Interview with Prozak
Interview conducted by Chris Mitchell (Desolate Gale)
Date online: May 24, 2004
Q: Hails! How are you Prozak?
Thanks for sending this interview. I'm doing well on a Saturday in the bright unanchored light before rainfall.
Q: Will you provide us with a quick bio of yourself?
I suppose I'm a relatively typical generation XYZer. Born in a large city, grew up in suburban areas, and found myself disliking our pretentious, dysfunctional, neurotic and self-righteous society from an early age. I was a voracious reader as a kid, and spent most of my time in natural surroundings (forest, field, etc). Consequently, not much that occurred at school made any sense to me on a practical level, and I refused to conform to social norms. I did not like rock music, but I did like hardcore punk music, and starting around age 11 started getting small doses of this through older friends. It reminded me of the classical music that I grew up with because it wasn't as interested in beat-oriented rhythm like rock music, but had riffs that changed the shape of the chord without falling out of cadence. Consequently, my earliest memories of music involve the Exploited, Discharge, and Agnostic Front, but I eventually discovered thrash music like D.R.I., Cryptic Slaughter, dead horse and C.O.C., and this brought me toward liking metal sometime in the late 1980s. I spent a lot of time listening to early Sodom, Morbid Angel, Massacra and Sepultura CDs.
When I was introduced to nihilism is a tougher question; since one of my parents was involved with academic teaching, I had books at my disposal from an early age; these were not the usual kind of "entertainment" books but the wisdom and literature kind, often dating back to the roots of Greco-Roman and Nordic civilization. Grow up reading Aristotle, Beowulf, Tacitus and the like, and something like nihilism seems an evident conclusion. For me it made sense that in a neurotic and brand-obsessed time, a philosophy of calming the mind and reducing the external hysteria/trend-motivation was the only logical path, so at age 15, I started A.N.U.S. the organization, which existed in various forms continuing into the present.
Q: What possessed you to form A.N.U.S.?
A feeling of helplessness at (a) how far society was from any kind of sane ideal and (b) my own situation, in which I had no forum for views that didn't fit into "art"/entertainment, could not be expressed by something as simple as lyrics or politics, and were misunderstood and baffling to my peers. Luckily, at that time, the electronic underground of bulletin board systems was just starting up, so I was able to form a group and begin releasing idea documents at an early age without having to go through much of the tedium of "youth-oriented" culture and marketing. A.N.U.S. has been a great forum for my ideas, which have remained basically the same despite some realizations over time, including a rejection of Marxism and liberalism, in addition to previous rejections of capitalism, Christianity, moralism, etc.
Q: What is your general impression of the Metal scene today and the typical Metal Head?
At the current time, things are not going so well for metal in terms of its raw material: people. Black metal and death metal basically came into being around 1983, a year after Discharge created a new form of hardcore/crust with "See Nothing, Hear Nothing, Say Nothing," and so we've only had about two decades of underground metal, which is the only metal with which I'm literate (I do not like heavy metal much, and I see it as an extension of rock music that latched onto a few neoclassical ideas and thus briefly shined before being dragged back into the morass of oversocialized "mob rules" thinking). Death metal really jumpstarted itself as a movement in 1988, and black metal leapt forward in 1992 for all practical purposes, and since then we've been sort of on autopilot, living out that legacy. When black metal wound down in 1996, and by "wound down" I mean that the founding bands which had provided the momentum dropped out of that cycle, there was a choice before metal: either take the high road and aim for artistic and musical complexity, as genres like medievalist and selected electronic music and, to some degree, jazz, had done, or head for the low road and try to make crowd-friendly music.
This choice is a crucial one in that its outcome reflects what kind of fanbase will be brought into the genre; it also mirrors the choice that faced hardcore music in the middle 1980s, when most of the original bands threw in the towel and the imitators came out of the woodwork. Some tried to pull away, but in doing so, often lost what made their music relevant and invited in many of the elements in other forms of music that they had traditionally detested. I'm thinking specifically of emo here, which in a desire to "get closer to its audience" made sop worthy of muzak that, since it was angry, appealed to a new generation of television-brainwashed, neurotic youth. Metalheads have traditionally been socially underconfident, and when faced the doubly problematic ideas of black metal which were truly taboo, the genre and its fans were thrust into a new light, as innovators and revolutionaries, and this proved to be too much.
Many great philosophers have cautioned against revolution as a mindset because most revolutions replace the people in charge, but don't change the underlying assumptions, because it "appears" as if the revolution has caused "change" enough. After all, there are all these bodies lying around and the government - the evil, privileged, oppressive government - are now dead, so we've gotten past the bad stuff, see? But that isn't how it works. Black metal was a revolution in ideas, not a social movement. The people who came after were afraid of those original ideas, and were underconfident and wanted to be socially important in ways they would never be without some justification like "artistic revolutionary" tacked onto their names, so instead of opting for further growth, they choose an involution of the genre, by which the music became more like the radio heavy metal of the 1970s and thus the genre "grew," but in doing so, it lost selectivity and invited in people who had no idea what it was about. They brought with them the consumerist, neurotic, and oversocialized attitudes of society at large, and soon the genre was so diluted that it stood for nothing. Death metal had a brief resurgence which resulted in the same thing. In my view, underground metal is about to exist in two forms: (a) an underground form driven by pure novelty and (b) a mainstream form similar to nu-metal or rap.
Q: What is your opinion on the following bands:
Countess & Xasthur: I'm going to answer these two together, because the opinion is the same. These guys are trying to reinvent the past by further developing technique, but further development usually means simplification and codification of the most obvious parts of older bands, forgetting how much else was there to set up those aspects. In short, they're taking a very consumerist view of art in assuming that technique and style are the sum total of an artistic work, which denies that art uses its techniques to show a thought pattern or experience. It's like brilliantly empty art, reminiscent of Andy Warhol's paintings of everyday supermarket objects. A product. I admire both bands for being better than almost everything else in metal at this time and in Xasthur's case, for writing songs of a cryptically hidden melodic hook, but in the larger context, they're meaningless.
Judas Iscariot:
I think this band was intended to be a giant prank. "I'll emulate the most obvious aspects of black metal, and be very evil, and people will buy it and I can scorn them." I respect Akhenaten as a thinker primarily, and would add that the only works of his that reveal his creativity and intelligence come from the band Sarcophagus. Judas Iscariot is like that old band Goatlord, trivial.
Vlad Tepes:
When the French Legions became popular in the late 1990s, you could've put this slogan across the hype: "Happy Days are Here Again." All these suburban kids who couldn't recreate what the Nordic Melodic Black Metal (NMBM) folks did in the early 1990s, through sheer desire for having something significant and being able to re-live the experience like a Disney movie, suddenly glommed onto the French Legions as a chance to have that feeling of great innovation and being a leader -- but they couldn't. Vlad Tepes is good, Mutiilation is good, but they're not what early Burzum, Immortal, Emperor and Enslaved were. Sorry. I think the bands were also sickened by the hype, at least until the dude from Mutiilation decided to hop into a wheelchair and cash in on past glories. I don't blame him for doing so, except that he generated unnecessary plastic waste for landfills with his later albums, which are worthless. Form over substance, you have a new champion!
Deathspell Omega:
Their newest seems like a really good idea, aesthetically, and hopefully someone with an understanding of melody will take that concept and frame from it a newer type of music. Thinking along the ideas of aesthetics allows some highly creative people to make something brilliant from what was once garbage; examples are all the bands inspired by Venom, which was garbage, who nonetheless made great music by trying to sound like Venom. Darkthrone, in cloning Bathory, came up with something new and better; Burzum was in part inspired by Von, which is trivial blather, but from the concept of simple undulating riffs dropped to the lee side of the initiatory beat of a cadence, in part made something great. I think Deathspell Omega will be the same way with their newest, which is aesthetically one of the most ambitious things to come out of black metal since 1997, but still lacks some of the compositional and intellectual depth and clarity that made, for example, Emperor's "In the Nightside Eclipse," Enslaved's "Vikinglgr Veldi" and Immortal's "Pure Holocaust" so distinctive and enduring.
Q: What are your views concerning racism and equality?
Racism is the most difficult topic one can tackle today. I like to refer to it as "tribal self-preservation"; in my view, at least 80% of our thoughts, actions, ideals and values are determined by genetics. If your ancestors were brave warriors or noble thinkers, you will have some of those traits; if your ancestors were carpenters, artisans and people who worked with their hands, you will have some of those traits. Obviously, each tribe and each race has evolved differently, and some took more chances and took on great challenges, and I think benefitted from that in adapting to their new environments. Clearly, whatever one thinks of "race," history shows that no tribe continues to exist after anything more than about half of a percentage point of admixture from another race; for this reason, I support racial uniqueness and the right of every tribe to deny immigration and to eject people who are not of their own genetics, or are of mixed genetics. Throw the Boers out of South Africa, and repatriate everyone else - this is the only way we can preserve the work of our ancestors and our unique cultures.
Opposing this, of course, is the mob. The mob is the crowd, it's the people who have never been good at anything in particular, it's the priests and others who are motivated by revenge. They want to drag down anyone who has anything distinctive, and make us all "equal" so that their own lack of achievement is not a drawback. This is sensible for them to want, but the end result for all humanity will be a dumbing down of the general population and a loss of all of the unique traits, tribes and viewpoints that otherwise existed. In my experience, and in that which I have read in history, any group which succumbs to this level of conformity is heading for collapse and will in the future be the slaves of another tribe that didn't have this problem. Whether this new tribe is humans, or another species that evolves intelligence on earth, or an alien race that could exist, is not for me to determine; however, this is my prediction for the globalist, philosophically liberal, Judeo-Christian empire that the United States and Britain and Israel are spearheading at this time.
I think it's important however to reject bigotry, which I define as the blaming of other races for one's own race's problems. In my mind, Judeo-Christianity is an affliction of the Indo-Europeans, and when they reject it and reject "tolerance" in favor of acting in their own self interests as a tribe, the race problem will go away. Blaming Africans or others for this race problem is an error, both at a technical and a spiritual level. To do that is to give up on one's own future, and I believe people who do that are inherently genetically inferior.
"Equality" obviously is a myth; some are stronger, some are smarter, some are better leaders. But that's not to the advantage of global industry or the superpowers like the USA/UK/IL alliance, so they'd prefer that the rest of us breed ourselves into grey-tan lumpenproletariat while the elites remain, as they have always been, the lightest-skinned caste of the mixed-race people. In ancient times, nations were defined by race and tribe (e.g. if you are French, you are of Indo-European race and French tribe), and those who were of mixed-race were seen as those without a nation, later to be called "internationalists." Their goal, in doing what benefits them, is to shatter the other tribes so that internationalism is the dominant outlook; this puts them on top and eliminates those ideologies that would oppose them.
WWII was essentially a war between the internationalists, represented by mixed-race republics like the USA and UK, against the nationalists, who realized democracy means "the mob rules" and that loss of nation means loss of culture. There were nationalist parties in Japan, China, Germany, Italy, Spain and much of Eastern Europe, but they were vastly outnumbered and, because they valued natural living over a super- commercialized consumer society, less mobilized toward having dominating economies. First the United States limited their access to resources, and then, when they counterattacked, proceeded to bomb their means of production and civilian populations, bringing them to their knees. Because of this history, the United States is the place where any kind of race-based preference is most immoral/taboo; I would prefer that the neo-Nazis drop dead so that the real Nationalists can speak up and say, clearly and without any emotional hysteria, "We prefer to live among our own, and realize that race/tribe/caste are essential to the preservation of culture."
One could see this entire issue as being part of the Christian crusade against "unequal" natural order, and the differences between cultures, that has gripped the West in doctrinal cannibalism for over a millennium.
Q: What is Nihilism to you?
Nihilism to me is the removal of all preconception and emotional response to objects and events in reality; another method of doing this is to focus only on what is, through a logical chain of events which one can observe or derive, "real." It is a very simple philosophy. Nietzsche differentiated between active and passive nihilism, and I would have to say mine is of the active kind; it is not a passive nihilism, which is a shrugging statement that "nothing has any value" and a consequent loss of preference for achievement over degeneration, honor over convenience, etc. I think we see passive nihilism in both Judeo-Christian religions and global consumer society.
In my personal life, Nihilism means that I worry less about what others think and more about what I want to achieve. It means that I let taboo and morality and social fear fall by the wayside in my quest for truth. It means that I recognize life outside the boundaries of my own mortality, and my own existence. It means that I can stop fearing nature, and can embrace it, "warts and all," as they say, for how it functions and the ongoing beauty it produces, in which is much horror. I see nihilism ultimately as a way to gain intelligence by gaining a power of concentration unavailable to others, and for me, it means a loss of the neurosis, hysteria, fear and advertising/television-induced mental stupor in which most exist.
Q: What does the following picture communicate to you:
I have respect for nuns and monks of all disciplines, in that they have renounced the physical world in order to study the spiritual. However, when they moralize this renunication, they become agents of a self-destructive death force that is programmed into every organism so that when it is time to die, it dies. If one obsesses about death, or becomes bitter toward life, this death force is invoked; I think all but a handful of Christians worldwide are agents of this death force, and are bitter toward nature and life itself and thus passively hate it with a great violence; every Jew I have ever witnessed serves this death force, as their religion and culture has no tradition outside of the material and thus is wholly unable to derive idealism of any kind. These three religions are passive aggression turned into a spiritual value, and thus represent the illness that would consume all that I value (experience that leaves one in contemplative joy, fields and forests and butterflies and rattlesnakes, a universe which unfolds from nothingness into great complexity). Modern Buddhism is also mostly afflicted with this death-force, as are many Hindus and members of Eastern religions, so I see our time as an era in which this death-force reigns supreme over most other forces. However, the ascetic tradition, including the monastic ideal, are to me sacred and powerful ways of gaining in spiritual potency. It is worth remembering that martial arts and most active nihilistic traditions, including ancient Buddhism, came from this monastic tradition. For more information on this topic, I recommend F.W. Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and Julius Evola's "The Doctrine of Awakening."
Q: If you could sit down with one person throughout history who would it be and why?
Probably the first humanoid to emerge from the apes, so I could witness his or her reactions and the development of his or her mind. If I were given more than one person, I'd like to sit and chat with Siddhartha, William Faulkner, Savitri Devi and Mary Shelley.
Q: Should negroes be allowed to listen to Black Metal?
I suggest that anyone of African heritage begin working to stabilize Africa and the African lineage, which is currently under the same assault as all other races. Thus if someone made African black metal, it should utilize African traditions in music and ideas, and thus probably would not be black metal, but for the sake of argument, were an African to make music in that ideal, I would consider him or her to be a blood comrade, as I consider all African Nationalists to be allies, brothers, friends.
Q: Many say that there is very little room for innovation in Black Metal and Metal in general, do you believe this to be true and what new direction do you think Metal will take?
The word "innovation" makes this a tough question; for me, history is a farce, and there are no new ideas. There are new technological discoveries, but what music is has never changed. Classical music is the highest end of the spectrum; at the lowest end is a few apes sitting around banging on rocks and hooting and howling in cadence. Metal is somewhere in the middle, with black metal being its highest stylistic and compositional achievement; if anything, I'd like to see it go further in the direction of bands like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, who made classically-influenced compositions without a fixed format, allowing the experience being communicated by the song itself to define the structure of the song. Were metal to do this, it would cease being a "popular music" genre and would gain strength for its esoteric discipline, although it would become radically less popular and would evolve into a true subculture, where music and ideas and behavioral standards are inextricably linked, which would exclude most of the people currently using it as a way to socialize.
If I had to say a new direction would occur in metal, I think as an intermediate it would resemble a cross between Burzum's "My Journey to the Stars" and Demilich's "Nespithe" album, with influences from older Massacra. It would thus retain its thunder but develop its melodic and structural knowledge, becoming more like the work of the ancient Indo-European poets, where epic poems (experience symbolic to the evolving mindset of the race) were a combination of lengthy rhythmic word-chanting and narrative motifs which developed through recombinant improvisation reflection a progression among metaphors conducting the story.
Q: Where do you see America in 50 years?
It's hard to predict with that short of a span, but within the next century, either split up or a third world nation beset by violent and vengeful enemies. Either way, it is clear that America as its current concept must die; the original concept of America I applaud, but that was before it became seen as a marketplace/paradise for ALL immigrants, and when it was still seen as a country of relatively homogenous heritage and belief, thus it was not facilitative to all beliefs but still had some core values, which were positive - if one is of northern European heritage. For others, new nations must be invented, or old ones renovated.
Q: I'm sure you don't agree with America's judicial system, how would you suggest that criminals and so forth be dealt with?
I would decriminalize most behaviors seen as criminal today. Gun ownership would be unregulated, sales and investments would be unregulated, there would be no regulation on chemicals sold, etc. What would occur from this would be that all sane people would withdraw from certain types of speculation and investment that are inherently destructive, and local communities would become tighter as people realized - once again - that they depend on each other for survival. You would no longer walk into Wal-Mart and buy a wad of useless plastic with your credit card, but would go into a local store and put locally-made products on your tab, which you keep up as part of keeping your name healthy within the community. You would do free labor for your neighbors, like raising barns and helping on posses to track down criminals, but they would do the same for you. Lawsuits would not exist; the community would handle its own needs. Also, it would regulate who could join by the will of those involved. If you wanted to smoke weed, you'd grow the stuff in your backyard and no one would care, unless you also brought degenerate behavior to the community, in which case you'd be killed or driven out. If nothing else, it would have a positive Darwinian effect on drug users!
Q: What do you hope A.N.U.S. will accomplish?
The A.N.U.S. organization exists to produce thougth which will lead humanity to a better time; in this it is partially successful.
The A.N.U.S. website will ideally bring people who are sick and tired of society to certain revelations, which they will then apply in their own lives, or will fight with every ounce of their spirit and thus mark themselves forever as a certain type of intellect.
Already, it has accomplished much. There is more to do. Ultimately, I would like to see it publishing more information like Heidenlarm, our popular culture ezine, and the philosophical writings on the site, such that it could bring realistic ("nihilistic") ideas into literature, thought, art and culture.
Q: What are your top five favorite albums?
This is actually the hardest question on here, but I'll give it a stab.
1. von Karajan/Berliner Philharmoniker - Beethoven's Nine Symphonies
(an album doesn't mean "a single disc," does it?)
2. Burzum - Burzum/Aske
3. Kraftwerk - The Man-Machine
4. Tangerine Dream - Atem
5. Ildjarn-Nidhogg - S/T
Q: That covers all my questions, any final words?
Thank you for sending me these questions. Acting in self-interest, I'll of course promote some ideas here. I'd like people to take a moment to consider the complexity of evolution, and to realize how much larger than ANY human concern is the natural system which has produced us, and in which we live. I'd like them to consider the motives of Islamic "terrorists" and other resistance fighters worldwide in opposing a system which will invade their lands, sell their raw materials to industrialized nations at low cost, replace their culture with American strip malls and yes-sir-no-sir jobs, and indoctrinate future generations in internationalist rhetoric and secular Christian morality. I'd like people to consider supporting the Earth Liberation Front, which believes in violent resistance as a means of stopping the overexploitation of our natural resources and land (land consumption is what kills natural ecosystems and species the most, and leads to their extinction; it's amazing that the average American will howl out loud if a "racist" idea is suggested but thinks nothing of the TOTAL AND COMPLETE IRREVOCABLE LOSS of species that have inhabited this globe for millions of years). I'd like people to read Friedrich Wilhelm "Fred" Nietzsche, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, in addition to Pentti Linkola, Theodore Kaczynski, Julius Evola and Arthur Schopenhauer; these are real minds who have something to say that isn't 100% herd-approved, and may show you the future and not the present, if you care to listen. Finally, please visit ANUS.com - we've been offending people, trolling the internet and creating better ways of living in various forms for quite some time now, and we're still "the most hated site on the internet." I appreciate all who have read my words with a mind open to the possibility of their partial or whole truth, and I thank you sir for provoking response with this interview.
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