Into The Deep & Dark Sonic Shadows

Forming in the early 2000’s TenHornedBeast is a British project that creates a rather distinctive blend of black ambience, doom, dark soundtracking elements, ritual and military percussion touches. It’s all the work of Christopher Walton, who during the mid-to-late 90’s was part of the infamous occultic dark ambient, neo-classical & ritual percussion duo Endvra. We interviewed the project back in 2010, and for this new interview, we discuss what TenHornedBeast has released/ been up to since, including its most recent release The Lamp Of No Light (Hymns For The York Doom Stone) on Cold Spring Records- which sees it’s sound stripped down to it’s sound at its most bare-bones/ sparse.

M[m]: It’s coming on for twelve years since we last interviewed you on M[m]. How do you feel the project has changed/ evolved over this period? And are you still using any kit you used at the start of the project in the early 2000’s?

Chris It has changed because I have changed, and being a sole proprietor TenHornedBeast is whatever I will it to be. Saying that I am aware that it is important to have continuity, whether that is the continuity of the traditions I illustrate with my music or a sonic continuity.

I am still using much the same gear I always have but the trick, for me at least, is to make new sounds for each album. I want each release to have its own identity and not sound like the last one, either in terms of the timbre of the sounds or the structure of the compositions.

In that respect, the pieces I am working on now are very lush and “colourful”, almost the opposite of the bleakness I tried to capture with The Lamp Of No Light.

 

M[m]: You mention the new material you’re working on is very lush and “colourful”. Any hints on themes/ concepts behind this new work, and when do you hope to put out your next album?

Chris It’s difficult to talk about because I want to keep as much as possible under wraps until it’s fully developed and ready to go but it’s fair to say that I swing from one extreme to another, so “The Lamp Of No Light” was – for me – an “indoor” album. It was cryptic and claustrophobic and had an energy that was lightless and Dead. I record at home so I can do as much or as little as I please whenever I feel like it so I’ve always got more than one thing on the go, and I find it helpful to be able to contrast things.

I’ve been working for a while on things that have a much more open, bright and “outdoor” energy in that I’m trying to make music that represents the sense of mystery and awareness that I sometimes find in wild places. In my experience this is seldom “dark” and is much likely to impress in a different way to the atmospheres of man-made places. As an example, I often visit an abandoned farmhouse in a very remote valley in Northumberland – all around it there are wide open spaces, wind-blown heather, tiny rivulets of water that form pools among grey sandstone boulders – then down in the valley there is a ruined farm that must have been abandoned since the 1940s. There are ruinous outbuildings, cattle sheds and sheep pens, a large barn with half a roof and the house itself which is just walls and chimneystack. I assume that the valuable masonry and roof slates were salvaged until all that’s left is a shard of a building – but it feels so different from the hills around it. It has a definite and immediate darkness and a heaviness; you feel that something is watching you and that bad things happened here that have left echoes. But when I leave it behind and step back into the heather the mood changes, it literally is a threshold. So, what I’m hoping to represent are the wide wind-blown uplands, the sun on rocks, the dawn on the hills and the numinous, ecstatic transcendence that I feel when I’m alone in very wild places.

How long is a piece of string? I’m a small artist making unpopular music for independent labels – which means that I need to limit my releases to what my small audience can support. The last album came out in 2022, I’d like to aim for 2024 with this next one if possible.

 

M[m]: A year or so after our interview Tenhornedbeast released its largest release to date-Ten Horned Moses Descended The Mountain, which was a three-CD set on Handmade Birds. Tell us a little bit about how this release came about, and have you thought of returning to a longer format like this again?

Chris Many times ideas come to me from outside of conscious thought, I’m sure a lot of people experience things just “popping” into their heads, that’s how the name TenHornedBeast came to me – I literally “saw” it in my mind as one continuous word. In a similar way the phrase “Ten Horned Moses Descended The Mountain” came to me fully formed. Since then I’ve done a lot of research into the lore of Horned Moses, visited churches with images in stained glass or caved figures but at the time I only had a very limited understanding of the motifs within the folklore but I knew that it appealed to me strongly.

About the same time, I began to become interested in what I called “macro composition”, very long – one might say unnecessarily long – pieces of music that were essentially static and evolved slowly, perhaps imperceptibly over time. I had been experimenting with these pieces for a while based on a comment made by the composer John Tavener that, for him, scared music must contain an essence of “stillness”. I was very taken by this idea, and it seemed to me that it was pertinent to the music I make, whether we call it Drone or Dark Ambient or whatever.

So, with these things in mind, I started to work on a series of very long, very evolutionary pieces of music that contained that Tavener element of stillness with the aim of illustrating Moses’ descent from the Mountain. I was thinking about the way He would have been transfigured, literally “horned” by his contact with the Divine, how he became something else – a Mediatory between the Worlds and how this act of revelation and the burden that it placed on him changed Him. This recording finally produced three complimentary pieces.

I initially pitched the project to Cold Spring, but I think the sheer size, cost and anti-commerciality put them off and they politely passed on the idea, although we did briefly kick around formats such as DVD and USB drives. About the same time Handmade Birds made contact and asked if I would consider releasing a TenHornedBeast album with them, so being the cheeky get I am I told them I had a three-disc project ready to go. I was expecting a polite no but to my shock they seemed to be thrilled and we began to work on the design and layout. I had hoped to do something more graphic with their artwork, but small labels have small budgets and it was more economic to use some of my landscape photos.

I can remember being very satisfied with Ten Horned Moses when it was released, although it was pressed on CDr rather than pro-CDs. One day I’d love to do a re-release on CD with different artwork, something like I originally envisaged, however, the scale of the project is intimidating to labels who need to turn a profit.

I’ve got several other very long unreleased pieces in the archive – and by very long I mean pieces around 60 minutes or longer. 20 minutes is probably an average length for me. Maybe they’ll see the light of day, I tend to return to pieces after a long time and re-record or tweak them – it’s a constant process of iteration and editing.

 

M[m]: you talk about the THB archive- have you ever considered releasing a box set of unreleased/ rare material? Talking of boxsets- have you ever considered putting out an Endvra- with all the albums, and rare stuff?

Chris The archive doesn’t really work that way – it’s a large collection of pieces that are constantly at work-in-progress stage. I’ve said it before in other interviews but the best way I’ve found to self-edit is to forget what I’ve done. I record pieces, work on them and take them where I can but I don’t force it. If it’s not working I save it, archive it and move on. I might return to a piece after months or years and have no real memory of what I’ve got, if I listen to it again and I like it then I work on it again and maybe the downtime between sessions gets shorter until I’m finishing the piece and putting a final mix on. That way I can avoid, as far as possible, the confirmation bias of thinking everything is just great! When you work with others you get a much more direct sense of when something is good or bad but being a one-man band you need to develop a strong sense of self-criticism. It’s a technique I was taught at university in respect of creative writing – when you finish writing something you’re riding the creative high that fuelled the work, so you need to put it away, forget about it and have another look with the benefit of a little perspective.

So, there is not a set of completed but unreleased work that would naturally form an anthology but there does exist a living body of ideas that grows every time I switch the gear on. We worked in a similar way in Endvra – it was almost like a production line of material, we recorded what we needed to and moved on to the next project. Very little was left over, it was all recycled and reworked into finished pieces – either album tracks or separate pieces to give to compilation projects, of which there were very many more in the 1990s than today.

The Endvra material is somewhat problematic – there have been a few failed attempts to re-release it but so far nothing has worked. There has been definite interest in the Black Eden album from a few labels over the years, perhaps it was the most “Black Metal” album in that it had the imagery and ideas that chimed with what was happening when it was released in 1996 – even though there is not a single guitar anywhere to be heard. I’ve had serious offers to re-release Black Eden on a quality vinyl release but so far it’s not something that has felt right. I’m against having a label cherry-pick what they believe to be the most profitable album if in doing that it destroys the possibility of a full re-release of the whole back catalogue. That would be the ideal – all of the albums plus the uncollected tracks together in one wholistic release, whether it makes financial sense and whether a label exists with the appetite to do it is another matter.

There is also the reality that as time passes my time, energy and motivation become more precious and I’ve got to use it for the best possible purpose – which at the moment is focusing on moving forward and saying new things with TenHornedBeast.

 

M[m]: For your next album, after a few collabs and a gap in releasing, you put out Death Has No Companion. This featured three long tracks, and I felt it seemed a lot more bleakly cinematic than the project's previous work. Would you agree with this sentiment, and if this is the case are you a general soundtrack fan?

Chris No, I’m not much of a soundtrack fan – in reality I’m not a film fan either. I’ve always found it an inferior medium in as much as it requires very little of an audience, you just sit and watch it. Of course I understand that there are films and Films, and there are a few Films that I genuinely love and which reward repeated viewings but on the whole music and literature have always been my preferred mediums. Saying that one of my favourites films is Aronofsky’s The Fountain and one of the most striking elements of the film, along with the narrative and visuals, is the beautiful soundtrack by Kronos Quartet and Clint Mansell, so maybe film has had more of an impact on me that I care to admit.

Death Has No Companion is definitely dark and bleak and in that it is completely reflective of my personal life at the time. I’m generally not a happy smiley person, which is not to say that I do not find joy and beauty and pleasure in life but I also have a dark, introspective side and can be prone to solitude and an inner isolation. During the time I was recording Death Has No Companion I was coming to important crossroads in my life and that definitely impacted on the mood of the album. I was also taking very long walks, although “walk” may not do them justice, across the winter landscapes of the North Pennines, especially the hills between Teesdale and Weardale. This was true isolation. I was out before it was light and would still be walking after dark. I was doing full days criss-crossing the hills, using completely empty snow-bound paths and also walking off-trail through knee-deep heather. It was a kind of physical numbing, using extreme exhaustion and endurance to still my mind and make sense of the decisions I had to make. It was on these walks that I took the photographs that were used for the cover of the album and also when the title of the album came to me, which the cultured will recognise as a Phil Lynott lyric. It is often the case that an album drifts along as a work in progress for months or years until the ideas that crystalise it come to me, once I’m certain of the ideas I want to express it becomes easier to shape and complete the final tracks and it was during these cold winter walks that I came to the decisions.

The track “The Wanderer” is a reference to the Old English poem of the same name and it seemed to fit my mood at the time. I used to recite to myself as I was walking, especially towards the end of the days when the sun was setting, the cold was biting and my knees were beginning to scream.

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?

Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?

Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?

Hwær sindon seledreamas?

Eala beorht bune!

Eala byrnwiga!

Eala þeodnes þrym!

 

 

M[m]: Bringing us up to date your most recent release is The Lamp Of No Light (Hymns For The York Doom Stone). Here you seemed to strip back your sound even further to a doomed and barren dark ambient focus. Over what period of time was this created, and did it develop/ change over time?

Chris This was my lockdown album. I had a lot of time to work on the album but also, perhaps, too much time. What I ended up doing was stripping down the pieces I had recorded to a sound palette of very dark and heavy tones and drum-beats. I think the sounds did change over time but they degraded rather than evolved. The tracks themselves were at one point more lush and expansive and that just wasn’t what was needed – I built them up then I broke them back down, taking out the things that didn’t serve the piece. I have a bad habit of over-producing my tracks, loading on layer upon layer to build something vast and epic. I’m aware of this and mitigate against it by spending time paring tracks down, it’s part of the composition process.

I wanted it to be subterranean, infernal and claustrophobic. The sounds needed to carry the ideas - death and damnation, the burden of sin, the literal reality of an eternal Hell as imagined by the people of Middle Ages. There was no space for softness or mystery, I wanted the sounds to be horrific and immediate.

 

M[m]: The new album is themed/influenced by The York Doom Stone- a 12th-century limestone craving that depicts hell, it’s centred around a cauldron to which the souls of the damned are being pushed and tortured by demons- it presently sits in the crypt at York Minster. Please talk about your first encounter with the stone & what your impression of it was?

Chris  As soon as something is forbidden it becomes even more desirable and as I was sat at home, prohibited from travelling my own country by people who we now know were bringing suitcases full of booze into Downing Street parties I became more and more desperate to see some of the things I had taken for granted. We were lucky in that we live in a relatively rural area and it was possible to get outside, even take relatively long journeys to walk in hills around the border in Northumberland but it was not possible to visit cities – and York, as the ancient capital of the North, holds a deep attraction for me.

I have always been a frustrated Medievalist and during lockdown, I used the time to really submerge myself in the carvings found on the Romanesque churches of the 11th and 12th centuries. There is a surprising amount of this carving extant and in my opinion it is far more powerful and interesting than the later Gothic period. There is a playfulness and mystery in the Romanesque, a sense that Christianity was still coalescing and forming around a credo but still had within it ideas and symbols that would later be exorcised as non-canonical and irreligious. It was this submersion in the signs and symbols that dominated the thought of 900 years ago that brought me to the Doom Stone.

I think I first saw the Doom Stone as a child but I really started to take notice of it around twenty years ago when I became fascinated by the Harrowing of Hell, the idea that during the three days of His death Christ journeyed to Hell and redeemed the forsaken souls that had been damned before His incarnation. Now, modern Christianity has abandoned this idea but it was an accepted reality of medieval life and raises some thorny theological problems – such as the nature of the transactional relationship between Christ and Satan – that seems to have been dealt with by simply wiping it from the dogma of the Church. However, it hasn’t gone away because there are still wall paintings, door knockers, corbel stones and stained glass depicting the Hellmouth and Doom Scenes. We also have the texts of medieval mystery plays and guild plays that reference the Harrowing of Hell and – in the crypt of York Minster – we have the Doom Stone as a visual text of the horrors the sinful could expect.

By synchronicity I am typing this on Good Friday 2023, the festival of dying and risen Christ. What is Christianity if not a continuation of the Mystery Cults of late antiquity! An incarnate god born of a virgin, dying and rising in cyclic renewal.

The Doom Stone is the kind of thing the modern Church would rather we didn’t think about, perhaps that’s why it is tucked away deep in the crypt of the minster. It is a visceral piece of art, demons torment both the souls and the bodies of the damned. For a medieval audience of most illiterate people, this would be a textual example of why it was important to live a good life – it was art as instruction and warning.

 

M[m]: The Lamp Of No Light really does seem to suck you back to a deep, dark and shadowy medieval past. What do you think is so intriguing about this time/ period?.

Chris For me it has always been partly a rejection of the modern world, however oxymoronic that may sound as people in the Middle Ages were obviously experiencing their own modern world! As a child, I was drawn to the romance – castles, knights and crusades but my first serious experience of the Medieval was via literature. As a child, I became deeply involved in the work of Professor Tolkien and if one persists in that interest there are two choices – the nerdy “fantasy” world of role-playing games and geeky shit or the study of Medieval language and literature. For me Tolkien was a gateway drug to Medievalism and I was lucky enough to have an English teacher at my bog-standard comprehensive school who recognised this and ordered a load of academic Middle English, Old English texts and also translations of early Irish, Welsh and Old Norse texts for me from the county library. I would take these home and be reading the Tain Bo or The Battle of Maldon when I should have been revising for my Maths and Physics O levels.

The Paradox of the Middle Ages (which it itself is an incredibly long and diverse period) is that people were both very similar to us but at the same time entirely different and with very distinct values and idea. A few years ago I attended a demonstration of medieval coin making – the man who was giving the demonstration was an incredibly well-informed Living History enthusiast, he spoke about how the Black Death had reduced the workforce of England to such an extent that working men could command higher wages and could afford to work for a month then have a month off, with enough to support themselves and their families. Imagine that - earning so much you only have to work six months of the year! Obviously this state of affairs didn’t suit the ruling elite and we all know how that ended.

I’m not sure people like us who have the conveniences of the modern world would actually want to experience the realities of life in the Middle Ages, just as people in the 14th century didn’t want to experience the privations of the Iron Age, but there were certain points of view – social, religious and artistic that do hold an attraction for me.

 

M[m]: Sonically what do you see as the sonic influences on the album, and was there any medieval music in its make-up?

Chris No, definitely no genuine medieval music. I’m not an expert in early music but from what I understand it was written and performed in certain contexts – sacred, courtly and the vernacular folk music of everyday people. I would very much doubt if anybody in the middle-ages would have dared to write music for the doomed souls in Hell! It would have been unthinkable, and possibly fatal.

Sonically, I suppose an influence was those early Swedish masters of Death Industrial and Dark Ambient that influenced me thirty years ago and who were, to an extent, our contemporaries in Endvra: Archon Satani, Megaptera, Morthond, Brighter Death Now, In Slaughter Natives. I did not set out to replicate their sound but rather to replicate the impact their music had on me as a young man in the early 1990s. It was a real window into another mindset, and I think it has always struck me as the pinnacle of that sound. If I can channel a few fragments of that darkness I will have succeeded.

 

M[m]: Have you ever considered playing near or around ancient stonework/ monuments?. And if you could please select a few locations you’d like to play?

Chris Not at megalithic sites but I did have an idea a few years ago about building aeolian harps and installing them along a very remote stream so that their sound filled the valley. I would then invite people to walk into the valley and immerse themselves in the sound. It needs revision though, the site I favour is at least five or six miles from the nearest B road and I doubt people will be interested enough to hike in what with the hills, streams and ticks.

 

M[m]: I know you enjoy walking/being in nature- what are some of your favourite locations/ recent discoveries?

Chris I love the hills along the border between England and Scotland. It is a vast an empty part of the country with enough to keep anybody busy for life. When I go there I try to walk in from the Scottish side because it’s even more remote and there is even less chance of seeing other people, apart from the occasional shepherd or gamekeeper. I have found valleys and colls along the Border Ridge that have no name, where on a clear day you can see almost north to the Pentland Hills or south to the mouth of the Tyne. There are snakes, buzzards, wild goats that are almost identical to those herded by Neolithic pastoralists. There are hundreds of hill forts, megalithic sites and rock art panels. There are Roman camps, pele towers of Reiver families and ancient churches. I am pleased that it is so hard to get to that most people never see it or it would become as intolerable as the Lake District.

I’ve become fascinated by the Cotswolds in the last year, maybe because they are so cosy and quaint and the opposite of the wild uplands of the North that I know. I’ve driven through them a few times on the way to somewhere else but I’d like to spend more time there, especially the western edge that looks down into the vale of the Severn, from Chipping Camden in the north to Cheltenham in the south. It looked beautiful and I am more than happy to test the trespass laws and vigilance of the local gentry.

My heimat, though, is the woodland and hills along the valley of the River Wear in central County Durham. I’ve walked this area since childhood but it still fascinates me. When I was a kid more people had seen the Loch Ness Monster than a lowland otter but these days I can find their track and sign all along the river. It’s not unusual to see Red Kites soaring along the valley and Buzzards are so common that they sit at watch you as you walk along the edge of the fields. There has also been a huge explosion in the Roe Deer population, they are everywhere and with a bit of stealth and quiet they are easily stalked. This is a serious re-wilding of the landscape that only fifty years ago was polluted with agrichemicals and fouled by extractive industries.

 

M[m]: What has recently impacted you in the last few months- be it music, film, literature, or art?

Chris I’m an eclectic reader. Recently I’ve been working my way through the works of Bede, his life of Saint Cuthbert is beautifully written and has much to recommend it to those who are interested in the links with an animate landscape and the early church in Northumbria, which may just be me!

I’ve also been reading about Shinto in modern Japan and have been trying to combat insomnia by reading the novels of John Buchan, a wonderfully reactionary Imperialist Tory social climber. I’m sure we would have loathed each other in person but his novels, very much popular “shockers” when published, sometimes rise to the level of great literature and offer a different view of the early 20th century than we were taught at school.

 Music – much the same as I’ve always listened to. I’m really looking forward to Cirith Ungol and Atlantean Kodex playing Durham in May and I can’t describe how excited I am to see US Doom Metal legends Orodruin when they tour the UK in July. I’ll probably catch Bolzer once or twice when they tour in June and I can recommend the particularly nasty and aggressive War Metal made in India and Sri Lanka – Genocide Shrine, Kapala, Tetragrammacide are good places to start. They play without any hope of getting an instrument endorsement or a mid-afternoon slot on some wanky festival. It’s good to hear bands not holding back.

Thanks to Chris for his time & effort with the interview. The Lamp Of No Light (Hymns For The York Doom Stone) can be purchased directly  here from Cold Spring. If you would like to read the first interview with the project head here