I've downloaded a bunch of VSTs in the last few days, with a touch of early 2000s nostalgia, because of their sometimes grotesquely "science-fiction" interface, which already evokes I don't know what as-yet unseen retrofuturism, and because I spent a few years working exclusively with them (alongside my composing for Maelifell or FDS, which were entirely PC-free).

There's a certain purity in composing only with a PC, a sequencer, VSTs and possibly a master keyboard. I've always hated the tangle of cables, the thousand problems with connections, compatibility, MIDI settings, latency, etc.... From this point of view, working in the studio at Xavier's or my place can sometimes seem like torture.

VSTs have their own flaws and limitations, of course - they're cold and often sound far too similar, and after going through X dozen of them you're so saturated with identical and discouraging sounds that you'd almost consider, with relief, stopping all musical activity. But I still think I've found a few that I missed, in terms of "types of sound", moods... In particular, some excellent 90's ambient pads and half-tribal, half-metallic FM percussion.

The idea behind all this is to compose with sounds I rarely use (or have never used before) to renew myself musically and give birth to compositions I don't know yet, and don't want to know in advance, what they'll sound like, what "style" they'll be assimilated to, if indeed there is such a thing as assimilating to a style or scene. I'm looking for the sensation of moving forward totally blind, into the unknown, without any determinism, without any preconceived ideas, without any goal.

For a number of years now, I've noticed that my best albums, or at least the ones I prefer, are the ones that weren't premeditated, that sort of built themselves, as time went by and as samples or VSTs were discovered by chance; I'm deeply convinced that each synth, each bank of samples or presets, "contains" in germ its own musical genre and the tracks that correspond to it. All you have to do is change them from time to time and let yourself be carried along; the music creates itself. And it's good not to control everything, to be able to be surprised and changed by what you yourself have created or helped to create, like a simple channel for transmitting a message from God, or from your own unconscious, or from nowhere.

The first songs for Maelifell – or, more precisely, for what was to become Maelifell – were written and recorded around 1994-1995, when we were 14-15 years old.

Xavier and I were still in middle school, listening to heavy metal, cold wave and Dead Can Dance, which we thought was unique in its genre (and indeed, it's not entirely untrue). I knew about black metal, but had never listened to it.

At the same time, I was also recording alone, for a band I called Hesperides Garden, which had a maximum of... two members. Two guitarists, no bass, no drums, no keyboard; it was still far from my dream. But sometimes I rented keyboards from the local music store and recorded songs on my own. Some were released under the name Hesperides Garden, others ended up on the first Maelifell demo.

What I'm trying to say through these anecdotes is that even if Maelifell (I have no intention of denying this or rewriting history) was carried along, encouraged, uninhibited by our discovery of black metal and bands like Mortiis, fundamentally, we already existed before we knew them, we had our own aesthetic, our own themes, and our background comes as much from post-punk and its mutations as from the mutations of metal (the "dungeon synth").

Maelifell intersected with the history of dungeon synth (just as it later intersected with the neoclassical/darkwave milieu), but neither belongs to it nor was it determined by it.