Arctos

    At long last this is finally going to see the light of day! In February I tracked down Dan Von Thrash and we had a chat about the birth and developement of Arctos while it was a somewhat top-secret project lurking in the shadows. Since we chatted Arctos has taken the stage and released their album: A Spire Silent. Catch up with them on their Facebook page for updates, or get a copy of their album through Bandcamp.

Dan: Hello there.

A Spire Silent

DK: Hey! How's it going?

Dan: Not to bad. This is Imo---?

DK: Yeah, close enough.

Dan: Ah, ok. I figured I wasn't gonna get that one on the first go.

DK: No one ever does. It's all good.

Dan: That is your real name?

DK: Yep. That gibberish that appears on my social media is, in fact, my real name. My parents were alcoholics. 

Dan: That's fantastic! Even the weird part?

DK: Yep! So, Arctos, how is that pronounced?

Dan: Pretty much as you said it. I believe it's Latin so we're not gonna correct anybody who says it any differently. If you wanna say it a different way that's completely fine.

DK: How long have you guys been writing together?

Dan: We've been writing specifically for Arctos for, coming up on three years now. Josh, the drummer, myself, and my brother Nick were playing in Trollband for about a year, or two years or so. Trollband went on a hiatus for a bit and we decided that we were gonna just keep on jammin' and writing by ourselves. I mean, it's fun, why would you not do that?

DK: Exactly! Do you find that there's any real crossover between your Troll stuff and the Arctos stuff?

Image by Dana Zuk Photography

Dan:  Um.. A little bit. From it's inception, Trollband has changed quite a bit stylistically. At the time that we stopped playing with Trollband, when we went on hiatus we were definitely moving in that darker, more black metal direction. Our music is similar in some aspects to Trollband but with darker atmosphere, and it's taking it’s own path. Since day one, this material was uniquely Arctos and it continues to evolve and grow of it’s own accord.

DK: Cool. It's good to keep that separation in there and not have two bands that just sound the same.

Dan: Yeah, that would be weird and probably quite awkward.

DK: It would. You'd be playing a show then suddenly your playing stuff from the other project, the audience is confused...

Dan: I hope to never be in that situation.

DK: Yeah, sure there's unintentional comedy, but you'd lose a lot of credibility.

Dan: No kidding.

DK: What's the highlight of Arctos for you? What's the most fun to play?

Dan: I would say... finally putting it out there and releasing it. There's only so much time you can spend perfecting something or getting to a place where you're comfortable with it. Honestly, if comfort is a factor all the time, a lot of releases just wouldn't actually make it into the public realm, so we just set a hard date and said “Let's just get this out there.” We needed to start somewhere. We can't keep nitpicking ourselves to death. Most of these songs have probably changed a dozen times. It's an evolution. The songs are good the way they are. It's a process and we need to respect it. It'll affect our future song writing, but we need to cut it off and say “These songs are good,” let 'em lay and get them out there. It's been about three years of basically operating in the shadows, which is fine because you've gotta take time with things. The thing I'm most proud of is finally stepping into the public with these.

DK: How close to recording are you?

Dan: We're actually about 80% done. Just last night I finished all the strings, we've got all the drums down, so it's just down to vocals then mixing and mastering.  

DK: Perfect! You're almost there.

Dan: Yeah! We're making pretty good progress.

High in the Rockies. Photo credit: Arctos

DK: What's your projected release date?

Dan: We're speculating. If life goes as projected, which life never does, we're hoping for sometime in later February.

DK: Perfect! That's right around the corner.

Dan: I know! I was surprised. That tends to happen.  

DK: Absolutely. It seems like it's so far away, then all of a sudden you're like “Holy shit, it's here now.”

Dan: Absolutely.


DK: Are you planning the release party yet? How are you planning on dropping it?

Dan: Not really a party, we have some prospective shows lined up. We haven't actually really talked about that. We're just focusing really hard on getting this thing done then we'll start looking at what we'll do with this thing now that we have it.

DK: Fair enough. I guess that's something that takes a bit more planning. When you're focused on recording the actual aftermath of that comes later. You'll wanna give it equal attention and present it in the right way.

Photo credit: Dana Zuk Photography

Photo credit: Dana Zuk Photography

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. I think we started tracking for this back in November. We all have very busy lives. My brother, he's over in Europe. He's been living there for a while. Sometimes communication and moving things forward... you can't rush it too, too much, so... We're taking the time to get it done properly but we're also... we haven't been slacking, we've been getting it done as fast as our lives can allow.

DK: You're keeping a regular schedule, keeping a killing pace but sometimes that has speed bumps.

Dan: This is very true.

DK: So, you write with your brother, but he's in Europe, how do you find that working out?

Dan: Well, he and I, we do a lot of sharing of guitar profiles and voice recordings. He's only been in Europe since about October but, before then, he was living down in Canmore and I was in Edmonton so there was still the distance factor. He and I are both stylistically on the same page, for the most part. We're very comfortable bouncing ideas off each other and critiquing and extrapolating from those ideas, so the distance thing isn't a huge deal, but sometimes it makes for conflicting schedules.

DK: Gotcha. That's cool that it's working that way; that you have that chemistry and you know each other well enough that you can work with it. Distance is quite the challenge.

Dan: We're not afraid to tell each other if one of us made something that sounds fucking terrible.

DK: That can be difficult at times when you've got a real “sensitive” one. Being able to just bluntly say, “Dude, that sucked!” is such a wonderful thing.  

Dan: The group dynamic that we have within the band, is a very honest, upfront, dynamic and that's very... I appreciate that more than I can possibly express. It's such a breath of fresh air.

Photo credit: Dana Zuk Photography

DK: Has that been a big challenge in the past?

Dan: I think it always factors into any project that you do, but in general I think there's people that... people seem to be very afraid to just be straight up about how they feel about something. If they have a problem they're not gonna attack directly, they'll kinda pussy-foot around the issue and then it just becomes a way bigger problem. I don't wanna have to deal with that when it comes to our music and making it happen. It's very personal.  That's one headache we can all live without, and happily don't have to deal with in this case.

DK: That's a bonus, for sure. Straightforwardness certainly streamlines the whole process. so, you've played a few shows, you've been writing together for a while, what's one of the wilder experiences that you've had during a show? Something that's gone haywire, off the rails, or just plain nuts...

Dan: I should correct you, sorry, we haven't played a show yet as Arctos. Most of us have played together in Trollband so we have that history.

DK: Brand spanky new! That's fantastic! How exited are you to do your first show?

Dan: Absolutely! I'm very curious to see how this will be received publicly, but I don't know how important that really is to me. We're all very proud of this music and we just want to play it live. It'll be super rewarding to do that. If people like it, that's great, but we're not writing music for other people as much as we're writing it because this is the music that we want to hear.

DK: That's the best reason. You see a gap in what's out there and you go, “I wanna hear something that sounds like “THIS,” let's create it.”

Dan: Precisely.

DK: So your album is almost done, you haven't actually played a show with it yet, I noticed a lack of online presence...

Dan: Yeeeeahaah... We're just coming back to that thing... we just wanted to make sure that we have everything at the place where we wanted it to be before we put it out there. You think you might be doing that because you're worried about what other people might think about it, but it's mostly so that when we look back at this release we can like, “Ok, we did the work, we got it to a good place,” so we don't look back and are ashamed of ourselves and say, “Man, we really cut corners. We could've done this a lot better.” We probably could have booted this up online and publicly, maybe even played some shows too, but I'm happy with the path that we took to get here.

DK: It's kinda like a secret mission that you're on. It's definitely very hidden. Top secret.

Dan: We live in an age where nothing is secret. Everything can be monitored at the touch of your phone. Having a bit of that unknown factor is an intangible benefit. It's one that is very hard to have these days.

DK: Absolutely. There's no mystery to anything. Keeping something out of the public eye definitely builds that, which is super cool.  

Dan: Yeah.

DK: Kind of curious, where is Old Goat Glacier?

Dan: It's a glacier in the Canadian Rockies where we spend some time.


DK: “Old Goat” has a great sound to it, it seems like it would be a magnet for metal bands.  How would you describe the tone of the album?

Dan: The tone of the album... the non-existent one... The album basically centres on 3 songs. They're not necessarily linked but you can definitely draw a very linear path through them. It has definite themes of emptiness, self-discovery, and the sort of triumph that you feel after you've pushed yourself through something incredibly difficult and you've gained a new perspective on your life, your situation and that may be a very hard triumph, and one that maybe doesn't feel very good at the time, but it's an important one. I don't know how to describe that feeling. Enlightenment?

DK: So is the name of the album, “A Spire Silent,” or was that just a great caption for a photo?


Dan: Most likely that will be the name of the album. For certain it is the name of the final song on the album.

DK: That's something to look forward to. It sounds pretty exciting, to say the least. “Arctos is the voice of the mountains, the call of the rising wild.” Is that a modified quote you found somewhere, or is that something that you guys wrote?

Dan: We were just trying to define what our music is. We say we're melodic black metal, but I honestly have no idea if people will agree on that. There are so many different sounds, themes, and concepts that we have included in our music that we kind of tried to think about what inspires us. We looked around an saw that we're inspired by our landscape, being in the mountains, and being able to be introspective. It could be taken literally as the mountains speak to you, they put you in a mood where you can think without clutter or distraction. The places that it takes you after that, that's the true wilderness, that's the rising wild.

DK: Perfect. The landscape of your subconscious and everything that lies within it.

Dan: Absolutely. I hope that's not too “hippy” sounding.

DK: No, not at all. Very succinct. It says a lot and really puts into words a strong element of black metal. So, thank you for taking the time to chat with me today.
       
Dan: Thank you.  

Written by Dink Kickin.