Mortiis

[andrewwerdna]

This thread is to discuss Mortiis after The Stargate.

I personally really love The Smell of Rain. I haven't been able to really get into anything else though. It's catchy, honest, and powerful. The lyrics seem to often sound like a "fall from grace."



Edit: just realized my avatar looks a lot like Mortiis. That's kind of cool. It's a Clark Ashton Smith drawing.

[shadowcloak]

I feel the same way. I really enjoy The Smell of Rain, but anything else he does now is not very interesting to me. Funny enough, when I was a 16 year old black metal elitist I HATED The Smell of Rain when I first heard it (I hated anything that wasn't metal, though). It took me 15 years to finally appreciate this album.

[Verminaard]

I can respect The Smell of Rain for what it is -- I don't hold Mortiis' change of musical direction against him at all. However, I just am not a fan of anything post-Stargate. There's nothing necessarily wrong with it, it's just not the music I enjoy. I just feel like when you're going to shift sounds THAT drastically, it might be of good mind to start a different project -- at the same time though, I understand not wanting to do that due to the momentum that a name often has behind it.

[Erang]

I personaly really like The Smell of Rain (and I even got it on CD) but like shadowcloak and @andrewerdna, I find the rest of his discog after that non-interesting and, in my opnion, it sounds like some generic/cheap imitation of Nine Inch Nails.

But the song "Everyone Leaves" (and the lyrics) on the Smell of Rain is awesome > www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDRfAvF1kbo

[andrewwerdna]

I'm glad to hear someone else say that, because honestly I didn't give the albums after Smell of Rain much of a chance. Like a few songs in I just immediately lost interest, as much as I wanted to like it. Smell of Rain though seems to get better every year.

[nayrb]

I really like this album. Catchy as hell.

[nahadoth]

I remember cringing at the lyrics and being really pleasantly surprised by the songwriting and production. Bought a copy on eBay, and didn't listen to it much until I heard New Order, and then the development made perfect sense. Some of these tunes are better executed than others, IMO, and most are too long. But I appreciate it for what it is, and I'm glad that I can occasionally tell people about the medieval/dungeon artist who upgraded his goblin costume before releasing his pop-crossover album.

[ranseur]

I also like the smell of rain. It was actually the first album I heard by mortiis because that was being promoted heavy at the time I was first getting into underground stuff. Although I knew already he was in emperor.

[garvalf]

It sounds pretty decent for a gothic / electro album, but it's a bit a shame he kept the Mortiis moniker for the band name because there is nothing left from the "Mortiis" DS world. It's quite a shock in the same way "Ulver" totally changed their music from the first era. I can understand the artists wants to explore new dimensions ("Keiser Av En Dimensjon Ukjent" hehe), but it's such a change from a dreamt inner land to a modern, contemporary music with nothing really special at all, it sounds so urban

[andrewwerdna]

I agree. He said in an interview at one point that his stuff after Era1 was basically a continuation of the Vond work. He should've just called it Vond then.

[andrewwerdna]

Pretty big new interview here: www.decibelmagazine.com/2017/10/16/mortiis-black-metal-dungeon-synth-beyond/

[stormcrow]

I remember at the time it was released, The Smell of Rain was pointed like a "betrayal" album... Listening to it after all these years, I find a really good album, Parasite God reminds me of some Billy Idol stuff... I really enjoy it. The vocals are very good too!

I know nothing about Mortiis' discog after TSOR... Probably you can recommend me some stuff?

[crystallogic13]

Thanx for the link andrew, gooood interview with lots of interesting bits and pieces and especially this :

I don’t know. I have thought about it. If you refer to stuff like back in the old days… Maybe. I mean I am re-recording the Ånden som Gjorde Opprør album right now, so in a sense, yes I am. I don’t have much unreleased stuff at the moment, some bits and pieces, but not much. We’re doing a reissue of the Blood and Thunder 7-inch a bit later, and we turned it into a 12-inch, remastered so it actually sounds decent, which it did not originally. Also, we added two songs that have been laying around since around 2002-2004, these weird sort of instrumental things, that I thought would be cool to throw in there, even though the B&T material is from several years prior… I thought they fit in fairly nicely anyway.

So good news

[andrewwerdna]

My first reaction when I read that was "holy shit!" but I knew about him doing those live shows in the near future of a "reimagining" of that album, so yeah I guess him being in the process of re-recording it makes sense. I wonder if he's going to release the re-recording separately form the live performance. I'm guessing from this interview that he's going to do the live show as a performance art thing, like he used to do, rather than actually playing the keyboard.

It's definitely one of the better interviews he's done, if not the best. It's cool to hear that he's embracing his old stuff now and recognizes that the mistakes and naivete are part of the magic.

[andrewwerdna]

Oct 20, 2017 15:42:30 GMT -5 stormcrow said:

I know nothing about Mortiis' discog after TSOR... Probably you can recommend me some stuff?

Nope. I know nothing much after Smell of Rain either. I've dabbled, but nothing's ever clicked.