By Niklas Göransson

In 2005, after signing with The Ajna Offensive, Bestial Devotion and Nameless Void descended into Down There… Studios to record Negative Plane’s debut album, Et In Saecula Saeculorum.

 

NAMELESS VOID: Tyler wanted to do a feature to introduce NEGATIVE PLANE and let people know what the band was about. I’m not particularly comfortable with interviews – I never really am – but we did this one over the phone. I remember sitting outside our house in Florida, talking to him.

In the fall of 2005, Tyler Davis of The Ajna Offensive – an Oregon-based label that had recently signed NEGATIVE PLANE – published an interview with Nameless Void. The piece delved into the band’s philosophies and future plans whilst also stressing the importance of their Satanic beliefs.

NAMELESS VOID: With age, I’ve come to appreciate subtleties more. But back then, we aimed to be the exact opposite of these pagan and nature-romantic themes that were so prevalent in the scene. For me, black metal meant being unapologetically over-the-top Satanic, and I wanted to eliminate any ambiguity.

While many of his statements aligned in tone and sentiment with the emerging wave of orthodox black metal – in which The Ajna Offensive played a leading role – they stemmed from a different source. For lyrical inspiration, Nameless Void looked to bands like BATHORY, VENOM, HELLHAMMER, and MERCYFUL FATE rather than OFERMOD or FUNERAL MIST.

NAMELESS VOID: Being raised Roman Catholic, we were taught very explicitly what the Devil was. I grew up believing in the religious idea of Satan as a real, distinct entity. When I heard bands singing about that, it resonated deeply. I thought, ‘Perfect! This is the only thing that makes sense.’ None of the ‘Might is Right’ stuff ever clicked for me.

The concept of ‘Might is Right’ – popularised by Ragnar Redbeard’s 1896 book – had a significant influence on the war metal subgenre. Rooted in social Darwinism and power dynamics, it promotes dominance and the rejection of traditional moral codes.

NAMELESS VOID: I never cared for that self-help angle, ‘Oh, maybe Satan can motivate me to work out more!’ Same with the LaVeyan ideas – ‘Do what you feel like’, or ‘Hit someone back if they hit you.’ All this nonsense about ‘Satanism is just rebellion’ always felt like a total cop-out to me.

Around the same time, Emil Lundin of REVERORUM IB MALACHT – NEGATIVE PLANE’s labelmates – expressed similar disdain for ‘philosophical Satanism’, seeking instead a ‘real’ entity to worship. Interestingly, while Nameless Void came from Catholicism, Lundin was gravitating towards it.

NAMELESS VOID: I learned about the grey areas later in life, but when you’re raised like that – when it’s drilled into you – you don’t sit around thinking, ‘Well, Satanism is just doing your own thing.’ No, fuck that! Don’t even bother calling it Satanism. That’s why I rallied so hard against it.

Do you think your background made it easier for you to engage with these matters, compared to metalheads from secular upbringings?

NAMELESS VOID: Possibly. It’s hard for me to relate to what someone with a secular background went through because I’ve never experienced that. From a very young age, I remember sitting in church and having the concepts of hell, hellfire, the Devil, and temptation hammered into my mind. That’s what felt meaningful to me and shaped how I viewed everything.

Were matters of metaphysics something you discussed within the band?

NAMELESS VOID: Yes, we talked about theology a lot, and there was genuine belief behind it – especially back then. Matthias and I spent considerable time discussing and researching, really immersing ourselves in those ideas.

BESTIAL DEVOTION: Absolutely. We had frequent and serious conversations about those topics. At the time, both of us shared a belief system and pushed it to its logical extreme in our lives. That’s really all I can say about it.

 

After signing with The Ajna Offensive, NEGATIVE PLANE began recording their debut album, “Et In Saecula Saeculorum”, at Down There… Studios in August 2005.

Three months later, in October, the recording was complete – but locking in engineer Chris Cook for the mixing process proved impossible.

NAMELESS VOID: Matthias and I kept bugging Chris, ‘Hey man – how about mixing that album you got $2,500 for?’ But he’d go, ‘Sorry, I don’t have time.’ He completely screwed us over. Eventually, I told him, ‘This is ridiculous. We need everything mixed and delivered to our label before the end of the year. Just send us everything you’ve got.’

BESTIAL DEVOTION: Back then, a month felt like an eternity; unlike now, when you work every day and time slips by. This shit dragged on forever, and I wasn’t even sure if we’d get the tracks or if the whole thing would have to be re-recorded.

NAMELESS VOID: We called Chris every day, asking, ‘Where are our recordings?’ His response was always the same: ‘Yeah, I’ll get it to you soon.’ By mid-December, we finally received copies of the album – raw tracks burned onto a pile of CDRs. Matthias and I were at a loss, thinking, ‘What the hell do we do now? How can we get this mixed?’

 

Bestial Devotion and Nameless Void briefly had a PENTAGRAM cover band with Steve ‘Tregenda’ Childers from BLACK WITCHERY and his wife, Christina. At the project’s first-ever local show, the engineer made an excellent soundboard recording. Desperate to find someone who could mix their album, Nameless Void called the venue.

NAMELESS VOID: They told us, ‘We do mixing at a studio called Red Room’, so I reached out to the owner, Shawn Beamer. If I remember correctly, he’d played drums with bands like MOLLY HATCHET and BAD COMPANY. I asked him, ‘Do you think it would be possible to add some reverb to the guitars?’ He replied, ‘Of course, no problem. Easy.’ I was shocked.

Wasn’t that obvious?

NAMELESS VOID: No, because when we asked Chris Cook to add effects or to double the guitars, he’d always push back – ‘You demand too much!’ I’d suggest something simple, like reverb, and he’d respond, ‘Eh, why would you want that?’ Chris treated us like idiots, constantly saying, ‘Oh, you guys don’t know what you’re doing.’ Erik Rutan did the same, so we just assumed that’s how studios worked.

When the Red Room studio engineers, Shawn Beamer and Brad Johnson, loaded the audio project onto their mixing desk, they discovered the tracks in complete disarray. Nothing had labels – no ‘guitars,’ no ‘drums’ – just a pile of unmarked files. The entire first session was spent on tidying up the channels before mixing could begin.

NAMELESS VOID: They knew exactly how to separate elements and add what we needed. I didn’t have to micromanage or explain, ‘Okay, this part starts at 1:15.’ With Chris, it was the total opposite. If I asked him, ‘Can you hear where the riff repeats?’ he’d reply, ‘No. Tell me the exact time.’ But Shawn and Brad understood everything by ear.

Was this over email or in person?

NAMELESS VOID: In person – and honestly, we kind of… <laughs> those guys smoked a lot of weed, so all of us ended up getting incredibly stoned and a little overexcited. We went too far with a few things the first time around. Ultimately, the album was mixed four or five times, and each pass improved it.

Were you financing this?

NAMELESS VOID: Yeah, we spent about $1,500 of our own money. No way Matthias and I were gonna ask Tyler to bail us out after we’d been foolish enough to hand over all his money upfront. But in hindsight, it was the best thing that could have happened; Chris Cook mixing the album would’ve ruined it. The Red Room guys transformed everything.

BESTIAL DEVOTION: Oh, absolutely a fucking blessing. When we finished it, I thought, ‘This is the greatest shit ever! It’s everything I’ve ever wanted to do.’ The funny thing is, I still have old emails from back then – sending Tyler the completed album and him writing back, ‘What the fuck did you guys do? How is it this good?’

NAMELESS VOID: Tyler said something like, ‘This is amazing – but I have no idea who’s going to like the album or how it will do for us.’ At that point, he didn’t think anyone would be into us, and neither did we. Still, it was the first thing I felt truly, genuinely proud of.

 

A pre-release copy was sent to French label Norma Evangelium Diaboli (NoEvDia) with the hope that they might handle the European distribution. Label manager Christian Bouché told me he listened to the album and ‘heard MERCYFUL FATE’. At the time, he adhered to the belief that any black metal released under NoEvDia needed to be both revolutionary and groundbreaking – criteria that, in his own words, led him to ‘overlook the brilliance of NEGATIVE PLANE’.

NAMELESS VOID: My expectations were always low, so I wasn’t disappointed. Matthias would’ve been much more familiar with that label than I was. Back then, I didn’t really listen to most of their releases, and they did not seem interested in us at all.

BESTIAL DEVOTION: It’s funny you mention that because about four or five years ago, Christian and I had a long email exchange. Before that, my attitude was, ‘Well, fuck you then. NEGATIVE PLANE is the coolest band on the planet, and if you don’t want to release our album, then your label sucks.’

There must have been some reason you sent it there in the first place.

BESTIAL DEVOTION: Of course. I admired what NoEvDia were doing – I appreciated the extremity and musicianship of their bands, even if I didn’t personally listen to them. I respected the vision and ideas behind the label. In the end, we kind of apologised to each other.

NAMELESS VOID: See, I never heard about any apologies. Nobody told me. It wasn’t communicated properly. I had no contact with him at all. Typically, everything band-related went through Tyler – and half the time, Tyler talked to Matthias, who would then tell me. I was completely out of the loop.

BESTIAL DEVOTION: As I told Christian: despite our differences, we had similar ideas. NoEvDia went one way, and NEGATIVE PLANE went another. I said, ‘I respect that you do exactly what you want. If we sounded backwards to you and didn’t fit your ideology, then fair enough.’

 

In May 2006, The Ajna Offensive released “Et In Saecula Saeculorum”, marking NEGATIVE PLANE as the first homegrown Ajna band to put out a full-length. Tyler still holds the album in the highest regard, noting that it’s ‘had more reprints than pretty much anything else’ he’s released – though it took some time to gain traction.

NAMELESS VOID: When it came out, we didn’t hear much. Everything just went… quiet. I had some delusions about what having a label and releasing an album meant, but the reality was very different. I know Tyler took a big chance on NEGATIVE PLANE, giving such a weird band all that studio money. But at the time, it definitely didn’t feel like we were a big deal. Not at all.