Ezekiel RodofiliBrendan has been immersing himself within music for a good long while, and part of that immersion has involved the creation of and playing some. Shortly after playing shows with Dumbsaint and Altars, I was afforded the opportunity to speak with Brendan Sloan about these bands, as well as Convulsing.
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Ez: You work in extreme music. You play extreme music. You play a lot of death metal, i.e.: Altars, Convulsing, but it’s not “standard” death metal. There’s a lot going on in it.
What is it about going beyond the trappings of a single genre that you find appealing?
Brendan: Well, I don’t think of myself as a metal musician. I spend quite a lot of my time listening to extreme music and some of it sounds like metal, but generally, the type of personality I have is that if I like something I want to go to the extremes of it anyway.
When I started my job and I had my first cup of coffee as an adult that I enjoyed, it was a nice sort of filter coffee around the corner from where I worked in Redfern. From that point on I went head first on a ninety degree downward slope into the extremes of it. Measuring total dissolved solids with a probe, and measuring and weighing and doing all the stuff, and it’s like that for me with music.
I’m genre agnostic in that sense, where the extremity that I’m looking for can be one of many things. It can be extremely slow, sparse, fast. It can be extremely sorrowful, cold, extreme virtuosity, noise… I find myself in those places because I wanna hear the best of the thing it has to offer, and it just so happens that metal has a lot of the best musicians that music has to offer in the same way that jazz does.
But also, so do singer-songwriter genres. Some of the best, heaviest songs I’ve heard in my life have been made by, basically, anti-music, indie people who objectively can’t play their instruments and aren’t interested in learning how but have made something powerful with that energy.
So in a roundabout way, my answer to the question is that it’s not metal and it’s not anything in particular. Because of that outlook on the whole thing, I don’t think of the music that I’m making as having a particular boundary. It’s about what expresses the thing correctly, whether that’s heavy, fast guitars tuned to drop a, or whether it’s like a sparkly telecaster in Nashville tuning, or whatever. It’s all the same. It’s all music. We’ve all got the same notes, which is the general prevailing thing.
As time goes on I’m trying to be braver, I guess, with Convulsing. The tendency as a person who likes metal and listens to a lot of it is to make it and make it within a limited fence and think about it academically while you’re making it as “I’m not allowed to do this, or say this”, or “I can’t put clean vocals in it because x y z won’t listen to it, or I can’t do this kind of beat, or this is too much like Opeth, or too much like whatever”, and I’m trying to get over that conditioning as time goes on.
Ez: So then, with the music that you play, would you say that the framing of metal is merely the medium in which you use to express your ideas, regardless of how they sound relative to that medium?
Brendan: Yeah, I guess so. When people ask me to describe convulsing, at least the way that I describe it is extreme music, not extreme metal. I thought of it, and then I told a friend about it and he was like “Yeah, I’ve been calling my shit this for years”. Ingressive metal as opposed to progressive metal, or egressive metal or something like that. What I’m trying to do with Convulsing specifically is analyse and process things that I’m thinking about, and events that have happened to me, and my development, and as I move through the world, what is happening around me and to me and to other people, and my place in the whole thing. It is obviously a metal band in some sense, but I don’t think of it as one. The next thing will be whatever the mood strikes.
A lot of the music I listen to isn’t metal, so it’s turning up more and more as I get braver about what to include and what feels relevant.
Ez: You did mention before hearing these artists who can’t play their instruments make some really powerful music. Do you feel that as you’ve become more talented, your music’s become less powerful?
Brendan: No, but you do have to do a lot of work. The thing that makes an easy path to powerful music is naïveté, I feel. This is the classic thing: You learn music theory and then you spend as much, if not more time unlearning the theory so you can play with naïveté and impulse, and reconnect to the source and get out of your head. The people making music who haven’t studied, or don’t have the interest in studying music are no less musicians than anyone else, but what they are playing with is the naïveté of “This is the tool that I have and I need to express myself with it at all costs”, and so that often has the result of being really compelling. It sometimes doesn’t, but eventually… that’s the beauty of it.
After a certain point you kind of wish you could go back to not being able to play your instrument, because the decisions that you make when you “can’t play” are more personal and unique to you than anything you can be taught or learn, so that’s what I mean by that.
I don’t think it makes you better or worse. If used correctly, the naïveté of not really knowing what you’re doing is a powerful tool.
Ez: I think the other thing as well is that when you’re in a position where you’re kind of forced to work with whatever extension that you have, you do quickly learn – maybe not consciously or actively – how to express yourself through that extension.
Brendan: Yeah. The jazz canon is a lot like that. There’s so much orthodoxy about how it’s done, and how you play over this particular cadence or particular change. You’ve gotta play “Donna Lee”; you’ve gotta play “Quiet Breaker”; you’ve gotta play “Giant Steps”; you’ve gotta be able to improvise over “Giant Steps” chromatically. All these things, and you get taught this is how it’s done, but that’s not really how music works. When those things were invented, there wasn’t that template. They created the template. It’s useful to engage with it so you know you have an education of what has transpired in music, but that’s all it should be. Just knowing it’s there can influence you to take a road, but it shouldn’t lock you into anything.
Ez: So in what ways do you see a connection between Dumbsaint, Convulsing and Altars?
Brendan: They are all connected in a very direct way. I’ve mentioned this a handful of times, but I joined Dumbsaint after watching them play and signing up at the merch desk to a newsletter. Nick, the drummer, found me on The Internet, which is very out of character for him to just reach out to people and talk to them. He’s pretty insular, but for whatever reason he began messaging me about something. I can’t remember what it was about, and we learned we are both into disgusting goregrind and horrible-sounding metal and these stupid, absurd early Internet memes.
We’re quite similar in that sense, and even while Dumbsaint was dissolved, every couple of weeks sending something like “here’s the new Effluence record, or some standard elite, horrible toilet goregrind thing”. But anyway, he asked me to join that band because they were exiting the current guitar player at the time, and he knew I was a guitar player and didn’t have anything else to do, more or less, and we had shared interests and the aims of the band… I understood the mission. I understood the assignment of what they were trying to do, so I joined.
Convulsing I started after that. Sort of around the same time, maybe a little bit earlier; my grandmother died, and I was struck by the thought that she was my biggest supporter in my life. She pushed me into it from a young age, kind of softly, and was more interested in music than anybody else in my family by a long shot. So when she died the realisation hit me that I hadn’t done anything or showed her anything with my own creative soul, and I became really despondent at that thought; that my greatest supporter was gone and she never saw the reward for doing it. So I started writing bits and pieces of music, just in the background to Dumbsaint.
Then Altars played a show in 2015 or 16 or something. Maybe it was 17? I don’t know. It was the last Sydney show before the band stopped. They played at the then-Bald Faced Stag, and I took Alex Wilson from Sleepmakeswaves, and Nick from Dumbsaint and we all watched Altars, and I bought a hoodie from Lewis at that gig.
After that we thought “Well okay. So, we’re all writing independent, random bits of music that don’t fit in any of our bands and we have a shared interest in this kind of music. We’ve got a perfectly good trio here. Why don’t we have a go? Guitar, bass, drums; why don’t we see if we can do something?” So I’ve got some recordings of Convulsing 1.0. It wasn’t called that; It was just like Alex, Brendan and Nick at Top End, and it’s in a folder somewhere, with the embryonics of what would become the first two or three songs of the first Convulsing record.
So Dumbsaint, Sleepmakeswaves and Bird’s Robe kind of created Convulsing in that way… had a hand in it. And Altars also had a hand in it ’cause we all went to watch Altars, and so, that’s more or less how they’re all linked. The very basic level is that I’m doing Convulsing because I went to see Altars with members of Dumbsaint *laughs* and Sleepmakeswaves. They’re directly linked in terms of how they came to be.
I wound up in Altars because I moved to Adelaide when Dumbsaint concluded and released an album, and Altars was dead in the water. And some time around 2020, 2021, I think… just before the pandemic really struck, Lewis (Fischer) decided he wanted to revive the project and do another record, and he was going back and forth between Melbourne and Adelaide to visit his family. I think in a particular outbreak moment, the border shut behind him when he came across. Altars and Convulsing were supposed to do an east coast tour together to celebrate Altars getting back together and writing a new album, but instead I ended up in the band finishing the album because Lewis got stuck in Adelaide and it was just proximal and easy, so now I’m in the band.
Ez: *laughs*
Brendan: So, go to watch Altars with band mate and kind of band mate, Alex. Form one project because they lose interest, or couldn’t really stick the landing on getting it done as a trio so I just took it away and did it myself. Then main band dies and move to Adelaide, and join the original band went and saw ten years prior, in sort of an Ouroboros.
That’s as succinct I can make it. It’s a really meandering thing. A lot of assumed knowledge *laughs*
Ez: I love meandering.
I [now] know who Dumbsaint are. That was my first, and hopefully not only time seeing you guys.
Brendan: Whatever happens now will be completely different I think. In your interview with Nick, he sort of floated the idea that he is engaging with this stuff better, and playing better and feeling better about it than he ever has in the past, and I think that is true.
I think the interest is there. There’s potential there that it will move forward, but it’ll be something that doesn’t resemble very closely anything we’ve done in the past. We kind of reached the zenith with the whole Panorama project, and then we gave it its rock band mode, playing the three shows with toe, and so now it can kind of be fully retired.
The music emerged from behind the video and got to fully speak for itself, and now it can fully go back into the time capsule, so anything that happens now will be a reimagining of what’s the kind of music this trio makes in 2024/5. What do we have to say now?
Ez: We’ll move to Convulsing in a sec, but touching on Dumbsaint for a moment, at the [toe] show you spoke to me a bit about your thoughts on how it went shortly before someone assumed I was in the band with you.
Brendan: *laughs*
Ez: Now that it’s been a little more than a week, what were your thoughts on those three shows? You’ve said that those were conclusive to that era, but now you’ve a bit more… about it.
Brendan: Barring the oddity of doing it with a phantom bass player and no visuals, and a few of the things that felt core to the Dumbsaint experience; especially the things that excited me when seeing Dumbsaint way back was seeing it with the films, because that’s the kind of pretentious shit that I go for; music that demands a lot of you as the listener and you have to pay attention to it and be reflective and get inside of it and think about what it’s trying to say to you. You can’t listen to it in the background, or while having a conversation. It’s demanding something from you.
That’s not to say that music which doesn’t demand things from you is bad. I tend to prefer music that asks a lot of me to engage with it, which is why I love jazz so much. Jazz at its best, when you’re fully engaging with it, is kind of you inserting yourself in the ensemble and imagining what you would do if they were like “You’ve got sixteen bars to solo, go!” That part of my brain lights up when I’m listening to music like that, and it was the same with Dumbsaint. So it felt weird not having those things.
The demands for the audience were lowered quite a lot, but in a funny way, that made the material hit better. Because the audience wasn’t being asked to do so much to join us, all they had to do was listen. It felt like it went over a lot better, and we could somehow get a bit more comfortable, even though it was deeply uncomfortable to be testing this live.
We didn’t have a warm-up gig; we just went straight out, and The Triffid suffered a bit for that. We only got to like a seven out of ten or something like that because lots of little things that we couldn’t have predicted. Didn’t go so well. Wasn’t a bad show, but we weren’t comfy, but Sydney was comfy.
I think it couldn’t have gone better than that, and certainly the Sydney show, if not the Melbourne one. I have to consult the tapes for the Melbourne one ’cause I wasn’t all the way there for some of it. Just dissociated a bit while I was playing. I didn’t make any mistakes; I just wasn’t present. So if those moments are fine, then the Sydney and Melbourne, back-to-back are the best two shows that we’ve played, ever, in any configuration.
So it’s hard to go beyond that, frankly.
Ez: Let’s move to Convulsing then.
You released an album this year called perdurance.
Brendan: I did.
Ez: Do you feel that perdurance is a dense record, in terms of sound?
Brendan: I tried not to. I found Grievous to be really dense. It’s woolly and claustrophobic-sounding. The guitars are really loud and kind of smothering everything. The drumbeats are really simple. There’s a lot of reverb on everything and it kind of swirls around you, and is loud and MIDI, and the guitars are crushing you. For perdurance I sort of wanted to split the difference between Errata and Grievous.
Errata felt really naive ’cause I just did it for the sake of doing it. I needed to write this; I needed to get the music out. I needed to dedicate it to my grandmother. I had no expectations or interest even, in what to do after that. I just needed to do the thing so I did the thing. I released it; I said “Hey, I told some of you I’m doing a death metal record. Here it is. It’s kinda weird. If you like Porcupine Tree, Emperor and Enslaved, but also Pain of Salvation, Shining and Immolation all at the same time, here it is.”
So I was trying to recapture a bit of that naivety and reopen things up and make it a bit more intelligible, but in terms of the emotional content, it’s much more dense and it’s more demanding of your attention to peel back the layers or just separate all of the parts and listen to them individually, mentally, as you’re going through it, or read the lyrics and really think about what I’m trying to say about myself or the world, or about you if you related to any of the things that I’m saying and the ways I’m examining them, so it’s asking for that sort of engagement. So in that sense it’s more dense than the other stuff, but I tried to open the mix up.
There’s very little reverb, the guitars are mixed quieter, the vocals are louder, the drums have a punchier sound. I mastered it a little bit quieter to try and make you turn it up so that it surrounds you instead of being pre-crushed, before you got there. I don’t know if I succeeded. I go back and forth on whether I like what I’ve done all the time. That’s just the thing, but… yeah.
I would say it is dense, but that’s the kind of music that I want. Stuff that I can really get inside of, so it stands to reason that I’d make it.
Ez: Was there intent in going to make the record, or did it just more come together over time and you were like “I’ve got these songs that work”.
Brendan: It’s very conceptual. I don’t want to sound in a pretentious way, but it’s all very deliberate. A lot of the ideas arrived to me over time by accident, but it certainly wasn’t arranged by accident. I’ve been trying to write a follow-up to Grievous since I finished it, and I just hit a wall and couldn’t write anything until I was in Altars and we needed another five, six minute track to complete the tracklist, so I wrote “Anhedonia” for the Altars record (Ascetic Reflection), and that was the first song that I’d written in six years or something to completion, and went “That’s good, the arrangement’s good”. So Lewis and I cultivated that into something that appears on the album.
perdurance, some of the riffs on it, like the opening for “inner oceans”, are older than anything that appears on Grievous. It’s the very first thing I wrote before Grievous when I tuned one of my guitars in a particular way, and the very next thing that appears beside it is the most recent riff on the whole album. So philosophically it collapses the seven year span of doing it into a semi-quaver. It’s crushed that whole period down ’cause I’ve got this old material and this brand new materials, and that’s kind of the conceptual underpinning of the whole record.
perdurance is a state of matter, of existence where you have things that endure. They born, they live, they die. perdurance, in a sort of reduced way, where you’ve come to be a form, you live, you die, the things that you are…
It’s like you are an apple. The apple falls off the tree, you die, decay, the seeds go into the ground. The seeds retain the memory of having been an apple. Another tree grows, another apple grows, the seed falls out…
You contain this continuous memory backwards and forward through time of things that have happened to you. It’s not like reincarnation; it doesn’t assume you have a soul or anything like that, but just that matter and atoms and things, there’s a perdurant state of all things. I felt that whilst I was making this music I was flowing backwards and forwards in time to things that haven’t happened yet and things that happened in the distant past, and relitigating things as I was going along.
I had the title in a text document, and I knew that that was what it was going to be and I couldn’t get away from it, and the cover art was sketched years before I even started working on the album properly and arranging the songs, ’cause I did arrange it all between April and May 2023, whenever it was.
So there are a lot of predetermined things that I can’t explain that I also couldn’t get away from, so I went with them. The track titles are the ones that I gave them when I first saved the project, so that’s just what they are, and they always end up being the right thing to call them.
I didn’t know the song was supposed to be called “inner oceans”, but because I called it that, it asked a certain question of me of “What does that mean?” and I wrote the song in service of trying to answer the question. What do I mean by that?
So, yes. Dense. Dense *laughs* It’s a dense record. There’s a lot of stuff going on and in and around it for me. The older I get and the more time I spend doing this, the more philosophical I get about the whole process.
Ez: Would you say that perdurance is as honest a record you could’ve made?
Brendan: They always have been. I can’t do it any other way. The thing you can track though, I guess… with the exception of Grievous [where] the track order is in reverse to the way that I wrote the songs. But everything else is basically, start to finish is the order they appear [and] the order I worked on and finished them.
In Errata, you can hear me playing around with the idea of honest and authenticity in the lyrics. By the end of the album I’m writing a narrative about wanting to kill myself quite directly. Very few conscious pull. Earlier on in the album it’s kind of dressed up in poetry and metal jargon, and by the end of the album I’m like “I feel like shit and want to die”. As time has gone on with the project I’ve tried to explore myself more, and less subtly. Maybe more poetic, but less obscure in what I’m trying to explain or learn about myself, about my place in the world. So they are as honest as I can make them ’cause I can’t bullshit myself.
Ez: Do you feel that Convulsing’s music has potentially become more optimistic since Errata?
Brendan: Yeah. I mean, I wrote a love song, sort of, on perdurance. That’s what “endurance” sort of is. The lyric, if you read it, it’s kind of like “Oh, I’m old and tired, it’s so hard to do this shit every day. Look out the window and there’s a genocide, it never fucking ends”, and the chorus is like “Yeah, but can you hear the birds? You can go have a pint with a friend and laugh, you can look at the smiling face of your partner, you can pat a dog”. So there’s this kind of optimism, trying to break out.
Then we go to the funeral doom bit where I’m just doing a bit of cosplay. I didn’t really go all-in on that ’cause the track was too long already but I wanted to go much slower in that bit. Really do the My Dying Bride skepticism thing. Then it gets a bit darker at that point, then comes out of it with the same sort of idea. You suffer these things in life for the privilege of experiencing the beauty of life, in order to smell the flower or look upon the artwork in the gallery, you have to go through some shit to get to that point.
In order to feel the depth of positivity and happiness, you also have to feel the depths of misery, ’cause it’s two sides of the same coin. If you deaden yourself to the misery of the world, you also deaden yourself to the positivity and the beauty of it. And then I finish it off by saying, you know…
Ez: “I’ll endure for a while longer”
Brendan: Yeah. Because I love my partner and I get to wake up next to her every day, and we have a great life together, and I’m a better person for having met her, and it’s good to remind myself of that *laughs* at the end of an album in which I’m describing myself being flagellated, or dragging the yolk of history through arid soils all the time. It’s good to remind myself that I actually have it, in some ways, really good, and that’s usually enough to offset anything that I might be feeling which is more negative.
So there is a bit of optimism that’s crept in over time. I didn’t expect to be writing a love song ’cause that’s kind of what it is. At the end of the day I was like “How do I include this part of myself in such a sort of, overall very dismal and cynical outlook that I have? How do I include this part where I’m not so cynical, and it’s beautiful and florid? How do I do that?
Ez: I remember seeing Convulsing back in 2018 for Negfest.
Brendan: It would’ve been one of the first shows then, if not the first show.
Ez: You’ve obviously played a few shows since. Are you looking toward presenting perdurance live?
Brendan: Yeah. I arranged the songs in a way that they pushed the limits of what I’m capable of doing live in a trio, so it would be good to see if I can actually do it. The challenge is always: the people that I want to do it with are two of my dearest friends, and I don’t really wanna do it without them, so it’s about finding a way that works for the three of us to do this sort of…
It’s asking a lot of them to do it with me, so I need it to be fun for them and I need it to be compatible with their lives and something they want to do, and recently it hasn’t really been possible, and it became very clear when looking for other people to do it with, that few of them exist.
Few people where I want to do it with, that would have the right attitude to the whole thing. Not that I need it to be taken seriously, but you need an element of fearlessness to want to play it, because I give you complete freedom. I don’t tell Peter or Robin what to do, basically at all. I give them the songs and say “This is what I did on the album. Here’s what I played. Take it or leave it. If you think it sucks, or it doesn’t fit your body, do something else. If you think you can play this and it would highlight this better, play something else. You have total freedom to do that interpretation.
We have to play at the same time. It almost doesn’t matter what the notes are. I know what I’m gonna play. I trust you to play something with me, and I’ll play with you, and then we’ll do this thing.”
It became very clear that there aren’t many people who are interested in that, ’cause it asks a lot. So I am looking forward to doing it and I hope we can figure out a way where everybody’s in a good place and we can all do it, but we were due to play in Essence Fest in Canberra in September, and it just became an impossibility. We were all so tied up with life and I’d done three tours in other bands and all the Dumbsaint stuff was happening. We just didn’t have the time for it.
I lost a whole month in the middle of the year to a decompression holiday, and I lost my job, and lots of things, so it would’ve just been too much to stack on top of that. Next year, however, we’ll try and reconvene and do something to do it justice all have fun with it as a little gift to ourselves, ’cause it’s simultaneously the hardest music we have to play, but also the easiest ’cause we have a good time doing it quite a lot of the time. We meet up and just fart around and play death metal.
Ez: We’ll wrap up with some Altars. Your last show of the year was at The Bald Faced Stag.
Brendan: Crowbar. Bald Faced Stag in my heart *laughs*
Ez: What were you looking to achieve on that particular night?
Brendan: Another Sydney show. We haven’t played very many, but also, when you get asked “Would you like to play with Nile?” and you have to say “No, one of our guitar players are doing some shows with toe with Dumbsaint that same weekend…”
Ez: *laughs*
Brendan: *laughs* It’s a difficult equation to do when you say “No, we don’t get to play with Nile ’cause I’m doing this other thing and it’s my fault”, so we made it work. We were originally supposed to play the Melbourne show ’cause that would’ve been more convenient. Two of us live in Melbourne, but the scheduling didn’t work out so we got put on the Sydney show instead, so it meant that I had to do the Dumbsaint stuff and then immediately go and do the Altars thing, which was fine because playing those Altars songs to death, I could do it in a coma.
We’ve toured so much and played so much together that it’s effortless at this point to play those songs, and so it was a good way to go “Yep, this is the last time you’ll see these songs in this configuration,” and it’s with Nile, with one of our primary influences as death metal musicians. We’ve all heard Annihilation of the Wicked. We’ve all heard all those early Nile material bangers, and deeply influential to all of us, so it’s a fine way to end the touring cycle, where you’ve gone all over the world and get to play a sold out Stag show with Nile, and just play as hard as possible because we had a forty minute set and no changeover time, so we just got on the stage and blasted as hard as we could, and then got off the stage and watched “Sacrifice unto Sebek”.
So we were just hoping to achieve that, where it was supposed to feel like we’re a real band *laughs*
Altars is another band where there’s kind of a high presentation portion, where we’re trying to be very precise in the way we present it, be dynamic and play with texture, and go places that we like and we wish more death metal bands did. Again, sounds pretentious and egomaniacal, but that’s the kind of stuff we like to listen to.
Playing a show like that is a good way to remind yourself that “Actually you’re a death metal band and your job is to blast a bit, and you can have fun doing that to”. So we didn’t really have the time to set up and be precious about things. We just had to plug in and just *makes a blasting noise* and so those kinds of shows are good to play. They feel good. Primal metal energy. Get as much out of doing that as you do the high concept stuff.
Ez: So it’s a bit of a plate cleaner as well.
Brendan: Dumbsaint and Altars are both going to bed again. Dumbsaint, maybe we’ll do something. We have to figure out what it is. Altars, we also have to figure out what Altars sounds like, again, for 2025. Both of those bands played as hard as they could on that same weekend, and now we sleep. Dream of a new sound.
Ez: How do you feel about it?
Brendan: With Altars we’ve been hitting it pretty hard on the stress factor. US Visa stuff, European stuff. We’ve been at it for a while, and the journey for Altars started before and during the pandemic. I moved state in that time, and changing jobs and all this stuff, so I’m looking forward to just not having anything to do particularly, for a while. I don’t even have to do a Convulsing record ’cause I did it at the same time as planning the European Altars thing.
I was writing lyrics in the van and listening to work in progress mixes. I crunched it all, so that once we got to the end of this year where everything was finished, I would just have the rewards for all of the effort and the punishment that I put myself through to get it all done, and that’s basically what’s happened. So now I get to reflect and think about if and how to present Convulsing in its own space, unburdened by anything taking my attention away from it.
I feel just as strongly about the other stuff. Convulsing isn’t the thing that I dream of doing more than anything else; it’s just a thing I do, and I try to give it the attention it deserves.
So that’s what I’m looking forward to. Just having a rest and coming back to music in a good place to give everything the attention it deserves again. Have enough room to think a bit where I’m not worrying about a Visa or a show in three months, or flying to Sydney to rehearse for Dumbsaint. Just little details. Nice to have a clear mind for a bit.