Slate: Deathless- a Ryan Walker Interview for Louder Than War

In a room with a window in the corner: Slate on Deathless- a Ryan Walker Interview for Louder Than War

Deathless, the new album by Slate released yesterday, conveys the humanity in Cymru and harnesses its landscapes, reveals the embers of ancient flames concealed behind walls of smoke and attaches a girdle to the dragon starving behind it while seeking to reinforces the sheer, literary power in what happens when the written word articulates the emotional depths of a memory we have been abruptly plunged into. All of which is authenticated from within one room. Interview by Ryan Walker.

”To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth but with music in your blood, and poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed’’ – Brian Harris.

There’s an overriding sense of poetry with the debut album from Slate. Deathless, initially a review of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, establishes the Cardiff group as being vessels firmly set on continuing the poetic lineage that resides in the Welsh valleys, that pulsates within the blood of its people. And as we’ll all soon discover, manifests itself as an absurd rage.

”I’ve always wanted to make music that has context. Personally – my inspiration for making this EP came from works by someone like Jacques-Louis David. This idea of various scenes being painted within a greater scene’’ says Raychi Bryant, drummer and keys.
”It’s as if each song is an image, with its own individual narrative. But when you step back, you see that they are all a part of the same painting – happening all at once as part of the larger composition’’.

Remoter Heaven, our introduction (following Tabernacl/St. Agatha) to the band as the first single taken from the release, speaks a wild spell or two before swallowing us completely in its cascade of dazzling colour, speckles of dust, crackles of light that reach for the skin and penetrate it as rays would bounce back off a glitter ball. The scene within the scene. All siren serenades from deepest deep, shimmering rivers both calm and unsettled, all monstrous walls of corruscated-clean guitars from the upper ups that goad gods andas guitar melody weaver Elis Penri prepares us for battle using mood as the desired loom. The group exposes our shrewd, uniquely human sensitivities, framed with a vigorous aura and vapour halo that is utterly enchanting the more the song surges forward like standing before the siege of Syracuse.

Taking us through the day, able to vicariously experience, observe, or ally ourselves with the protagonist figure moving throughout each moment as the album transforms along with it adds a wonderful sense of intimacy, richness and depth to the album (the vinyl edition comes with handwritten diary entries adding to this sense of lo-fi, hallucinatory gauze of entanglements we are invited to investigate and vest ourselves in the belief that this character actually happened, that he (for some reason, he’s a he in my head) occupied a room, potentially a bedsit at a seaside resort, that he had a diary, that he sat on the edge of the bed and took his shoes off yet – he never actually left.

Yet things are susceptible to seasonal change. Snapping at at any moment. A air raid from above shakes the ceilings. An earthquake from below dislodges the floor’s ancient panelling.

Everything here is beached. Belongs or belonged somewhere. Everything is fossilised in droplets of amber. But by god what points of view and spectrum of emotions are explored just when sat in the confinements of this lad’s lonesome abode: one room. One mind that stages the album. Peeling paint. Dry rot. Damp walls. A space where things don’t enter or exit, where things don’t change or remain entirely permanent.

A lot can happen here. But why set it here? Why sit the protagonist here as the desired location to cast his entire life back to the moment a finger was pricked when a rose was picked? Is it a womb? Is it a tomb? Is it heaven? Is it hell? Why do I care so much about a fucking room? Maybe it’s my room. Maybe I am him.

”Interesting’’ states Penri. ”I agree that it seems to take place within one mind for sure, but a mind is a place where many things enter and exit. This ‘mind’ is in a constant state of change with daylight, nighttime and the states in between breaking through the windows of the mind’s room, influencing its thoughts and ideas’’.

It’s here that we get a glimpse into the mind of our trusty protagonist, the flowing film of their dream of pain by being pricked by a thorn a child. This is our impression. This is his temperament. The room as survival. The mind as a soldier wading threw the slew of obstacles the war throws at it. An impression composed of the acute intensity of sweating palms when you see a bridge, the bridge one was afraid to pass as a child. The murderous taste in one’s mouth when we see a bottle of alcohol smiling at us from the supermarket shelves, casting us back to the moment we almost blacked out upon turning an innocent drop into a reservoir of regrets. The stomach’s cement mixer churning back all kinds of anxiety-inducing acids we can’t help but conjure up as we stand in the presence of a bully we used to know in school now stood before us, pram in hand, partner linked, at peace with themselves.

This is a magic, special room within the dreamhouse. It has its own passwords. It’s own padlocks. Or maybe the room is the dreamhouse. Or maybe the room is just a room and the narrative that unfurls this sonic banquet, this asymmetrical aural illusion from a group that Steve Albini should’ve produced, this massive drama, this notebook (the LP version sees the lyrics written out by hand like a diary entry, each penned by a different member) from the forests of the spiderland are all contained within the head of this protagonist, this hero in the middle of a heaving seizure.

”I think we can’t help but be inspired by our surroundings in Wales’’ Jack says on what informs Slate’s worldview. ”Everything around us seems to be embodied into the music we write. I think that is epitomised perfectly by the clock tower in Cardiff which is on the front cover of the E.P’’.

The album art too seems to be a sonic monument haunting the record. But the record can do that, it can change state. It can soak up units of matter around it. It can unfold like the tower and the tall shadow it casts against the ground.

”I can’t properly explain why that image encapsulates the words and music so well, but it does. It would seem that when we hold a mirror up to our own lives and our surroundings, they are reflected back in our songs in a slightly altered, obscured way’’ explains Jack. ‘’I think with this E.P., we took the first steps into creating our own world. One that we will inevitably explore further and is surely where we are heading next’’.

A mirror? A room? A tower? An entire earth.

Deathless abounds sublimely in exposing the fallacy of the room as some no-place, a no-time, the no-real that the protagonist at the heart of this album can be found in.
Rather – the room-as-mind widens its ability to receive and transmit anything and everything it commits itself to. It’s an album of contrasts. The objects on the chest of drawers throw shadows onto the walls once the sun spills in. Pretty shadows. Assassin shadows. Frightened shadows. Violent shadows.

The sonics of the EP are very much one of juxtapositions and movements that encompass this idea of transition. The room vibrates and shatters into something else. Something shines through through the windows or rattles the walls. Why was this musical approach the way forward for the narrative and vibe of the album?

”We were all interested in the idea of creating light and shade in our music. It’s a notion we had in the back of our minds definitely, particularly after our first single Tabernacl, which informed our writing for Deathless. That’s one reason’’ says bassist and backing vocalist, Lauren Edwards.

”Alternately, we’re four writers. Each with very different musical backgrounds. So I think that the contrasts in the sonics of the EP are a result of that. This EP is not a singular perspective, though it seems to take place in one mind. We all have very different approaches to writing, and though we come together over a shared love of atmosphere and melody I’d say we each have our individual ways of crafting it’’ she adds. ”Sometimes it’s reactive to what someone else is doing and sometimes we all move together. It’s a very enjoyable and collaborative process. Each sharing our own experience and understanding to reach the collective goal. A friend of mine once said it’s like we are workers in a factory which I always liked. That’s definitely how it feels’’.

There are no signposts that indicate where reality ends and the dream begins. All signifiers that could potentially anchor us into some familiar reality are alien, suspicious, rogue. Without those frames of reference, our memories are rendered complicated puzzle pieces but are just as able to make themselves known through a new kind of hypervivid poetical language the band bonded over (Rimbaud, R.S. and Dylan Thomas to name but a few).

In this way – we live the album through the life of this protagonist. Shepherd stands and sings as a communicative vessel for the protagonist either content or trapped within the four walls. The album articulates itself because of this absence of any clearly outlined temporal, spatial, or dimensional properties – it simply exists: sensitive and stricken with confession, awake with feeling.

“I liked the idea of writing a very simple narrative to a big epic song. Something as modest as the story of a child playing in some flowers and then bursting into tears when a thorn pricks his leg’’ Shepherd explains. ”The words are an ode to that sensitivity we embrace when we are young. Then when we become adults, we insist on subjugating all of that wonderful, absurd rage’’.

Such a sensitivity to the written word must surely come from someone who pours over poetry all day, right? Do they think that this poetry, this means of tapping into the consciousness of the contemporary age has been supplanted by something indomitable, devoured by something ephemeral and ominous?

”I think maybe it could have been lost a time ago, but from my experience, it seems to me that the infusion of poetry and music is being encouraged more than ever’’ Jack says. ”I personally never went looking for poetry but it started bleeding its way into my life and the music I listened to. That can only mean it’s growing in prominence’’.

”Whilst I don’t believe great words always makes a great song; I do believe words are a useful preserver of authenticity as a songwriter. I personally find myself constantly falling in and out of love with songs I have written, for various musical reasons’’ he adds. ”But so long as the words I had written at the time of its creation were honest, I find the foundations of the song are far more robust and therefore easier to trust. Whether or not you can call it poetry, I think taking care of over our words as writers can only mean there will be music with greater depth and meaning across all genres. And that can only be a good thing in my eyes’’.

With Slate, no detail is dismissed. All pins dropped are pins heard. Dogs bark. Neighbours argue. Imaginary traffic slides from the night and into the morning. Imaginary dogs. Imaginary barks. Imaginary neighbours. Imaginary arguments. How can details go unmissed when everything is situated within one confined space, one of imagined escape routes, one that harnesses the elements, one that pushes against the walls and pulls up the floors to reconfigure what that space, that room, that buzzing mind looks like, feels like, and symbolises.

All is taken into account, paid attention to, given space, and then sucks up that space, and then spits it out. The juxtaposition of the images, the field of flowers able to suddenly turn into a thorn pricking the fingers and draw blood gives a good indication about the kind of musical flash floods that drive the album. It’s a wholly seamless experiment in incantation, onomatopoeia, and scuzzy, gothic chaos. But it takes its turns, regardless of our state of readiness to receive what’s contained within them.

The Heir is a ballad by way of the 4AD songbook. A doom-laden post-hardcore hymn (Hum/Hey Colossus/Loop) from the broken chords of an abandoned butterfly house stuck in a park long overgrown. It almost collapses below cathedrals of guitars, all instruments wrapping rope around each other for fear they may drift into the dark abyss, sparks flying the more coruscated strings screech against palettes of pipes and wire and whistle and beg, naked drum roll exit.

Elsewhere, Sun Violence injects a spool of neo-psychedelia into the veins but with a frantic, feral post-punk rhythmic authority coursing throughout. After rocking back and forth between eye-watering, wah-wah guitars, amplified baroque crackle and exploding rainbow textures, it experiences a moment of calm as the ocean catches up with itself. A moment of raw, naked contemplation. Nothing but the shadow of the protagonist and any surrounding ruminative intrusions remains. Smoke rises up from the shape of a silhouette projected against peeling walls.

Eventually, the calm is duly thwarted by the oncoming storm observed from the bedroom window. An apocalypse that sucks up the neighbourhood in a gigantic vacuum, gulps, belches and cackles across Wales.

”Cymru is a very unique place in terms of its landscape and energy, and therefore its people’’ states Penri. ”I feel we’re a warm people in a cold climate, and very honest – where the landscape is rugged & wild but true, so are the people’’.

And that’s what we have when experiencing the record: the whole swollen, sodden landscape of Wales and the people within it – the warm glow within a bitter blanket of night, the chimes in the breeze, altruism in a time of adversity, stubborn collectivity in the hour of change with a jagged edge.

”It influences us in the way that we are from here and have been formed by it, like any other country really. I feel there’s a lot to be admired by how much Wales has produced, withheld and inspired considering its size. It’s like a small dragon with a huge, bright flame’’ he adds. ”And though a lot of the flame’s story has been forgotten and hidden from us, there’s no doubt that something very special lies in the smoke. We also feel that there’s a history that is not being taught to us here’’.

Like a mournful lighthouse commanding the ship to return or face a future as a horrific wreck, Deathless is an ominous sound experiment of juggernaut footsteps, spidery guitars, and Shepherd’s vocals dragging a stick through the sands of time on the beach this room has suddenly burst into. ‘Seconds, minutes’ breaks into a momentary explosion of fractured, musical lifeforms, and in the aftermath of this line ripping through the sheets of time, are forced to confront the eyes, ‘on every face, deathless, everlasting’ and finally refusing to conceal oneself any longer from what life before that line etched into memory.

The last song the group wrote for the album, Shade In Me makes use of both darkness and light, all internal harmonic mirrors playfully held up against each other thanks to bassist Lauren Edward’s vocals that balance above them all as an acrobat would risk their life whilst travelling across a tightrope. Musically, it’s an indomitable festoon of skyscraper-shaking guitars and street-shattering drums by Raychi.

Near-complete nakedness gradually develops into something fully-clothed with Hailstone like developing film in a dark room. The death glide and stutter of the bass. The distant percussive echoes. The climactic expansiveness of the guitars rushes through the wrists. At some stage – it all appears to evaporate. The Polaroid exposed to daylight too soon. The clothes burned to a crisp still stuck to our spines and shoulders. The sound of the band playing live, looking into each other’s eyes and feeling the pulse behind them. Instruments suddenly decreased to the size of vintage toys, muffled, and muddy. The room shrank to the size of a shoebox.

But no matter. There’s enough trust, even faith in the now-typical musical dynamics of the group to appreciate that something else always resides to approach us from behind the corner. Dynamics akin to taking you to the ocean floor or flipping you into outer space. In this case – chords that clatter and whirl as a Catherine wheel would when nailed to a wooden fence. The occasional gleam of a piano with icicles dangling from the carbon steel strings in its cavernous case. All an accomplice to Sherpherd’s final, lasting stanza: ‘gyring in the gorse petals/it was a pretty thorn that pricked my leg/stood in the blinding light’.

Let Slate and their Deathless educate us about a new history, one hiding behind the flames once they have been parted and the smoke finally cleared. Let it show us the flint of something promising and can find its memory again. There’s more than a flame there, but a dragon waiting to stretch.

~

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Main image photo by Sam Stevens ©

Words by Ryan Walker