Tone Glow 114: Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix (Liturgy)
An interview with the singer-songwriter & guitarist behind Liturgy about classical music vs black metal, negative dialectics, and the Smashing Pumpkins.
Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix (Liturgy)
Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix is the founder and bandleader of the black metal band Liturgy. Their sophomore album, 2011’s Aesthethica, was one of the most controversial and critically acclaimed metal projects of its year, rupturing traditional notions of what the genre should be. The group’s subsequent albums followed suit, with 2015’s The Ark Work and 2019’s H.A.Q.Q. finding Hunt-Hendrix doubling down on her ideological conceptualizations and expanding the group’s sound. With Origin of the Alimonies (2020) and 93696 (2023), she has created an entire universe of theology unto itself, which is further explored on her Substack, where she grapples with deep questions surrounding religion, philosophy, transhumanism, and more. Eli Schoop chatted with Hunt-Hendrix via Zoom on October 26, 2023 about the band’s cultural perception, negative dialectics, liquid temporalities, and the Smashing Pumpkins as a platonic ideal.
Eli Schoop: You were a lightning rod when you popped off with Aesthethica (2011), but I’d consider you a legend now, going on almost 15 years. How does that feel?
Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix: Yeah, it’s been a while. It was definitely a controversial project back in the day, and I think still controversial in some circles, but I don’t have as much contact with the haters now. I think we’ve been sticking with it for so long and expanding the style that people have to accept that we exist. It was such a different world back then, also. That’s the thing about going so long—the world changes so much.
Definitely with music critics’ conception of metal and taste. That’s probably why you got such a big reaction in the “traditional” metal space.
Sort of. I mean, during that era there were a lot of mainstream music journalists who were looking for metal crossover acts, like it was sort of a new thing for metal to be listened to in independent music. But I think part of what made Liturgy difficult to digest was that… I kind of like certain aspects of black metal that are more challenging, or have a challenging attitude toward the surface of culture. In some ways it feels as though Liturgy’s “life” began a couple of years ago as something that isn’t as a complete outsider. There’s community around the music, and we can go on tour and have a great time and have fans appreciate what we’re doing.
Does that coincide with the pandemic as a new era?
Well, I think the rise of social media generally really helped. It was when I got on Twitter, which is where we met [Editor’s note: Schoop and Hunt-Hendrix initially met in a Twitter group chat], and being able to interact directly with fans more, especially with the more philosophical aspect of music, and finding community online that was more accepting of these hybrids of experimental music and religion and critical theory. It also took a while. Like, our more recent records were better rendered, like H.A.Q.Q. (2019). That was the one that silenced a lot of the haters, and part of that was that I think we did a better job making it, too. With the earlier records, I was less happy with them myself.
Yeah I know The Ark Work (2015) is maybe your most controversial or eccentric, but it’s cool ’cause it’s one of those records that shows your in-between growth. Do you look at it that way?
Yeah, The Ark Work is definitely the most controversial. I see it as a genuinely flawed record too, like it doesn’t sound to me now the way it sounded to me at the time. It’s a pretty weird-sounding album, and I think I was kind of reeling from some of the criticism of the previous records. That sound world, black metal, is the basic instrumental background, but it includes trap beats, it includes a lot of glockenspiel, and a lot of glitch edits on the audio files post-recording, as well as gabber and hardstyle references—there was nothing even close at the time. And it wasn’t recorded that well. Previous Liturgy records didn’t have any of that stuff and that one did, and it was an experiment. Now I integrate those sounds pretty easily and it doesn’t sound as crazy to people.
Do you think your categorization as a “metal” musician made people more resistant back in the day, rather than just being called “experimental”?
I’ve wondered that. The thing is, experimental music critics have also not been that supportive. The Wire still won’t give Liturgy a positive review. Sometimes I wonder, because my background isn’t really with either of those things. The music I came up on… I wasn’t really in a metal scene. I guess it was the noise-rock, math-rock, art-rock, screamo scene based in New York, like no-wave revival. Ex Models and Arab on Radar were really popular bands when I was in high school. So I was approaching black metal from afar, but there was a lot of continuity between that music and Converge and Pg. 99, hardcore that was extremely metallic, extremely brutal. I was also studying classical composition, so I’ve always seen Liturgy as classical music that’s being made with various genres of rock music as materials. And I think some experimental music fans don’t really like that, because it feels patriarchal almost? Making Brahms style compositions—
Like you’re playing inside a box, so to speak?
Maybe, but I feel like experimental music is its own box.
Yeah, I get that feeling about avant-garde music sometimes.
I think there’s a difference between experimental in your approach to doing something, and the genre of “experimental music.”
It does feel like you use metal or genre as a tool, and disregard any preconceived notions of what it has to be.
Part of what I’m interested in, in invoking classical music, is the entire edifice of rock music—albums, the music industry, press, labels, using electricity to make the music, playing a role in capitalism, sculpting a certain kind of attitude, making use of transgressive gestures to actually kind of manipulate people like the music industry does sometimes. I’m kind of invoking classical music via black metal as, not a rebellion against that, but as an engagement with it and with a foot outside of it. Like a whole different horizon of what music is or was and can be, that’s like anti-commercial in a way, but with this deep historical depth.
You’ve touched on Lacan and Kant on your Substack, but that almost feels like a “reverse” Adorno. Don’t quote me on that, but you’re like reverse engineering how he saw what modernity did to music.
That’s an interesting way of thinking about it or naming it—a reverse Adorno or “expanded” Adorno. I think the culture industry that Adorno criticized has a much wider scope than at the time he was criticizing it. He thought that “serialism” was the only answer, that the culture industry manufactures emotions for people, that commodified music gives people a sense of familiarity and appeasement that is disempowering somehow, and that more difficult forms of music—which he identified as atonal, serialist types of composition—would enhance human freedom by forcing you to think. That was kind of stupid because he didn’t have a notion of the “underground,” he didn’t have a concept of the value of something like jazz or Jimi Hendrix as a sort of non-cerebral insurrection.
More recently, commerce—all music is commercial, so the culture industry is the entire life-world—and experimental music, underground music… it’s a micro-industry. That doesn’t mean that it’s bad because of that, but it’s not outside of something in the way it feels when you’re on the inside of it. And that’s kind of perplexing to me. I think there’s a historical amnesia that the current music horizon can foster. I’m always interested in bringing in things that are really left-field, but almost by virtue of being so trad, like Brahms and Wagner or something. You don’t think of those as left-field but they actually are, ’cause nobody listens to them.
I know you study philosophy, it seems like you approach music academically. Or at least you’ll start from a point, like a little thesis, and it can then go wherever, and that evolves your approach to music.
A little bit. I feel like sometimes when people say “academic” it’s kind of an undermining word. People will say it’s brainy, but I have an academic approach to philosophy by definition, and with music it’s a mix. Music is so emotional too. When I’m writing the music, I’m following a muse, very much so. Emotion is really kind of at the forefront, but it’s not an either/or. I like that you brought up Adorno, that idea of negative dialectics, doing it and having this sense of negation, of having this critical lens when it’s not clear what the resolution to the dialectical antonymy is but to be observing it.
Right, and I didn’t mean “academic” as a pointed word, more so that you steer clear of that metalhead cliché of being all about emotion. Of course, you put emotion in the music but also have that critique inside a lot of it, and that’s part of the backlash and what gets people being like, “What the fuck?”
Exactly, and also from that perspective, a backlash isn’t the worst possible thing. It doesn’t feel good, but a non-backlash can be tragic in a way. That smooth functioning is almost a sign that something’s not going right.
It’s like you didn’t instill any feelings into anyone. There’s very classical-influenced metal but it’s really obvious, like symphonic metal, but you go for this classical influence that’s studied but not too apparent.
The way I would put it is, it’s the difference between combining the simulacra of classical and metal, and having been deeply engaged beneath the surface in a formal way. With any form, with any genre, there’s a way the music is constructed under the hood. And there’s also its history, the materials it uses, and the way that the people making it generate a surface, and it’s not clear from the surface how it was actually made. And so, it’s one thing to combine the surface of something with the surface of something else, but it’s another thing to take both and go down the depths of their formal nature and combine things there, and then find out what it will look like and make a new surface.
One thing I think about a lot, which doesn’t get a lot of airtime in descriptions of Liturgy, is the difference between the temporality of rock music and classical music. At its essence, rock has that steady beat—kick, snare, any kind of it. And for rap and techno, the kick and snare are the essence of that world of music. Whereas with classical music, the sense of temporality is different because the precision of the rhythm doesn’t matter as much; the music will breathe and pause in this way. So I’ve always been really interested in taking metal drumming and speeding it up so much to make it really liquid, like a super fast kick and snare that’ll be like a hummingbird effect. You can recreate classical music temporality by pushing through rock music temporality—it’s like a renewed version of this other kind of temporality. I really enjoy that. To me, that’s an example of getting deep into the formal aspects of the two styles, and combining something ineffable about what I like about symphonies versus what I like about extreme music.
When you talk about liquid temporality, you use electronics and synths too and that reminds me of Aphex Twin or Venetian Snares especially, where he makes his breaks go so fast that you can barely hear the drums and it sounds like Black MIDI. I can hear that with this classical music influence but in a different way.
Yeah, Aphex Twin is a great example of someone who combines classical and rock in a wider sense and in a really deep way.
Do you ever think metal is not gonna be the avenue you choose to represent the thesis of what you’re trying to say?
Maybe. I’m writing more and more music that’s not in a metal style. Part of me is getting tired of metal, not in the sense of not being interested in it anymore, but I kind of feel tired having made so many intense records and having performed it so much. Like, this year we’ve been touring a ton. There’s a lot of tenderness in Liturgy even though the foreground is cacophony, and I could imagine writing something that is as extreme in the opposite direction. But the thing is, when I sit down to write something that I’m seriously going to make into an album, it just turns into metal again. Before I even realize it, I’m not satisfied with it and think, “Oh yeah, maybe this one part should have some blast beats and guitars come in! Oh yeah, what about this other part?” And then it’s just this metal song with 4 measures of trap beats thrown in. I’m not really in control of the writing process. I know that when I’m going to be working on stuff, I just let it happen and then feel very strong emotions about how it’s supposed to go, and then it ends up sounding like how our albums do.
I mean, painters have their preferred canvas and if that’s the way your brain works then shit, do you feel an active sense to rebel against that disposition?
I do feel like our next record will be pretty quiet, because the last one was so epic. It’s like making Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995). You sort of have to make Adore (1998) afterwards. What are you gonna do? I don’t think I have to rebel but it will feel natural to. But I’m not sure I trust that… like I’m starting to do that but I’m not sure it won’t just end up heavy. I could never just rebel against my creative drive—if I feel like I have to make metal, I will, because it won’t be good otherwise.
Is Smashing Pumpkins the platonic ideal of where you’re going?
I was just comparing the albums from Liturgy to Smashing Pumpkins, but I do feel a connection to the Smashing Pumpkins. Some people think that’s really obvious and will say, “Of course your music sounds just like the Smashing Pumpkins!” and then some people are like, “What the hell are you talking about? It’s totally different.” The Smashing Pumpkins have been a big influence on me from early childhood. I could imagine finding some satisfaction in making an album that combines my earliest influences in an obvious way, like Smashing Pumpkins, Aphex Twin, Nine Inch Nails, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. There’s a whole nexus of music that I got into when I was very young, and then I got into more challenging and extreme music. The signature of the former is in there with my music even though that’s not what people read it as. Maybe something in me has not been letting myself make a more direct response to those influences. I don’t know, I’m kind of rambling.
It’s an interview, you’re good!
In some ways the Smashing Pumpkins are a platonic ideal, yeah.
They’re a good influence to have! In some ways I can see those influences in there. Like when you start listening to music heavy, it’s those classic feelings of saying, “Oh this grand gesture’s so cool, this is so epic”, but you’re intertwining it in a way that makes sense for yourself.
It just seems to me that with the way that the world and music industry are changing so much, it’s a strange time to be a musician. Music doesn’t have the same relevance that it once did.
Would you consider something else? A different medium? You’re a talented writer considering your Substack.
I’m interested in game design, I’ve been doing fine art, I’ve had a couple of sculpture shows, but it always feels very present to me that the world is changing a lot. Five years from now is going to be very different from now, I guess we’ll just see what happens.
Liturgy’s newest album, 93696, is available to purchase at Bandcamp and the Thrill Jockey website. Hunt-Hendrix’s writing can be found at her Substack.
Thank you for reading the 114th issue of Tone Glow. It’s you that I adore…
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