processes, for instance…

Shantidas: It was incredible. That is what we wanted to do since the beginning. There are certain places, such as the Saline Royale d’Arc-et-Senans, an old salt factory in Jura, the abbey of Noirlac, and the Ideal Palace of the Facteur Cheval, where we always dreamed about playing. It might be the influence of Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii… With Stephen O’Malley, we got the chance to play in a church in London and in a morgue in Bristol. The three of us often discussed the idea of making pieces specifically for certain places with unique acoustics. If we could, we would only do that kind of performance. It’s a possible interpretation of the title “voix”, “voices”: the voices you hear in a church, or the voices you hear when you are transcended by an idea…

It was really exciting to play in Saint-Merry, the Baphomet’s church. Since we live in Paris, we could go there two or three times beforehand to get a feel of the place before the concert and prepare our light show as well as we could. It was the first time the cable of our light bulb was eighteen meters long. We are thrilled we could have had this opportunity.

Is the location important for the recordings as well?

Matthieu: Absolutely: immersing ourselves in a location is primordial. The last two albums were made at the Drudenhaus studio, and one of the reasons why we record there is the location itself, its magic. It’s an old farm building, it doesn’t look like a traditional studio at all. To be in the middle of nature, far from everything and from our everyday lives, only within the music, it’s ideal.

Shantidas: We also get along really well with the sound engineer who works there, it’s important as well.

You already mentioned it, Shantidas, but I’d like to know more about the album title, Voix, which sounds paradoxical for an instrumental band like yours. While preparing for this interview, I thought about a book I read a few months ago [Chaosphonies by Théo Lessour] where voice is described as what brings idiosyncrasy, physicality, and potentially chaos to music, in opposition to its more abstract aspects, like composition. Could we see “voice” as the opposite of “language”, for instance?

Shantidas: What is interesting about this title is that it can lead to different approaches to the album. Voix can evoke resonances, divine voices, Joan of Arc, plenty of things… The interpretations of such a word choice vary a lot, and in relation to our music, it’s like a question mark. It’s precisely all these spaces that we find interesting.

Matthieu: We already had the album title before we started composing it. This title had us question everything we had done at that point. The question was: how could we, on this album, reveal the voices that were already there on the previous ones? This being said, I do hear your interpretation, we never thought about it in those terms but it’s an approach that really speaks to me.

The artwork of your previous album, Occult Rock, was a picture of a rock occulted by clouds, turning the title into a pun, almost…

Shantidas: What is important to us is that it’s open to interpretations. Then, whether you find it ironic or oneiric, it doesn’t matter; as long as it makes you think, it’s a success. For both Voix and Occult Rock, there’s a back-and-forth between artwork and title, the way they relate will be perceived differently by different brains, different listenings, different world views. That’s what we like.

Likewise, the variety of music genres you draw from—black metal, krautrock, jazz, etc.—means that everybody will hear something different in what you do, and the symbolism you work with—your name has been borrowed from an Indonesian cult, your logo, from John Dee, Voix’s artwork, from Aleister Crowley, himself a big champion of syncretism—lends itself to different interpretations as well…

Matthieu: Yes, Crowley was very inspired by Sufism, for instance… We share some principles with Zos Kia: we recreate our religious motifs and our rituals without pledging allegiance to any current. We claim no particular affiliation. I think that the way we use our symbol, for instance, a cross from John Dee’s Enochian alphabet, by completely taking it out of its context, turned it into our own magical symbol. We borrowed it and there aren’t any references to this alphabet and its functioning left. It became our Aluk Todolo cross.

Shantidas: For the artwork, we borrowed the concept from Aleister Crowley’s Konx Om Pax, but Antoine is the one who would talk the best about it since he’s the one who drew it. It’s a work of typography and what we like about it is that sometimes, people don’t see what is written. This is what we like: it’s graphic design, there are vertical elements, black and white with the same interstices, you don’t really know if you should focus on the black or the white, eventually, all you can see is this monumental, stretched-out aspect, and then you can recognize a title, a maze… All these elements, like the title, form a multi-directional approach.

Your music could be seen as a mirror, in a way. I think that you actually used this metaphor somewhere already…

Shantidas: That’s what makes instrumental music interesting compared to Rock music where lyrics map out the songs’ interpretation. With this new album, we wanted to have no pictures anymore to leave it even more open to interpretation. For Voix, all you have left is the typography.

The fact that your music is so abstract, outside of language, and that you deliberately try to leave room for various interpretations makes it difficult to talk or write about it without feeling like you’re restricting the possibilities it contains. Are you bothered by that? Do you feel like putting your music into words limits it?

Matthieu: It’s the opposite, we find it interesting. On our website, we collect all the reviews and takes we can find on our music. Even the people whose views are completely narrow, like, “It sucks, it isn’t metal!” are interesting to us. For us, there is no good or bad feedback; what is interesting is to see how people react. We aren’t necessarily the best ones to talk about our own music, especially at the end of a tour. What the listeners say about it feels more interesting to us.

Wolvserpent describes their music as guided meditation. I feel like this could fit yours, too. Would you agree?

Shantidas: Yes, I love this band, we played with them at Stella Natura, actually.

Matthieu: This idea of guided meditation speaks to me but I never thought about it in those terms. You’ll tell us what you felt after the show!

You let the listener figure out their own way to deal with your music whereas nowadays, many bands tend to drown us in information… Is it something you’re trying to oppose?

Shantidas: When it comes to the album, we completely control what we show of it and how we present it: it is all part of it. But we aren’t closed to all communication (as this interview shows), like Neurosis was at the beginning, or Corrupted who didn’t want any pictures or interviews of their band… We aren’t at that level. But we have no interest in illustration. We don’t want to make music videos, for instance, to avoid restricting interpretation. We come from black metal where there was a deliberate intention to completely erase our personalities; we had pseudonyms, it wasn’t clear who was who… But now, Aluk Todolo is our life, it’s what we are. Our goal with this project is this, at the end of the day: a kind of honesty. So the goal isn’t to hide everything but to leave open the way the band can be perceived. It shouldn’t be limited by the visuals or the discourse.

You’re often programmed with black metal bands or in black metal festivals, probably because as you said, you were in black metal bands before, like Diamatregon. How do you feel about this?

Matthieu: We want to play everywhere. Since we come from black metal, it doesn’t feel absurd to us that we end up in that kind of festival, but it is true that we often contrast sharply because what we do has more to do with rock; even our guitar-bass-drums structure isn’t a very metal combination. But conversely, when we play in indie festivals, we’re seen as these big metalheads [laughs]… The consequence is that we play everywhere, with all kinds of bands.

Shantidas: We played at the Jazz Off Festival in Colmar, Sonic Protest, a noise, experimental music festival, black metal festivals… We’ll soon play Chaos Descends with Revenge and Mysticum, we also did a festival with dark metal band Bethlehem in a hangar with big Germans blasting black metal and downing beers in the parking lot…

Matthieu: … And the Funkenflug in Austria, a solstice celebration: all the bands on the bill shared this pagan, rural spirit. Which isn’t necessarily our case, we aren’t claiming we’re pagans, for instance, and in the band, we all have our own personal views on religion. But our music is open enough that in a festival like that, people on this path can project their own beliefs and through the music, experience something powerful.

Listen to Aluk Todolo here, and find out what they are up to on Facebook, Instagram, or there.