words @killer.solo.music
Dungeon Synth’s original nightmare architect talks Ghosts of Europa, sonic rabbit holes, studio obsession and the glorious art of making a noise that shouldn’t fucking work.
There are two kinds of people in this world. People who hear a synthesizer and think, That’s a nice sound. And people who spend six hours turning one note into the audible equivalent of a Victorian orphan discovering something unspeakable beneath the floorboards.
Håvard Ellefsen, better known to the rest of us as Mortiis, knows the second type intimately.
Before Dungeon Synth became a recognized underground genre, before every second bastard with a keyboard and a fog machine started building castles in the musical equivalent of a damp basement, Mortiis was already disappearing into strange electronic worlds of his own making.
Decades later, he’s still at it. Different sounds, different monsters, different machinery. Same fundamental urge to follow an idea until it either becomes something beautiful or crawls out of the speakers and demands legal representation.
His latest album, Ghosts of Europa, is the result of years spent recording, rebuilding, tweaking and apparently refusing to let the bastard lie still.
Naturally, I wanted to know what the fuck happens inside that process.
As it turns out, quite a lot.
I’m currently four songs into writing my own Dungeon Synth record, which means I’ve recently discovered that synthesizers are less musical instruments and more portals to an alternate dimension where time has no meaning and you’ve somehow spent an entire evening changing one knob.
Mortiis understood immediately.
He described a process built around experimentation rather than rigid plans: throwing sounds through processors, twisting things until they become something unexpected, and following the music wherever it decides to drag you.
Sometimes the result is a happy accident. Sometimes it’s an entirely different song. Sometimes, presumably, it’s three hours of making a noise that sounds like a haunted fax machine having a nervous breakdown.
That’s the beauty of it.
You’re not always searching for a sound you can already imagine. Sometimes you’re discovering something you didn’t know existed until it appeared in front of you.
And sometimes that discovery becomes the entire fucking point.
THE BEAUTY IN THE UGLY
For Mortiis, the distinction between instruments seems almost irrelevant once the experimentation begins. Guitars can become unrecognizable. Synthesizers can turn into vast, disorientating landscapes. A sound can begin somewhere familiar and end up somewhere nobody involved could have predicted.
The instrument is merely the starting point. The possibilities are the destination.
We got into the eternal argument between analog hardware and digital processing, the tactile satisfaction of turning actual knobs, and the ridiculous amount of sonic potential hiding inside equipment most normal people would never dream of owning.
Mortiis has a particular affection for analog sounds, but he’s hardly dismissing digital technology. The interesting stuff happens when the two worlds collide, when you start pushing sounds through different machines and discover that the original source has become almost irrelevant.
Which is excellent news for anyone who’s ever plugged a guitar into something completely inappropriate and accidentally created their own personal brand of sonic terrorism.
Then there’s Ghosts of Europa itself.
The album brings together a sprawling cast of collaborators, including vocalists recording from different corners of the planet. Rather than treating their contributions as decorative additions to an already finished vision, Mortiis allowed their performances to reshape the music itself.
Sometimes a vocal inspired him to rewrite parts of a song, turning a background element into its emotional center.
That’s an interesting kind of control: knowing precisely what you’re building, but having enough confidence to let somebody else knock a hole in the wall.
Mortiis says he deliberately seeks out people he respects, musicians who can bring something to the table that he couldn’t necessarily create himself. The challenge isn’t surrendering the vision. It’s knowing when another person’s contribution makes that vision bigger.
Of course, there’s a practical downside to recording with people scattered across different countries. Ideas travel through messages, files and endless waiting rather than spontaneous experiments in the same room.
Still, the modern world has its advantages. We may not have perfected teleportation, but we can beam audio files across the planet in seconds.
We’re basically living in Star Trek, except the transporter keeps crashing and nobody knows why the fucking driver has stopped working.
THE STUDIO IS A BEAUTIFUL PRISON
The conversation eventually wandered into the strange contradiction between creating music in isolation and performing it in front of actual human beings.
In the studio, you can spend hours perfecting a part. You can redo a vocal take twenty times. You can dismantle an arrangement and rebuild it until the thing finally resembles whatever deranged vision you’ve been chasing.
Live, you get one shot.
Mortiis admitted that thinking too much about that loss of control can send you down a miserable mental rabbit hole. His approach is to use the nervous energy rather than let it consume him. Particularly during the heavier industrial years of Mortiis, that tension became fuel for the performance.
It’s a familiar disease among musicians: walking offstage convinced you’ve committed an unforgivable musical crime, only to discover that everyone else thought the show was brilliant.
Mortiis recalled playing bass with Emperor and leaving a performance furious with himself over mistakes he’d made. Meanwhile, the people around him thought everything had gone brilliantly.
The audience remembers the highlights. The musician remembers the one fucking note that landed slightly wrong.
And perhaps that’s part of the deal. You care enough to be dissatisfied, but you eventually have to accept that perfection isn’t the same thing as connection.
Sometimes the mistake is the most human part of the entire performance.
FOLLOW THE FUCKING SOUND
What struck me most about talking to Mortiis wasn’t the equipment, the years of experimentation or even the sheer amount of time poured into Ghosts of Europa.
It was the willingness to follow an idea without demanding that it justify itself according to some arbitrary musical rulebook.
Dungeon Synth. Industrial. Electronic rock. Metal. Whatever the fuck comes next.
Genres are useful for finding music, but they can become little cages when musicians start treating them as instructions.
Mortiis has spent decades moving between sounds, building different worlds without asking permission from the people standing outside them with clipboards.
And that’s something I understand. I’m only four songs into my own synthesizer-driven descent into madness, but already I’m finding that the most interesting moments happen when I stop trying to dictate what the music should become.
You start with an idea. You feed it sounds. You follow the strange little bastard wherever it goes.
Sometimes you get something beautiful.
Sometimes you get the Elephant Man.
Either way, if the music is alive, you keep going.
Ghosts of Europa is out now through Prophecy Productions.
Go make something weird. Make something ugly. Make something nobody knows what to do with.
Just don’t spend six hours changing one fucking knob.
Actually, never mind. That’s probably how the good stuff starts.
AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES
Wednesday, 18 Nov – SYDNEY – FACTORY FLOOR
Thursday, 19 Nov – SYDNEY – FACTORY FLOOR
Friday, 20 Nov – BRISBANE – CROWBAR
Saturday, 21 Nov – MELBOURNE – CROXTON
Sunday, 22 Nov: – ADELAIDE – ED CASTLE
This is the gospel.
I bite crowd surfers.
Killer.
