"In the circle of birches" – a reference to Perunwit, of course, with their "W kręgu dębów" ("In the circle of oaks"). The birches are the ones that once stood in the fields behind my building. The birch trees remind me of both Siberia and the American Indians. Two things that are actually quite close. As a child, I used to roam these fields and shoot with a bow I'd cobbled together from a branch and a piece of string. It would be a good idea to become an Indian again.

This is the first release since Demo 96 to feature electric guitar (there was a classical guitar riff on "Rois d'ici bas").

Also the first release to feature spinet. Maelifell returns to its folk roots, while also moving in an increasingly electronic direction, with sounds that don't try to emulate ancient instruments. At the same time, the first three tracks have an unintentional cold-wave feel, which Perunwit also had to some extent. There's something about the release that makes me uncomfortable. The melodies are cold, sad. They remind me of lonely morning walks, "white sky walks", when I was a teenager, in the streets of Sarreguemines and Neunkirch, and in the fields, of course. As I wrote in a self-interview:

I took countless walks around the neighborhood on lonely mornings as a teenager, instead of going to school. With gray skies, loneliness and Joy Division on my ears. "Down the dark streets, the houses looked the same". It's an experience of emptiness that has stayed with me forever and that I can recall at will. The emptiness of life; the adolescent intuition, incredibly powerful and devoid of the slightest doubt, that the world is empty, that we wander in it and that there's nothing else to expect, that existence is purposeless, that no event, no encounter, that nothing will ever really happen. An intuition I've never been able to shake off. Except – on my good days – by means of Faith, which gives back to the world a reality it had lost or doesn't have on its own.

The photo of Xavier on the cover is 25 years old. It's obviously not a question of "making believe" (and to whom, by the way?) that this is his current appearance, but of being out of time.

The mention of the synths used is a reference to what was done on some old DS albums (Jim Kirkwood, I believe) and electronic music in general; on the cover of Lauri Paisley's "Reel to Real", for example.

Side A : the first three tracks are from our last session. Side B : the next three tracks come from earlier sessions – the piano piece having been done by me alone, at home.

Our music is badly played, wobbly, always on the verge of going completely wrong. It's deliberate: even if our incompetence isn't deliberate, we accept our failings and don't limit ourselves to what we've mastered, and therefore play poorly on this or that poorly mastered instrument on our releases.

The mix is deliberately low. We wanted our music to be distant, muffled, remote in time, as if under metres and metres of earth.

A demo with almost no content; short, aborted tracks, lots of silence, a few sound effects.

A music of emptiness, absence and oblivion.

A recent revelation. The distinction between music already released (as single, demo, album, etc.) and music still private, on our hard drives and recorders, no longer makes any sense to me. Maelifell exists, it's Xavier and me; Maelifell doesn't just exist through its public, official releases, it exists at all. Our public discography is only a fraction of what we are, just as the persona we embody at work, in society, in the street, etc., is only a fraction, minimal, poor, of what we are in totality.

Will Maelifell really release any more "albums"? Haven't we gone beyond that? This commercial form that no longer makes sense, precisely because we exist outside any commercial circuit?

I spent part of the afternoon blocking people on Facebook - people I knew from near and far in the indus scene 20 years ago, and complete strangers. I'm working on being invisible, on social networks, to those who might have even read my name once in their lives. And I don't want to see them either, even if it's only in other people's friends lists - even if it's just crossing their names in the list of likes under this or that publication.

I want to live in a universe that's exactly parallel and watertight to theirs. I don't care if I'm the only inhabitant...

I realize that I've always hated these circles. Black metal, gothic, industrial, neofolk and so on. I only entered and evolved in them through a misunderstanding - the belief that liking the same bands, the same sounds, made all these people and me natural allies, and people called to collaborate in one way or another. People to whom I could communicate something that they would understand and that we could share. That's not the case and never has been. My music has never - from what I've seen in 25 years - provoked anything but misunderstanding.

(In the same way, I've come to accept that characters like Tony Wakeford or David Tibet are entirely uninteresting, and that getting to know them better, as individuals and as artists, would do me no good and, on the contrary, would always destroy a little more of the pleasure I get from listening to them; listening to them while fantasizing about them and about the neofolk scene, giving them, through these fantasies, an interest and a nobility they don't have on their own).

It's time to admit that I'm entirely alone, and not only admit it but rejoice in it; rejoice in the absolute freedom it brings me.

"What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense." (Charles Baudelaire)

Mental exercise: make a list of public personalities, in the musical, literary, artistic world in a broad sense. People who have made a career, who are respected. Who probably have a good taste and a wide culture. Imagine them listening to my music, and finding it bad, ridiculous, despicable. To train myself to wish it were so, and in no way otherwise.

I invented industrial music, with Xavier, in 1998, when we recorded "Towers, Open Fire", entirely improvised, on a bored afternoon, with two children's keyboards connected to a primitive mixing desk that allowed to lower the pitch of the sound, which gave it a very metallic sound. I had copied at the very beginning of the tape a passage from Burroughs, read by himself, that I had recorded on the radio:

"Pilot K9, you are cut off — back. Back. Back before the whole fucking shit house goes up — Return to base immediately — Ride music beam back to base — Stay out of that time flak — All pilots ride Pan pipes back to base"

The cover that Xavier designed afterwards (or was it me? it doesn't matter) was a collage, and all our later demos under the name of Fervex were to use a rather similar formula: messy keyboard noise, some silly lyrics, more or less humorous, referring to totalitarianism, and covers showing collages that used media figures (Kate Moss), to the world of technology and work (workers on an assembly line), to popular resistance (I don't remember what revolt in South America)... The titles of the songs referred to computers, nuclear war, surveillance. In short, all the Burroughsian and industrial mythology a la Throbbing Gristle was there, even though I had never heard of them or of industrial music in my life. It was a total coincidence.

In the same way, still with Fervex, by pushing my sound experimentation a bit far, by recording parasites on an empty radio frequency, by getting a high and strident sound from my little keyboard connected to the mixing desk, by whispering sinister things into the microphone, I almost made Whitehouse. So I am also the inventor, in 1998, of the Power Electronics.

And of course, Xavier and I invented what is now called Dungeon Synth.

Our first pieces in this style date back to 1994, 1995 – we were still in high school. Xavier recorded with a primitive sequencer and a Soundblaster, on his father's Windows 3.1, some medievalist pieces in General MIDI. As for me, I had rented keyboards with which I had recorded tracks of the same type, repetitive, minimalist, dark; in both cases it was a primitive, broke, teenage version of Dead Can Dance of which we were fans, and very influenced by video game music. We had never heard of Mortiis, Wongraven or Summoning at that point. And when Metallian magazine allowed us to discover all these bands, they made us crazy with excitement; not because we discovered something radically new, but because these bands were realizing our fantasies, they were proving to us that what we had imagined all alone, in the depths of our small provincial town, also existed outside of us, that we were not entirely alone.

So Xavier and I invented, all by ourselves, in our teenage bedrooms, a good part of the musical styles that we would listen to in the following years.

I say this knowing that it is an absurd claim, laughable, and I am joking in a way; and at the same time I say it quite seriously. These musical genres exist from all eternity, in the sky of ideas. We discovered them by ourselves, without knowing that others had preceded us. We didn't jump on any bandwagon; our own experiments coincided with the history of music around us.

*

The consequence of all this, which I really realize, literally decades later, is that I don't need any outside influence, musically speaking. As for Xavier, he knows absolutely nothing about the current scene (or current scenes in general, for that matter) and he is right to have no curiosity about them.

We don't need any outside influence. We don't need to be part of any scene.

On the contrary, we need to free ourselves more and more from the stylistic and thematic conventions that mark the musical environments we have known in our lives, whatever they may be.

The themes, the texts, the images that accompany our music must become ever more personal, ever more "idiotic". As if we were exactly alone in the world.

The tape hiss is a sonic image of the veil of time that separates us from the happy past; it makes explicit the fact that this past is gone and far away, but it reminds us of it, too. It is the equivalent of the timeworn colors in a photograph. This electronic hiss and these past colors are also a reminder that time exists, or has existed; even if we live today in an eternal, digital present, time has existed.

My future musical work must remain secret, hidden.

I must not imagine that "others" will not find my music, my images, my texts pitiful.

This WILL be the case. The total indifference with which I have been treated so far is rather fortunate; I have not yet been given the opportunity to be humiliated, mocked, despised.

I must not repeat the mistake I made when I left the small, regressive and finally musically tolerant world of Black Metal in my teens to venture into the goth/indus world.

I'm not "on the level" of the others, I don't play in the same league, I'm an amateur, a tinkerer, a wanker, whatever you want in this genre; I must not risk trying to play in the big league.

I have never, in any case, had the DESIRE to play in their court, and therefore to "upgrade". Buying more and more expensive and performing equipment, sounding more and more professional, being in competition with the others in terms of performance, innovation, etc. I don't care about all that.

I don't care about all that. I've always been a dreamer above all. I might as well have never composed anything but just written fictional biographies of music bands. Or making fake album covers. Or reviews of imaginary records. That's where I am. In the reverie. Just like I only liked the BM and dark folk scene when I knew almost nothing about it and it was a medium for my daydreaming.

The best I can hope for is that people as lonely and lost as I am will come across my productions by chance and that they will find an echo in them. The circles, the scenes, I must flee from them.

If one seeks to be recognized, to influence one's time and to be useful, and loved, then there are much better things to do than art: there is politics, love and family, work, normal life, that of the adult world, which offers a thousand excellent ways of being somebody.

It is necessary to mourn the figure of the artist, the myth of art, and to become again a child who draws alone at his table.

One does not address the "public". This word has no meaning. We address ourselves and our ghosts. To his lost lives. To those you loved, to your dead. The "public" exists only as an occasional voyeur of this dialogue – there, of this real dialogue – there.

I think back to this track on the first Perunwit album, track 4 to be exact. A single guitar, with chorus and reverb, playing eerie, slow arpeggios.

The track evokes emptiness and loneliness, how does it do that? By the silence and the solitude of a single instrument, without accompaniment. Quite simply.

A music is also defined by its silences and gaps.

Between 1996 and 2000, Maelifell changed its sound and styles several times; in other words, the project evolved.  One can hear, from the extremely primitive tracks marked by a great technical poverty to the very constructed compositions (on Eternity or Rois d'Ici-bas) using synthesizers as well as samples or acoustic instruments, what can seem a logical progression of the band, from a total amateurism to a certain level of competence, and from an ultra-naïve style to something more "adult".

Since 2017, when we started working together again, this logic no longer makes any sense. So much so that it would be relevant, in the absolute sense, to secretly record albums until we die, and then have someone put them online, all at once, without any indication of when. Because we are indeed out of time; out of any idea of progression vs. regression, or evolution vs. stagnation.

We record without the slightest premeditation what comes into our heads, what comes out of itself, under the effect of inspiration, chance, the specificities of the material used that day... It can sound like any of our old periods, or like something absolutely new to us.

Still owning all the material used from Demo 96 to Rois d'Ici-bas via La Peste, and having extended our studio to include analogue synthesizers, 16 and 8 bit samplers, various folk instruments, we are able to revisit all the styles we have practised, extending our music to other ambiances, other genres. "What exactly will be the style of the next Maelifell release" is a meaningless question because we have reached our own kind of eternity.

The indifference, if not hostility, with which I am treated in the artistic world in general – music and interactive fiction essentially – is probably a blessing, a chance offered to me, on the one hand, to develop, by force of circumstance, in a totally autistic way, my own universe, without the help, certainly, but also without the influence of a warm "environment" to surround me, but also, on the other hand, to escape the pride and the delirious pretentiousness of the artists who obtain at least a minimum of recognition.

I AM deliriously proud and pretentious, but fortunately my pretentiousness has ceased to be indexed to any idea of my artistic qualities or of the interest that my work should legitimately arouse in the public. Even if I were to do nothing more than draw with felt pens on sheets of paper, write three-line stories full of mistakes, and record two-note songs repeated in a loop, I would still be more and more proud and pretentious, because it is my identity, my being, that becomes my work over the years; art is only a poor means, a path like any other.

I often reflect on my relationship to music, instruments, etc. Just as I reflect on my relationship to photography – in both cases it is the relationship (and the most intimate one) to technique.

My inner life is more determined by technique (recorded music, movies, video games, internet dialogues and readings, photography, pornography, etc) than by anything else more alive, more direct. My experience of life is essentially mediated.

I realised something fundamental that I had never understood or at least never made clear to myself: I never play music for myself, for pleasure, just to frolic with my favourite instruments and sounds; everything I do is utilitarian, I only turn on my instruments to compose and record afterwards, and when I do so, it is with a very specific record project, with a content already determined in my head. And my way of playing, my way of writing a song is very cold, "professional", conscious, etc. I don't leave any space for the music to be played. I leave almost no room for chance, for accident, for madness. I don't do that anymore, if I ever did, anyway.

Xavier, on the contrary, and it's by observing him that I realise how I operate, does exactly the opposite: he only plays for himself, for pleasure, without recording himself, unless I literally beg him to do so, and he never asks himself what he's going to do with his compositions.

When we finish an album, he's not particularly interested in the cover, the title, the name of the project, the "concept" that encompasses it all. He quickly forgets what we're writing and when I give him a cassette or USB key containing our finished work after X months, he rediscovers our music entirely and I almost have to persuade him that it's really about us, not just me.

I am obsessed by the notion of the album, by the album as an intellectual object and a fundamentally multimedia work, where the music does not and cannot go without a visual and literary accompaniment, without the storytelling that surrounds the conditions of its production, etc.