Krieg’s Neill Jameson Reflects on His Illustrious Career as a Musician, Label Owner, and Journalist

The famed black metal stalwarts Krieg recently celebrated the release of their latest triumph, Ruiner. Of course, this American institution of musical integrity has proved once again that they remain at the top of their game. Ruiner is fearless, uncompromising, and powerful as a crowbar blow to the gut.

Last week, we presented the first half of our conversation with Krieg’s frontman, Neill Jameson. We discussed Ruiner, Jameson’s live work with the revered Judas Iscariot, and his participation in the eccentric supergroup Hidden — an obscure gem of a band that we highly recommend. Jameson generously opened the coffers of his memory, treating us to amazing stories and insights.

Today, we share even more of Jameson’s beautiful reminiscences. Join us as we continue our exploration of black metal history with Jameson, who tells us about his time in Twilight, experiences as a label owner, and love of Decibel Magazine — one of the many esteemed sources for which he writes his stellar articles.

In the supergroup Twilight, you collaborated with the iconic Thurston Moore, Scott Conner of Xasthur, Jef “Wrest” Whitehead of Leviathan, and others. [Wrest has also functioned as a member of Krieg, and Thurston Moore made a guest appearance on Krieg’s Transient.] I know that you’ve spoken about difficult times in the band, but do you have any good memories you’d like to share here?

Oh yeah, absolutely! I have great memories of all three records. For the first record, Blake [Judd of Nachtmystium] and I flew out to San Francisco to meet up with Jef to record at his apartment. That’s where he had done all the Leviathan demos and the first few albums, so we decided to start work there. Scott was supposed to come up to do his parts, but he just ended up mailing that in.

My memories of that were that me and Blake [Judd] ended up staying at Brandon from Bone Awl’s house because, you know, Jef’s apartment wasn’t big enough. So, we would end up jamming with Bone Awl. And just out of the blue, we recorded the Krieg / Nachtmystium 7” up there. You know, Bone Awl was our backing band for both bands. I mean, I worked with Andy [or Andrew Jay “Akhtenaten” Harris of Judas Iscariot] on a bunch of stuff before. But this was exciting because it was one of the first times that I really collaborated with other people. This was really just like a massive exchange of ideas.

We didn’t really have any kind of idea as to how this was going to turn out, and you can tell on that first record. It basically sounds like… Here’s an unused Leviathan song. Here’s an unused Nachtmystium song. Here’s something that Scott didn’t use. So, it’s not at all a cohesive record. It was not what people were expecting, and I don’t think it was what people were really hoping for. It got an okay reception, but, again, once we were done with it, we were all back to focusing on our own lives.

A few years later, Jef and Blake wanted to get together to do the second record, so I flew out to Chicago. Jef was staying in Chicago at the time. We went to a cabin in either Wisconsin or Iowa, just one of the really cold as fuck outlying states. This was in like late January, early February, so it’s absolutely freezing. The cabin was owned by Jeff from Autopsy Kitchen [Records]. And we basically spent the entire time doing an exceptional amount of cocaine and a marathon amount of drinking. We wrote what was possibly, at least as far as our perception, which was obviously very skewed, some of the darkest and nastiest shit that any of us had ever written together. And… they forgot to bring a fucking tape for the 4-track. This cabin didn’t have running water. We were just fucking disasters, but we had all these really great songs… And then, we couldn’t remember any of it. And it was just kind of aborted, you know, like: “Oh well, maybe this is never going to happen again.”

Then, like a year or two later, Blake got everyone together to do the second record. That’s when Stavros [Giannopoulos] from The Atlas Moth joined and [ex-Isis’] Aaron Turner contributed some parts. I wasn’t even supposed to be on that record. Blake was trying to get it so that I wasn’t a part of Twilight anymore. My reputation at the time wasn’t necessarily sterling, so it wasn’t going to be as good of a business decision to have me on it. I was going to have as little to do with the record as possible. I only wrote one song on it. And I was only going to do vocals for maybe like two or three songs.

For whatever reason, the day that we were supposed to do vocals, Blake decided that he wanted to go on a date. So, he fucked off for the entire day. And while he fucked off, I wrote all the lyrics, besides the two songs that he’d written. Jef and I just sat… Jef had a bunch of lyrics, and I had a bunch of lyrics. So, we basically just composed the entire thing. I did every single song in like two or three hours. Everyone else thought it was obviously good enough that I’d be the voice for the record.

Then Blake came back, and he wanted to do a little bit. He did maybe two or three sections on one or two songs, and that was it. There was a bit of tension because he wanted to be front and center for vocals for that, and, I mean, he missed his chance. I’m just much-much quicker at doing these things in the studio.

So, that was our last record with Southern Lord. Scott didn’t take part in it. Tim [“Hildof”] Lehi from Draugar didn’t take part in it. I really love that record. I think it’s my favorite of the three. It was my first time working with Sanford Parker, and that was just exceptional. It started Sanford and Jef’s relationship. It was really the catalyst for a lot of difficult things that were going to happen but also a lot of really important great things that would happen down the line.

And then, for the third record… It is really well-documented what my relationship with Blake was at the time, so we don’t really need to get into that — you can just Google search that. But as far as the actual recording is concerned, I flew in, and they’d done like skeletons of some of the songs a few weeks before.

And then, we went to a bar. It was me, Jef, Stavros, Blake, and Sanford. And we’re supposed to meet Thurston. We’re just at the bar hanging out, and he just comes in and sits down with us. And that was just this revelation of “holy shit, this is actually going to happen.” We’d been tossing around the idea of asking him to contribute because he’d done an interview with Decibel where he talked about how much he liked what Jef and Scott do. Here’s this guy I grew up watching. I’m 45. A lot of what was really important to me musically in the early ’90s was because he had basically started the path for that, or he introduced the world to a lot of that shit.

So, it was really weird, you know, sitting there talking to this guy, and then he asked me: “Oh, you’re Neill?! I like this about Krieg. I like that about Krieg.” He was able to talk to me about my own band in a way that only someone who obviously really appreciated it could. And he did the same with Jef. And then, he was even able to talk to Sanford about his stuff. He was just what his legend made him out to be, just this absolute fanatic for music and art and culture.

For the third record, Thurston was the first person there every single morning to record, and he was the last person to leave. He came in with so many ideas and was just so open to us poking and prodding him. I mean, I got him to do some shrieking on a few songs. It was just a really amazing experience because, you know, we’re all just a bunch of consummate fuck-ups. It was really different to work with someone who’s a professional musician, someone who’s made their life with it.

We already knew going into it that the reaction from the general public was going to be less than welcoming, especially because that was before Deafheaven was super popular, and then it became okay to mix genres. All of us were really just trying to do bizarre shit with us. We weren’t really focused on trying to make a very pure black metal record. I don’t think that’s something that was on any of our radars at that point. It didn’t really change for me and Jef until he did [Leviathan’s] Scar Sighted, and then I did [Krieg’s] Transient, and we kind of got back into the swing of what we do normally.

The last two memories I have of that record… One was there was a noise at the studio door. The studio had like this little kind of entryway hallway outside. So, again, there was this weird banging and noise coming from the door. Jef went and opened it up, and there was a man standing with his pants around his ankles shitting onto the door. Jef went to kick him to get him away and ended up just sliding into the guy’s shit, which is probably the funniest thing I’ve ever seen happen in a studio. And then, when everything was done, me and Jef Sanford and Thurston all went to the bar. We all had one shot, and then went our separate ways, almost like a fucking movie. It was one of those rare moments in life that really is kind of just this poetic ending.

The record didn’t come out for like a year and a half because of all the legal shit and all the issues with Blake. It just wasn’t received very well. And it was challenging because then, all of a sudden, I took on the role of having to navigate with the record label and navigate with all of the press. Me and Stavros basically had to manage the band. And Blake didn’t want me on this record at all. I didn’t do any music writing on it. I submitted things, and he just wouldn’t allow it. So, for a band that I was supposed to be kicked out of multiple times to, all of a sudden, become my responsibility was ironic. And it kind of sucked… But it really got me into the real intricate parts of the music industry that I might not have necessarily experienced before just because I mostly worked on handshake deals with underground labels, so it was a growth experience. I guess that’s the best way to put it.

As the former owner of Profanation Records and Blood, Fire, Death, obviously, you worked with Xasthur, Leviathan, Archgoat, etc. What did you learn from that experience?

I learned how to ruin a business that had a lot of promise, and I learned how to fuck up a reputation very easily. Towards the end, I had so many releases that would just have been amazing. A lot of them came out elsewhere like the Urfaust / Joyless split. I was going to do that. I was going to Skepticism / Stormcrowfleet on vinyl, all of these things.

But I ended up really overwhelming myself, and I didn’t have any kind of business plan for it. I mean, I had the ideas… I could find the talent. I could set up deals with people. I could pull together a really great roster. I’m really proud of everything that I was able to release with that. But once my working relationship with Red Stream was over, as far as that’s concerned, I didn’t have any idea about the business side of things. It’s just really overwhelming to go from basically being a project manager to being every single facet — being the mailroom, being the accounting, all of that. It was at a time when my mental health was just really starting to spiral down. And a few years later, the end of Blood, Fire, Death signifies when I was really starting to have a nervous breakdown that lasted three years maybe and culminated in a suicide attempt.

I look back at it now, and I realize how badly I fucked up these opportunities and how easy it would have been if I had taken a little more time with it and maybe paced myself better — I could probably still be doing it right now. I’ve thought about doing a label again. I’ve released a few tapes for people here and there but nothing major. It’s just so time-consuming, and it’s incredibly thankless.

Running the label made me realize how to talk to the labels that I worked with. It made me realize that regardless of how the distribution goes or whatnot, these are people that are putting, for the most part, their own money and their own time into making sure that your music gets heard. It made me appreciate a lot of the people who had done me right over the years. It made me just appreciate honest people that are doing labels, zines, podcasts, or any aspect of music for the love of it. It’s rare. I think it’s going to continue to become a more rare commodity that there are people who are doing this simply for the love of it, and I was fortunate enough to be able to work with people like that. I hope that, at least initially, the bands that I worked with were able to tell that I was doing it out of the love for their music and supporting what they were doing.

What do you love most about being a Decibel writer?

The freedom. There is almost nothing that I can write that I’m told to dial back on. I have very good artistic license with what I write about. Rarely, I’m pitched anything. Generally, I’m the one doing the pitching. I’ve kind of backed off of a lot of the larger social kind of writing in the last few years because I didn’t want to be a part of the people who are just out just to expose others just to make themselves look better. I didn’t want that perception about me. Everything that I ever wrote about social issues in metal and all was done because of something that I cared about or something that I genuinely felt.

Once I started seeing a lot of people doing the same thing… I don’t want to use the word “cancel culture” because I think that that’s stunted, but there really was this whole rush to try to take people down. I was afraid that I was being a part of that. I didn’t want to write hit pieces anymore. It just seemed stupid. The last big one that I did it was when Jason [Jordan “Dagon” Weirbach] from Inquisition got outed for being arrested for having a hard drive full lot of kids getting fucked. And when I wrote about that, you know, I thought: “Hey, this is something that people can get behind, especially within black metal and of the more right-leaning black metal.” They’re all like: “That kind of shit is why we don’t like the church.” Or: “You gotta protect kids.” All these platitudes that these different people would talk about.

But I was an asshole for exposing it because it’s a band that they like. It’s a band that did cool records. And, yeah, Inquisition is a great band. I would never take away their musical achievements or anything like that. But the dude got pinched for fucking jerking off to kids. There’s no moral excuse for that. As someone who was molested as a child, plus now I’m a father, that’s just a line that you can’t cross. There are all these NSBM guys that are all about Inquisition, but isn’t part of the Fourteen Words something about children?!

I mean, it just really hit me where it’s like: “Wow, everybody is just a bunch of fucking hypocrites out there!” And it’s okay to target people in bands that you find that are wrong as long as they’re not like a cool band that, you know, lots of people like. That just really disgusted me, so I just decided to focus more on writing about music that I liked. Plus, it’s a lot less stressful to sit and write about some demo that you heard that you think is fantastic and nobody gives a fuck about, so you’re trying to push that on people. But in my print column, I’m still kind of pontificating about morals and ethics, just on a different scale. It’s not as big on social issues. I’m writing about behavior and perception because, in the metal scene, we do deal with a lot of really just overgrown children that have really bad takes on things — you know, guys in their fucking 50s that still think that it’s 1984, and they have that attitude. They’re people that just can’t grow and evolve and think for themselves. And so, I never run out of things to write about with that.  

Thank you, Neill, for a fantastic interview. Be sure to order your copy of Krieg’s Ruiner today.