This was a collaborative effort with San Francisco-based black metal and ambient artist Agonanist who joined me shortly after I had started working on the release. We first met on the internet in August 2016 and quickly realized that we have a similar taste in extreme metal and both happen to make music. I remember how impressed I was when I found out that he had gone to great lengths to teach himself how to build his own fretboards so he could convert guitars and basses to microtonal scales, often at considerable expenses. As it so happens, I am also interested in microtonal music because it really forces you to work outside the box, outside the confines of most western music.

We had joked about making music together on previous occasions but this time, it was for real, and it was not just an EP but a full-length album, clocking in at a little over 43 minutes. He ended up contributing more than half the tracks for this release, with me only playing the drums and singing on them. I will leave it as an exercise for the listener to figure out who wrote which track. Instrumentally speaking, it is less apparent than I had originally anticipated. Lyrically, however, we diverged.

Originally, the lyrical concept behind this album was based on the works and life of the tortured French artist Antonin Artaud. He became addicted to opiates at an early age and spent over a decade in and out of sanatoriums and hospitals where he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. Most of his artistic endeavours failed to materialize and he struggled financially for most of his life, yet his vision of art remained radical. He wanted the books and the poems of his favourite authors to become alive, to transform the day-to-day experience of every single human being. To Artaud, art was life.

I encouraged Agonanist to write his own lyrics, though. Some of the details might be too personal to be revealed here but his texts heavily draw from notes he made on his own dreams and also, as is the case with me, from literature. I was fascinated by the idea of using dreams as a source of inspiration because I was also reading lots of psychoanalytic drivel by C.G. Jung at the time - most of which I consider highly pseudoscientific in nature, I must add. In fact, I tried to imitate him for a while and started making notes on my own dreams, right after waking up at night. This process is supposed to preserve the narrative of the dream with greater accuracy. I can attest to its necessity.

My most vivid account from that period was a dream in which a procession of people were accompanying me and a brown cow to a table that resembled the one in the painting The Last Supper. Somebody had placed a colourful crown of flowers on the head of the cow. Nobody spoke a word. Other than the shuffling of our feet, there was no sound to be heard. The expression on their faces was one of complete apathy. It was an eerie atmosphere. They had me take the seat of Jesus in the painting. One of the women milked the cow and placed the bowl of milk in front of me. Then she took the crown and placed it on my head. It seemed like a festive moment but nobody applauded or said a word. I knew they were honouring me for something but I was unable to tell what it was. I drank the milk and placed the empty bowl before me.

At that point, the dream ended and I could not sleep for another four hours. What does it mean? Are these the religious delusions of an atheist? Hardly so. While psychoanalysts believed that dreams would often express one's subconscious desires, contemporary neurology provides us with more down-to-earth theories on the cause of dreams.

This release partially represents a continuation of the "dogma" I defined for the previous Voidcraeft release of the very same name. It was loosely based on the Dogme 95 Manifesto by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. I insisted that Agonanist and I record individual instruments in a single take without any further post-editing of the recordings. However, we did break the "rule of effort", with two tracks being under 2 minutes and 30 seconds in length, and also the "rule of sound", by using ambient samples he created using tape loops being played through a customized cassette deck.

As for other hardware used, I ended up miking a Marshall JCM 2000 TSL 100 in combination with a 4x12 cab with two Celestion Vintage 30 speakers at the studio. We also used a Laney IRT-Studio to get a different clean guitar sound on one track. Miking cabs was something I had avoided on the previous release but re-amping guitars this way is actually a fascinating, magical ritual that connects you to the riffs in a new way. This was my first release without any digital guitar or bass modelling. It is also the most experimental one so far, featuring not only Agonanist's tape loops but also an electric zither I built out of a mahogany body and two EMG pickups that I had previously extracted from my ESP Ltd EC-401. Inspired by Sunn O))), I even tried my hand at a guitar feedbacking track by the name of The Breath of Unreality.

Partially inspired by Agonanist's guitar customizations, I went through two intense do-it-yourself phases in the course of making this album. In the first one, the woodworking phase, I built the aforementioned zither, a 4x12 cab out of 17 mm birch plywood with Celestion Vintage 30 (16 Ohm) speakers and a 2x12 cab which I have yet to add speakers to. In the second one, the electronics phase, which was considerably more challenging and also more dangerous, I built a transistor-based microphone pre-amp and two guitar pre-amp prototypes using 12AX7 and ECC83 vacuum tubes. Powered by mains, all of them. Recently, I also defretted a cheap Harley Benton bass I had used on some of my early albums in preparation for a future microtonal release. However, out of all these creations (or abominations), only the difficult to tune zither with 12 strings found its way into this album, in the track You Are the Dissolver.

The title of this album, Indoctrination of Emptiness, was chosen by Agonanist. To him, it was a statement on consumerism. That is, a culture in which people are constantly encouraged to buy things they do not need with money they do not have to impress people they do not like. While this is not connected to the lyrical themes of this album, I can very much identify with it. I concede that American consumerism exceeds that of my native Germany by far, though.

I do not own a car - I go everywhere by bicycle. I do not own a fridge - I only ever buy food for one day. I do not own a bed - I sleep on a mattress on the floor. Sometimes, I am under the impression that my life is defined by the things I choose not to have rather than the ones I choose to have. According to the famous mathematician and amphetamine addict Paul Erdős, "property is a nuisance". I would take it even further than that, though. I feel threatened by the things I own!

While I do take pride in my minimalist lifestyle, I secretly admire people who are psychologically equipped with the ability to buy happiness with money, which is certainly not the case with me. Spending money on anything other than food, rent, acts of charity or the occasional bike repair evokes feelings of disgust and decadence in me. Why have I even been working full-time for years? Primarily to socialize and, less importantly, to get a minimum of physical exercise every day. Other than that, it seems like I am stockpiling money for an early retirement that will likely bring me nothing but isolation and depression.

The cover art is a sinister high contrast piece by Australian photographer Heather Baker which was originally intended to be used for an upcoming Agonanist release. I would like to thank him for agreeing to use it for our collaboration.

In retrospect, the period of my life coinciding with our work on this album was marked by doubts about my lifestyle, immersion in war-related media, moderate drug use (alcohol, cannabis) and a transition from my previously largely vegetarian diet to a vegan one. I might take a break from making music for a while but I eagerly await the delivery of a 17 TET guitar Agonanist is currently working on. Many thanks!