“Unsteady hand wielding a final arrow.”
Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. Dobbin chatted to all of Falls of Rauros at Fortress Festival 2024 just after their set. Cover image by Acidolka (website/Facebook/Instagram).
Dobbin: This is your first time overseas as Falls of Rauros? Particularly at a festival like Fortress, which is perfect for your audience.
Evan Lovely (Bass): We’ve been looking forwards to this for well over a decade. It’s extremely exciting, we’re so happy to be here. Everyone’s so keyed into it, so it’s really really welcoming.
Dobbin: You’re also touring with Panopticon and Vemod – can you tell me some more about that connection? You did a split with Panopticon a long time ago.
Aaron Charles (guitar/vocals): We connected when we both had one record out, 2008-ish – the ‘MySpace’ era. Austin Lunn just sent us a message saying he loved our band. We reciprocated and stayed in touch. After our first record, our drummer left the band. Austin just offered to fill in. So on our second record, The Light That Dwells in Rotten Wood, Austin plays drums. So yeah, from friends to collaborators. During that period, Ray Capizzo used to play guitar in the band. And he was like, I’m gonna learn drums because we need a drummer. So Austin filled in for a while and then Ray learnt to play drums. The split was after Aaron and I spent some time with Austin while he was living in Norway – that was a good time.
Dobbin: Aaron also jumped on for some vocals during “Silence”! Awesome to see. I wanted to ask you about The Light That Dwells in Rotten Wood, it seems to be your most streamed album and the ‘go to’ album for your band, and it’s often in your live sets. What’s your perception on the album looking back?
Aaron: We’re kind of in an interesting position where we try to do something really different on every album. We’ve certainly moved on from what we did, but the songs definitely like have a power to them and that people connect with, so they’re really fun to play live. We definitely enjoy playing them live even though we don’t really write that sort of stuff any more. But I think if you played that album for someone and then our newest record, it’s pretty different. You might be surprised that it’s the same band.
Dobbin: I was going back over your discography and the evolution is is really clear, and it’s not it’s not that you changed massively overnight, but more and more as you go to Believe in No Coming Shore,Vigilance Perennial, Patterns in Mythology and Key to a Vanishing Future, each album is increasingly complex, and perhaps shorter. But back then, you might have had three riffs over six minutes.
Ray Capizzo (drums): That’s a fair assessment. It’s it was somewhat intentional to reduce track length and maybe increase the ‘density’ somewhat. Each album has been sort of its own adventure: we first established ourselves with this line-up, which took a little while, then we wanted to write songs for live material, and then we changed studios, and so on. So each had its own constraints. The last one, Key to a Vanishing Future, was the ‘pandemic’ album where we were all just locked up and thinking, let’s do whatever! We’ve also evolved in our listening and our playing our skills.
Dobbin: Are there any specific influences that have brought you towards that more complex sound? A term that springs to mind is ‘prog’, would you identify with that term? These records do sound distinct compared to a lot of the community.
Evan: I’ll answer part of that question first, but um, the word prog is something we all reference, but ‘prog metal’ is a very specific thing. I think like describing us as prog metal is is not helpful to people that would maybe be interested in it. We really try not to use that word, but we certainly borrow from particularly prog rock.
Aaron: It’s hard to pinpoint influences. We all listen to a lot of different music and kind of absorb all of it. When we were writing Key, I can’t really think of anything that was influencing it specifically – it was like ourselves influencing ourselves in a weird way and trying to push it further.
Evan: We always have the ‘classic’ reference bands, like 90s black metal and, you know, Katatonia, Opeth, and so on. So we’ll be like, let’s do a ‘Katatonia’ thing or whatever, and then it never sounds like that, but it gets us quicker to what we want.
Jordan Guerette (guitar/vocals): The four of us have not necessarily like gone down the same musical path. I think we all have different interests and we’ve split off in general over the past 15 or so years. When we bring riffs to one another, we’re pulling from a really quite wide musical library that doesn’t necessarily overlap. Then it’s a process of integrating, finding what works, and how we can build that into a real song, and not a weird riff salad.
Dobbin: Thinking about you as individual musicians, there’s an extra project, Rhûn, could you tell us about that?
Aaron: That was just something I did in 2021 in less than a month, from the first note to the recorded product. That was still technically like kind of pandemic era, and we had finished our latest record, and then had some equipment and time. So I was like, oh, I’m going to try to just do something really quickly without overthinking it. So there’s something a bit more traditionally metal in its riff vocabulary, and it’s darker. I just started writing and I basically recorded it while writing, so it’s really stream of consciousness. It all came together within probably about three weeks, including the finished takes, and then Ray play drums. I mixed it myself, too, which was interesting – learning how to mix with the internet as my guide! It’s not a live project, unless something really special came up, I wouldn’t really know how to do it live.
Dobbin: Would you consider doing anything for Vigilance Perennial’s 10th anniversary, because that’s coming up…
Evan: Uh, sure! We have some time… If the right offer came up, and if people really wanted that…
Aaron: It’s a challenging record because we used a lot of alternate tunings on it. So there’s songs that are it’s like, I’m in a weird tuning, Jordan’s in a different weird tuning, and we both have capos and stuff, right? So that actually limits when we pick a song to play. We considered playing “White Granite” from that record, but it’s in a weird tuning and there’s a capo. So it just becomes a logistical nightmare.
Jordan: We have played “White Granite” and “Arrow and Kiln” live quite a bit. The other songs we’ve never played. So it would be a process of figuring out new arrangements, because we have so many guitar tracks. We recorded a couple records with Colin Marston and he makes fun of us for how many guitar tracks there are. So we obviously you know, only two guitarists left, so trying to figure that out.
Dobbin: My favourite song on that album is “Warm Quiet Centuries of Rains”. It’s my favourite ‘black metal acoustic interlude’, and that’s a whole genre. I’m wondering – is there a little story behind it? Because it is such a perfect little song.
Aaron: It’s not glamorous or romantic, but I remember coming up with the main acoustic finger, pick part at our friend Brendan’s apartment when I was just noodling on his guitar. Ray came up with the lead guitar part, and there’s piano, I think… Not much to say on a story level.
Dobbin: A hallmark of Falls of Rauros is that you folks are really good at song and album structure. There’s always a sense of ‘where you are’ in the song when you’re listening. You could jump into the middle and it would feel like in the middle, that sort of thing. This carries over into how you close out your albums, you just know it’s going to be really memorable. Is there an approach that you have when it comes to writing for structure?
Jordan: We simply spend a lot of time on it, I think that is the biggest thing. We also record every practise – Ray has a really elaborate setup. When I tell other musicians about it, they’re like, oh my god, what the fuck are you doing? That helps a lot.
Evan: We are fans of music, we listen to a lot of music, but I think we all had albums that we know feel like have a distinct beginning, middle, and end. It’s nice to have a narrative for an album and I really like it when it’s distinct. So it’s really cool to be able to produce something like that. We’re aware of the general concepts of what makes a beginning track and an ending track and what is a solid metal track. We try to work towards that once the rifts have been assembled, so that the song will fits into something that has a flow that you can attach yourself to and just enjoy it.
Ray: We write our songs, but very early on, we are thinking about where they’ll fit and that helps to shape the album. Maybe a track has more of a ‘middle’ vibe, or this one is has a good ending, so we have them organised like that in our heads. It can change of course. We also compare that to previous records, because we don’t want to open, close, and transition the same way on every record.
Dobbin: Load of the music we have in this genre is really connected to nature. I wanted to ask you, rather than shouting out bands at the end of an interview, to shout out natural locations. Are there any like specific places for you that are sources of inspiration?
Evan: For me it’s pretty straightforward – Mount Katahdin in Maine. It’s our largest mountain, in In Baxter State Park, and it’s got a lot of history. There’s a lot of culture around that mountain in particular, it really stands out.
Aaron: It’s pretty intense to hike. There’s like a section of it called the Knife Edge trail, and it’s just sheer drops on both sides, and it’s like a little over a mile of that. It’s part of like the Appalachian Mountains which are way older and more beaten down than the west coast in America, where it’s really dramatic. Still, compared to the surrounding land, it does stand out, and it’s very remote.
Dobbin: There’s also a lot of lakes in Maine, right?
Evan: We’ve got infinite lakes, and infinite forest. That’s hyperbole, but really…
Ray: We’re lucky to live in such a beautiful area. Even in the city itself, Portland, is by the ocean and is still five minutes from some hikes, and it’s just such a great place.
Aaron: It’s the most forested state in America, and the coastline is pretty insane, very rocky, tons of inlets and islands.
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