An Interview with Ashkelon Sain

Ashkelon Sain, Seattle, 2012. (photo by Photo Slavery)

Ashkelon Sain is an absurdly talented musician that deserves to be known by anyone who likes; ambient, psychedelic, soulful, shoegaze, and experimental music. One of my missions in life is to champion the music that I enjoy. I treasure Ashkelon's music. He makes so many different types of music that there's an album for every mood, or activity.

It's been my great fortune to have seen Ashkelon play twice, both times with his darkwave, dreampop, prog, goth, psychedelic, awesome band, Trance to the Sun. I'm still hoping to see Ashk play some more and maybe with a different band. I attempted to cover a number of Ashk's projects, but there was no way I was going to try to cover them all.

So, here is an interview conducted with Ashkelon Sain via email. Dig it.

What was your first music project/band? What did that teach you?

The first??? Oh Dear! Just a little cover band where we attempted to play songs by The Clash & The B52’s. I think the most important thing to recognize here is that I was just a 14 year old kid who asked his mom if it would be okay if he started a band and held rehearsals in the garage, and my mom was kind enough to say yes.  

This Ascension, Santa Barbara, 1991. LtoR: Kevin Serra, Dru Allen, Tim Tuttle, Ashkelon Sain, Matt Ballesteros. (photo by Tom Tuttle)



For a while you were with the band This Ascension (an amazing 90's Santa Barbara darkwave/dreampop band) what are some of your standout moments with this band?

Indeed. Awesome band. Not much of my time with them is really captured anywhere though. I joined on as bassist around the time their second album was being finalized. I was present for the mixing of that album (Light and Shade) and I got to lay down some celestial guitar leads for the song “Chameleon Room” at that time. I went on to play a year’s worth of shows with This Ascension, as their bassist, & along the way I co-wrote a small cluster of songs which appeared eventually on their third album (Walk Softly, A Dream Lies Here). I left to concentrate on my other band Blade Fetish though, in like 1992, for better or for worse, so, it was ultimately Cynthia Coulter who performed those basslines of mine when the third album finally got recorded. I think she did an excellent job of it.

Trance To The Sun, Santa Barbara, 1996. LtoR: Ashkelon Sain, Zoe Wakefield, Robert Alonzo, Israel Medina. (photo by Lucian S. Donato)



Trance to the Sun was your main musical project for a number of years. TTTS toured the US multiple times as well as doing a number of shorter tours. How did you manage to pull that off without the backing of a major record label?

Monetarily speaking? Well, we kept our expenses down as best we could. Thinking back, it seems to me that the concert promoters who brought us in were really enthusiastic about having us, and super gracious about paying us well. So what comes to mind first is all these individuals in different cities who made it possible for bands like ours to come through... I salute you all! And then there was my 1991 Volvo station wagon named Miranda. Champagne color, very sturdy. We didn’t have a live drummer very often, and we relied on drum machine for most shows, therefore we could fit all our gear in that one car, which saved on gas. It was always quite an epic adventure. 

Trance To The Sun, Philadelphia, 2000. LtoR: Joaquin Gray, Ingrid Luna Blue, Ashkelon Sain. (photo by Clovis IV)

Ambient Submarine Fleet, Santa Barbara, 2001. (photo by Shawn Brenneman)



You did a string of experimental guitar albums that were mostly improvised and recorded live in front of an audience. What memories do you have of those shows? How do you feel those recordings got you prepared for what was next?

The coffee shop I used to frequent back around 2001 was looking for some chill live music on the weekends. They asked me about that possibility, and I said ok. My setup was really simple for that, all direct, so capturing a recording was super easy. What surprised me was when I discovered afterward that I had so much fun listening to the playback! I gave titles to all the different pieces that I’d made up on the spot, and then the obvious next step was to print up some easy CDrs. In a span of about a year I ended up recording eight CDrs worth of “Ashkelon Sain’s Ambient Submarine Fleet”, as it were. There was even a hand-made box set which I had for sale on my website for a time, but I sold out of all those in like 2003. 

Ashkelon Sain’s Ambient Submarine Fleet, Santa Barbara, 2001 (photo by Shawn Brenneman)



I’m flattered that you asked about it, since that music has been submerged beneath the sea for almost 20 years. Since you asked though, I’m going to set a little time aside to dust off & polish up one of those original concert recordings. Look for that to appear soon at trancetothesun.bandcamp.com

What else did you ask? How did it prepare me? Oh heavens! I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I approached the years immediately to follow with any profound preparedness, so if the experience was meant to prepare me for anything, it most definitely backfired! Hahhahahaa! It wasn’t about that though. It was just a moment in time where I basically pulled back the curtain and was like, “Ok everyone, here’s what Ashkelon Sain does with his guitar when he thinks no one is listening.”

The Astonished Eyes of Evening, by Cinema Strange. Recorded 2000-2001.

You produced at least one album that I know of, that you didn't perform on. How did it feel to be the producer instead of the band?

Back in 2014 I was on tour as bassist for an Italian band called The Spiritual Bat (I’ve been guest keyboardist here and there on some of their studio recordings), and when we showed up at this club we were going to play in Tijuana, they had “The Astonished Eyes of Evening” by Cinema Strange playing on the sound system. I was wowed!!! It was as if my own living room had been delivered to me in another country! I’m not really sure if the DJ knew my connection to that music, I kind of think it was just happenstance.

I’ve produced a small grip of songs & albums for others, including Deadfly Ensemble, and also a Portland band called Fever (formerly Bedtime…), but I’m guessing that the Cinema Strange album is the one you know. It all felt really normal, actually. Cinema Strange are amazing musicians. I basically just encouraged them to be their raddest selves, and they really just let me do what I was brought in to do. I amped them up, I gave them feedback, y’know, like “This is rad!”, “Fix that!”, “Add to that”, “Axe that!”. They let me be the arbiter of their disagreements and they gave me a lot of freedom as far as how the final mixes would sound. And they even invited me to come up with a structure for some of their rougher ideas (like the Red And Silver Fantastique, for instance). It was a true team effort, and I think everyone remains to this day feeling it’s like a dream come true, the way that album turned out.

Cinema Strange, Camarillo, California, 2001. (photographer uncertain)

The production aspect is probably my strongest suit, really, when you take the Ashkelon puzzle all apart. I have a bachelor’s degree in music composition, which basically means that I’m versed in an onslaught of 16th century pseudo-scientific equations which, when applied to Western musical tonalities, are thought to be capable of translating emotions across any and all language barriers. I’ve only ever used this information to help me express my own emotions, if I did anything else with them I’d be a film score composer, or just plain insincere. It’s helpful information to have though, and I’d recommend it for anyone college age that thinks they’d like to do something like what I do. I wish I hadn’t waited so long to become truly educated about the physical science of sound though, geeeez! To think I went through my entire thirties not knowing there’s exactly 10 octaves of audible sound??? The lowest sound humans can hear falls somewhere around F or F#, and the highest sound humans can hear sits way up around another F borderline F# at ten octaves higher. And then it occurred to me that any C falls dead center between two F#’s, like, is that why Middle C is thought to sound like the “middle”? I still wonder about that. Anyways, eventually I made up my own set of names for each of the ten octaves of audible sound, & I use them when I’m listening and analyzing and thinking. These are:
Whale Sounds (46hz & below)
Subsonic Bass (46-92hz)
Shadow Bass (92-185hz)
Voodoo (185-370hz)
Bells (370-740hz)
Whistles (740-1480hz)
Heat (1480-2960hz)
Action/Shimmer (2960-5920hz)
Hiss (5920-11840hz)
Air (11840hz & above)
The physical science of sound matters a great deal when a song is in the production phase. People’s eardrums prefer by default a balance between the ten octaves in order to sense beauty, generally speaking, although in musical sound there’s these exceptions that often occur which can be magickal. Had I been able to explain all that stuff logically years before, maybe today I’d be like one of those amazing guys who make pro-recording Youtube videos while sitting in front of a 96 channel mixing console, or like someone who gets their own feature in Tape-Op Magazine, LOL! I can do theoretical analysis like a professor on the human-made auditory cosmos we call “Western Music”. However, I am totally self-educated when it comes to mixing, acquiring knowledge even still where I can, and somehow that’s gotten me by for all this time but I don’t know how. I will confess though that lately I’ve been reading an author named Bob Katz, and that’s made me feel so much more informed than ever when it comes to sound.

Oh, so back to the original question. I had this friend named Shawn Walker back in High School whose dad had pretty nice little recording room, and Shawn by the age of 17 was becoming an incredible songwriter. Shawn gave me the gift of engineering, by engineering and mixing one of my songs in his dad’s studio, and I was absolutely hooked! So I got my first four track cassette machine when I was about 17 or 18. The first thing I did outside of tracking my own songs was to record a punk band from my school. They were a tight band, but then I was listening carefully to their lyrics and I realized they were white supremacist nazis, so I realized I need to be more selective about who I do this stuff for. I didn’t touch anyone else’s music for a long time until for some reason or another I engineered a couple demos for this Santa Barbara thrash metal band who won’t be named, but their friends caught my backyard on fire and stole my neighbor’s pot plants, so I was again deterred from becoming any kind of a professional recording dude. Along came Cinema Strange a couple years later and they were wonderful! That led to me producing some songs for Deadfly Ensemble later on down the road. The most recent band I produced anything for was Solemn Meant Walks from Chicago.

Ascension To The Sun, Portland, 2012. (photo by Kristin Neuschwander)

For a time you performed with members of This Ascension as Ascension to the Sun, playing songs from both This Ascension and Trance to the Sun. How challenging was it to meld the styles of both bands together and make them work on stage? Are there any recordings of those shows that might be released some day?

I wouldn’t say we even tried to “blend”. It was just like, let’s draw up a set list and give it a shot. Had we written any songs, maybe a discussion about blending would have occurred, but the project was only ever assembled for the purpose of performing existing TTTS & TA songs live. Oh, and one of our drummers, Jeremy George, wanted to call the project “To The This”, but he was outvoted, haha!
The project gave me a chance to perform with Cynthia Coulter, which was a pleasantly unanticipated opportunity… Oh, and there’s three Youtube videos, so as for the result, just see for yourself! Honestly, that was just a really short chapter that came together by accident. The video of us playing the last song off “Bloom Flowers, Bloom!” is priceless though, to me at least. “Rex” is the title of that one… I’m so proud of everyone’s performance there. I loved how Daniel Henderson really made my drum machine parts come alive. And, oh, so cool, I got to relearn my original improvised celestial solo from that day in the studio back in 1991 when we did “Chameleon Room”, and to perform it live for the first time ever. So much fun! And Dru & I go way back, like, I think we first met at a Siouxsie concert in 1988. I’m really grateful that we all got to do that handful of shows, how many of them there were I can’t remember. 

Ascension To The Sun, Portland, 2012. LtoR: Ashkelon Sain, Cynthia Coulter, Dru Delmonico, Daniel Henderson, Jeremy George. (photo by Lucretia*Renee Rathmann)

Here’s those videos:
“Rex”:https://youtu.be/Rlun_CmPY6I
“Chameleon Room”: https://youtu.be/29JPEiLCd0w
“Fearful Symmetry”: https://youtu.be/U_mbzODkwy8 

Ashkelon Sain & Soriah, San Francisco, 2012. (photo by Dru Delmonico)

One of the many artists that you worked with is Soriah, a Tuvan throat singer. How did you get involved with Soriah? There is a spiritual feeling in your music with Soriah, was that intentional?

I don’t think Soriah would object to me calling him musically, how should I say this… promiscuous, hahahahaahhaa! He plays with everybody! And then he flies off to Asia all the time and plays music with everyone there too! In all sincerity though, Soriah has to be the most naturally gifted, musically inclined person I’ve ever had the chance to work with. & I think most people who’ve performed with him would say the same thing. He primarily does conceptual performances, so most of his concerts are one of a kind, one time sets. Soriah had me perform with him a few times when I was new to Portland, and the improvisatory nature of the type of performances we did back then was a different and interesting challenge. After a time, I envisioned a concept for what an album we made together might maybe sound like, and we tried writing and recording some actual “songs” together, and it clicked! In fact, we made two studio albums, plus a live album! They all live here: https://soriah-with-ashkelonsain.bandcamp.com/   

Eztica Tour Flyer, Los Angeles, 2011. LtoR: Daniel Henderson, Ashkelon Sain, Soriah, Marshal Serna, Jonathan Howitt. (photo by Lucretia*Renee Rathmann)

Soriah with Ashkelon Sain went on to become a band in its own right. We brought in two or three other musicians, depending on who was available. We went on tours, made videos. We even toured Japan! Seven years went into that effort. Some of the best shows I ever played came along that pathway. Was it spiritual? I’m going to defer ultimately to Soriah on that one. You’ll have to interview him. To me, I think we just had a sense of what each other would feel like was common ground, and we worked within that framework, that empire, that forest, that temple… hahaha whatever it is! Did you know that it’s now believed that temples were the founding monuments of civilization itself? Where am I going with this? Oh yeah, was our music spiritual? Maybe, but not exactly? Soriah might give you a different answer, but from my point of view, the sound we achieved together, I’d have to call it primordial.
Here’s a video or two:
https://youtu.be/y-tjFUWDzXo
https://youtu.be/FmXNoRYglcQ   

Soriah with Ashkelon Sain tour flyer, Jerome, Arizona, 2012. LtoR: Daniel Henderson, Marshal Serna, Soriah, Jonathan Howitt, Ashkelon Sain. (photo by Lucretia*Renee Rathmann)  

Trance To The Sun, Eugene, Oregon, 2015. LtoR Enrique Ugalde (Soriah), Ingrid Luna-Blue, Daniel Henderson, Ashkelon Sain. (photo by Lucretia*Renee Rathmann)



After being away from Trance to the Sun for many years, Trance to the Sun (TTTS for short) released an all new album called Via Subterranea. How did that come about and why then? 

Trance To The Sun, Seattle, 2014. LtoR Ingrid Luna-Blue, Ashkelon Sain, Daniel Henderson. (photo by Terry Luna)

Let’s see, that was like, 2013 when we embarked on that! And it had been some years for sure. The last concert prior to that had been in ’07, and the last album prior to that was released in ’01. I didn’t think I was ever going back to doing more TTTS, and then in 2012 & ‘13 I had been demoing new ideas, some of which were ostensibly for a third album with Soriah, but it was all too far outside the ‘Soriah with Ashkelon’ framework. And then I took a more objective look at that folder full of new music ideas, like the initial demos for Aviatrix, Loch Ness Square & Where Smoke Blows Across, and I was like, well damn, it’s actually more of a rough sketch for a new TTTS album. So I called Ingrid and she really wanted to do it. And Daniel Henderson had had a great time drumming for Ascension To The Sun & Soriah, so he got on board, and we made it real. I mean, when a freak snow storm inundated our first photo shoot, that was when I knew for sure that the stars were aligning just for us! The songwriting was the funnest part of the whole experience though, absolutely. When Ingrid & I got together to do our tag-team wordsmithing and start transforming the raw musical ideas into actual tunes, it was totally alchemical, explosive, mind blowing. Definitely the most enjoyable songwriting experience of my life. It took almost 4 years to realize the album though, which was too long. And it’s hard to be in a long distance project. I had a lot to learn about making mixes using a real drum kit too. I simply didn’t know how much I simply didn’t know until we made that album. Biggest single learning experience of my life.
Oh, but those songs! I love them all.
I’ve seen where you’ve written in your blog, btw, that it’s your favorite album TTTS ever made. That makes me very happy to know. Here it is: https://trancetothesun.bandcamp.com/album/via-subterranea
And here’s a video: https://youtu.be/3WWm2mQ9AGE  

Trance To The Sun, San Francisco, 2014. LtoR Terry Luna, Daniel Henderson, Ingrid Luna-Blue, Ashkelon Sain. (photos by Rafa Corral) 

Devoured By Flowers tour poster, Portland, 2018. Ashkelon Sain & Dorian Campbell. (photo by Marshal Serna)


Devoured by Flowers is one of your more recent bands. Can you tell me more about the band and how it came together? Have any of Devoured by Flowers live shows been recorded for release?

Devoured By Flowers began when I started producing an album for my friend Dorian Campbell. Dorian had been the frontman of this band called Sumerland here in Portland, and I was a huge fan, still am. Anyone who likes Devoured should track down Sumerland’s album “Imaginary Ways”, you’ll love it. Soriah was a member of Sumerland incidentally too, on drums and guitar (he appears under his birth name Enrique Ugalde). After they disbanded, Dorian asked me if I’d be game to produce a solo album for him. He brought over a truckload of songs he’d written, I think this was like 2010. We thought we were supposed to be making a solo acoustic album at first, but all Dorian’s songs held these wide open spaces which cried out for more instrumentation, so I got out my bass and started programming drums, and we brought in Daniel Henderson and Jonathan Howitt to add some live drumming as well. I was still focused on Soriah back in 2010ish, and then in 2012 there was a Sumerland reunion show (with yours truly as guest bass player). In 2012 I actually performed as a member of six different bands! 

Sumerland, Portland, 2012. LtoR: Dorian Campbell, Ashkelon Sain, Cedric Justice, Enrique Ugalde (Soriah), Marshal Serna. (photo by Lucretia*Renee Rathmann)

After that crazy year, for 2013 I switched gears completely and started working on the new Trance To The Sun album, so what Dorian & I were working on never really got off the ground until 2016, when we played our first gig opening for The Spiritual Bat (That initial DBF lineup featured me on bass and Soriah on guitar, actually!). Devoured By Flowers went through a number of very cool and interesting lineups over the next 3 years. And we played up and down the West Coast, just basically enjoying being in a band. Dorian & I were the core members, and we had some excellent other players along the way, but a lasting full time lineup of other musicians never really took hold.

 

Devoured By Flowers, Los Angeles, 2018. LtoR: Andrew Stromstad, Dorian Campbell, Ashkelon Sain, Aaron Nicholes. (photo by Dizhan Blu)


You know how it is these days, everybody is in multiple bands, working multiple jobs, falling in love and moving away. How we actually pull this off, sometimes I don’t even know. Our first album “Moonscape Hotel” was finished in 2018, and then our second album “Phantom Time Traveler” was done in 2020.
https://devouredbyflowers.bandcamp.com/album/phantom-time-traveler
https://devouredbyflowers.bandcamp.com/album/moonscape-hotel

And I don’t know if this is what you mean by a “release”, but we have some concert videos on Youtube that aren’t bad at all. This one I’ll link is perhaps my favorite. Daniel Henderson set up his camera and let it roll before climbing behind the drums. It features Devoured By Flowers (with our friend Devon Lopetrone on bass) playing at 1 in the morning on the third night of a music festival called Litha Cascadia, which before the Covapocalypse was held annually at a venue called Red Hawk Avalon, which is on private land in the Washington woods near Olympia (hopefully this fest will return): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5LYvxfOitE&t=972s
And then there’s a full concert set worth of individual song videos beginning here, with the talented Sandi Leeper on keys, and the legendary Andrew Stromstad on bass. Same band, different lineup. Very tight! : https://youtu.be/XBdTeZOWI9Y 

Newest Releases, 2020/2021: Remasters of Venomous Eve, “Bloom Flowers, Bloom!”, “Phantom Time Traveler” by Devoured by Flowers… & the new Trance To The Moon 2xEP “Lavendar Skies”.

Recently you released remastered versions of the TTTS albums “Bloom Flowers, Bloom!” & “Venomous Eve”, both of which originally were released in the 90s. Why did you decide to revisit these two albums in particular? What challenges were involved in re-mastering the album? Did you have to approach them differently?

Well, I just love those albums SO MUCH! It was on my to-do list since forever to have those be remastered someday. Quarantine yielded the time, so 2020 became the year, with “Bloom” being ready by December, and “VenEve” coming up behind it and finally being printed in March of 2021. I did the preliminary audio restoration and spot fixes myself, and I hired Doug Krebs to do the final mastering. He did a really super excellent job I might add!
As far as my bringing any expertise to the remastering process, I really owe it to all the experience gained from struggling to mix “Via Subterranea”. It was the lessons from that whole endeavor that made me able to do the front end restoration work needed to enable these two remasters sound as beautiful as they do. As I said, I learned a ton from that experience.
I don’t know if this is interesting to anyone, but what I mean by preliminary audio restoration is I isolate audio frequencies that are out of range with the rest of the sound, like I look at every little tone that bends your eardrums excessively out of shape, and using highly fine tuned EQ technology I knock all those frequencies into a more logical place, approaching them one by one. And you asked… was the experience different between the two albums? Yes. For “Venomous Eve” those transients, as we call them, the ones in need of individual attenuation numbered in the hundreds. On “Bloom” they numbered in the thousands (it sounds amazing after mastering if you take the time to do that first). I’d been slowly working on “Bloom” for years. Come 2020, I finally found I had the time to finish the project. https://trancetothesun.bandcamp.com/album/venomous-eve-2021-remaster
https://trancetothesun.bandcamp.com/album/bloom-flowers-bloom-2020-remaster



You have appeared on many albums, produced, and recorded in many different styles, what are some of the things that you achieved musically that you the most pleased with?

Bringing people together. Somehow that turns out to be the most rewarding thing, actually. People form friendships all the time based on their mutual gravitation to certain music. Whole crowds condense on concerts with the shared realization that they’re at an important time and place. I feel it every time I set foot in the venue at a great show.
One thing I’ve done which I’m not sure very many people know about is I played guitar on and off for more than a decade in a Portland-centric Cure tribute band called TheXplodingBoys. And this exemplifies what I’m saying, aside from it being great practice and discipline and all, I didn’t do it to glorify the Cure, or pretend I was someone I wasn’t. I didn’t do it to go on tour or prove anything. I did it because of the awesome sense of community that arose from us performing those shows here locally. We did a final show in 2019, and if you watch it you’re sure to see what I mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOFcHpYHzMU&t=926s

There’s plenty more videos of TheXplodingboys on Youtube, but this one in particular of “The Kiss” is something I still really enjoy, and I think it also exemplifies what I’m saying: 

https://youtu.be/pcNnmK0zTGg

Like I said, the best thing about that experience, and I think these videos reflect it, is the awesome vibe within the crowd. It seems to me, in our culture as I know it, loving the same music is the superfuel of making friends. Performing music as a band can be as well, like, I sometimes ask myself, who would I even know in this world if it weren’t for the experience of playing and creating music? I shudder to contemplate the void my life might actually be without the friends I’ve made through music.

TheXplodingBoys, Portland, 2012. LtoR: Michelle Peccia, Viktor Nova, Cedric Justice, Daniel Henderson, Ashkelon Sain. (photographer unknown)

Not a lot of people know that you've often written lyrics, as well as music. You have also done titling for songs and albums. Do you want to write more lyrics? Occasionally you've made up words. How much do you value that word play?

The funny thing about my lyric writing is, well most of the time anyway, I seem to only be interested in writing lyrics vicariously, as in, I have to know who is going to sing it, and I imagine it in their voice. So that means I have to know the person, and it’s usually the knowledge of their perspective that becomes the inspiration for what I write. It helps immensely though to work with singers who are great lyricists themselves, like, because I don’t really have this great overwhelming need to write the words to my music on my own. Lyric quality though, that’s massively important to me. So I’ve always sought out singers who had a way with words. It’s as important as voice tone. Thinking back to like, “Urchin Tear Soda” & that era, there were times when I was doing a fair bit of lyric writing. I definitely liked writing specifically for Ingrid, since she was such a great friend, and we could relate to one another, and we shared a very blunt sense of humor. When it comes to Devoured By Flowers or Trance To The Moon though, I just pipe up with a few word suggestions when that’s called for, and that’s fine with me.

Ashkelon Sain, Seattle, 2012. (photo by Photo Slavery)

You also ask about titles? So, dude, where did you get your information? Yes, you’re in fact right, I have been the one to give titles to most of the songs when it comes to Trance To The Sun & Trance To The Moon. As a rule I come up with some sort of a title before the words are even written. Those initial titles aren’t necessarily final, and they don’t stick every time, but in general I find it works better that way if I start with one. Maybe it’s like, if I give a singer a musical sketch and say sorry, I don’t have a title, then that’s too non-committal. It seems that on some level maybe I have to know what emotion I’m conveying from the music, and summarize that somehow in a title.
I’m a big fan of song titles, especially long ones, or extremely short ones. I’ve always loved the most those ones that wrap around the back of the album cover, like “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get”, or “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun”. Trance To The Sun’s song “Calling All Vanished Airplanes” aspires to be part of that long song name club. Sometimes I even think of the title before I play or compose any music at all. As a matter of fact, from time to time I’ve maintained lists of proposed future song titles. I have notebooks with pages devoted to song title ideas. There’s a lot of ancient notebooks on certain shelves around here.

Monet Alarie, the voice of Trance To The Moon, Portland, 2021. (photo by Ashk)

Your new project is called Trance to the Moon. What would you like people to know about Trance to the Moon? How will this project different from TTTS?

The most important thing to know is I discovered an extraordinary new voice to collaborate with, and that voice belongs to Monet Alarie. They’re a great friend as well. As of this point we’ve released seven songs, and those are up on https://trancetothemoon.bandcamp.com as well as Spotify & all that. We have a very cool new video on Youtube: https://youtu.be/ouq-r8hXr-E and another video is on the way, along with about 6 more songs we’ve written, so there’s more stuff in the pipeline for sure. And I’m just really excited about it all, because this new stuff we’re doing is awesome & beautiful. Also, we’re participating on a Killing Joke Tribute album, due out on Halloween. We have a debut live performance coming up in December. If things ever become truly ok again in this world we’ll play more shows, maybe tour, who knows?


What musical projects are there that you haven't done yet, but would very much like to try?

You kill me! I have no idea at the moment! I usually feel like I’m going full throttle all the time just to try to keep up with the ideas that emerged maybe six months or a year ago! Maybe I just want to lean more and more in the direction of Psychedelic Haunted Forest Goth?

 

Ashkelon Sain, Portland, 2021. (photo by Ogo Eion)