Wolves in the Throne Room interview (Aaron Weaver)

Interview by Davide Sciaky

Puoi leggere l’intervista in italiano qui.

Hello Aaron, how are you doing?

Good. It’s been a good busy morning. Had a couple of interviews. I talked to a guy about pouring a concrete slab at our studio. So it’s been a busy day full of many different strange projects.

So, well, the first thing I wanted to ask you is, this morning I was reading the press release for this upcoming tour and I saw mentioned the return on stage of the original drummer, Cedar Serpent. And I didn’t realise it was your art name, so it took me a while, I googled the name thinking, “What, there was someone else playing drums before Aaron?!” Can you tell me about this art name?

Yeah, it’s kind of been evolving over time.I think that as an artist, I think that you sort of settle

into yourself over time. And it’s very much a tradition in Black Metal to work with an art name or a pseudonym. But in the early days of the band, we did not want to do that because we were very concerned with forging our own path with Black Metal and not wanting to copy in any way the Norwegian greats that were an influence, but certainly not our only influence. But now that we have established ourselves as, I think, a very unique voice in Heavy music and in Black Metal in particular. And we’ve proven ourselves to be exemplary with our commitment to our own vision. It feels right to like, you know, take this sort of piece of the Black Metal tradition and lineage. Another part of it is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve very much settled into my identity as an artist. I can definitely say that in my younger days, I was much more tentative with that. I always had the feeling like, ah, maybe I’m just doing music for now, but someday I’ll do something else. And now that I’m in my mid 40s and Wolves in the Throne Room has been around for almost 20 years, it’s very clear that no, this is it. This is my life. This is my vision. And we’ll continue doing this for the next 20 years.

Six, seven years ago I interviewed you and you told me that you weren’t touring with the band because the band is like a family and, at the time you felt that you served your family best by staying at home and working on the music. Now you’re back to the stages, what has changed in this time?

There were a few things that led to my decision to take some time off from touring. I think the most important thing is I had a young son who is now 10 years old. So he’s like on his own. He’s wandering around out in the woods by himself. You know, just foraging for roots and berries and stuff. But also I really did need to take time away from the road just for myself to stay connected to the source of energy and inspiration for the band, which is absolutely the forests, the mountains, the rivers. And to be honest, I was getting a bit out of balance. Touring all the time was taking me away too much from these things that inspire me and give me strength and inspiration in my heart. And just for my own mental health and spiritual health, it was time to take a break. That being said, it’s been amazing to come back to touring. It’s so much more fun than I remember it being. A big part of that is that nowadays, we always tour with our touring bass player Galen Baudhuin. And in the old days, we never had a real bass player. Like we’d tour with bass player sometimes, but Galen is just such a badass musician and such a good friend and a brother that to have someone to be with in the rhythm section is a totally different experience as a drummer. And it’s like an amazing pleasure to be on stage with Galen and Nathan and Cody, because things just sound so good and feel so good in the deepest, like, root essence of the music.

Last year, you released a new EP called the Crypt of the Ancestral Knowledge. This is only the second EP in your career with the previous one being released almost 15 years ago. So I was wondering why now you felt it was the right time to release an EP. Also, why didn’t you just add a few more songs and make it a full studio album?

Yeah, good question. Well, for us, an EP is an opportunity to close the chapter on a stage of the band’s career. And for us, Primordial Arcana was such an epic undertaking. Because artistically, we really pushed ourselves to work without a producer to record the entire thing by ourselves in the studio, actually, where I am right now. And so it involved literally building the studio from the ground up. The building was here, but it was just an empty shell. So, like, hanging the drywall, painting it, building all of the sound treatment, installing all the gear, building this desk, all these things. That was part of Primordial Arcana. It’s not just the music, it’s creating the space with great intention where the music will be created. And so it’s just epic. It was just an epic time in our lives. It was an epic triumph for us, just personally. And so the EP was a way to close a chapter on that. To maybe finish up some of the concepts and feelings and ideas that were kind of left hanging on Primordial Arcana. So we have a fresh start for the next record.

And I know that Primordial Arcana was the first album where you also mastered and mixed it. You took all of that in your hands, and this continued with this new EP. Has anything changed in these processes between that album and this EP? Have you evolved the way you approach these things?

It got a bit easier and faster. The first track on Primordial Arcana, Mountain Magick, I was just going through the session files and I did a hundred mixes of it. Over a hundred mixes. And just kept mixing it, mixing and mixing it until it sounded good to my ears. And so that was like an initiation into another level of the craft of being a musician. And anyone who’s initiated into the next level of anything in life, it’s hard. It’s like a grind. Like I just slept on the couch. I would sleep on the couch, wake up, mix all day, fall asleep on the couch and did that for days and days and days. And just to break through this wall of being able to hear the things I wanted to hear and then be able to do what it is on the technical or energetic level to bring the music into line with the sounds that are in my head. And so, you know, being past that point of initiation, things are easier. The EP was much easier to record. Things just flowed a lot more smoothly. We didn’t make as many mistakes. And so that means for the next record, we’ll have to set the bar even higher. We’ll have to create another challenge for ourselves because we always like to be pushing and striving and topping the last thing that we’ve done, just purely for ourselves. Like it’s important for us as artists to always feel like we’re growing.

Beside the technical point of view, I guess the producer is also an extra set of ears to give you feedback and help you in the whole process of the production. Have you completely absorbed that side of things or do you still ask to friends and family for feedback or anything, you know, to have some external point of view on your music?

That’s a really good question. And yes, that’s the role of the producer to provide outside perspective. I think that we have a very unique situation that began during the Primordial Arcana era, which was that Cody was fully involved in the writing and recording process. That was the first time he came in, he joined the band right at the end of Thrice Woven when we were recording Thrice Woven. And so the three of us can do that, like the three of us can produce each other in that way, because we’re all so different, and we all hear different things and we all have different ideas about how things should sound. And so we all trust each other to give that perspective like, “Hey, that kick drum’s too loud,” or “That guitar part sucks”, or “Those lyrics aren’t good enough”, or “Here’s an idea of how you could do it better”. And we’re all able to, you know, take that feedback from each other in an egoless way, in a way that works. It was important to work with Randall Dunn in the past, who was the fellow that recorded Two Hunters, Black Cascade and Celestial Lineage, and Thrice Woven too, because he brought a lot to the table creatively and artistically, and had that outside perspective about his idea of how things should sound. And it’s in that synergy, that alchemy, that cool records are made. But nowadays with the three of us, we can achieve that same result, and I think the results are even better.

And given this thing that you just told me, do you think you might work again with a producer in the future or are you completely satisfied and think you’re maybe more productive in this way?

We might. You know, Nathan and I were just talking yesterday about the next record because we’re just starting to get our gears turning for what will be the eighth Wolves in the Throne Room record. And that’s on the table, like working with someone, not a producer per se but with someone else that can bring another artistic perspective, but that’s very much in the infancy of developing.

Back to the EP, I think this EP showcases very well the two sides of your music, the more Black Metal, heavier side on the first two songs, and in the second half the more melodic, atmospheric one. I read a review that was saying that this EP feels very much like an introduction to Wolves in the Throne Room like, for someone who’s never listened to the band this could be it. How deliberate was it to showcase in such a distinct way the two sides of your music of your sound.

Yeah, that was intentional. We definitely wanted to have the EP feel like a miniature album. Because of course our albums are meant to be listened to from beginning to end, and have a narrative arc woven into the music. And so the EP is like a novella version of that. So yeah, very much intentional.

One of the songs that impressed me the most, and I like the most, is Initiates of the White Hart, also because it reminds me of another artist that I really love, which goes by the name of Nest.

I don’t know if you know about him. It really reminded me of his music. So I was wondering if you had any particular influence in mind when you worked on this EP, not specifically on this song, but like on the EP in general, and maybe on this song as well.

The influence that I was bringing forward on that production is The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud. Do you know them?

I heard about them. I should listen to them.

Criminally underappreciated, so influential. It’s one of those bands that has influenced everything and no one knows that they have. Do you know Der Blutharsch?

No, I must say I don’t know.

Austrian Neofolk. The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud was the previous project. Very mediaeval in its feeling, and all done on samplers. It’s all done using old rack mount samplers, to my ears. And that’s the way I like to work. I work a lot with old samplers like Ensoniq ASR-10, or some old Akai rack mount units. And so that was the influence that was most of my mind on that track.

Talking about your live performances, as we mentioned earlier, you haven’t played live now since the end of October. It’s almost six months. I was wondering if these longer gaps are necessary for you to sort of recharge your batteries or, if you had the chance, if you’d play more often?

No, it’s good to take time off from recording. Because we do so much, we do so much other stuff, because we create our own photographs, we make our own music videos, we record and mix our own records, we built our own studio. To go on tour all the time, this is impossible. It’s part of it, just the reality of life that there’s only so much time, but also it is good for us to take time away from the road, and to be at home, to be in the woods, to be with our community and our friends and family here in Olympia, and to keep that inspiration fresh and strong. 

Talking about that, I was looking at your past concerts. I’ve seen that, because of the pandemic, you had a long gap in touring between 2020 and 2022, so more than two years. How has that affected you as a band, both from the live standpoint and in the studio with the music you wrote after that, or during that time?

At the time it was extremely disappointing, because we had some really cool tours lined up with bands that we love and are really excited about and had to cancel it all. I think we cancelled like three tours during the pandemic. The artwork was printed up. We were excited about being on the road and we had this vision of how cool it’s going to be, and to have that all be cancelled was really disappointing for us. So, eventually we realized like, fuck man, this is not going to be over tomorrow, we need to do something else. And so that’s when we really started focusing on video production. We built a video production studio and invested a good amount of resources in cameras and lenses and lighting, these sorts of things, and began to improve our skills in that arena, which has been really fun for us because the visual aspect has always been as important to us as the music. It really is just one piece. And to have the ability to make our own visuals that are coming just from our minds is really inspiring. And it’s fun too, like making music videos is so fun, because it’s like a crazy challenge. And we just do it just the three of us. So we’ll hike in, all of our cameras just in backpacks, out into the woods or down to the beach. I don’t know if you saw the video for Primal Chasm, the one with the blacksmith forging a sword. We carried that anvil to the beach down a trail. It was like stupid. Men in our 40s carrying an anvil down to the beach in the rain. It’s preposterous, but that’s the kind of stuff we like to do.

Since that is my job now I’m curious about this. Did you have any previous experience with producing videos or did you start from scratch then?

No, no, like the Mountain magick video was the very first thing we’ve ever done. Like it was a matter of like, we bought a Blackmagic 4K camera. Nathan has done a good amount of photography over the years, so kind of understood about lenses and just the very basics of the technical side of capturing images with a lens. But for the most part, it was a crash course about, oh, shit, we need a storyboard. Oh, we need costumes. Oh, lights. Well, we have to edit this. There’s a lot of YouTube tutorials that are very helpful.

And then did you just work for the band or do you work also for other people?

We’ve thought about doing production for other bands. It would be fun. But again, it comes back to time. You know, occasionally we’ll do little projects for friends, like just film stuff because we now have a lot of nice camera gear and that stuff is expensive. But for the time being, we’re going to keep those energies focused on assets for us.

I remember from the last time we talked, and from other interviews I’ve read, how spirituality is important for you and is a big part of your life. And I was wondering, how did that journey start for you? Like, how did you find an interest in that side of life, if you will?

As I get older, I don’t even know what any of this stuff means anymore. Like, what does that even mean? What does spirituality mean? The labels become less and less relevant. When I was younger, it was like, I’m interested in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, which is this particular lineage, and you do this and you do that and this is the meditation you do. Or I like ceremonial magic and here’s a book you can read by Crowley and here’s my tarot deck. It just seems like over time those things all just sort of fade away. And what becomes important is what’s happening inside, in your own heart. And to call it spirituality, I think makes it out to be something that is special or something that is unique to some initiated person. When in fact it’s just nothing more or less than the experience of living a human life. With the magic we experience, the love we experience, the suffering, the madness, we all experience these things. And no one person has any special access to something that anyone of us can access. That being said, I do think that maybe especially now in this modern world, our minds can be very clouded and distracted by negative forces, by silliness and stupidity, by, let’s just say distractions. Distractions from one’s own truth. So maybe spirituality is nothing more than just finding a way, everyone finds their own way to brush those things aside and connect more with one’s own heart and to live a life from the heart. And not be knocked off course by these other forces that buffet us, whether they’re family patterns or societal patterns or a chaotic thing that arises in your life. Just to stay the course. Be able to listen to your own voice inside and believe it. So often we hear our own inner voice, our own truth and we say, ah, no, no, no, I’ll do this other thing that someone else told me to do. And so maybe a part of spirituality is not doing that anymore. Say no, no, I know what’s right. I know what’s right for me. I’m going to stay on that path and not be knocked off of it. And yeah, meditation helps. Spiritual practices help. But what that is, is different for every individual.

I only really have one final question, which is, you mentioned earlier that you were starting to think of the next album. Have you already worked on any music? Can you tell me where you’re at? Maybe when we could expect the next album?

Yeah, I’m not going to say anything yet because we’re just getting our gears turning. We’re very much in like fucking tour mode right now. Galen is here. He flew up from Santa Fe yesterday.

And right after we get off this call, I’ll meet the other three guys and we’ll have a rehearsal for the day. So we’re just laser focused on the live show and digging into all the little details to make the show as magical and intense as possible. And I think as soon as we get home, we only have a couple of handful of shows lined up in the months to come, so we’re going to be laser focused on bringing the new record into being and visioning on it and dreaming on it. So talk to me after the tour of some ideas about when it might happen and what it might be like [chuckles].

Well, actually, I have another question that came to my mind earlier when you said you started working on the videos and you thought a lot about the visual side of the band. I saw you guys twice and both times I was shooting the show, which was very hard for me because you use very low lights, which, I mean, it’s very nice as a fan looking at the show, but for a photographer it’s a bit of a tough job. So I was wondering if you changed anything about your live show from a visual standpoint.

Yeah, it’s always evolving on this upcoming tour. I’m very excited because we’re working with lighting tech who we met on the last tour and connected with and I think we really share a similar vision of how to use the lights to create this magical experience. And so I think that there’ll be a bit more of a mix between these very dark introspective times and other times when it’s more radiant. So photographers can get their shots and during the times when it’s lit up. You’re not the first one to give us the feedback that shooting us on stage is a challenge [laughs].