I think that’s a very important point. People who get involved in the underground or DIY scene are constantly faced with the decision of what they “sacrifice” for the cause. And in your case, it also has to be said that you are a very active band. Let’s talk about the records you’ve released. There are three regular full-length albums, two EPs which are actually long enough that a powerviolence band could probably make two or three albums out of them. On top of that you released your compilation, a live vinyl, a VHS cassette, and most recently also a tape. Those are, as I said, only the physical releases, and with these publications you really only started in 2019. Given everything you described, that’s a consistently high output.

Actually, I think. there is one musical thing missing from that list. Funnily enough, I was ranting about it recently because it’s not listed on Metal Archives: this year we also put out the “Vigor of Duh~hul” tape in an edition of 50 copies. It contains one song from the fourth album, which of course we’ve already recorded as well. That’s our classic move: we basically always already have the next album in our hands. When one album comes out, we’ve already recorded the next one.

Exactly, we’ve released three studio albums. We founded the band at the end of 2015, and the first album only came out in 2019, even though Metal Archives says 2018, which isn’t correct either (laughs). The first EP was relatively spontaneous. We were in the studio, recorded five songs, and still didn’t know how we wanted to use them. At some point I came to rehearsal and suggested taking three of the songs as a full-length, because that would make a great album package, and we’d just use the other two songs as an EP. What’s interesting from a story perspective is that because of that, the two songs on the EP do not build chronologically on the previous album. Our second EP (“Rise of the Ruan~angh”) is then also a complete spin-off, the way “Rogue One” is in the Star Wars universe. With that, we created an option for ourselves that also allows us to tell stories outside the main lore. Of course that opens up room for storytelling, because it allows us to release things that no longer focus on the main character. To stay with the video game analogy: those are side quests for us. If we were to say we wanted to finish the game quickly and be done, that would be counterproductive. “Rise of the Ruan~angh” is actually my favourite release, I think. We like playing with the lore. And for me it was exciting to zoom out and look at what is happening somewhere else in this world at the same time. What could we tell, perhaps as a cross-reference to events that have already been reported?

So that means “Rise of the Ruan~angh” sits outside the story framework of the pamphlet written so far?

Exactly, yes. Speaking of which: when you look at the discography, it might give the impression that in the anniversary year there wasn’t really “the big thing.” Sure, we did the VHS and so on, but the really big release this year is actually the book. So, Pamphlet 3, the final version of the book. That’s 400 pages of high fantasy! I have to remind myself of that too, because that release was already a few months ago now, but it also came out this year. And if you want to talk about the “main release,” then this year it was the book.

That’s a wonderful sentence, and in my opinion it describes you very well: “The main release this year was the book.”

So “Rise of the Ruan~angh” is your favourite release. Looking back, both in terms of the songs and the sound, how do you view your earlier releases like the already mentioned Carrier of Weight or Desert of Ghouls?

On the first anniversary day, we played Carrier of Weight in full. So we basically had an old-school set and played those songs. The plan was also to play “Dry Land,” the first song from the first album, with Marco, the original drummer. But unfortunately he was ill, so that didn’t work out.

In terms of sound, it’s difficult. In the first five or six years I listened to EREMIT more myself, now I listen to less EREMIT. Maybe that also has something to do with how present Raumordnung is. Funnily enough, I was reading the current issue of Deaf Forever and there was a band in it that had re-recorded an album that was 15 years old. I don’t think that’s our thing. I’d rather move forward and make new things. Sure, there are things where I know I’d do them differently today, but that’s always the case. We already have a 23-minute song that is just one riff, we probably won’t do that again. Although, during the time when Marco and I were just the two of us, we actually spent a long time trying to write another “Dry Land.” We were looking for a riff like that for a long time, but it never came. Then we wrote different material instead. So that song is really a unique feature of Carrier of Weight.

With the third album, there actually are a few moments where I’d say I would do that differently today. Live, we play the material a bit differently anyway. By now there’s saxophone and harmonica and even more trumpet, we’ve become freer, more experimental. For example, the current live version of “Entombed in a Prism of Blindness,” the second song from the third album, I like better than the studio version. There’s this long section with saxophone and harmonica where we fall into a kind of Blood Incantation or 70s jam mode. That loosens up the arrangement and makes the part afterwards even darker. But I wouldn’t want to go back and change that. I’d rather integrate that into new material and keep pushing forward.

When it comes to sound, I have an ambivalent attitude. Sometimes I put on EREMIT and think: “Wow, the sound is crap. Somehow this isn’t it, why do people like this?” (laughs). But sometimes I also think: “Wow, this is huge.” When it comes to sound, I’m the one in the band who experiments the most. Kalle basically has one guitar and amp setup, and he’s been playing that since 2019. In principle, almost nothing has changed there. I, on the other hand, am always tinkering. I have two fixed mines — effect pedals, in terms of distortion — those don’t change, but I always have a second effects chain that I keep working on. Different amps, more amps, other cabinets. I try out a lot.

On the one hand, you’re searching for a riff in order to write another complete song out of it. On the other hand, your newer songs feel packed with ideas that go beyond riffing. How conscious was that step? Was it a deliberate “we have to go somewhere else,” or more a letting go of expectations that automatically led you into this sonic world?

It’s both. There are moments when we know how we want to write a song. It has XY, it’s super long or quiet or whatever. But at the same time, we write riffs and see what happens. The fact that the third album became a four-LP record was not planned at all. “Conflicting Aspects of Reality,” the first song, is 63 minutes long. That was not planned. Marco and I started writing and we just kept writing, kept writing, kept writing, and it never stopped. And at a certain point we somehow found that funny. For ages we didn’t even know how long the song was, because we were only ever rehearsing individual parts. At some point we said, let’s play it all the way through, and then we thought, okay, this is really on some Sleep Dopesmoker or Bell Witch kind of level. And funnily enough, I think the song is exactly 12 seconds longer than Dopesmoker. But that was a coincidence. A coincidence we had to laugh about.

So, like I said, it’s a bit of both. I’m someone who listens to a lot of music, likes going to exhibitions, the theatre, the cinema. I like consuming art. Often it’s like this: I hear something or see something, think it’s great, and then I want to do that too (laughs). But between that impulse and the moment when you actually start working on something, there’s always a process of transformation. How do I want to do that? How can I even make that happen? A lot of that really has to do with skill. None of us is a trained musician, formally speaking. So our skills naturally limit us too. But very concretely: I think Bohren & der Club of Gore are really great, and then at some point I came into the rehearsal room and suggested doing something quiet with saxophone. In the EREMIT guise.

The new material now is going to be different yet again. The people who already bought the tape can already get a little glimpse into the future. In terms of songwriting, it was a new feeling for us again, because now we have the second cycle and are kind of starting over a little. So: writing a first album again, but what does this first album sound like? That was exciting.

When you say that while playing live you see a film, what does it feel like when you work with so many artists and then suddenly see the grottoes you mentioned visualised, or find yourself looking into the protagonist’s eyes on a hoodie?

In most cases, it’s like Christmas for me. I absolutely cannot draw, I have zero talent for it. I’m completely dependent on other artists visualising this world that I have in my head. And I’m really fortunate that I get to experience that. I’m sitting at my PC, I see an email, I see an attachment, and I think: okay, wow, now I’m seeing something new. That gives me tremendous joy. I’m happy that over the course of ten years I’ve been able to commission artwork so often and work with so many wonderful artists. Of course, it’s a filtering process. It never matches my own imagination 100 percent exactly, because the artist’s style, perspective, and expression are always part of it. There has also been friction there. What do I like, what don’t I like. Sometimes the language barrier comes into play as well, and then you ask yourself how to get that across in an email, maybe in English, though the person may speak neither German nor good English. Then you keep refining it. I’m incredibly proud of our visual channels over the last ten years. Visually, we’ve created something coherent and given glimpses into this world. In my ideal vision, maybe I would have had the same artist from beginning to end. But in the real world, tastes change, and artists change too. In the early years, for example, we worked a lot with Ryan Choi, an incredibly talented illustrator who did many of the desert illustrations. And at some point he stopped illustrating and became a boxer. I could have worked with him all the way to EREMIT Part X, but that’s just how it goes. I wander through digital galleries, Instagram feeds, I see artists and think: “Wow, that’s good.” Through the band I have certain resources and can at least ask what an illustration costs. Maybe funny as well: people think I painted the oil paintings for the albums. Spoiler: I didn’t. I can’t write music, write a book, and also paint oil paintings. At some point, that’s the limit.

And it really isn’t limited just to the covers or the artwork for your records. While preparing for this, I put on the live vinyl from Kaufbeuren again and for the first time really looked closely inside the slipcase: there’s a face staring back at me. On every page, everywhere there is space, there is art. It’s not limited just to the oil paintings.

That’s a beautiful sentence. “Everywhere there is space, there is art” — that is exactly what we try to do. I like physical media very much. I’m a big lover of comics and graphic novels. I like having something in my hand. Over ten years, a lot of brainpower has gone into the conception of our physical releases. I’ve been working for many years with Sabrina Stegmann, a school friend. She is a designer and is now the in-house designer for Drei Gleichen, our label. Being able to create art together with good friends is something else entirely. It’s a gift.

We’re talking about art, the oil paintings, and the fact that everything is canon. Everything is one world. Let’s step into this world that you describe, illustrate, and portray musically. We follow a protagonist, on a world. This world consists of three bodies. On your last album, EREMIT 3, this is beautifully illustrated. Visually, you have to imagine it as a hollowed-out cylinder into which a sphere “breaks.” If I understand it correctly, that creates three bodies: a sea, something solid, and a gaseous world of mist. Could you describe this structure a bit more closely?

For me, it was always important not to simply use our Earth as the setting. I loved Tolkien’s world, but I also somehow found it a shame that it is basically our world. I tend more toward sci-fi there. That means completely different living conditions, different from our world, different from our universe. In discovering this world, I asked myself fundamental questions. For example, where the light comes from. If there are no stars emitting light, as there are for us, then how does anything exist at all? And that’s how I arrived at this form. “Ya~wa,” this world, consists of a world-sea, spherical, set inside a hollow cylinder. This cylinder is solid matter, a world of cliffs, a terrestrial body. And it is filled with a world of mist, of which we know the least so far. This structure in turn exists inside a larger body. Of these bodies, the “Sabeih~kura” or “Eon,” many exist. These are very, very large, jellyfish-like lifeforms that move through a space I do not want to explain in more detail here.

That means: the EREMIT story takes place in one world, but this world is only one of several inside an even larger organic living being. Box in box in box. Actually a bit like in Men in Black. At the end of Men in Black 1, the camera zooms out and you see how small everything is, that our whole universe is only a marble and some aliens are playing marbles with it. This scaling of size and this ambivalence between “it is completely irrelevant because it is so small” versus “for the beings inside it, it is the whole world.” It is like with us: we have known for over 100 years how big the universe is, and yet we still live our individual lives. I find that ambivalence totally fascinating. It is reflected in the world of EREMIT as well. There are large entities there, small entities. With the Raumordnung collective, the story begins exactly at the moment when EREMIT will end, after the ten albums.

It is structured a bit like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Again, transitions and larger scales. And the large is found in the small, the small in the large, that has always interested me. That already existed in the world before EREMIT. The previous band, Dragged, had already told stories from this world. But EREMIT made it more concrete, and through the collaboration with visual artists I was able to illustrate it more strongly. That is why there are also these images in the third album and in the third pamphlet. They are glimpses, so that one can better understand where one actually is, and that it is less of a universe as we know it.

A really great take. For me, that was an aha moment, seeing it visualised like that. Especially in retrospect, when you have heard Raumordnung and then see the Eon again.

If we zoom in there: in an interview you once spoke about the language in this story and how it came into being. What I asked myself is this: does the world actually also have a written form of expression? In many of your designs, what I’d call tribal-like ornaments appear. Are those readable characters or, in the broadest sense, forms of communication?

That is somewhere on my to-do list, that I make some kind of iconographic representation or explanation of symbols, because over these ten years we have created a depth of symbols that is not to be underestimated. In the second pamphlet there is the seal of Un~nu~in-wamu on it, and we used that a lot in the first five years. Then there is the Drei Gleichen symbol, the three floating figures, our label sign. Then these tribal-like, insect-like symbols, which appeared for the first time with the third album and the live vinyl. Of course, they have a meaning, they come from certain corners of the world, belong to certain characters. I really should go into that more concretely at some point. So which symbols stand for whom, who uses them.

The idea for these ornaments has to do, on the one hand, with the fact that I find symbolism itself exciting. Besides that, it is a classic sci-fi element. Protagonists enter a temple, discover symbols, at first do not know what they mean, and only as the story unfolds does it become clear. I like playing with that. And I also discover the world myself while talking about it. If we are talking about it now, I immediately feel like wandering into that part of the world and thinking about who lives there. What materials do these inhabitants use? How do they document things, and how does that shape the symbolism? Outwardly, it is a game of knowledge and ignorance, but not because we want to keep anything secret. It is more a question of complexity and how much space or time we have. If someone says we tell too little of our lore, then I say: there is a 400-page book. There is no shortcut, you have to read it. There I have to quote the Bielefeld sociologist Niklas Luhmann with the sentence: “Complicated objects must also be presented in a complicated way, otherwise one does not do them justice.” On the other hand, of course one also has to say: I am not Tolkien. I am not a linguist. I have not built a completely coherent artificial language. There are proper names, words, but not a whole language. The book also grew organically. I started it without a plan, and I think you can also notice while reading that you are accompanying an author who worked on it for ten years. I think the beginning of the book certainly reads differently from the end.

I’d like to come back once more to this comparison with a video game.
There is a main quest, and that is the music. But you can also read the book in order to dive in even deeper. In addition, there is, for example, the comic for Raumordnung. If you pay attention, it becomes relatively clear again on the first pages that there is more to understand about the world of EREMIT.

And there is lore content that you can only find on certain T-shirts. Or things are written in the albums that are not in the book. Lyrics in songs are again different from the corresponding chapter in the book. It is a puzzle game, and I like that. Cross references like in Jodorowsky. Inside the live vinyl, it said “The Future Will Show” on one side and “The Rise of the Ruan~angh” on the other, before Rise of the Ruan~angh came out. That probably makes the nerd heart beat faster. It is similar now with the prologue comic you mentioned: it is meant to give a taste, to create question marks. And yet, as an EREMIT listener, you recognise: “Wait, I’ve seen that before.”

Because you mentioned the lyrics: I think you would be withholding something from yourself if you did not read your lyrics for what they are, because they are more than just one part of the music. Your lyrics fluctuate strongly: sometimes very narrative, almost like prose, sometimes extremely abstract. I have two examples of this contrast. The battle description in “Beheading the Innumerous” on Desert of Ghouls, and then “Passages of Poor Light” from Wearer of Numerous Forms differ very strongly. With the latter I always think: this is the scored season finale. You do not decide by chance which form a text takes for which chapter, do you?

I always already know roughly what happens in a song. There was actually never a case where we had written a song and I still did not know what happens in it. Maybe right at the beginning, on the very first album. Back then we wrote riffs months before I wrote lyrics. But in the bigger picture: I already know what it is about. I mostly write the lyrics to already existing songs. And I also orient myself toward the song. Black metal parts, quiet sections, ambient parts, they have a meaning, they are not random, they are linked to the lore. The lyrics should correspond to that. For a few years now, it has usually worked like this: I have a demo recording from the rehearsal room and first I just write down what happens, without it having to be beautiful. Simply: what happens in this chapter. From that, phrases crystallise in the next step. Then I look at how these phrases fit the riff. I like collecting words. I like sound and meaning. I hear a word somewhere and think: “That’s intense.” “Aqueduct,” for example, is a word I like, it has been lying around for years, maybe at some point it will fit and I will use it.

Even back at university, I always had two notebooks: one for the seminar, and one for words, sentences, phrases that I liked. And sometimes that flows straight into it. On the third album there is the sentence “From where I stood, I heard the sickening whacks” — that is taken almost word for word from a book about Gandhi’s Salt March, where it describes how people are beaten to death. That sentence hit me so hard, and there is a similar scene in our story, so the sentence flowed into it. That is how lyrics sometimes emerge from the narrative perspective, sometimes as pure image words without sentence structure, only through atmosphere. With Raumordnung it is different again: there is a narrator in German, Japanese parts, English parts. It is unfolded in a completely different way.

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