1. For those that have never heard of you before, can you tell us a little bit about the solo project?
I imagine there’s few people who have heard of me before, so I appreciate you taking interest and asking for the interview.
Antimony is a band, which I write and record all the music for. It’s possible that in the near future I’ll find a couple musicians with a similar taste living near me and there can be a live version of the band, but my goal is to keep future releases fully written and recorded by myself.
I would describe Antimony’s music as black metal, though it’s been called atmospheric black metal or even post-black/blackgaze. What I can say is that the biggest influences I can hear in my own music is Moonsorrow, Drudkh, and Mgła, with more scattered tinges of melodic death metal and folk music.
2. In December you released your first album, can you tell us a little bit more about the musical style that you went for on the recording?
There were a few themes that have come out of my work on Antimony so far in terms of writing and arranging the music.
The music comes from an emotional place. It’s important to me that however “big” I want the music to sound, the arrangement has to be limited to what two guitars, a bass, and drums could play live. The limitation helps me write and forces me to approach how the guitars and bass are played in ways I haven’t personally heard, especially in metal. I don’t know whether a listener would notice that the instrumentation is a little weird, and at the end of the day I’m happy with that because I’m not trying to be showy. I’m not technically skilled enough as a musician to be showy even if I did care about that kind of thing. But I think anyone who sits down and tries to learn these songs is gonna run into a few fun surprises.
I also have a big fondness for less rhythms like odd time signatures and polyrhythms when they’re used in a very natural sounding way. The album starts in 7/8, and there’s a few different parts in 5/4. When I’ve described the band as having “progressive”, I mean stuff like that and the longer song structure. But that’s all very much my love for Moonsorrow showing, which no one calls a progressive black metal band.
3. What are some of the lyrical topics and subjects you have explored so far with the music?
Antimony’s an outlet for my anger and sadness at life and the world. When I was younger I worked on music that was themed around Persian mythology, before eventually abandoning that to work on an album based around a supervolcanic eruption that nearly wiped out humanity 75,000 years ago, before also eventually abandoning that.
My goal with Antimony’s lyrics is to convey whatever feelings of misery I have, which I don’t fully understand, in a way that might be recognizable to someone feeling the same way. This first album, Ending, is centered around my feelings of dread.
The album does have a loose narrative and it’s inspired by an Isaac Asimov short story called The Last Question. Asimov’s story is about a supercomputer that can answer any question, until it’s asked whether it’s possible for life to continue despite entropy. The story jumps thousands and millions of years into the future with different people asking the same question, with more and more urgency as the universe gradually has its heat death.
It ends with a deus ex machina and everything is saved with a happy ending, which I always felt really dissatisfied with. The narrative of the album loosely describes a similar situation with the self and the world decaying away, but with no happy ending.
Nietzsche wrote about “eternal recurrence”, Camus wrote about something similar in The Myth of Sisyphus, and I’m drawn to this idea of whether it’s possible to affirm life and finding some meaning or value in it while still fully facing and accepting that the vast majority of it negative and painful, and that at every scale, personal and universal, it’s all going to end with nothing to save it.
4. What is the meaning and inspiration behind the name 'Antinomy'?
Antimony is a chemical element that has some pretty superficially “metal” properties. For one thing it’s literally a metalloid, but It’s also toxic, it’s nicknamed “Monk Killer”, in its most common natural form it’s black and spikey and was used for dark eye makeup. That and just the way the word looks and sounds phonetically, the fact that pretty much anyone could pronounce and spell it, made me pretty happy with how the word worked as a band name.
But the truth is that Antimony has been my favorite word for over a decade, and that’s the real inspiration and spirit behind it being the name of the band.
One of the major linguistic theories for where the word antimony comes from is that it was never seen in a pure form in nature, and so the Greeks called it anti-monos. The opposite of alone.
The writer Charlie Kaufman has a lecture on screenwriting that I really love and in it he talked about how everyone has a wound. Something old, tender, painful, buried away and inarticulable. Unique to them and common to everyone. He says that rather than just being entertainment, art can be a way of exposing that wound. And maybe someone who feels something similar will know they’re not alone.
That’s how I felt growing up listening to my favorite bands, and to me the word and the band name Antimony represents that feeling.
5. Can you tell us a little bit more about the artwork that is presented on the new album cover?
I love the look and feel of old wood-engravings. There’s also the added benefit that they’re out of copyright by hundreds of years.
The specific art on the cover of Ending is from a set of books on human anatomy published in 1555 called De humani corporis fabrica (Of the Structure of the Human Body). At the time it was the most detailed depiction of human anatomy ever, but beyond just illustrating what the body looks like, there’s a certain sense of dread that’s placed into each engraving. I felt it resonated with the feel of the music.
I handed the image to a close friend of mine, Ramy Shadid, who’s a talented graphic designer. He did some touch ups and added the band logo and album title on the cover.
6. With this project you record everything by yourself, are you open to working with other musicians or do you prefer to remain solo?
A lot of it comes down to finding people who have similar taste and a compatible schedule but, in a dream scenario, I might like to record albums with a drummer and have live musicians for shows. That doesn’t seem likely at this point, but who knows. With the guitar parts especially, I feel like the music is a very direct expression of something I’m feeling, and it feels really weird to imagine someone else playing those parts — especially on the final recording.
7. So far very little is known about the musical project online, are you planning on expanding your presence or do you prefer to keep a lower profile?
Yeah, I’m not really sure how I want to approach that. I feel that there’s a lot of value in letting the music speak for itself and not really having a known personality that will color people’s perception of the music. But at the same time, I’m very social. I know that’s not a super black metal thing to say. But if something I’ve made resonated with someone and they want to talk to me about it, I’d want to hear from them.
In any case, I don’t have nearly a large enough following at the moment for any of that to matter.
8. Does the culture of Iran also play a role in your music?
I could maybe stretch and say that some of the way the guitar is approached is reminiscent of how the tar is played in Persian folk music. I also use a lot of 6/8 time, which is quintessentially Iranian. But none of it’s really done intentionally.
Something about metal inherently seems to resonate with Iranian culture. There’s a significant subculture of Iranian metal musicians who risk their lives out of their passion for this music. I can only make vague guesses as to why that is. But I feel the role Iranian culture plays in Antimony is more along those lines, rather than the songs being specifically about Rostam slaying a dragon.
9. Currently you are unsigned, are you looking for a label or have received any interest?
Not really. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what a label actually does in the context of something like Antimony. The music’s digitally distributed, and even if I wanted to make physical copies I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to manage myself. Maybe that’s hubris. Anyway there’s no tours to set up or videos to shoot or anything like that.
If a label reaches out I’ll hear what they have to offer, but I don’t really see it happening.
10. On a worldwide level how has the reaction been to your music by fans of black metal?
The album’s reached a much wider audience than I was anticipating. I’m pretty blown away by how much passion and work fans of this genre, and people like yourself, pour in.
The reactions have been really kind and positive. It’s not exactly what every fan of black metal is looking for, it’s not particularly grim or brutal, but it’s seemed to have some sort of resonance with a lot of people.
11. Where do you see yourself heading musically in the future?
At the moment I’m forcing myself to take a break from making music. This album took a huge toll on me and I’m trying to give myself rest before jumping back in, but I’m pretty restless and anxious to follow the album up.
As for the specifics of what’s next, I’m not exactly sure. I’m currently sitting on something like 50 riffs I like, which I either wrote a long time ago, wrote while working on Ending but didn’t use, or wrote after the writing stage of the album was already finished. It’s too early for me to know what the finished product will sound like and I’d rather just let the music develop however it wants to.
Thematically, I think the next album is going to move from focusing on dread to exploring feelings of defiance.
There’s a chance that before beginning work on that album, I’m going to put out an EP with three or so cover songs.
12. What are some of the bands or musical styles that have had an influence on your music and also what are you listening to nowadays?
I think the influence of Mgła’s Exercises in Futility is pretty significant on the guitar sound and my approach to the drums parts and lyrics.
I hear a lot of Moonsorrow, both broadly in terms of the approach to song structure, having vocal choirs, and odd time signatures which feel natural, but there’s some specific melodies I can tell I drew from Moonsorrow albums like V: Hävitetty, Jumalten aika, Varjoina kuljemme kuolleiden maassa, and Verisäkeet. I also love the drumming and drum sound of Moonsorrow.
Someone writing about the album somewhere said that the Drudkh influence is really clearly there, but nothing sounds like any specific Drudkh song. In thinking about that, I’ve realized that Drudkh’s been one of the only black metal bands that made me want to pick up my guitar and figure out how to play what I was hearing, especially with their albums The Swan Road, Forgotten Legends, Autumn Aurora, and Estrangement. I also adore the drumming on those albums.
As far as bands I haven’t mentioned before, there’s intentional nods to Bathory and Amon Amarth. I also grew up sort of friends with the members of Oskorei and Lyceum. A lot of the more melodic death metal or heavy metal influenced stuff people hear on the album is my decades-long love for those bands.
A lot of the more minor influences come from outside of metal. I’m a huge fan of Randy Newman, as weird as I know that always sounds to people. I think a lot about Meat Loaf and especially Jim Steinman’s approach to writing vocal lines and lyrics, though only really faint traces end up in the finished product. I live right next door to a big record store, and I pretty often pick up a handful of old cheap records and check them out. I can’t say whether this influenced any of the specifics of what you hear on the album, but Conferring With the Moon by William Ackerman felt really inspiring to listen to as a guitarist.
13. Before we wrap up this interview, do you have any final words or thoughts?
Just to say thank you for taking the time to tell people about my music. It seemed from your review that you got something out of it and that’s always encouraging. Makes me want to cut my rest short and get started on whatever’s next.
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