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An Interview with Jason Wallach of The Unquiet Void
Posted: Monday, April 09, 2007
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

Since 1989, Jason Wallach has been the sole guide for the audio direction of The Unquiet Void. Crafting unique soundscapes where dark atmospheres give way to hidden melodies, his work creates a cosmic ambience in which the listener becomes lost in a sea of celestial dreams and unnerving nightmares. Through the years, Wallach has performed a variety of original pieces as well as performing covers of David Bowie, Lycia, and Black Tape for a Blue Girl, before releasing his first studio album, a soundtrack to the independent film Scorpio, in 2000. His second album, Between the Twilights showed Wallach progressing and experimenting further, delving more into ethereal territory that transports the listener's subconscious directly to the abysmal cosmos.

In 2004, The Unquiet Void released Poisoned Dreams, the first entry in a trilogy of albums based on the literary works of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly "The Call of Cthulhu," "Dagon," and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." Like the cosmic deities presented in the author's works, Poisoned Dreams was an epic and desolate affair, providing a soundtrack to the twisted thoughts and entities Lovecraft only hinted at in his writing. This was not safe music, and barely registered to the human psyche as music at all, though there was still a sense of humanity left within the torrent of horror. In 2006 came The Shadow-Haunted Outside, the second entry, an apocalyptic descent into the consequence of magicks. All traces of humanity were slowly decimated, as if lost in the very bowels of an unnamed and indescribable beast.

ReGen dares to look long into the abyss as Jason Wallach guides us through his sonic sanctuary of the macabre. From discussions of Lovecraft's work to the questions of the Montauk Project, this is no journey for the faint of heart.

Let's start off with your most recent release, The Shadow-Haunted Outside. It's the second entry in a trilogy of albums dedicated to the literary works of H.P. Lovecraft. What made you decide to create a trilogy based on this writer's works? Why a trilogy as opposed to a single album?

Wallach: Well, it really all starts back during the summer of 2000. I left southern Florida to move to Washington state, where I couldn't get work for a month. There were several other factors that sort of weigh in on this, but what came of the whole situation was I had this awful nervous breakdown, and it was sort of like this cataclysmic event in my life. Around the same time, I rediscovered the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, which in itself is pretty cataclysmic when you consider all of the outside entities trying to come back into the world that we inhabit and take it over for their own purposes. So it kind of felt like that, and upon reading his work, it really hit home with me. It was something that I could identify with at a point in my life when there was absolutely nothing left. It really gave me a direction, and the more I read, the more I understood, and it gave me an outlet to exorcise those demons. Then what happened was I was trying to figure out where I was going to go with something related to H.P. Lovecraft. It wasn't until 2002 when I saw the movie Dagon by Stuart Gordon, and I was really looking forward to it because back in the '80s, Stuart Gordon's movies Re-Animator and From Beyond had queued me into H.P. Lovecraft in the first place. When I saw Dagon, with as much of the reading as I had done at that point and knowing those stories very well, it kind of disappointed me in the sense that I wanted to see something a lot darker and a lot more along the lines of Lovecraft's own nihilistic vision of this whole thing taking place. What I decided to do was Poisoned Dreams, which would've been the movie that I would've wanted to have seen, and being that I'm not a film director and don't have the means or the capacity or the clout to make a film like that, I had to turn to making an album. And when I made the album, it just didn't seem like it was finished. There was a lot more to it. And there was a lot of emotional garbage that I was hanging onto for awhile there, so it seemed natural to continue it. Now, a trilogy...I guess I was inspired by Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy and wanted to do something kind of epic as far as that is concerned, because I'd never done that before. Also, I had not recorded music to any great extent since the last album, Between the Twilights, which came out in 2000. So it was sort of something that seemed logical to do at that particular point in time. And now, being that I've spent about five years on the thing, and it's going to be another year when the third one will be done, I've kind of trapped myself into it. I had to do it at that point after I'd announced it. I just really identified with it, and the kind of darkness that he's describing and that he's talking about was exactly the kind of darkness I was experiencing during that whole period of time when I was having this nervous breakdown. It happened at the right time, I guess.

The first entry in the trilogy, Poisoned Dreams, seemed to owe much of its inspiration primarily to 'The Call of Cthulhu,' 'Dagon,' and 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' specifically. With the recurrence of Bryin Dall's chant from that album opening The Shadow-Haunted Outside, it seems clear 'The Call of Cthulhu' and 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' still hold, but what other specific Lovecraft works did you draw inspiration from for this second album? Is it all based solely on the Cthulhu mythos, or do any of his other works play a part in the music?

Wallach: Oh, absolutely. Lovecraft's themes run through all of his stories, not just through the Cthulhu mythos. The mythology is really just a name given to it by his friend and one of the people responsible for his work persevering in the world, which was August Derlith, and he just kind of called it the Cthulhu mythos as some sort of marketable title or catchphrase. But the work itself is far from mainstream. The first album is an exploration of those three stories as a continuing story to accomplish a certain goal, you know? 'The Call of Cthulhu,' is really just elements attaching 'Dagon' and 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' together to sort of fill in the gap of the 10 or more years that occurred between the two stories, because I think 'Dagon' was done in 1917, and 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' was in the late 1930s, and I think it was the 1920s that 'The Call of Cthulhu' came out. It seems like the next logical step in a series of events that was taking place, and I just used that as my springboard. The Shadow-Haunted Outside goes beyond those three stories into a much broader, more sinister territory, because there's a lot less human involvement in it, and we're also dealing with a lot of creatures that nobody knows anything about because they were never really described. They're just mentioned. I did a lot of reading into some of his other stories, and 'The Dunwich Horror' gave me a little bit more insight as to just how enormous Yog-Sothoth would be, which is the centerpiece of the album, which is 'The Lurker at the Threshold.' I didn't want to name any of the tracks after the names of these deities. I thought that would sound absolutely ridiculous. I wanted to give it the ambiguity that Lovecraft himself gave them. So, 'The Lurker at the Threshold' is Yog-Sothoth, and there were others like 'The Whisperer in the Darkness' that invokes this strange sense of...I really don't even know how to describe the feeling. It makes me feel very strange and uncomfortable, so there were those stories that I kind of drew from. Also, the one main story that was the biggest inspiration for that album was 'Nyarlathotep,' and that was the second track on the album, which is 'Messengers, Deceivers.' Even in the story, it mentions that he had these glass instruments that he would take, and he would buy these metal things and take them and create new, strange instruments. It mentions a lot about science, and I tried to mirror that in the track with the sound as much as possible. There are some sounds in there that are very magickal and scientific to me, and that's pretty much how I went about creating that album.

It is definitely a lot more alien than the first album. Returning from Poisoned Dreams is Bryin Dall. How did he come to be involved in The Unquiet Void in the first place? Beyond his instrumental work, what would you say he contributes to The Unquiet Void, either personally or musically?

Wallach: Well, Bryin Dall's a good friend of mine, and I absolutely love the guy. He's a wonderful human being; I can't stress that enough. But he's also one of the most creative people I've ever met. Just to give you an example very quickly, we did 'The Lurker at the Threshold' together. That was our piece that we did for that album, and the reason that I asked him to do that piece is because I just didn't think I could stand up to the challenge by myself, with the minimal amount of equipment that I had at that time. We spent about 12 hours cranking that one out. It's like trying to embody something along the lines of Christ in a song, or of Kali in a song. How do you do it? The themes and the premises of these themes are just so intense and enormous that I didn't feel like I could go in there and just do anything, and I knew that Bryin could help me achieve a certain enormity to the piece that I really wanted it to have. I actually created some sounds for the piece, and he just took it, and I don't know what the hell he did with it. It's just enormous. And I had to relinquish that much control in order to give it a faithful adaptation. When I listen to 'The Lurker at the Threshold,' it's just like one of those pieces where you have to just lay back and deal with it. That's exactly what it needed to be, because that's exactly what I would imagine it would be if a being like Yog-Sothoth actually did exist and was capable of returning to this world to take it and make of it as it wanted, and I knew that. As far as getting him to be involved in Poisoned Dreams, the story goes way back. I'm originally from New York, and in 1992, I was really starting to get tired of the run-of-the-mill gothic music. The Sisters of Mercy were my all time favorite band in high school, and people just didn't quite get where I was coming from with that. Christian Death and Sex Gang Children I'd seen in concert, and all that stuff was great, but I needed something more, something deeper in sound, something darker in scope. A friend of mine invited me to this festival called Night of Misanthropy at CBGB's. I went and I saw Loretta's Doll play, and they're all sort of on stage, and Bryin's got this monstrous looking instrument in his hand that's supposed to function like a guitar and he's playing with a saber. The five of them played, and it was almost like they were so in sync that they could have opened the portals of time themselves. It was that much of a magickal experience for me to watch them play and hear the music that they were doing, because it was very dark, it was very strange, and it was also very funny in a sort of sick and twisted way. I just fell in love with it. I went and got all of the Order of the Suffering Clown releases and it was like nothing I'd ever heard before. I really respect that kind of thing, when you can take something conventional and twist it and mangle it beyond recognition and create something new and utterly beautiful with it. I respect that, so I stayed in touch with him in 1993 because I moved away from New York. We lost touch, and what happened was after the first album, Scorpio, came out, AlterCulture Records told me that they were going to stop doing the label. They went ahead and we parted amicably, and I had gotten an e-mail from Kevin Dunn, who ironically was the drummer for Loretta's Doll. He basically said, 'We would love to release something of yours,' because I had sent them Scorpio on CD-R after it was mastered. He said something along the lines, 'We wish we had our label up and going when you sent us this, but if you want to release anything else on our label, let us know.' So I did. And that's how I got back in touch with Bryin Dall; he did a remix for the song 'Angels' from Between the Twilights on the Butoh compilation, and we just got back in touch with each other and have stayed really good friends ever since. That is how he came to be involved in The Unquiet Void, because he also did a project called Golden Dawn, which is magnificent. It's the Golden Dawn ritual set to music. I even told Bryin this, but he reminds me of Saruman from Lord of the Rings, because I saw an interview with Christopher Lee who said that Saruman's power really resides in his voice. That's exactly the way it is with Bryin. When you talk to him, he kind of sounds congested, but when he sings, all sorts of dimensions unfold. He's got a very, very commanding presence with his voice, and I was having insecurity issues with doing the chanting because I tried it and it just wasn't turning out to be anything that I could take seriously, but I said, 'I'll bet I know who can pull this off.' I went to Bryin, and I said, 'Look, I'd love to work with you, and this is what I'm doing, and this is what I need,' and he gave me a lot more than that. With Bryin, it's not what he can do. He can do anything. It's what he can't do, and I really don't think he can't do anything.

You also have a project with him working on the soundtrack to Montauk Unveiled. What can you tell us about this project? How do you feel the music you create for Montauk Unveiled compares to your work in The Unquiet Void, or Bryin's in 4th Sign of the Apocalypse?

Wallach: Well, I've wanted to do a full-length collaboration with Bryin for years, and so did he, and we kind of just got together. I'd go up and see him, we'd hang out for the weekend, and we'd stroll into the studio and record something off the cuff and make it more of a magickal act than something that's planned and scripted, which is when I think some of the best work is done. Let me start at the beginning with this. In 2006, I was extremely stressed out to the point where I needed to do something musically, and I took a bunch of samples from some sampling discs, and I'm going to say this right out front so that if anyone ever heard the original versions of these songs that we mutated, they can't say, 'Hey, you're copping out and taking these samples and saying that they're your own,' which is not what I was doing. It was just something to get it out of my system. It's been a good experience and a bad experience because of the fact that it's taking someone else's samples and twisting and making them something different, but at the same time, it was a great learning experience. I did this album in like six days. It was practically all day, all night, as much time as I could put into it, creating this project. I created a new moniker for it called Puree of Heart, which I'm still going to use. Just not right now. I just put up a MySpace site, just to see what people would think of it, not really expecting anything, and people absolutely loved it. It was really strange. I told Bryin that I'd love for him to help me with this project, and it's funny because when I brought this project to him, my friend John Brody, who directed the movie that Scorpio was the soundtrack to, called me up and said, 'I'm doing a new movie. It's a docudrama about the Montauk Project.' And I didn't even know what the Montauk Project was, although he did say it was a continuation of The Philadelphia Experiment, which I had seen with Michael Paré back in the '80s. I remember the film because he walks into the bar and they're watching Roger Corman's Humanoids from the Deep on the television, which is a movie that freaked me out when I was a kid, but that's a whole other story. I looked into it, and it just seemed so strange that there would be these kinds of horrible experiments going on, and again, with the ambiguousness of something like Lovecraft or The X-Files, it really left a lot to my imagination. Whether or not it really happened, something happened, something not good. So he showed me some photos of the location, Camp Hero out on Montauk Point, Long Island, and that there were a lot of children abducted and lost in these wormhole experiments, and I was just like, 'OK, I've really got to put this to some use.' So I took the material from Puree of Heart, and the album was going to be called The Burst of the Soul, and I decided, 'You know what? I'm not going to do that because this isn't my work. Let's take this to Bryin and see what he can do to help me further it.' So I went ahead and brought it to him, and it was funny because at first I thought he was really pissed at me. Firstly, these are all MP3s, so the sound is going to suck. Then he was like, 'You took this off a Skinny Puppy sampling CD, didn't you?' I said yes, and he said, 'You can't just take something, put it on a disc, and use it as your own. You just can't do that.' That basically led to an exhausting weekend of him just manipulating the hell out of these sounds. The album sounds absolutely nothing like it did originally, and that's what I knew was something that we could call our own. There were some tracks of that material that I took and I mangled mercilessly beyond recognition, and then he took it that much further. I really feel that it's a strong release. With The Unquiet Void, there's a lot of planning, and there's an order that the songs have to be in. These songs could be in any order. The only reason they're in the order that they're going to appear on the CD is because the names of the songs form a chess piece or a pawn, much like the people that were involved in the experiments were pawns to it. But I think it's very strong material. It's definitely out there. It's the weirdest, strangest thing I think I've ever had a part of. As far as The Unquiet Void is concerned, it's just another step out into the ether for me. It's nothing, I think, even remotely recognizable if the project hadn't been called The Unquiet Void vs. 4th Sign of the Apocalypse. Bryin did so much work on the project over and above the work that I did that I said, 'There's no way I'm going to consider this an Unquiet Void project. This is The Unquiet Void vs. 4th Sign,' and he was perfectly fine with that. And he did some really neat things, he put some really sleazy dance beats in there, but it was really all experimenting with different things. Basically, it all comes down to this: he asked me when we first started, 'What do you want to do with this?' 'Well, this project is all about experimentation. Let's make people feel like they're being experimented on when they listen to it.' That's how he approached his part of the work on this album, so it's pretty much the feeling I get when I listen to it, but it's also really spacey. You're going to find a lot of people smoking weed and listening to this album, and that's just where it goes. It's dark, but it's not unpleasant. It's very inaccessible to the mainstream, and yet I think a lot more people could be open to it. It's really contradictory, but the album is really intense. I like it a lot. It's grown on me quite a bit.

Do you have any idea when it's going to be released?

Wallach: The film, I believe, is going into post-production now, and it's not a docudrama anymore. It's a full-on documentary. Apparently, the interviews with the people who were involved in this project were so strange and so disturbing that he felt it really carried itself as is. I'm just waiting for him. They're going to cut a trailer later on this year. Hopefully, the film will be out this year, and I'll be hitting some film festivals with him to talk about it. It's really strange stuff. I've seen some images from the film, and it's on the MySpace Web site. It's a really fascinating project. I'm hoping it'll be out this year, toward the end of this year.

Also contributing to The Shadow-Haunted Outside are Mike Vanportfleet and Tara Vanflower of Lycia. As Lycia's music is generally considered more in the darkwave genre, what was it like to incorporate their style of musicianship into The Unquiet Void? What sorts of similarities and differences do you find in their approach with yours?

Wallach: I've been friends with Mike for a long time. We've been friends since Ionia came out. I got a hold of that album on a whim, and it just haunted me for months. We had wanted to work on something anyway. The last thing we did together was 'We Three Kings' for the Excelsis compilation for Projekt Records back in '95, so we really wanted to do something. It never happened, because Mike had some health problems, and they separated from Projekt. My life had gone its own way, and somehow we just came full circle and found each other again, which is really cool. Mike was sort of in a period in his life when he just didn't want to do music anymore, period. Then he comes out with this solo album, which is very experimental and has a lot of depth and a lot of creativity to it. He sent that to me, and I told him I would send him Poisoned Dreams in trade when it came out. And he said, 'Alright, well, you know? I'm going to say a 75 percent chance yes, but don't hold me to it.' It was great, because I sent him Poisoned Dreams, and two weeks later I got this e-mail from him saying, 'Yeah, I definitely would love to do something for the album.' I think when he heard Poisoned Dreams, it really kind of reaffirmed for him the direction I was moving in with it. So I sent him the descriptions, very vague descriptions of three of the deities that are spoken of in Lovecraft's work, and I said, 'I want Tara on one of them, and I want her on the one for the track that's going to be for Shub-Niggurath, and here's the description of this creature, so just run with that.' 'The Dark Mother' is what she is commonly referred to, so that piece is so wholly about her...it. The funny thing is when I got this sample, this loop Mike and Tara created, there are all sorts of almost Gregorian male chants in it, which signifies this intense male worship of this powerful female deity, which I thought was great because it was, in a sense, very intimidating to most men to have a powerful female entity and have men completely subservient to it. That just worked twice as good for me. I knew Tara could pull something really magickal off, and I knew Mike could, especially after hearing his solo album. So I took what they did, and I threw them into three tracks, which were 'Messenger, Deceiver,' which was about Nyarlathotep, 'Him Who Shall Not Be Named,' which is about Hastur, and 'The Dark Mother' with Tara. It came together very easily.

We touched on this a little bit before, but with The Shadow-Haunted Outside being the second part of a trilogy, what would you say are the main differences between it and Poisoned Dreams? From a musical and production standpoint, how did this album progress from the first one?

Wallach: The Shadow-Haunted Outside has a lot more of my own sounds, and with those sounds, very dark melodies. Some of the material was from a little earlier on, and I felt that it really fit the purpose much better. These songs were sitting on the shelf for years and years; 'Cyclopean Monolith' was an outtake from the Scorpio sessions. I realized one thing after Between the Twilights came out, which is my piece de resistance just because there's a lot of love and very positive energy in that album for me. It didn't do very well when it came out. I don't know if it was the time, the climate, the economy, or whatever. I took the bitterness that I felt from that, and I just decided that I was going to make another really dark album. I mean, let's face it: my nervous breakdown, H.P. Lovecraft...it doesn't get a whole lot darker than that. I decided to take these tracks and incorporate them in and build new tracks and break new ground as far as my abilities with The Unquiet Void are concerned. Between the Twilights was done on computer, but I absolutely played everything out. With this one, there was a lot of construction, a lot of manipulation, almost like the process of bringing Cthulhu back himself. I decided to just really roll with it, make it much more experimental, much more out there, something I hadn't done before, something intimidating, even for me. Everything about it had to fit the ambience of what I was attempting to do when creating the album, and it did. It fit perfectly. I really just wanted to make the most appropriate and faithful adaptation of Lovecraft's work, because I have the utmost love and respect for it. I really do. Say what you want about his writing, but his ideas were just so incredible, and this was from a man of science and logic back in the 1920s. It just blows my mind! The differences are that Poisoned Dreams is a more musical album, and there are also a lot of very familiar elements to it. Everyday things, like the sounds of wind, the sounds of water, the sounds of lightning and rain, the sounds of footsteps. In 'The Esoteric Order,' the sound of breathing, strained as it may be. These people are turning into fish, for Christ's sake! It really is something going on in the world we know, something really nasty, and much like his stories like 'The Dunwich Horror' and 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth,' which is one of my absolute favorites and one of the stories that is most definitely explored in the album. Poisoned Dreams was being able to take that darkness inside me and put it into an album. I was just happy to be making another album. It had been four years in between the release of Between the Twilights and Poisoned Dreams, but I had a lot of fun with it. At the end of 'Necronomicon,' there's this sound. My son was born in 2004, but obviously we did the doctors visits and they did the ultrasounds, and there's this very strange undulating sound when you listen to the heartbeat of a baby in the mother's womb. I took this sound and I put it at the end of 'Necronomicon,' when you hear this sort of static sound. That's what that is, and what it was supposed to signify was that by discovering the Necronomicon, there's something in the depths, something being cultivated, something gestating, waiting to see the light of day. So every sound, every movement has a specific place for a specific reason. With these two tracks, 'Necronomicon' and 'The Esoteric Order,' which is sort of like an Innsmouth ritual exploring what that would be like, they're both utilizing magicks from this book that are going to bring these creatures back into our world. I took elements from each of those tracks for the opening track in The Shadow-Haunted Outside. That's the only glimpse of familiarity that you get, the chanting and the rhythm, sort of like a brief rehash. 'OK, this is where we were, and this is where we're going.' But it was significant to put that in there because there has to be a why this is happening, as in, 'OK, fine. These people wanted to resurrect Cthulhu,' but at the same time, what they did had consequences even above and beyond anything they could've imagined. Therefore, all of these other things are going to start waking up and taking advantage of the situation. That's really what The Shadow-Haunted Outside is about. As far the production goes, I created a lot of sounds for that album, and I only used samples of sounds and things that when I heard them, they really bothered me. I couldn't sit still because there was something about it that was psychologically detrimental to me. Therefore, it's the only album I've ever created that I cannot personally relate to, and it had to be that way.

That's interesting that it would have the same effect on the creator as it would the listener.

Wallach: Right! And it's the same effect that it would have on someone if this nonsense was really going on. There are certain things that the human mind cannot comprehend, and the stress of which would annihilate it.

Which is essentially Lovecraft's magick.

Wallach: Absolutely. That's his thing. Some people have told me that it's the most faithful adaptation of Lovecraft that they've ever heard, which is the greatest compliment I could get for it. Some people feel, 'How am I supposed to believe this is Lovecraft?' But the fact of the matter is that the influence and the intentions are there. A lot of pain and personal torment went into these albums, especially the second.

With the first two entries now completed and released, what are your thoughts on the impending third album? What will be different on the third album? Or is it still too early to tell?

Wallach: Oh, yes, it's been begun. I decided I'm not going to continue from The Shadow-Haunted Outside and spell out something; that would completely defeat the purpose of adapting Lovecraft in the first place. He never did that! There's no reason for me to make an album with some kind of earth war.

It's too much the logical conclusion.

Wallach: Absolutely! The way I left off with The Shadow-Haunted Outside is on sort of a cliffhanger, but it leaves it up to your imagination, which is exactly what Lovecraft himself did. I felt that I hadn't read 'At the Mountains of Madness' in awhile, so I started reading it and thinking to myself, 'Wow, you know what would be great? If I could go back before these two albums and give some kind of audio interpretation of how it all started!' You know? And a little of the earth history of The Elder Things and all the different settlements they made and the different enemies they had to contend with in order to exist on Earth, and really give sort of like a history, which Lovecraft himself did in spurts in that story. So that's where I'm going with that. It's inspired solely by 'At the Mountains of Madness,' by the historical passages, and it's going to exist before humans were created, because apparently The Elder Things accidentally created humans as a food byproduct or something. I just decided that this one can't be so dark and so dismal like The Shadow-Haunted Outside, or as messed up as that album is, because the only reason there's so much darkness and fear in those first two albums is because it's occurring in the human world and that's exactly the reaction that humans would have to something like that going on. When humans don't exist, we have to go back to the cosmic horror element and strictly that, and not play upon human emotions in terms of how I approach recording this album. I do have a collaborator on this album, and I've kind of narrowed it down to one, and his name is John Longshaw from a band called Black Seas of Infinity. He and I have spoken at great lengths about Lovecraft and magick and things like that. I asked him, 'Would you be interested in doing this third installment with me?' And he said, 'Yeah, I'd love to!' We're working on that now, and I couldn't imagine that it would be available any earlier than 2008.

There have been numerous interpretations of Lovecraft's work over the years, from many different genres of music and film. How do you feel your work in The Unquiet Void stands up to them? What other works based on Lovecraft's writings have you felt lived up to his legacy?

Wallach: Well, you know, it's funny. There was a review of Poisoned Dreams where the guy said, 'I'd much rather listen to Slayer or Metallica.' I'm thinking that's fine that he didn't like the album. Not everybody's going to like this. I had no problem with the fact that he didn't like this. But comparing this to Slayer or Metallica? I only say this because Lovecraft was more about what goes on in the shadows, what you don't see. Metal is so in your face and blatant in that respect, it just doesn't really hold that correlation for me. I don't necessarily think that The Unquiet Void stands up to their work or doesn't. If these people are influenced by Lovecraft, share the wealth. It's all about interpretation, and you can interpret it any way that you want to, but personally, I don't find any logic in that vein of interpretation. It doesn't mean I can't enjoy that type of music or get along perfectly well with other fans of H.P. Lovecraft that are working in the metal vein. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I just don't relate to it. As far as what other bands do I feel have really captured the essence…

Bands or films? You mentioned the work of Stuart Gordon.

Wallach: Right, well, Stuart Gordon makes films for the sake of shock and gore. That's not to say that's a bad thing, but even he's admitted, in a DVD documentary called The Eldritch Influence, 'Lovecraft would hate my films.' And he's probably right about that. Lovecraft wasn't a big fan of moving pictures anyway. But he does some interesting things, like in From Beyond, where they're conducting the experiment; they got that dead on from the story. But after that, it's completely ridiculous and excessive. As a movie unto itself, I love it. As a Lovecraft adaptation, I much prefer the story, so when I watch that film, I just watch it as a movie. But I think John Carpenter's The Thing is incredible! I thought the H.P. Lovecraft Society's The Call of Cthulhu was wonderful. Very, very creative people there. They recently did a CD, which is a 1930s-style radio show broadcast of 'At the Mountains of Madness,' which is wonderful. It's very freakish! And then as far as films go, something like The Mothman Prophecies in a way tapped that energy. Even that recent movie The Abandoned kind of touched on that kind of sinister darkness that he had going on. As far as music goes, there's a band on MySpace called Mythosphere that does amazing Lovecraft-based work, and he just did an album called The River of Night's Dreaming, which is just wonderful, very strange. There are a couple of people out there doing it, but more and more lately, I'm seeing people actually starting to interpret his ideas in music, which I think is a great thing. I'm not the first person musically to interpret Lovecraft, and I know I won't be the last. It just so happens to be that I'm doing this trilogy, which I can't wait to have over with so I can just get on with it.

In the past, The Unquiet Void seemed to veer towards a more experimental darkwave sound, especially with your covers of David Bowie and Black Tape for a Blue Girl. Would you say your current work on the Lovecraft trilogy is more indicative of the direction The Unquiet Void will take in the future? Are there plans to incorporate more covers in the future, or perhaps shift the sound yet again to something closer to your earlier work?

Wallach: People have me pegged as a Lovecraftian artist. I can't say that 100 percent for certain, but I'm not a Lovecraft band. I had to stop along the way and filter out this intense emotional garbage by doing Lovecraft. That's not to say that I would never visit that again. I'm totally open to that. Once he gets under your skin, you can't get it out. I'm not going to do just Lovecraft albums for the rest of my musical career; that's not what I plan. The Unquiet Void has always been about music and sound. A lot of the earlier stuff was really experimental, like the first song pieces that I wrote, so there are pieces that are really pretty and melodic, but there's always something in it to complement it and contradict it in a sense, much like the name The Unquiet Void, which would be some sort of nasty sound or noise in the background that you could fall into. It's always been about expressing life. The Lovecraft trilogy is no exception to that. It was a big turning point in my life that I'm kind of shaking off by doing it. A lot of the original catalog of songs I have has not been released yet. Some of it has trickled out, like the opening track for Scorpio, 'A Constant Looming Uncertainty,' 'Autumn Fires,' 'Dust,' 'Breathing Liquid Breath,' those are older songs. In Between the Twilights, you have 'Drifting Beyond Familiar Dreamscapes,' which was originally a piece called 'Sun Up' that I did, and I completely reworked it. In Poisoned Dreams, there's track one, which was done in 2001 with my friend Michael Otley from Vehemence Realized. We are childhood equals. We did that, and I just decided to use because it was so entrancing and nasty. 'R'lyeh Rerisen' was originally done as a track from an EP I did which 'A Constant Looming Uncertainty' came off of. For The Shadow-Haunted Outside, it was all new stuff. For this one, it's all new stuff. One day, I'll release all that older stuff, but when people hear it, ultimately they'll understand exactly where I've been, where I've gone, and why. But I'm kind of heading back in that direction. It was very sort of strange orchestral experimental stuff, and I'm not ready to let go of that by any means whatsoever. I played a lot of bass, incorporated that in different ways, and I don't foresee myself staying a noise artist, but incorporating it into the work that I do.

Dark ambient music is very visceral and tends to instill a wide range of images in the minds of those who listen to it, and often tends to create some preconceptions about the creator. Are you really as dark as your music might suggest? Tell us about Jason Wallach when he's not creating music for The Unquiet Void.

Wallach: Well, the whole purpose of creating music is creating catharsis. If I didn't have an outlet like that, I would go insane, and I probably would be that dark. The whole purpose of making music is decompression, staying sane, staying focused, and staying healthy. There are a lot of things that have happened in my life that have really sort of made me understand darkness, what it is and what it does. This music here is really helping me stay human, and I like being human, so I want to definitely keep myself in check. But as far as a lot of my thoughts, who doesn't have dark thoughts? Who doesn't feel like when someone pisses them off for no good reason or invades their own personal boundaries like they want to kill them? No one is exempt from those feelings, no one whatsoever. Some people are better at hiding it than others. That's the only thing, and I don't hide it. I just get it out. I've always done that, and there's a story behind every song that I've ever written. And it's a great release. The whole reason I did the trilogy in the first place is because having worked retail and after having a nervous breakdown, these fucking assholes didn't make it any easier for me to recover. So it's just kind of like, 'I want to kill the world!' Well, what am I going to do? Am I actually going to run outside with a machete and start chopping people up, or am I going to sit down, think of something, create a challenge for myself, give myself a reason to get that energy out, and make something really unique and creative in the process? I'll take the second option. I guess I'm not really all that dark if I'm willing to get it out, but obviously it's in there. I'm pretty easy to get along with. I'm a pretty friendly guy. I work on Web sites and graphic design. I watch Thomas the Tank Engine with my son because I absolutely love that show. I'm about as much of a human being as anybody else.

Besides your work in The Unquiet Void and the Montauk Unveiled release, what other projects do you currently have in the works right now? What sort of new music can we expect from you in 2007 and beyond?

Wallach: Well, I have this gothic jazz project called Bonedaddy, which I've been doing since 1994.There's a site for that too. I did a Trance to the Sun cover with it because I love that band, and it's just strange dark ambient jazz. I haven't done that in about 10 years now, but I really want to do a full-length album with it at some point, and that album in question is called Cocktails with a Refreshing Twist. I saw it on a menu somewhere. It's really stream of consciousness stuff. I did a song call 'Smurfberry Crunch' based on my favorite cereal. It's just out there. I've got a project called Visionz with Craig Pillard of Methadrone and Evoken, which is a New Jersey-based metal band. It's very experimental, very ambient. One of my MySpace friends considered it 'disturbed serenity,' so I'm going to go with that, and we're working on an album called Subcurrent. What else? At some point, I'd like to stretch it and kind of go for another project in terms of Puree of Heart, which I was telling you about earlier, but at the same time, I really want to get into scoring films. There's a film that I believe I'm going to be doing the soundtrack for. It hasn't been finalized yet, so I don't want to say what it is yet. It's a sort of Lovecraftian horror film, and that would be this year. But other than that, as far as music goes, I just want to finish the third part of the trilogy, take the next little break, maybe work on some soundtracks if the work comes my way, which it has been. And I really want to focus on graduating college and getting my head together. That's pretty much where I'm going with it.