Mongol: Warrior Spirit

Artwork by Soloman Media

Welcome to Malabolgia. I had a chance to chat with Brandon Knott from Mongol recently about the upcoming release of their EP titled Warrior Spirit. For updates on what they're doing go here. To catch up on their previous releases and show some love go here.

DK: Hey, Brandon, this is Dink. How's it going? BK: I'm good. I'm pretty excited, we just announced the new album. DK: Cool! You announced it on your website? BK: No, we just made the announcement. (laughs) DK: (laughs) Awesome. BK: It's pretty exciting stuff. DK: No kidding! I look forward to announcing it through my page as well. What's it called? BK: It's called “Warrior Spirit.” I feel like it embodies all the content of the album. DK: How long did it take to write? BK: We actually wrote everything quite a few years ago, we had a bit of material written right after our last album, which we released in 2014. It didn't take long to write, but much longer for us to get around to recording it. DK: That's always the way.. BK: The stuff we have ready now, the sound quality is great. Phenomenal. DK: Nice! Who did your recording? BK: Um.. Diego Fernandez of Eye Of Horus. He's just starting to build his studio, just outside of Edmonton. He's very talented. We're going to have the album mastered by Lasse Lamert, he's just finished recording Alestorm, I believe. DK: Very cool. So, I wanted to ask about your Mongolian influence.. (laughs) BK: (laughs) Yeah, that can be pretty confusing for a lot of people, with us being Canadian Mongols. (laughs) But, yeah, it's just kind of an evolution that happened to our band naturally. It started out as just kind of a name that we had when we started as a band when we were all in high school, and I guess we just sort of became more and more Mongolian as we went along. (laughs). I've gained a great interest in the culture myself. Since I've learned about it and it's actually led to us playing the very first heavy metal festival in Mongolia. It was a huge learning experience. It was very interesting. DK: Wow! When was that? BK: Uh.. That was... 2014, I believe. DK: Very cool. Welcome to the world of hellfire, Mongolia. BK: Yeah! It was awesome! It was a great time! DK: I can only imagine. BK: We took more time to go beyond the festival there, to kind of help our influences while we were there and do some travelling around. It was awesome! DK: That sounds like it would be a really wild experience. BK: It sure was! I feel like, even taking the extra time, it still wasn't enough time. DK: Absolutely. So, this is your third album? BK: Yeah, it's just a three song EP that we're releasing. We have more material planned that we'll hopefully be releasing as early as this year. DK: When will Warrior Spirit be available? BK: We don't have a set release date yet, but it should be around April or May. We're still getting all the dates finalized with the studio so we'll be announcing a release date fairly soon. DK: Perfect! Lemme know when you've got that in order and we'll put that up here. BK: Fer sure! DK: So, of all your material, what's the most fun for you to play? BK: The most fun? That's a tough one. We have such a broad range from our folky, folky folk songs to stuff that's much heavier. I like having that range, the diversity is fun to play. Subutai is a song that we always play, I think that's probably one of our favourites. It's almost always included in our set list. It's very fast-paced and gets the crowd going.

DK: I was poking through your stuff on Bandcamp, flipping through some lyrics, and I really liked Scourge of The East. Was it based on a specific battle, or is it generally historic fiction? BK: That one is pretty much just general historic fiction. I took kind of a mix of a historical and fictional approach with most of the album. A lot of the songs are based on real people and events from the empire, and then there's also stuff that... like, Storming The Wall, for example, is a fictional scenario where the Mongolians raided into China beyond the Great Wall. We've taken some artistic license as well. DK: Makes sense. It's very fertile ground to work with. There's a lot that you can do. So, in your writing process, some musicians won't listen to anything in the genre, just out of the need to not have a subconscious influence, is that something that you guys do, or do you listen to stuff that inspires you to push your selves and draw influence from those sources?

BK: Um, I don't think do it on purpose, necessarily, I think we do make a point of trying to separate ourselves from other genres. One of the reasons why we move forward with this, the Mongolian aesthetics and adopting their culture into our music is because folk-metal is surrounded by using different cultures in their music. It tends to be very saturated in the Scandinavian realm. DK: (laughs) BK: All these viking metal bands! It's just viking, viking, vikings! We wanted to do something a little bit different and went with an oriental approach. The Mongolian empire was one of the biggest empires in the world and there are very few bands that sing about that. So, we still listen to folk-metal and stuff, but at the same time, we try and distance ourself from other bands and create our own sound that's unique. DK: Perfect! What's your favourite metal band? BK: That's tough. (laughs) I couldn't really say for sure. Right now, I've been listening to...l don't even know what I've been listening to, it's pretty eclectic. DK: (laughs) Yeah, it always is. BK: (laughs) I've been listening to a lot of black metal and black thrash and generally heavy metal. I've been listening to Aura Noir, Ashbury... DK: If we were to press play on your ipod or record player or whatever you listen to music on, what would come on? BK: Umm... Let's see.. I'll open my ipod and we'll see what comes up... (laughs) DK: Everyone always has so much variety in there that you never know what's going to come up..
BK: So what came on mine was Edmonton's own The Begrime Exemonious, Primeval Satellites. So, I haven't been listening to too much folk metal lately, apparently. (laughs) DK: (laughs) I asked someone the same question recently and what came up was Rebecca Black's Friday. (laughs) It was wonderfully unexpected!
BK: (laughs) Yeah! It's good to keep a variety. Keeps it fun.
DK: Thanks for chatting today!
BK: Thanks!