Neill Jameson Discusses Krieg’s Forthcoming Record Ruiner and His Past Endeavors

Ruiner, the forthcoming record by Krieg, is guaranteed to delight black metal fans when it unleashes its wrath this Friday, October 13. Formed in 1995 under the Imperial banner, Krieg has played a pioneering role in the history of dangerous American music. Fortunately, this leading USBM outfit remains as lethal as ever.

With Krieg and beyond, the group’s founder and frontman Neill Jameson has collaborated with the likes of Thurston Moore and Xasthur’s Scott Conner. Past and present, Jameson has acted as a member of a long list of exceptional bands: Twilight, Nachtmystium, Weltmacht, Hidden, N.I.L., Le Chant Funebre, Lithotome, etc.

In addition to his work as a musician, Jameson is a fantastic writer, whose articles and columns you most likely have read in a variety of respected outlets, including Decibel Magazine.

We are excited to present the first part of a two-part interview with Jameson about Ruiner and his illustrious career.

Congratulations on the release of your forthcoming album, Ruiner. Of course, I really enjoyed it. How would you personally describe the essence of Ruiner?

Aesthetically and sonically, it is steeped in the old Norwegian tradition. I really took a lot of influence from the first three Gorgoroth records, the really early Emperor stuff, the first Ancient record, things that I was really into when I first got into black metal almost 30 years ago. So, it was basically my love letter to the black metal of my youth. As far as the essence is concerned, it’s somewhat like The Black House, based on a lot of dreams and emotional visions. This record took over nine years to come out. Most of the song titles are aborted album titles. They were basically going to be like little vignettes of where I was going to go with the record whenever that was going to happen. The essence of the record really is just fighting against yourself and coming out on the other side.

Could you please tell me a little bit about the songwriting process? How far do your oldest ideas date back since, again, this record took about nine years to come out?

Oddly enough, the songwriting took nowhere near anywhere that long. “Solitarily, a Future Renounced,” the first single that came out, was probably the oldest song. And when I say oldest, the main riff on it is something that I had in my head maybe a year before we decided to record. Ruiner was done in two sections. The first three songs were done in September of last year. It was supposed to be for a split. Then, once we had some time with it, we decided that it was different. It wasn’t going to be for a split, and we were going to do something with it and turn it into a record.

We decided to go back into the studio in January. The writing for it was literally done in two two-hour sessions the day before each session. I live in Richmond, Virginia now. The rest of the band is in Philadelphia. I would drive up the night before, and we would record. I would sit down for two hours and write down everything I came up with. For a record that took this long to come out, you’d think there were a lot older songs on it, ideas that we’d been working on since 2014. That wasn’t really the case. There were a lot of songs that were in the skeletal form over the last nine years that just never made it anywhere. They were pretty directionless. I’ve held onto files of them just in case there are riffs that I want to pull out or other ideas that I want to revisit. But for the most part, this was just very spontaneous.

As far as the lyrics are concerned, did you have them ready before you began writing the music, or did you complete them as you were composing the different songs?

I wrote the lyrics in the studio while they were working on tracking the guitars and drums. As far as my lyrics have always been, I generally write the majority of Krieg’s lyrics while we’re in the studio. I have ideas going into it that I’d like to explore, but I enjoy the spontaneity of constructing something while the songs are taking shape. It feels a little bit more organic to me to build the lyrics while the song is being built. I have notebooks with ideas that I’ll dip into, but, again, especially for this record, everything was done right before the studio or in the studio.

You mentioned that you wanted Ruiner to originally be a split. Did you have any ideas about who you wanted to share that split with?

It was going to be the split with Withdrawal, a Canadian hardcore band, but we recorded a bunch of other stuff earlier in the year that we’re eventually going to use for that. Ruiner was just too different. For splits, they’re like hyper-focused, whereas this was more… full. I guess that’s the only way I can put it. It just had a different feeling to it. It didn’t feel like it would mix well on a split.

Is there anything that you would say was the biggest challenge of making this record?

Nothing. I mean, it was surprisingly easy. The biggest challenge was getting to the point where we had a record to make. We had so many false starts over the years. We were supposed to record in 2016 in GodCity, and then we talked about recording with Machines and Magnets in ’17 or ’18. Then just the general idea of doing a record the last four years just hasn’t really been anything that we really discussed. We stopped doing live shows. We really just halted everything for a while. So, the only challenge was really getting to the point where we were ready to actually work on a record.

This is a bit of a nostalgia-oriented question: do you have any memories of playing live with Judas Iscariot beside Ash of Nargaroth that you would like to share? I know that you and Judas Iscariot’s Akhenaten worked together in Weltmacht and another band that I’d like to mention in a moment.

That was so long ago. The Judas shows were in ’99 and 2000. They were my first real live experiences. I’d done guest vocals, did a few shows before, just hopped on the stage and yelled shit. This was the first time that I was really in the kind of situation where you rehearse with a band. You have your thing, and it has to be perfect because it’s not your music that you’re playing. You’re representing someone else, someone’s very important vision that’s only going to be done once or twice ever. There’s a lot of pressure there.

The first show at the Sacrifice of Nazarene Child in Texas. That was at a time when American black metal was a lot more insular than it is now. The scene was a lot smaller. In the ’90s, you basically had 20 or 25 bands. (I mean, I know that there were more than that doing demos that no one ever heard until they popped up on SoundCloud 25 years or whatever.) It was really special because it was the majority of the like-minded individuals in the country getting together and performing for each other and just doing something that really hadn’t been done before that. There were never really any American black metal fests. There definitely wasn’t anything that was solely focused on American black metal.

So, the biggest memory I have from that is just really the feeling of comradery in the scene. It was almost an era of innocence when I look at things that happened afterwards, when I watch people go down for drug addiction or various other bullshit that happens when you get older. This was just a time when everybody felt at the peak of their vitality. It’s something that I’m nostalgic for somewhat, but I don’t know if I’d want to go back to that period in time.

As far as the European show with Ash, Honza from Avenger was the drummer for that. That was the first enormous fest that I’d ever really performed at. There were bands from all over the place. We played with Tsjuder. Maniac Butcher was one of the bands. Andy actually did bass for them on that show. So, it’s just all these European bands that you never actually expected to really see live in your life. It was a different feeling because black metal in Europe, especially at the time, was a lot more vital. It was a lot more alive. It had more of a culture to it. So, just being able to experience that and subsequently any live shows that I either attended or performed at in Europe during the early 2000s… Again, it was just a very special time. Everything was pretty much in its infancy. The second wave had only been finished by 10 years.

So, sort of like the Sacrifice of Nazarene Child Fest, you were a part of something that felt larger than you. Then, as far as performing, it was fucking terrifying. My bass strap broke in the middle of the first song. I’m not a very acrobatic person, but I had to hold it with my knee while standing up, and that was kind of a challenge. Then, I believe, somebody got stabbed when we were playing. At least, that’s what the legend of the time was.

And, of course, there was the infamous picture of Andy [or Akhenaten] burning the American flag. The crowd went absolutely nuts for that. My biggest memory of the flag burning was that we went to a store like two days beforehand and bought a few different American flags. Then he would do test burnings in the alley behind his apartment. It kind of breaks down the mythological barrier of the entire thing, but it was just a real human moment for an almost inhuman time.

Hidden was a really interesting supergroup that included Akhenaten, Sigh’s Mirai Kawashima, Necrophagia’s late Killjoy, and other great names. Could you please tell me a little bit about that project and perhaps why it seems to have dissolved?

So, I was just going to bring up that you might be the only journalist, especially in the last 10 years, that I’ve seen even touch upon that project. Hidden… It’s a strange story. I’m the vocalist on all three records. Killjoy’s on the second one, but we share vocal duties. Hidden was the project of Pat [McCahan], who owned Red Stream Records. It was him and one of his friends, Joel [DiPietro]. They had this idea that they wanted to do just this whacky, really bizarre sci-fi black metal-ish project with really bizarre lyrics — they were all about these worlds that were just kind of made up. The two of them smoked a lot of weed, and that was pretty much when I asked Pat: “Well, what’s inspiring all this?” That was his answer: “Cannabis consumption!”

He wanted Andy to play guitar on it. This was after Andy had moved to Germany. He would occasionally come back to the States and go visit Pat. I didn’t live too far, so I would drive out as well. They’d been going back and forth and, you know. Andy was fine playing guitar on it. He didn’t write anything for it. It was really just more of an opportunity to work with a friend. It was around the same time that [Judas Iscariot’s] Moonlight Butchery was recorded, which Pat also did drums on and Andy recorded outside of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. So, we did the first album.

Then they kind of just asked me: “Hey, do you want to do vocals on the second album?” “Of course.” I mean, I was just hanging around. I wasn’t really doing anything. The vocals were the most excruciatingly detailed that I ever had to do because they had written out specific time signatures on where they wanted each word to be placed and then how they wanted each word to be pronounced. I don’t enunciate very much when I sing, so it was a challenge to really just sing in this highly regimented fucking bizarre language that they wanted me to use to go through. We recorded it at some studio with a guy that worked with Phil Collins and someone from The Beach Boys and someone from U2, I think. It was just a really unusual experience, you know, because we’re doing this kind of bizarre album that wasn’t really for anybody, except for Pat and his friend.

Then, once that was all done, he decided to call it Hidden, and the backstory of the band was going to be that it was a bunch of anonymous people doing it. He thought about getting a P/O box in Finland for the band just to kind of throw people off. Then the record came out. I didn’t really think too much about it, not that I didn’t enjoy it. I enjoyed the record, but… After that, it wasn’t a project that was necessary mine.

A few years later, Pat decided to do another record, and this time it was going to be put out through Killjoy’s Baphomet label, which was Red Stream’s sub-label. Pat asked me if I wanted to do vocals on it again. I said: “Sure.” He’d moved to Florida at this time. He flew me down to Florida. I think Killjoy was supposed to be there, or he had been there a few weeks prior. They didn’t like the vocals that he did, so Pat had me do the entire record. It was just layer after layer after layer of vocals. And, again, I had to hit every single word on the exact time signature, so it was pretty challenging. After that, I waited a bit to hear what was going to happen with the record.

Then he sends me a CDR, and he says: “Don’t be upset.” So, I figured: “Why would I be upset?!” Half of my vocals were taken out so that Killjoy could be on it. That was at the time when Red Stream was the parent label for Killjoy’s label, and they were also the parent label for my label. There was a bit of competition between us. If I had too many records that Red Stream was going to be putting out, Killjoy would bitch about it and tell them to slow down on releasing my stuff and release more of his stuff. Really, it became petty and childish between the two of us, which is funny because he and I got along really-really well. I mean, I hung out with him several times and really liked the guy, and I believe he liked me. But businesswise, we did not work too well together.

He ended up inviting Mirai to take part in the second record. So, they sent the record out to him. He did some keyboards over it, and that was that. That was around that time when I left Red Stream Records to go elsewhere and our relationship wasn’t exactly the tightest at that point.

Five years later, six years later, right after I finished [Krieg’s] The Isolationist, Pat messaged me and said that he had a third record and wanted to know if I would like to take part. I figured: “Fuck it! Why not?!” I’d been on the other two. He sent up the masters. Chris Grigg from Woe used to have a little home studio in his basement when he lived in Philly. I went over there, and we did that record. It was even more challenging than the other two because of the notes for exactly what time signatures and where to say this, how to sing that. It was really fucking hard to decipher because, I mean, I didn’t have Pat there to like point at me and show me when and how to do these things. And, again, I don’t have a very regimented approach to vocals, nor do I enunciate. It took all day, whereas normally I can confidently do most records in one or two takes. I mean, this was just excruciating. So, then that record came out, and I haven’t really talked to Pat since. It’s been 13 years.

Wow, it would be great if you reconnected because Hidden was an amazing band!

Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for next week’s edition of The Black Pages for part two of my conversation with the legend himself. In the meantime, you can pre-order Krieg’s Ruiner here.