A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

As I stated before, I started working on this song concurrently with “Black Flames…”, but this one managed to get done first. As most of you know, I prefer to contrast different types of songs on releases, mixing up fast and slow songs, atmospheric with technical, etc. Since “Black Flames” was going to be a fast song, I wanted something slower for “Ritual Curse” - doubly so, since I’ve always felt that, in general, black metal has mostly shunned influence from the doom end of the metal spectrum, and I think there’s a great wealth of possibility there to be mined. At the time I was writing this I was going through a bunch of tape dubs I got in a dubtrade, and earlier that day I was listening to Barathrum’s “Eerie” album for the first time. I loved the ritualistic, almost tribal drum pounding-based rhythm on a few of the songs, and thought that ‘the slow song’ for New World Blasphemy should start like that. I quickly set up a slow kind of ‘stutter’ tribal beat (syncopated, that is, not straight), and then started dicking around with my bass - and in almost no time at all I hit on what would become the main bass riff of the song.

Keeping up with that Barathrum idea, I figured the guitars would be a more ‘background’ type of thing, so I noted where they could ring or just crunch on steady pedal notes and let the bass carry the song, and so in no time at all I had my main riff and verses.

The next day at work I started playing what I had to try to come up with something for a chorus, and I stumbled across the basic rhythm for the chorus part by accident just by playing with a straight 2/4 beat - twisting it so that it ended up sounding different from a regular 2/4 beat. Leaving those ‘holes’ in the accents and then accenting anything but the 2 and 4 is what makes it sound off-kilter, but it resolves nicely with the simple neanderthal pounding as it rides out back to the verse.

The interlude section came as an evolution of a conscious decision. I figured after the second chorus ringout, I could start a new basic bass-drum pulse, then layer on guitar after guitar, each part building on the last one as they all build to a crescendo. The basic bass riff was just a little E-G-F# core, and I kept those notes in the guitar riffs, just modifying the way each rhythm plays it - one starts it ringing once per repeat, the comes a clean one doubling it inverted, then a third one starts crunching on B, then the first one mutates to playing every note, etc. - building up to where every instrument is doubling the same riff and exploding at the end, back to the main verse riff.

So the music was totally set within one day, and I had the title in mind very early on - Ritualistic drumming, “Ritual Curse”, it seemed obvious. Then I just sat down with a pen and scribbled out the lyrics:

New moon night, black skies above
Candles light the pentacle sigil
Entrails steaming, bleeding warmth
Blood of the goat consumed
Cold winds chill my naked skin
Let the ritual now begin

I invoke Sathanas, call below
Give me power yet untold
Unholy rites to quell my foes
Lucifer's reign now unfolds

Ritual Curse
Ritual
Curse

Servants of the Timeless Arts
Black Power doth command
Calling me to do His will
Possessed by Satan's hand

Ritual Curse
Ritual
Curse

[mumbled curses and invocations to crescendo]

Censer rises in the black winds
Leviathan from the black waters
Belial conjured from the black earth
Obey my black desires

Ritual Curse
Ritual
Curse

I was much happier with these lyrics than with the ones for “Black Flames”. Since there was no real narrative to tell, I just had to set a mood and describe images, and that kind of thing can be pretty fun. For the middle section, I originally planned to dig through my old Latin books from school (catholic school) and dig up some Latin stuff from the mass and pervert it, but I couldn’t find it - so I made up a couple of phrases from what I remembered of Latin then just did the rest in English, basically taking lines that I remembered from church and substituting Satan for god. It was mostly ad-libbed during the recording, though.

(I do like to vary the types of songs I put on a single release, but I didn’t specifically set out to do these two as such polar opposites. While Black Flames wears its influences on its sleeve, this one kinda came out of nowhere, except for the general mood of that one Barathrum song and the main bass riff being influenced by the type of riffs that Toby would write for the later Eyes of Ligeia material. I still maintain that the slower end of black metal isn’t mined as much as it should be, though many black/doom bands since this was written have changed that somewhat.

I equally like both versions, but the live drumming of Toby makes the CF version the definitive one, I think, even if Aerik extended vocals into parts I’d originally intended to be instrumental. It’s the vibe that makes it work, not so much the details. I do lament that I didn’t plan out the black mass/spoken word/chant thing in the original a bit more, but I still think it works.)