Pagan Moon - Mountain Chants

I found this project back in 2020, with "Arcane Solitude", if I am not mistaken. After that, I had the opportunity to listen to "Torchlight", and it blew me away. The simplicity, yet effectiveness of the sound, really struck.

2022 sees the release of a compilation: "Five Years of Anti​-​Mormon Propaganda" – a powerful title, if I may add.

Thank you very much, first, for your availability! Covid, pandemic, confinement, social remoteness and vaccination, worldwide terror, and human madness. How have you been dealing with this unreal reality?

Thanks for the interview! It feels strange to live through such a historically important event. Luckily for me, I work from home, so I was shielded from the main thrust of human misery.

Composing was an alternative you sought, to abstract the mind from this situation, I suppose. Can you trigger the mind to "composition mode"? Can you work that way?

Yeah I guess there is a ‘mode’ that I enter when composing. Very alone, stoned out of my mind.

You have, with Pagan Moon, a very short route (2018). Have you had previous experience or is this really your first?

The beginning of Pagan Moon goes back to around 2016 actually. I have a few unreleased demos from around that time that will likely never see the light of day. Before this project, I had a few short-lived musical experiments years before, but nothing that could be described as concrete (or even good).

How have these about three years been? Do you think this adventure has been positive to its full extent?

I would say it has been positive for me. One of the coolest things is getting emails from other artists around the world who want to trade tapes, or just talk about music.

What made you go ahead with the idea of Pagan Moon? Was it with the sole intention of creating Art or is there, in Pagan Moon, anything more than just Art?

I just wanted to have an outlet for the anger and hopelessness of existence. Blasting riffs into the void has been a way to cope with the reality that we are powerless cogs in the machine of capitalism, existing only to amass wealth and power for a small few.

Salt Lake City, Utah. What about that '90s team? Stockton and Malone, what a duo! Nevertheless, back to business... your music mirrors the region you come from, in my opinion. Do you take S.L. as a source of inspiration, or does your inspiring focus "disperse" to other stops, other sounds, etc.?

I have been a Utah Jazz fan my whole life! A consistent theme in my music has been the oppressive forces alive in the Salt Lake valley, namely the Mormon Church. In contrast with that, we have a limitless, untamed wilderness of unrivaled majesty in our own backyard.

Do you think Black Metal is more than just music? Is the blackest, mystical facet of Black Metal something you took as yours?

To me it feels like more than just music, but that is the essence of humanity I suppose. Taking something that is just noise and assigning it symbols that have power and meaning to us. My own idea of black metal is trying to tap into that.

Your vision of Black Metal currently finds correspondence in which bands, in which artists or in what scenarios?

I have said this before in interviews, but I don’t have a specific scene that I look to for inspiration. Rather, I strive for a discrete feeling that I get when listening to something. That sort of wintery forest majesty, or candlelit tomb type of imagery. That feeling is what I try to create with Pagan Moon songs. I appreciate the old german scene (Moonblood, Asakku, Grausamkeit) and polish scene (Infernum, Nokturnal Mortum) in particular.

What do you consider the current state of North American Black Metal? More and more bands have emerged, and many of them with immense quality and committed to bringing more and more new things to the genre. Good times, huh?

There are some quality artists here, I agree.

How do you deal with all this activity on social media, essentially by fans, and their special limited editions, and the entire Instagram universe, and whatever? Black Metal has left the Underground and is exposed in virtual storefronts, accessible to those who pay more to have it. Does this line of thought make sense?

Social media and the ecosystem around it is really annoying. I pretty much just use it for announcing things, but part of me wishes that I never started an instagram. There are other, more interesting ways that you can connect with people. IG in particular is just a time-wasting tool used to leech money from us through advertising, by appealing to our most obvious insecurities. I personally have no interest in growing my audience through endless social media posting, but I like being able to meet other black metallers on the platform.

You released a split with Arnor. Is this a project with which you identify yourself to the point of moving forward with a collaboration?

I’m not sure if we will do anything else in the future. I have limited time to write / record music and if I do another split, I have some other artists that I’d also like to collaborate with.

"Torchlight" was released on May 22, 2021. How did this process go since the day you decided to move on to the conception of the Demo, during the conception of the Demo, and the distribution / divulgation of said Demo? Did you have - if you had to – to adapt to this new reality to carry out this whole process?

I had a lot of the riffs swimming around in my head for over a year before I got around to even begin composing things. During the whole process I moved to a new house, and so there was a setback while I got my equipment all working properly again. Also, I initially recorded the demo and HATED it, so I scrapped the entire thing. I re-recorded it and I’m happy with the way it turned out.

What have you been projecting for the future? New collaborations, new Demo (an album, maybe), something new?

I have some new ideas for another Pagan Moon release when I get around to it. I could think about doing a full length release if there is interest from a label to do a LP, but for now I’m content doing limited tape releases. I have some other music in the works as well - a dark-ambient / black metal project for all the evil synth music I like to make, and currently starting to work with some friends on writing a demo for a new heavy metal / power metal band. So stay tuned for that!

Thank you very much, once again, for your time and availability, and for supporting this project by answering my questions. We look forward to a lot more music. See you again!

Thank you man, keep in touch!

Pagan Moon Official Bandcamp