Interview with Bronnt Industries Kapital, Geometer Magazine 2008

Geometer – I only came to hear of Häxan through your soundtrack - it’s a great film and I was surprised I’d not heard of it. How did you first hear of the film?

Guy - We were first approached to perform a live soundtrack to the film at Bristol’s independent Cube Cinema by the Aetas Arcanum organisation. What was initially meant to be part of an evening of loose interpretations became quite an obsession for Bronnt. Häxan often gets overlooked due to its unwillingness to fit into fixed genres or approach – it’s a victim of its own versatility. It’s essentially an historical documentary, but uses a variety of styles and media to depict the history of witchcraft – illustration, crude animation, terrifying mechanical representations of hell, dramatisation, and chilling fantasy sequences using (at the time) trailblazing special effects. On the one hand it’s about the nature of persecution and moral panic that led to the treatment of the misunderstood peoples who constitute the subjects of the film. But still, many of the dramatised sequences are a little too terrifying and involved to be simply a representation of an imagined world that witches inhabited.
The plan was to complement the film’s multi-faceted style with a soundtrack that was as varied in approach and tone. A lot of the songs used instruments that could have been available at the time of the film – so many traditionally orchestral instruments are used – clarinet, grand piano, drums etc – interspersed with more contemporary instrumentation and processing, but still retaining an early 20th century murkiness

Geometer - Your own soundtrack is very different from the original (a medley of Beethoven, Schubert etc.) The old soundtrack has the sense of decorum, order and enlightenment that comes with that kind of classical music - and the message seems to be that the things we’re watching are in the past and in control. Yours on the other hand is much darker - out of focus textures and heavier rhythms; was that intentional, and could you talk a bit about that?

Guy - It was certainly intentional to make parts of the score heavier – it IS a film about the horrific and totally irrational persecution of people, after all. But there was also a lack of personal emotion in the original score,which I hope to have countered - I find many of the stories quite intimate and saddening, such as the plight of Maria the Weaver and the drunkard Apelone, and felt that the score had never done these sections justice.
Another peculiar thing about the film is its unwillingness to fully align itself with either a rational explanation of witchcraft as the result of moral panic and religious absurdity on the one hand or actual supernatural occurrences on the other. I wanted to emphasise this with a soundtrack that was constantly drifting in and out of focus; using sharply arranged ensemble pieces interspersed with indistinct sound collages. To that end, a lot of the soundtrack was intentionally mired in delays and reverbs, degraded and smudged by bouncing tracks back and forth between antique tape machines.

Geometer - How do you find booking gigs? The only real reference I have for people doing live film soundtracks is - do you know Stock Hausen and Walkman?

Guy - Yeah

Geometer - Well he - Andrew Sharpley from Stock Hausen and Walkman - he was trying to book gigs for his new band [the excellent A&E] and he was saying that when he does, even some kind of perfunctory film or visual thing everybody wants to book it. Whereas without the film he doesn’t get bookings. Everybody wants to book the music with the film but… Is that something you find, is it easier to get …

Guy - Is it easier to get gigs with the film? I guess I’m quite lucky, because the music that accompanies the film is very different from the music that comprises the Bronnt live set at the moment, so they’re two very different things. One is quite slow and morose, and ensemble based - lots of classical instruments and things, and the live show is a lot more electronic, a lot faster… The strange thing is, it’s actually been a lot easier to get gigs in the countries where we’ve not had the translation for it, rather than in the UK. No actually that’s not quite true – we’ve done a couple in the UK … but we’ve done it in France twice, just with the English subtitles

Geometer – Really? With the French and their language…

Guy – Yeah! Without even a French subtitle. I’ve now found a French subtitle for it, so we can do a ‘proper’ show in French, and we’ve done it in Germany, just in English again. But we’ve got a couple of people working on the subtitles now, because there are a couple of things next year that might come off in German speaking countries, and I’d like people to know what’s going on. It’s funny anyway, in many ways the translation into English is really funny, because it’s very old.

Geometer – because it was originally in Swedish, right?

Guy – yeah that’s right. But it’s very old Swedish, my friend James (Mole Harness) who lives out in Sweden now, I saw him when we went out to do a gig there and his girlfriend’s Swedish, she says that the text, the intertitles are in really quite old Swedish, really quite quaint, very formal, and it’s been translated in that way into the English, so it comes across as really quite funny. I don’t know if that’s true of - you know the French translation for example – the formalism of it, and I guess the rationalism of it, which I guess reflects the film

Geometer – You were saying before, how at the end it has that typically Victorian tone: “Yes of course, we all understand now that this is all…”

Guy – Yeah, yeah, “Everything has been explained. The epilogue always seems to raise a laugh in audiences with its replacing of bizarre theological dogma for bizarre psychoanalytic theory. It seems ridiculous in many ways now, … the Victorian-dilettantes, obsessed with progress, that no phenomenon, however bizarre, is outside of the realm of explanation by rigid scientific inquiry.

Geometer– But at the same time it dwells on, really enjoys, and puts enormous amounts of effort into these grotesque special effects. I think I read that it was one of the most expensive silent films ever made when it came out.

Guy – Yeah, a lot of the special effects were really horrid. Like the section where they take a thief down from the gallows and snap his finger off, and it’s really… because the cinematography is so, kind of oily everything just seems really oily and sickly so anything that happens even if - I mean obviously the finger was made out of wax or something – but it just seems really horrid.

I mean it’s not very well lit, and some of the actors, playing the traditional witches are pretty horrendous looking old crones. It’s really well cast. But… I mean the bit with the baby hanging over the cauldron - dripping blood. It’s really horrid. It’s really surprising the way that section builds up as well, with the amazing mix of devils, just frotting with witches and these sacrifices. But also many of the failings of the special effects are left in – with the skeleton horse, the horse stalking around in that scene, but you can actually see the feet of the people walking underneath it

Geometer– there’s no suspension of disbelief is there? You never forget that you’re watching a film. I don’t know whether you would have done back then… though I guess in this context people were more credulous back then

Guy – You’re definitely aware that it’s people recreating these scenes, but that they’re really into it and they might actually be … devil worshipers themselves.
The director, Christenson’s a really fascinating character. There’s a story that he was once staying in a hotel at the same time as the opera singer Caruso – they had adjacent rooms. Caruso heard Christenson singing late at night – Christenson had this really amazing voice – and Caruso tried to get him to work with him on his next piece, but Christenson refused, claiming he would only sing when no-one else was around. He just seemed to only come out of himself when he was in total control, when he could just extend his will over other people. There’s an amazing scene of him, doing test shots for the witches flying through the air, and he’s just getting really into it. It’s just him on a broom on top of a chair and he’s just…

Geometer - Demonstrating exactly how he wants them to do it…

Guy - He reminds me a bit of Herzog in his stubbornness and mistreatment of actors in the name of getting a realistic performance – he insisted that all scenes be filmed at night to bring out the actor’s ‘dark sides’, put young female actors in thumbscrews, and eventually included many off-camera, out of character asides from the cast in the final cut. And he, obviously, played the devil in lots of the scenes. The really famous scene, where the devil pops up, that’s Christensen … and the scene where he comes to the girl sleeping at night

Geometer – God, for an introverted guy! I mean he quite enjoyed that, basically, didn’t he? There’s also that scene in the film where he says that the girl, the actress, asked him to put the thumb-screws on her, and you’re thinking “did she really ask him to do that”

Guy – It’s really nice that they leave a lot of that in, a lot of the candid performances of the actors. Where the “old crones” are talking about their own experiences of witchcraft. I mean this is the point when rationalism definitely hadn’t taken over, and there were still elements of the … witch trials, and distrust of people on completely irrational grounds in Northern Europe.

Geometer– I mean these days there’s none of that complete distrust of people on totally irrational grounds!

Guy – [laughs] Of course!

Geometer– We’re completely past that! …As the BNP members list that was released today [20th Nov] has illustrated quite nicely.

Guy – Yeah… I’m kind of torn over that whole thing. I mean, it’s a very contradictory thing that’s happened. Now, the BNP are going to use the Human Rights act to complain about it – something they are completely against, a piece of European legislation – and they’re having to use that to complain about this.

Geometer– that’s beautiful

Guy – and then all these people, who’re normally against ID cards and the “Big Brother State” think that this is a really good thing, that all this data has come out. It’s just baffling behaviour from both sides really.

Geometer– you wonder how this is going to play out, because with paedophile hysteria, you had situations where the public found out about a local paedophile – or paediatrician in that one case – and I guess it would be weird, and awful the spectacle of liberals firebombing BNP members, or bricks through the window. [I nearly edited this out of the interview, thinking the firebomb part was a touch naive. Unfortunately I was wrong, and in the days since the interview there has been at least one firebomb attack linked to the list - link]

Guy – And it all demonstrates a complete failure to engage with the argument, or come to understand this irrational hatred – it shows a failure to counter these people with … obviously superior arguments! To understand why these people do what they do.

Geometer– the divergence here from the witchcraft case, I guess, is that I can’t see, in 100 years time or whatever, some eccentric making a documentary dwelling on the delightful grotesquerie of the BNP. That’s where the parallel collapses I guess…
Did you see the thing recently, where modern day witches asking for pardons on … however many of the witches were killed in England during the period when witch hunts went on.

Guy – I missed this. Is this the Wiccans?

Geometer– I think so

Guy - That’s incredible. A modern day movement claiming the right to rally on the behalf of someone who may not have been a witch in the first place. Sounds very odd. It’d be interesting to know how much of the absurd stories whipped up by the church have made their way into the practices of modern witchcraft. How much of it has been informed and driven by the church. How much of these anecdotal stories about witchcraft were actually just fabrication by the church, but have drifted, through the centuries to become dogma.

Geometer– I was thinking of the way that people across the world claim irish ancestry with little or no justification, but this is even further removed than that, isn’t it? There’s no genetic connection, there’s not even any ritual connection most likely, these people didn’t think of themselves as witches. There’s just a weird sympathy with something that may well have largely been fabricated by the church. The creationof the persecutors.

Guy – Obviously this doesn’t explain it all, but it’d be interesting to know how much that affects it. I guess there’s absolutely nothing to fear by clinging to a cause that’s so far in the past that it bears little relation to modern day life and is exempt from being proved or disproved. Like the BNP establishing senses of being English, and it’s completely nebulous, there’s just no rational basis to it. The justification for it is just as baffling as the genetic profiling the Nazis were using, or the imperialists were using in Rwanda, the genetic differences between the Tutsis and Hutus – completely arbitrary but they fell into dogma, into formalised wisdom.

Geometer– it’s interesting even with the church’s dogma and the popular dogma about witches. If you can formalise something, at the time in terms of vaguely religious vocabulary, even if it’s incredibly tenuous, if it fits prejudices it’ll be accepted. There’s the scene in Haxan where the local witchcatcher comes in with his molten lead, swinging his crucible over the sick man’s body. This guy does this occult test and says “yes, this is witchcraft”, so the family run to the church.

Guy – divination, but because it’s using basic elements it was seen as a scientific process. It’s just like reading tea leaves, but because it’s gone through an industrial process, it’s been smelted and poured into water, so there’s a modern rationale and approach to it. It fits this idea of the trappings of the industrial being more worthy and credible than ‘magic’.

Geometer– I think at the time the church was heavily under the spell of the rediscovered Greek and Arabic texts- if my timing’s right they’d not so long ago rediscovered all this stuff about atomism, essences from the arab scholars, and Plato, Aristotle and the pre-socratics. So perhaps that’s where it comes from. This might just be complete bollocks of course, but I think the timing’s about right. They’d have been the scholastics, and I think that influence lasted quite a long time. So perhaps this smelting and the elements, base metals, that imagery would have perhaps been acceptable to the church at that time.

Guy – I’d not thought of it that way before

Geometer– if I check it out and it’s bullshit I’ll attribute all this to you. “Guy was telling me about…”

Guy – “his ‘awesome’ theory”

Geometer– [laughs]
But yeah it goes back to what we were saying – the way modern ideas of witchcraft have become this has become a mish mash of bullshit, folklore, and church propaganda and possibly some genuine practices. And the church itself had something similar, through the rediscovery of all those Greek and Arabic texts, and even through something like Dante, which makes up a huge chunk of Christian imagery, but it’s just one guy and a lot of ideas which have nothing to do with the bible, I read recently that Dante’s imagery might have at least as much to do with Islamic imagery. Dante’s Hell is a Santa Claus – this incredibly seductive composite, a product from outside of the tradition in many ways

Guy – But it still serves the needs of the church, and so can be co-opted. There’s a very strong tradition of that, the church, like a franchise adapting to local traditions. To gain power over a people, is often willing to make certain local concessions. The adoptions of pagan ceremonies are the well known end of it. Moving Christmas to December, and Easter as well, Eostres day at the spring equinox. There’s always a way of co-opting what’s important or useful to a people to gain submission.

And there’s definitely a strong history of science and philosophy supported by religion but then often going against the beliefs of religion – the whole thing of “I think therefore I am” coming from a deeply religious man, supported by the church. And that guy having massive internal struggles after having a very religious upbringing

Geometer– Decartes is the classic, that’s born of religious thought, and ultimately the thought that develops from Descartes’ cogito, ends up founding the scientific method that ultimately undermines the authority of the church. The history of all these things, witchcraft and, philosophy, science, are just intermingled and bastardised and often the connections are more to do with sheer chance than they are to do with the carrying of the scientific spirit.

Guy – yes progress, this linear journey. It often comes from very dark places, alchemy and the manipulation of base elements, essentialism and the idea that things that look alike having very similar properties, walnuts being useful for the brain. Seemingly bizarre connections. But I guess knowledge of that would have itself come from early scientific inquiry. A lot of the early doctors were persecuted for being witches because they took bodies from the gallows and dissected them, but the only place this connection that a walnut looks like the brain could have passed into folklore would have been from early ‘scientists’, who then made the – as we now know erroneous correlation between how brains look, and [how walnuts look], and the idea that you can influence the behaviour of one by ingesting the other.

Geometer – There’s an interesting article in this month’s Cabinet magazine – about Prussian blue. You know how blue is historically a very difficult pigment to produce – well there was this alchemist – I forget his name, but essentially he was a huge prick. [laughs] He travelled round Europe plying his alchemic trade and getting moved on whenever he upset someone, which seems to have been pretty often. So he travelled round Europe trying out these miracle cures and trying to turn lead to gold, and within that he developed this cure-all; a pseudo scientific snake-oil remedy. He created this thing through some convoluted process in part involving the burning of animal blood - and ended up producing this cure-all that turned out to be good as sheep dip, but actually not so good for you. At the same time, the guy working in his laboratory with him, he’d run out of some material for his own processes – some by-product of burning, potash or whatever- so he borrowed some of the asshole alchemist’s supply. This time around, this guy’s process, which never before had produced results of any kind suddenly produces this vivid blue colour. It turned out to be because the molecules of animal blood present in the ash were reacting to produce this chemical. Subsequently the asshole alchemist tracked the reason for this down and became famous world over for producing the first successful commercial blue pigment: Prussian Blue. And latterly it turns out to have all these other remarkable properties, it’s a molecular magnet, and has medical uses to this day. And all of this, this remarkable progress comes out of horrendous bullshit, an accident; the accidental by-product of an already pretty dubious process…

Anyway, I guess I held forth a little there and interesting as it’s been, we’ve wandered way off track - lets get back to the music. I find that a lot of your music reminds me of library music, or incidental music from the 60s and 70s are you a fan of that stuff?

Guy - Definitely - I love the idea that a piece of music can be designed in a way to represent and project a very specific human emotion or theme – that human experience can be reduced to an industrial process.

Having said that, a lot of the musicians who worked on library music in the 60’s & 70’s were looking for new sounds that hadn’t been used before to represent specific internal moods, so the scope for sonic experimentation was vast, and the approach was adventurous – it certainly wasn’t formal, production-line fare. Plus there was a lot more trust in musicians from the record companies, so they often ended up with really freaky experimental stuff. And of course, the BBC golden age of sci-fi and supernatural TV drama, and its requirement for otherworldly effects, provided an incredible soundscape of imagined new worlds and dimensions.

Geometer - And what’s next for Bronnt?

Guy - We’re currently producing another album which will feature songs that are a lot faster than Häxan.