The plan was to put some MP3s online and be done with it. No label, no album, nothing that needed organising. Instead Tor-Helge Skei ended up on Season of Mist with the first installment of a trilogy, roughly twenty collaborators scattered across several countries, and a record that opens with a French rap verse.
Our interview with the MANES and LETHE founder is now live, in text and as a video conversation.
He is candid about how little of this was designed. "I'm very impatient and impulsive. I got an idea and I just went for it," he told us — and once "Chapter I: This Endless Solitude" started moving, "it snowballed and grew almost uncontrollably, so I just followed along."
The method behind that mess is the most interesting part. Skei sent out about twenty sketches, deliberately stripped down, with most of his own recorded parts muted so nobody would be steered by them. Then he got out of the way. "Do whatever you want, whatever you feel is the right thing," he told them. Every vocalist wrote their own lyrics; there was no discussion about what fitted. One group of contributors came from his old circles, another from a decade of unused recordings, and a third from a single Facebook post asking whether anyone wanted to try something. Many of them he had never met. "I have no idea what you're doing, I don't know you, I have no idea what you're trying to do, but do it."
We also asked about the album's most divisive moment — the French rap in the opening track — and it turns out the loudest voice pushing for it as the single came from inside the label. Michael from Season of Mist "absolutely wanted that song, because it was his favorite."
There is a Ukrainian angle too. On "Would You Take This Heart", Martyna Halas sings in Polish over Buddhist monk chanting, and Skei says we are not the first to mistake it for Ukrainian. Her Polish was her own idea, and she is now singing on the majority of the next album.
Elsewhere he explains why "Behind Me" is "the big spike sticking out of the album", why he deliberately finished chapter two and half of chapter three before any reaction to the first one could reach him, why HOLISSSTIK will almost certainly never play live — and what he makes of Norwegian black metal ending up in a museum.
We gave "Chapter I: This Endless Solitude" an 8.5/10 last month. The interview explains a good deal of how it got made.