Interview: Aaron Weaver from Wolves in the Throne Room

Aaron Weaver plays drums in the black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room, along with brother Nathan on vocals and guitar. But unlike their Scandinavian forebears, the Weaver brothers reject most of the tenets that adhere to black metal. Instead, the two focus on channeling the dark energy of nature in their music. I had a chance to sit down with Weaver before a Wolves in the Throne Room show in Portland, the last in a long push to promote the band’s latest record Celestial Lineage. Weaver and I talked about the woods, Werner Herzog and the band’s uncertain future. I am proud to present the Spectrum Culture interview with Aaron Weaver from Wolves in the Throne Room.

In what ways are geography and nature tied to your music?

For us, that’s everything. The raison d’être of Wolves in the Throne Room is to make music that specifically reflects the energetic signature of the Northwest. Every place has its own spirit, has its own resident divine entities, energetic register and vibration. Metal, especially black metal, is music that tries to tap into the place where the music is made. That is why Scandinavian black metal has its specific sound. It is music that definitely comes up out of the soil, the rocks, the fjords and the forest. That is what we’ve always been trying to do with Wolves in the Throne Room, to make music that specifically draws upon energy of the Northwest.

Were you and Nathan born in the Northwest?

Nathan was. He was born in Portland. I was born in Topeka. But I’ve lived here my whole life. Thirty three of my 34 years.

What is it about the Cascades and the Northwest that innately speaks to you?

Well, I like a lot of different places. I like the desert. I love the mountains and I love the prairies. It isn’t necessarily that there is something specific about the Northwest that speaks to us. This is where we live. We’re into the idea of trying to connect very deeply with the place that we live rather than having this idea of wanting to go somewhere else or having our minds and spirits flying around on the internet.

So what energy is specific to the Northwest that you can’t find anywhere else?

I think it has a lot of the similar sort of spirit as Scandinavia. It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s wet, it’s mossy. Big mountains. Raging rivers. Untrampled wilderness, which is really rare in the United States and increasingly everywhere else in the world. It has places that are untouched. The mountaintops in the Cascades and the Olympics are places that haven’t ever been thoroughly done over by humanity. There are still places that are wild. That’s something that is really important to us. That’s something that really inspires our music. Wild places; places that humanity hasn’t thoroughly fucked over.

At its best, I feel like “Twin Peaks” captured the energy of the Northwest. It’s kind of sinister in some ways.

Sure, that’s another aspect of the Northwest. There is a darkness here. People think about the woods as being this cozy, comfy place where there’s all these good hippie vibes. It’s really not. There are places in the woods that are very dark and foreboding and have a very menacing energy. Yeah, I like “Twin Peaks” a lot and David Lynch grew up in the Northwest. I think he taps into that vibe. When you live in the Northwest and watch “Twin Peaks” you’re like, “Yeah, that’s true, man.” There are definitely places where you feel that malevolent, foreboding, inhuman sort of spirit energy.

In an interview, Werner Herzog said that he feels that the jungle is sinister and obscene. Life choking out other life. The birds are crying in pain.

Yeah, I know that quote. I like it a lot.

Do you feel the same way?

No, not at all. I think that when Herzog said it, it was maybe a little tongue-in-cheek. I don’t feel that way at all. I think he’s coming from this perspective where nature is this place of horror, where humans aren’t really welcome. That’s really far away from our worldview.

Humans have made themselves unwelcome.

Absolutely. We made the choice to set ourselves apart from nature. But yeah, I don’t feel the same way as Herzog. When I saw that, it was like the exact opposite of the way I feel.

Herzog is a big believer in chaos.

Yeah, for me, I feel a very deep sense of order. Even in a situation such as being devoured by a wild bear, which in the moment feels pretty chaotic to the person being devoured by the bear, that’s just the way of the world. To me, that doesn’t describe a universe that is chaotic and out of control. It describes a universe that has a very strong set of rules and a very beautiful order and structure to it.

I’m a native East Coaster and there is one thing I noticed in the woods here that is sinister. On the East Coast when you’re in the woods, you hear birds and see animals. Here it is pretty silent.

It’s very quiet. Yeah, that’s true. The old growth forests are really very quiet places. It does create a sort of spooky atmosphere. When I’m out in the woods, for the most part, I feel very welcomed. I feel very renewed and healed from spending time in the woods. There are certain spots that have this sort of portal to some sort of darkness.

Have you had any specific dark experiences in the woods?

Oh yeah, but I’ve never been really creeped out in the woods. I think I’ve had experiences that may creep some people out but I’ve never felt threatened at all.

We’ve been talking about how nature influences the stuff you guys do, but in your music you use electric instruments and synthesizers which are inorganic. How does that fit into channeling nature?

That’s the whole idea. We’re not playing hippie jam music. It’s like metal. It’s black metal. It’s about complexity. It’s about ambiguity and failure. Failing to live up to this ideal of living a pure existence with nature. It’s about being torn between two worlds: the desire for a lifestyle of true harmony with nature and then the reality where you just can’t have that. We have to live in the modern world. We have to exist as modern people. There’s six million people and we all need to find a way to eke out an existence. We all can’t live a pastoral, hunter-gatherer sort of lifestyle. You have to make music with the instruments of the age. You know, use the tools that are available to you. We make music that truly speaks to our condition. We’re not trying to make music that is a fantasy like some sort of Middle Earth fantasy music.

Like Led Zeppelin.

Yeah, Zeppelin is more fantasy-oriented than we are. We’re trying to reflect on our reality, on our day to day existence.

I read in an interview that you believe in magic. What does that mean to you?

The definition of magic to most people is to apply will to bring reality into focus with your desires. If you want something to happen, you can use magic as technology or a tool to make things happen.

Like in the same sense of what Carlos Castaneda writes about?

I think so. Carlos Castaneda is a charlatan and a liar. But I think that’s a definition most people agree on. I mean, our music is magic. We have a specific agenda, a specific goal. The music is a spell in order to achieve things or change things or manifest things.

What is a magical thing that has happened to you?

All kinds of stuff. Everyday, all the time. Increasingly as I get older and farther out of the mainstream I think that I have magical experiences more and more. This happens all the time. It’s part of the fabric of life. Just hearing the voice of the wilderness, hearing what the wind is telling you, seeing the future. All kinds of stuff.

My wife is afraid of the wind.

My wife is also terrified of the wind. Wind is an intense thing, man. It definitely has its own thing going on and it can be really terrifying. My wife is terrified of it, but she’s working on it.

When one of my friends came to visit Portland from New York City he said that it was almost as if nature was trying to reclaim the city back. It’s like the greenness of nature closes in on you while you’re here. Do you think as humans we will become more and more removed from nature or will there be a breaking point?

I think there’s a turning point that’s going to happen in the next 10 years when humanity as a whole, as a species, will choose which path it will take: the path of complete destruction of the natural world and ourselves or try to find some place and space of harmony. It’s a choice we will all make as individuals and make as cultures and societies. I don’t know. We’ll see.

Are we too far gone?

I don’t know. I’ve got some quasi-New Age beliefs when it comes down to it. I just choose to be positive about things. I think most people in the metal world make the choice to be deeply misanthropic and nihilist and cynical about things. You know, take the point of view that humanity is a cancer that will and should destroy itself. I just don’t buy into that. It’s just a belief system like anything else.

Yeah, I heard you’re not into violence happening at your shows.

It depends. I’m into people losing themselves and going wild. That’s what I like to do at metal shows sometimes. But I’m not into one tough guy Pantera fan moshing or whatever when it’s clearly not what the rest of the group wants to do or how the rest of the group is experiencing the music.

One asshole fucks everything up.

Yeah, there’s always like one mosh master. It’s like some jock or some fucking meathead. Yeah, I just want to kick that person out. They’re not welcome. If they are not attuned to what everyone else in the room is feeling, what everyone else in the room wants and how they want to experience the music, then I say, “Get the fuck out.” We do it. A lot of our roadies toss them out.

I know you have a lot guests appearing on Celestial Lineage. How do you replicate that during a live show? I know you have an invocation at the beginning of the record.

Yeah, we just don’t have Jessica [Kinney]’s vocals. That’s a real challenge and something I wish we could do. And maybe we will. Maybe someday we will do some shows with Jessica live. But for the time being we have resigned ourselves to the fact that we have to strip things back a little bit from the stuff we do on the records. I think every band does that. You have the mindset you’re in while you’re recording and the mindset you’re in when you’re playing live. It’s really two different ways of being in a band. But we do quite a bit. I’ve got a whole synthesizer scene back behind the drums and Nathan and Cody have two amplifiers apiece that are doing different things. Our sound engineer is deeply involved in crafting sound and effects and mixing of stuff.

I don’t know how many shows you get out and see, but it seems like a lot of bands don’t care about how shitty things sound in some venues. I’ve read you guys put a lot of care into setting up your stage and your sound.

I think every band wants to sound good.

A lot of times it’s just a barrage of drum and bass that washes everything else out.

Often times, it’s just out of your control. It’s really frustrating because the audience deals with it in the front of the house and we deal with it on stage with shitty monitors. When all you can hear on stage is this horrible roar coming off the back of the subwoofers it’s hard to get into it because you’re not lost in the music. You’re just trying to pull it together and figure out what’s going on. Everyone suffers from bad sound.

Branx, where you’re playing tonight, is a dark, cavernous, windowless place. Is that the type of venue you prefer?

I’d rather have a place that’s gnarly with a thrown-together DIY aspect to it rather than some slick, velvet room kind of club. We’ve played both. We’ve played the gnarliest squats and basements and nice theaters and professional venues. I tend to like the ones that are a little bit gnarlier.

Where were the photographs from Celestial Lineage taken?

A lot of the stuff was around our house. Some of it was in the Olympics on the south fork of the Skokomish River, not too far off Highway 101. Some really beautiful places.

I know this album ends a trilogy of ideas that you have been putting together. What’s next?

It’s totally wide open. This is the last show of this tour cycle for this record. We started recording about a year and a half ago. Our intention is to reach a place of completion. We’ve been working on this band in this very specific format for eight years or so. It is our definitely our goal to have Celestial Lineage and this tour be the end of that phase. After this it’s just wide open. We’ll definitely do more music. We’ve already got plans to do another record. Not anytime soon, but the ideas are definitely churning and turning. We want to do it differently. We always want to push ourselves forward and do things we’ve never done before. Even if it’s a total failure and people hate it. It’s important to us to never repeat the same thing. I’m not quite sure what the future music will sound like.

Does the idea of retreat appeal to you?

Yeah, oh yeah. We’ve been going really harder with this band, focusing almost exclusively on music for the past three or four years. I’ve had to put a lot of other things to the side. Now it’s time to take all those things back up again.

Like what?

Home life. Home and hearth. Being connected to one place. Being in a daily rhythm. Doing the same thing every day. Being with my family. Developing skills that are beyond manipulating Pro Tools and playing drums. I want to build a new house on our farm, so that will occupy about a year of my time.

Are you going to do that yourself?

Yeah, that’s kind of my thing. Woodworking.

When you do go back to the farm and you do go back to nature, when do you know you’ve achieved the oneness you’re looking for? How do you describe that feeling?

There never is a oneness, really. It’s not a perfect existence at all. It’s not as if we live in complete isolation. We interact with the modern world as much as anyone, really.

I’m not trying to conjure this idea of you becoming a hermit or anything. I meant when you’re out in the woods and you channel that energy there, how do you know you’re receiving it?

It’s very experiential. It’s a feeling. Your consciousness shifts. It’s like taking acid. You know it’s coming on and you’re in a different mind state and you’re beginning to get back in harmony with nature and living a quiet lifestyle in the countryside. This changes everything. The thoughts you have changes. Your body changes. Your perception of things around you changes. The things that you think about changes. I look forward to getting back into that zone because traveling and touring is not like my scene.

I don’t how people do it. It probably wears on you.

Sure, it’s physically exhausting. It can be a grind for sure. But that’s part of the deal. It’s supposed to be a grind. It’s kind of like being in a monastery.

A moving monastery.

Yeah, because you do the same thing every day. You’re around all dudes pretty much. Everything leads up to this ceremony where you play music for an hour and a half every day. Everything centers around this one event.

Being in the woods could be monastic too.

Yeah, it’s a similar vibe. You get into this zone where all there is is the tour or playing music every night. It’s kind of similar to being in the woods or living in a cabin somewhere. Your life really simplifies. There’s not these other concerns. There’s not all these thoughts about the future. All these you want to do. It all becomes very simple like chopping wood, getting a fire going, making some food and getting some chores done.

And playing electric guitar.

Yeah, maybe even write a song.