THE CABINET OF NUMINOUS SONG BY FILIP LUNDSTRÖM
To put it very simple, Jordablod is the name of the music we create when we as the group we are now are playing together. I don’t mean that in a vague sense, but I want to emphasise that the name itself does not have a deeper meaning or a concept to fulfil. Jordablod is an ongoing artistic exploration in sound; the name is simply the container for the creativity, collaboration and companionship we have built over the years of doing this. We came up with the name itself quite some time ago; it must be at least five years ago now. It came from discussions within the band; we talked a lot about nature and religion and the cycles of life and death therein and from that the name just appeared. It’s southern Swedish and means earth blood or blood of the earth.
The album title ‘The Cabinet of Numinous’ refers to sacred space. To unpack that we can begin defining sacred, I find compelling and pragmatic, something being sacred means that it is full of transformative potential. It is something with which you participate in the dialectics of order and chaos and thus moving forward following the ever occurring change of being. These spaces that can contain an element of sacredness are physical phenomena. They act as gateways, another theme of the album. They can be of course locations of cultural significance; temples, burial ground,s etc., art, sound, and the most present one for a human being, one’s own body.
I often see a very negative view on the physical and the body in both metal music and ”modern occult-culture” in general, and I guess it comes from gnostic influences. This is a big mistake, and it becomes quite contradictory to play music, which is a physical phenomenon, about shunning the flesh. Jordablod instead embraces the physical and its diverse expressions, sound and vision, to engage in a poetic exploration of the mysteries.
The guiding principles of our music are volume, violence and force balanced with stillness and harmony; dynamics is a big part of it. We try to craft vast and atmospheric landscapes in which we can take the listener on a journey. The continuity of the music I also very important, we don’t focus on the classic song. Still, structures instead focus on the song’s narrative and the bigger picture of the album’s narrative. Both our albums have clear narratives; they are journeys, you might even call them concept albums. They have a very clear beginning and a clear ending and to play the songs in any other order than the one on the album would be difficult for us. We prefer playing the entire record start to finish when playing live, but in slightly different versions than the recorded ones.
Of course, our music influence wise is the black and death metal traditions and the metal rock music that came before, especially the progressive and psychedelic offshoots. For this album we did include a clear county/folk influence as well, quite a lot of people have picked that up I have heard.
Exactly why black metal was the one style to grab me especially is a difficult question, it was a long time ago now, and I was a very different person at the beginning of this journey. What drew me to the genre was probably the philosophy of ”searching and manifesting darkness” and the notion of authenticity, which is at the centre of the genre. How much of that if anything is actually practised in the genre is most uncertain to me today. Of course, there are true devil worshipers who will go to hell and back to state their point in the black metal genre, no doubt, but they are very few indeed. The problem is that the fake guy and the authentic guy wear the same Darkthrone shirts, so it can be hard to tell who is authentic in their expression, but once you talk to them, you see what they are really about.
We don’t see ourselves as a strictly black metal band either nowadays, but who are we to say what genre we are or are not. Genres are not important at all for us when we create our music. The principles I mentioned earlier of authenticity in ”searching and manifestation” is fundamental though. Still, I would say it has instead drawn us from the genre than deeper inside it.
In the writing process music always comes first. Then as more and more of the song is developed, words and phrases appear, and I write the lyrics from this. So the themes and the narratives are something emergent from the sound rather than from a developed concept. What all our lyrics deal with is ultimately mysticism, with the focus on mystical experience. I would say they are more symbolic than explicit. There are no clear purposes to the lyrics other than walking that tightrope between the known and unknown. Of course, studies in philosophy, religion and various mystical traditions have inspired us since day one and has given us our vocabulary.
I have had many hours studying esotericism and occultism, some magick systems and such along with the spiritual/mystical traditions these usually are inspired by. Even though my interest has somewhat diminished through the years as other paths have revealed to me, I continue to study that and take a significant part in it! I don’t know if I would attempt to define the dark arts more than those fields I mentioned before, but I have to say that I haven’t found much deep interest and in-depth studies in the dark arts in the genre of black metal. There seem to be many people reading one or two chapters in a book on Qabbala only to dress in robes and recite fake Hebrew, smoke and mirrors and all of that. But like I said earlier about ”the true devil-worshippers” in black metal, some fascinating people study and practice in these fields and do so very seriously, but they are few and far between.
https://jordablod.bandcamp.com
