February 23rd, 2015 
Brian Leak 
“As for death and time, I’m running into one, and running out of the other.”
The patience and determination of Kevin Price is matched or exceeded by few in the music world. His most recent release as Unfathomed Of Abyss, entitled Arisen Upon Oblivion, was created over the course of 14 years, with breaks taken from the project periodically. The vast amount of material that was ultimately condensed into the six lengthy tracks that make up the album saw several forms of change over time but eventually became 57 minutes of powerful, brooding and doom-ridden black metal.
We had the chance to speak with Price about the unusual process that was the creation of Arisen Upon Oblivion along with his influences within the genre and the instrumentation on the album. Read through below to check out our entire conversation and stream through the works of Unfathomed Of Abyss over on Bandcamp.
Where did the name Unfathomed Of Abyss originate from and how do you feel it represents the music you’ve created over the years?
It is how I view life, considering that most of what can be observed in the universe consists of relative nothingness, I can’t help but think that life is something that was never fathomed or thought up in any way, as in, look at any of the world’s religions claims of how life came to be, and you will find bunk written all over them. Yahweh creating the sun, moon (erroneously referring to it as a light) and stars simultaneously while the biblical lineages imply a 6,000 to 10,000 year old universe. Considering that it takes light from the Andromeda Galaxy around 2 million years to reach Earth, I rest my case. Life was unfathomed before it began, as far as we know that is. So it has a slight atheistic and a more obvious science nerdery concept behind it.
I guess the simple and most obvious question regarding your newest album would be “Why did it take 14 years?”
I wasn’t actually working on it for the entire 14 years. I started it in the first, and every once in a while wrote something that ended up in the album, all the way to the last year. There was other material that I worked on that took up some time, mainly serving the purposes of tests of writing methodologies, but a small portion of the unused material consisted of songs or parts of songs that I ultimately didn’t think were worthy to be released. Actually, the last few minutes of the final track of the album was one such writing methodology test, where I started with a bass line where each note would last multiple measures – so 10, 20, 30, seconds or so per note. Then I came up with the rhythm for the guitar parts, devoid of any chords or notes, it was just me tapping on my knees while commuting via bus to a dishwashing job I had in Seattle at the time, and writing the result down on a note pad in the form of hash marks. Then I later assigned notes to the rhythms and divided them up between the guitars and bass guitar. Finally I added some synths and vocals. There was unused material (and some that made it on the album as well) that just consisted of me improvising on guitar and recording the memorable parts. And some times I would just record everything while I improvised for maybe 10 minutes or something like that. So I was learning to write by experimenting with different writing methods, though the one I just described for the final track to the album is my preferred method. It’s a way to impart underlying key changes or a sense of a tonic note or chord under more intricate bits that are added in later. A sort of basic outline, over which the final piece is strung out over later.
And then life in general got in the way a lot more than writing ultimately rejected material did.
What do you think the album offers that it wouldn’t have had you finished it in a more traditional 1-2 year album cycle?
I couldn’t write this way when I started, but I wanted to. So I wasn’t expecting it to be a quick job by any means. It was a learning process and if I wrote an album with my knowledge at the time, it would have been so repetitive and riff-based that I would have never bothered to release it. There are other people who can successfully make engaging songs like that, but I would prefer not to join them. I’m never happy with a song I write when it’s just the same several notes/chords repeated 4 times, then another assemblage of notes and chords repeated 4 times, then back to the first, then again to the second – create a never repeated bridge and introduce a new verse and chorus. It’s boring when I do it, but I listen to and enjoy a lot of band’s work that is just that.
I can’t even imagine the relief you felt when finally releasing it after all that time. How did you know when it was finally time to put it out?
When after literally a year of working on it nearly every day I was just like, “Fuck it, time to get it to a mastering engineer.” Even after that I had to yet again mess with it and re-send new mixes, but the end result was better that way.
Being 14 years in the making, technically, you’ve obviously been attracted to the black metal genre for some time. What initially drew you to black metal, or the world of metal in general?
Extremeness, individuality, satanism, atheism, the aggressiveness of it. It being metal and to me metal being all of those things. For black metal, the draw to me has always been when there is an atmospheric sense to it, with or without synthesizers, it’s just a malevolent feeling that is conveyed that I always enjoy. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Alan Hovhaness’s “Vishnu Symphony” both have a big influence on Arisen Upon Oblivion. The starts and stops of Hovhaness’s work, and more organic changes from drastically different parts with different feels of The Rite of Spring (Nile and Emperor do this quite well, too, by the way) played a big part in giving me a want to move away from more riff-based compositions.
Both lyrically and musically, where do you think you draw inspiration from the most?
Death, observational abilities unfucked by traditions and other pretend nonsense, and time. As for death and time, I’m running into one, and running out of the other.
Over the course of the album’s creation, did you find yourself discovering new influences that led to changes in how you wanted certain songs or parts of songs to turn out?
No. I did however find myself revising parts I had given up on in the past to the point where I could write a more complete song around them. The songwriting after a certain point in the first few years kind of fueled itself this way.
Technology has changed drastically since you started working on this album as well. How did that affect the way this process evolved over time?
Songwriting technology really hasn’t at all. It is the fake canned loop-based, auto tune, buy some midi/audio loop shit and this fancy software designed for 10-year-olds (that is probably used by much older people who probably think they are creating something that way) that will allow some slight customization that has seen leaps and bounds I guess in technological innovation. But all I use technology wise is a guitar and a midi sequencer for writing. The sequencer being a version of Sonar from around 2003. Point and click once, you made one note. Now drag the right end of a note around until it is the intended length. Now repeat hundreds or thousands of times until you have two guitars, bass guitar, and 2–10-ish synthesizers all harmonized the way you want before you commit to recording the guitar parts. Or, record some guitar parts and figure out how to turn them into midi parts by hand so it’s easy to harmonize the 2–10-ish synths without committing too much by practicing the guitar parts for hours and hours so they can be revised painlessly in the future if need be.
There isn’t much software innovation needed when you write without the aid of canned piss. And for recording, I can’t think of anything that has changed that I need. The technology for plugging a guitar into a computer and recording it (adding the distortion and amp effects in post) again has existed for over a decade. Maybe mixing software is better now – actually, it is. I should probably get a better computer for that phase; it took 10-20 minutes to mix a few tracks together. I had to do that maybe 20-30 times for each song. So mixing was a pain in the ass because my 2003 built PC runs slower than old people fucking.
It looks like you play a majority of the instruments on the album. Did you never pick up the drums or did you just prefer to have Kevin Talley play them on Arisen Upon Oblivion?
I’ll stick to string instruments only. It takes quite some time to learn to drum as well as Kevin Talley and I don’t have that amount of time. He nailed the songs so quickly I would have been crazy to try to learn drums that well myself. Actually, from the beginning I planned for there being drums recorded by a seasoned pro, and not just made by my left clicking finger in a midi software. So I’m quite happy with the result.
What do you have in store for the rest of 2015?
I acquired some sort of parasite or something in India that makes it hurt to shit. Badly. I’m back in the states now and first thing is I’m getting rid of that. I’ll figure the rest out after that.
Do you think it’ll be another 14 years before your next album?
Oh fuck, I hope not.
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