Interview

Horsehunter Explodes Onto The Extreme Doom Scene With "Caged In Flesh"

The new age of doom is upon us as Horsehunter's "Caged In Flesh" will drop next month via Magnetic Eye Records.

If you love full volume amplifier feedback and low 'n slow doom riffs that crawl across your skull like a hazy psychedelic horizon, then you've nothing to fear from this dawning age, and fans of battering ram doom outfits like Batillus or Maegashira will be right at home with this impending album.

To give you a taste of what to expect, we just premiered the title track online, and also checked in with guitarist Dan Harris to discuss the doom metal scene in Australia, how Horsehunter went from Iron Maiden cover band to a devastating original outfit, and the many travails of recording a full-length album. Check out the full interview below.

xFiruath: To start off with, what's happening in the Melbourne music scene these days as far as metal goes?

Dan: Metal is alive and well in Melbourne. Speaking from our doomy neck of the metal woods there are a number of excellent bands such as my two favourites, Whitehorse and Watchtower, who consistently put out gut wrenchingly brutal releases and live performances. There is a great community of doom fans who actually make the effort to come out to gigs and actively support the bands they care about, rather than claiming to be ‘a big supporter of the local scene’ without actually bothering to do any research or take chances in attending gigs on word of mouth suggestions alone.

Speaking more generally about Melbourne metal though, bands such as Internal Rot and The Kill really typify what I love about the Melbourne metal scene in that they have been playing a straight up brutal form of grind core for a number of years now and metal fans haven’t become disinterested with the sound, but rather I see support for these bands escalating because enough people recognize and respect the style and high quality of these band’s releases and live performances.

xFiruath: It seems like this is Horsehunter's first official release – when did the band come together and how did the members end up connecting?

Dan: Horsehunter started in the winter of 2012. Nick, Mike and I essentially grew up together playing music. Nick and I always had a dream of playing in a thrash metal band, which alas never eventuated and the closest we ever came was playing in the school Jazz band. Around about this time Mike and I were playing in a Rage Against the Machine/Iron Maiden cover band that I never completely successfully managed to turn into a Metallica cover band.

At some point in early 2012 I had expanded my horizons beyond Kirk Hammett and Dimebag Darrell and incidentally the three of us found some common musical ground upon which we could start a blue print for Horsehunter. This of course was the sound invoked by Sleep, Neurosis, early Mastodon, and Isis. Mike wrote “Stoned to Death,” we learnt it; we recorded it with a single room mike in my living room and sent it off to Himi (AKA Dr Himza), who had just recently been recommended to us by a mutual friend. We all agree that Horsehunter started the day HImza joined, and brought with him an excellent taste in music and a refreshing fashion sense.

xFiruath: Is there any particular meaning behind the name Horsehunter?

Dan: Not at all, we named our band after a Dillinger Escape Plan track more or less because it featured Brent Hinds and therefore no further deliberation was needed on the matter.

xFiruath: Tell me about how this album came together and how long the process took to reach the sound you wanted: a press release said it was scrapped, re-written, and re-recorded multiple times.

Dan: “Caged in Flesh” really did take a long time, and not necessarily so much in terms of studio time and money spent, but more so in the sense that we had freakish technical difficulty after freakish technical difficulty. I mean we probably spent two weeks all up recording the album and then one and three quarter years sorting out faulty mixing equipment. Tigran Fuzzmeister our producer and mixer really took the project to heart and worked on it tirelessly, which was lucky for us because any other person in his position would have quit three times over. We like to think that the hard work eventually paid off in that we got the sound we were after.

xFiruath: How and when did you get hooked up with Magnetic Eye Records?

Dan: Nato from the band Beastwars heard the album before it’s initial internet release in September of 2014, and saw fit to hook us up with Richard S Jones from Sheltered Life PR, and it was through his hard work that we ended up being offered a partnership with MER.

xFiruath: What's happening with the lyrics and overall themes on “Caged In Flesh?”

Dan: First of all I should mention that “Caged In Flesh” isn’t a concept album, but speaking about the songs individually… I don’t really know what the fuck is going on with “Stoned to Death,” apparently it’s some stupid story about some dude ripping the ultimate atomic-bong cone to appease some lame request of a tyrant dragon. We took a slightly more serious tact with the title track, which lyrically details the three stages of a masked character's unnamed suffering, suicide, and then cosmic rebirth, but more generally speaking the title refers to any triumph or surpassing of any limitation, mechanism, thought or behaviour pattern that was inherited through millions of years of undirected evolution and now presents a threat to our ability to make life worth living. “Witchery” explores the perpetual cyclical process of delusion and disillusionment one is unceremoniously hurled into when one starts asking too many questions about truth, morality, and meaning. The intention was to capture that feeling of near insanity when one can’t find satisfactory answers to questions of this nature.

xFiruath: Who handled the cover artwork and what's going on with the red smudge face profile?

Dan: We worked with a Melbourne based artist Mitchell Asquith, who after a number of discussions about the lyrics, the musical ideas and other general ideas decided he wanted to incorporate all the atmosphere of the music through his use of texture and color, but most importantly the focus of the piece had to be a human like figure. We felt that making a human figure the visual focus helped further the central bases for all the ideas on the album, being that of living a human life. Mitchell really pushed the purely emotional and atmospheric qualities of the music with his piece on the inner gatefold of the vinyl, which anyone who is yet to see will find out, possesses very little in the way of figure and form.

xFiruath: We've gotten the one massive 16 minute track streaming online, but I'm wondering if there are any plans for more visual media off the album: will we get a music/lyric video or any sort of play through clips ahead of the release date?

Dan: I don’t believe we have any plans at this stage to release any visual media before the album release. We certainly won’t be releasing a music video pre-album release, but there may be a chance that we will make available footage of Horsehunter playing CIF in it’s entirety at our appearance at the new Melbourne festival Dopefest which took place on Saturday 14th of March, but still I can’t make any promises on that.

xFiruath: Do you plan to take this album out on the live circuit in the near future?

Dan: Yes in fact we are taking the entire album on an Australian east coast tour with the legendary Space Bong, which kicked off at Dopefest on Saturday and will wrap up in Adelaide’s Crown and Anchor on the 28th of March.

xFiruath: What albums are you enjoying blazing up and tuning out to lately?

Dan: Immolations ‘Dawn of Possession,” Incantation’s “Mortal throne of Nazarene,’ Autopsy’s “Severed Survival,” Terrorisers’ “World Downfall” and Asphyx’s “Last One On Earth.”

xFiruath: Anything else you'd like to add?

Dan: Portal rules!