Old Ways by Jute Gyte
Notes:
It is difficult for me to recall my musical thinking circa Old Ways. I was a teenager listening to Judas Iscariot, early Burzum, and Today Is the Day as well as a lot of harsh noise and power electronics. I recorded these tracks in disparate sessions. Only two tracks, “Teeth” and “Snail”, have bass guitar. The detuned mandolin of “Snail” marks the earliest appearance of microtones in my work. Once the instrumental and vocal tracks were recorded I processed them over and over, running them through multiple passes of distortion, flanger and chorus until the results sounded appropriately delirious. When programming the drums, I limited myself to a small selection of drum samples chosen because I disliked them and thus would be motivated to process them into something better. Much of the digital harsh noise was created by opening non-audio files as audio. Finally, I overcompressed the tracks until they sounded like they were crumbling. This method of working was enjoyable but left little room to grow and I subsequently struggled to find a way forward.
The album's lyrics are meant as a sort of satire on the black metal trope of warlust, one way to utter the useless Nietzschean “yes” to life. The album's title is meant to refer to another black metal trope–the yearning for a fictive past–and is also the title of a Neil Young album.
