Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.10.2016, Qupperneq 30

Music 30The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 16 — 2016
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EXPRESS
There’s only one track for this is-
sue’s track by track: Martröð’s
“Draumleysa,” from their up-
coming EP ‘Transmutation of
Wounds’. Martröð is a black metal
supergroup featuring members
of Icelandic black metal bands
Wormlust and Misþyrming. If
you’ve never heard black metal
before, this track would definitely
not be a bad place to start. It’s raw.
It’s haunting. It’s nightmarish.
But it’s beautiful. To get deep-
er into Martröð—Icelandic for
“nightmare”—we asked member
Hafsteinn Viðar to tell us about
“Draumleysa” in his own words.
There are moments in life when
events reserved for fiction decide
to dress themselves up in a skin
suit and crawl into reality. For
us, that hideous creature was as-
sembling what we considered to
be the perfect band of musicians.
However, after the lineup had
been established, then came the
“How the fuck are we going to
do this?” stage. We didn't want
this project to sound like a mess
of our own styles, we didn't want
someone to be like, “Oh, this is a
Wormlust riff and there's the Ská-
phe over-effected vacuum cleaner
riff.” We aimed to keep Martröð
its own beast. Then began the
seemingly endless experiments,
with not only the boundaries of
songwriting, but with us also try-
ing to see how far we could wan-
der astray from expectations.
For a while, we even tried having
outside musicians from other
bands take our riffs and try to
structure something new. That
was quickly abandoned, although
for those five minutes, we were I
guess toying with the idea of Mar-
tröð being more of a Dada-esque
collective of musicians than the
old band dynamic. Essentially a
million theoreticals were float-
ing around before we just put a lid
on it, knuckled down and started
writing. We wrote hours of mate-
rial ranging from violently awful
to, finally, goddamn wonderful.
From the latter, “Draumleysa,”
our first illegitimate child, came
to be.
This child survived several
stages of growth: oblique cards,
musical gurus, and the now
trademarked deep overthinking
we do, a practice which remained
intact. In any case, we started
with something aggressive and
ended with something hypnotic,
the marriage of heaven and hell
in way. The riffs, however, under-
went the knife several times. The
opening riff to the song was ini-
tially a straightforward 4/4 post-
punk thing, but ended up into
whatever the fuck it is now. We
pulled the middle section from
a jangly mess of a song that had
been written for a project that
never went anywhere. We pitch-
shifted things, we added ridicu-
lous amounts of guitar layers, we
made a big fucking mess. It came
together somehow, by accident or
cunning; we rolled this vehicle
down a mountain and ended up
in a parking spot by the front door
without injury. I don't know how
the audio engineer didn't shoot
himself in the head.
Accident or not, “Draumleysa”
functions as a representation of
things that we were experiencing.
It wasn't difficult to write, but
it was definitely challenging to
complete. It's a dynamic song, go-
ing from one extreme to another,
much like our personal lives and,
as we would discover, the exis-
tence of this band. Collaborators
went missing, health issues arose,
personal struggles happened. The
best and worst of times. We man-
aged and now here we are.
LISTEN &SHARE:
gpv.is/tbt16
Words HAFSTEINN VIÐAR and HANNAH JANE COHEN
Image MARTRÖÐ
TRACK BY TRACK
“Draumleysa”
by Martröð