Interview: Abduction

Interview by Dayal Patterson

Abduction must be considered one of the UK’s most active and prolific Black Metal bands, having already released five extremely consistent full-length albums – as well as several EPs and demos – in barely a decade of existence. Just as impressively, this otherworldly entity has rapidly grown from a one-man operation to a full band, taking advantage of this evolution by embarking on numerous tours and playing a wealth of warmly-received festival appearances at the likes of Damnation, Bloodstock, Incineration, Fortress, Doomsday, Samhain and Reaperfest.

This year’s apocalyptic Existentialismus album proved to be a highlight in the discography, offering a return to a more stripped-down sound after 2022’s fiercely expansive Black Blood. The result was arguably Abduction’s most emotionally complex and personal recording to date, with the almost unrelenting aural violence of the earlier material remaining firmly in place, but soaked in a new level of emotion, perhaps echoing the sole songwriter’s A|V ongoing personal investment in his art. We caught up with him to find out more…

This Is Black Metal: You released Existentialismus earlier this year – how has the reception been to the record, would you say?

A|V: “Very, very good. It’s a really odd period because we’ve had such a quiet summer after a big release. It’s a bit disjointed, but the initial reactions were really good – all the reviews were four out of five, five out of five, ten out of ten, that kind of thing, which is nice to hear obviously. I mean, we worked for a long time on it – I’m sure people say that all the time, but I’m quite used to sort of throwing something together and then just putting it out there historically.

This time, we spent a lot more time on this in terms of production, and the label schedule held the release back for a bit as well, so there’s been a lot more time for it to kind of stew. So I’m just kind of glad it’s done with, in a way…. that makes it sound more negative than it is [laughs].”

TIBM: For the first five years of the band, you were issuing at least one release a year, but this was your first album in almost three years.

A|V: “Yeah, I had a lot more time to do that before. Things change in your life, and this is just a result of added responsibility at work, fatherhood and things like that. I mean, in the early days, I was just at a shitty job and had a lot of time in the evenings and school holidays and just cracked on with stuff all the time. Then it’s really easy to just kind of collate those works and work them into a record and then say, ‘There’s an album.’ This time around… I mean, I’ve only just picked up my guitar again for the first time this year, so that’s the comparison, you know?”

Abduction ~ Photo by Necroshorns

TIBM: Do you think you spent more time on this record than on previous albums, or was it just that the work was spread over a longer period of time?

A|V: “I think we probably spent about the same amount of time as Black Blood, but obviously, we were working with Necromorbus, and that was an extra bit of the process. But I think we needed that, I think it needed the finesse of somebody who is an actual producer, rather than just me in my bedroom. And the album definitely benefited from that; it’s got a separation and a shine to it that just sits leagues above anything else.”

TIBM: What was Necromorbus’ role in the record’s creation?

A|V: “Producing, mixing, and mastering. I mean, ‘produces’ is a loose term, isn’t it? I’ve essentially produced it, in terms of deciding where things go and the writing side of producing, that’s all me, but he’s produced it from a sense of…you know, the wall of sound, and what that looks like. What amps we should be using and things like that. From a technical side, he’s very much a producer, but from a songwriting side, I produced it, I suppose.”

TIBM: Where were you recording?

A|V: “In Nottingham, as normal, Stuck On A Name Studios, with a good friend of mine, Ian Bolt. We did the same with Black Blood and All Pain Is Penance. But this time around, we gave the stems – the raw recordings – to somebody else as part of the process. It was a new thing for us, but absolutely worth doing.”

TIBM: Does Abduction feel more like a full band now, given that you created this album with the live line-up?

A|V: “We feel like a strong unit now, we really do. Not that we ever felt like a weak unit, but it’s solidified into something more than just me. The other guys will 100 percent be playing their parts, at the very least, on the next record. I think I’ll probably still be the chief writer and assembler of things, because I think that’s a good pattern to follow, but they’ll definitely have a bit more involvement in the recording process.

We’ve done a lot of live stuff in the last year or so, little tours and European things, and we really are one unit now, it’s definitely more than just me and a mask.”

TIBM: It’s been a fairly quick transition from Abduction existing as a one-man band to the current set-up. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was watching you play a one-man performance at Bloodstock Festival, for example.

A|V: “It feels like ages to me because we’ve done so many things [laughs]. I mean, this summer has been the quietest it’s been for Abduction for, I don’t know, three years or something. We did the Infernal Sea tour, toured with Ulcerate in Europe, and’ve done various other things in Barcelona and Estonia over the last 12 months, up until the summer. It felt like we were out every weekend, or for a week or so.

And you kind of mould yourself as a band in those times, because you’re spending days and days no more than about three feet away from each other. That seeps into everything, really.”

TIBM: Is it an easier process to have a full band behind you, or does that throw up a lot of new challenges? I mean, if we’re looking at your release schedule, we might presume it has slowed things down a bit, but as we’ve touched upon, other factors contributed to that as well.

A|V: “Yeah, I think the slowing down of the release schedule is largely due to other factors. It’s not the guys I’m working with. When I have something ready, I’ll send it to them, and they’ll learn it in a day or two. Even in the recording process, it’s the same thing; they’re quick to react and extremely professional, so it’s never been because of them. I think the quickness of the early stuff is definitely down to time, and I’ve got a bit more impulse control now. I insisted on doing everything in one take in the early stuff, pretty much start to finish, not dropping myself in certain parts and things because, to be honest, I didn’t really know how to do it properly with the equipment I was using.

So I just kind of forced myself through it, and I quite liked the idea of having those wrong notes, those wrong moments, those moments where I’m just going, ‘Oh, I’m not quite sure,’ and it felt like it was all going to collapse. So those are largely gone because the guys are way more professional than I am, but we try to keep some of that kind of looseness and chaos in there.”

TIBM: And does playing live regularly with a full band affect the way you write songs? Do you write at all with the live show or the band dynamic in mind?

A|V: “No, I think they’re two very separate processes for me. I mean, if you’re writing something, you always have to consider, can we actually play this live? You know, is it three million beats per minute or whatever? But when it’s the writing process, I largely think, ‘What can I create?’ rather than, ‘How do I create this live? ’There are limits, obviously, but I think I put stuff together as its own thing. There might come a point where I end up deciding to record something, and it’s something we can’t do live. It’s very much a natural and organic process, the writing and recording, it has to be. I think that’s the most important thing for this sort of style of music.”

TIBM: As the band’s songwriter, do you feel your musical inspirations have changed at all over the years? Do you ever listen to new music and feel that it has an impact on your writing, or are you still kind of working from the same palette?

A|V: “I think that’s a good question. Some things come up; there are releases that come out every now and again that get you excited. But I think it’s largely the same palette, a random selection of bands really like Mgła, Enslaved, Xasthur, Leviathan… there’s obviously a really big early influence from those, especially those one-man bands.

I mean, none of them play live; if you were to take something like Leviathan and make that a live band, fucking hell, that would just destroy everything. There are some layers in there and some true evil that so far has only been put to tape and hasn’t been exalted live, and I’d love to see that. I guess I’m sort of trying to achieve that in some sense – they were a huge influence in the early days, and I kind of carried that through.”

Abduction LIVE

TIBM: Was it always your intention to play live?

A|V: “No, not at all. I just did my little tape Demo and gave it out in the woods. I’ve been in plenty of other bands, but this was a sort of a side project, I suppose. I was going to the Blackwood Gathering [festival] as a fan, and it was coming up, and I had some bits and bobs of music on my laptop, and I was like, ‘Yeah, wouldn’t it be cool to just release these Tapes anonymously in the woods and leave them for people to find.’ So that’s what I did. I managed to sort of get it together and made ten Demos. And that’s how it started.”

TIBM: You did begin performing live even before you had a full line-up, though, which is quite unusual.

A|V: “I just thought, ‘Well, I’ll give it a go.’ I found a way to do it quite easily in terms of the mechanics of it, an easy way of doing it that I hadn’t really seen anyone do before. It’s a boring situation involving cables, but that led me to sort of play along with it in my house. And it’s like, ‘Well, hold on a minute, this could, this could work live.’ And it was a bit of a joke really, but it’s gotten a bit out of hand now after nearly ten years.”

TIBM: And the band continues to grow, it seems – what’s next for Abduction?

A|V: “We are in London for the Spectral Wound show in November, then there’s the two German dates. De Mortem Et Diabolum, then there’s another festival the day after, which we’re also doing. That’s it for the year, really, but we’ve got quite a lot of things in the pipeline for next year in Europe and places we haven’t been to. You know, we’ll be going to Austria and some other places. I can’t really say yet. So yeah, we should have a much busier year off the back of Existentialismus!”