Since 2005, Andy Curtis-Brignell has been recording ambitious and innovative black metal under the moniker of Caїna. In 2015, vocalist Laurence Taylor joined in to round out the project's sound and allow Andy the capacity to focus primarily on his instrumental work. With the release of a challenging new work, Christ Clad in White Phosphorus, Caїna has pushed its own boundaries deeper into black metal territory while also expanding its sound into more experimental territory than ever before with the collaborative aid of acts like Warren Schoenbright and Vermapyre.
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With such an exploratory attitude, it makes sense that the band's own performances branched out to a point where they nearly collapsed under their own weight. The band played its final live show earlier this year, yet vows to continue on as a collaborative recording project, expanding upon its history as an innovative and dynamic unit. It's this unpredictability paired with consistency that has kept Caїna as a band to watch for the last decade, and it's what makes their next move just a bit more exciting than the one that came before.Noisey recently spoke with the members of Caїna to discuss the anger that went into the new record, artistically prophetic dreams, and the band's support of free speechNoisey: You've got a new album that recently came out, Christ Clad in White Phosphorus, which sounds like it'd be the name of a Current 93 record.
Andy Curtis-Brignell: It really does. The album title came with the song, which came to me in a dream. I don't know if I've actually said this to anybody in an interview. On Christmas Eve last year I had this dream where the whole song was just completely there. Every aspect was there. The title and this image were in my head. It was a visual description of the album's title. It popped in my head when I woke up around 6AM on Christmas Eve. I'm not a religious person. I don't wake up saying, 'Oh, golly it's Christmas Eve!' But I leapt out of bed, switched on my equipment and got the song down in two hours. The whole thing was created in that moment, which is why it's got my vocals on it. It's why it's so disjointed in its placement. I've done similar stuff like "Larval Door" on Temporary Antennae, which is very 80s sounding, but the placement of this song is really jarring. I just had this conviction, as soon as I woke up with this shit in my head. I knew it was the album title, that this was the title track, and that it would have to be placed at the very end of the album. It all came about rather intuitively. It's not a particularly calculated record. It sounds like a fucking mess, but it gets down everything I wanted to get out. That song's quite important to me but it's the only thing I've ever received like that. I'm not exactly a "prophetic" person where things just crawl into my head like that so I thought I'd listen to it.
Andy Curtis-Brignell: It really does. The album title came with the song, which came to me in a dream. I don't know if I've actually said this to anybody in an interview. On Christmas Eve last year I had this dream where the whole song was just completely there. Every aspect was there. The title and this image were in my head. It was a visual description of the album's title. It popped in my head when I woke up around 6AM on Christmas Eve. I'm not a religious person. I don't wake up saying, 'Oh, golly it's Christmas Eve!' But I leapt out of bed, switched on my equipment and got the song down in two hours. The whole thing was created in that moment, which is why it's got my vocals on it. It's why it's so disjointed in its placement. I've done similar stuff like "Larval Door" on Temporary Antennae, which is very 80s sounding, but the placement of this song is really jarring. I just had this conviction, as soon as I woke up with this shit in my head. I knew it was the album title, that this was the title track, and that it would have to be placed at the very end of the album. It all came about rather intuitively. It's not a particularly calculated record. It sounds like a fucking mess, but it gets down everything I wanted to get out. That song's quite important to me but it's the only thing I've ever received like that. I'm not exactly a "prophetic" person where things just crawl into my head like that so I thought I'd listen to it.
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You've been quite prolific. I found your demo in early 2007 and then looked you up and you'd already progressed a lot over your first two or three years. It hasn't really slowed.
Curtis-Brignell: Yeah, people started to pay attention around the time Mourner came out. I think it got uploaded to a prominent download blog around that time. I got the "hipster" tag almost immediately when that came out. I used to hate it and go on about it, but it probably did a huge favor for me. Purely by virtue of what I did beforehand, the demos and all, people would know I wasn't some sort of neophyte. Some songs are lifted from the demos, so Mourner is technically the first record really, and it's honestly the one that has the most in common with the new record. I don't know if you agree with that; I know Laurence doesn't agree with it. There's a similar vibe, it's a questing thing.Laurence Taylor: Mourner to me doesn't sound disparate or varied, it actually sounds quite consistent. Perhaps it's because of the nature of black metal in this day and age to take in more somber, dynamic aspects but it seems far more sonically cohesive than Christ Clad in White Phosphorus, which was intentionally something of an erratic collage of soundsThe two do have a lot in common. There's a lot of exploration
Curtis-Brignell: Some of it works and some doesn't. Even on the new record. I hate interviews where bands say, 'This is the best album I've ever made.' It's the best record I could've made at the time with what I had going on. It's a great record and it's what I wanted to make but it's not perfect. There are things I feel could stand some tweaking. You're not any kind of artist if you accept everything that you do. I like to stick a lot of stuff on the record. I shoot crap at the wall and see what sticks. It's a constant refining process. There seems to be a lot of removal from ego in that process.
Curtis-Brignell: That's really interesting of you to say because it's a very deliberate thing. I'm not philosophically "ego death" inclined, but artistically I am. After Mourner and Temporary Antennae I made a specific shift. It was still in my own world, but it was less allegories about my own life. Mourner had a lot of my own shit but I displaced it with mythology. So now I try to write about the architecture of my mind rather than the things that are going through it. I try to focus on the whole of it. You know the whole memory palace idea, right?
Curtis-Brignell: Yeah, people started to pay attention around the time Mourner came out. I think it got uploaded to a prominent download blog around that time. I got the "hipster" tag almost immediately when that came out. I used to hate it and go on about it, but it probably did a huge favor for me. Purely by virtue of what I did beforehand, the demos and all, people would know I wasn't some sort of neophyte. Some songs are lifted from the demos, so Mourner is technically the first record really, and it's honestly the one that has the most in common with the new record. I don't know if you agree with that; I know Laurence doesn't agree with it. There's a similar vibe, it's a questing thing.Laurence Taylor: Mourner to me doesn't sound disparate or varied, it actually sounds quite consistent. Perhaps it's because of the nature of black metal in this day and age to take in more somber, dynamic aspects but it seems far more sonically cohesive than Christ Clad in White Phosphorus, which was intentionally something of an erratic collage of soundsThe two do have a lot in common. There's a lot of exploration
Curtis-Brignell: Some of it works and some doesn't. Even on the new record. I hate interviews where bands say, 'This is the best album I've ever made.' It's the best record I could've made at the time with what I had going on. It's a great record and it's what I wanted to make but it's not perfect. There are things I feel could stand some tweaking. You're not any kind of artist if you accept everything that you do. I like to stick a lot of stuff on the record. I shoot crap at the wall and see what sticks. It's a constant refining process. There seems to be a lot of removal from ego in that process.
Curtis-Brignell: That's really interesting of you to say because it's a very deliberate thing. I'm not philosophically "ego death" inclined, but artistically I am. After Mourner and Temporary Antennae I made a specific shift. It was still in my own world, but it was less allegories about my own life. Mourner had a lot of my own shit but I displaced it with mythology. So now I try to write about the architecture of my mind rather than the things that are going through it. I try to focus on the whole of it. You know the whole memory palace idea, right?
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Loosely. Feel free to explain.
Curtis-Brignell: It's not particularly complex, but to boil it down, some people create their own sort of mental architecture that they can walk around in. It takes meditation and often it's something people do in therapy. It's certainly something I did in therapy when I first entered it at age 18, so I've kept the same structure in my head for well over a decade now and it's where all the music comes from. I wrote the early stuff at 18 and 19, and as I became more familiar with these concepts, I was more interested in exploring weird places than in the extreme emotions themselves. I think being diagnosed as autistic just two years ago made a lot of sense for me, as I'm uncomfortable with genuine human emotion. The new record doesn't have any of that. It's cold as fuck.Nowadays with the world in the state it's in, there's a lot more important stuff going on than emotion. It's almost more of what you think about things than what you feel. I need to reflect that. I don't have any real political engagement. I'm not that active in the community. The last couple of records reflect the world at large rather than my own petty, personal shit, like my illnesses and emotions. There's a lot of pain in the last few records, but now it's just anger. I think that's one of the takeaways I've heard from a lot of folks who've listened to the record. At least I've achieved that.
Curtis-Brignell: It's not particularly complex, but to boil it down, some people create their own sort of mental architecture that they can walk around in. It takes meditation and often it's something people do in therapy. It's certainly something I did in therapy when I first entered it at age 18, so I've kept the same structure in my head for well over a decade now and it's where all the music comes from. I wrote the early stuff at 18 and 19, and as I became more familiar with these concepts, I was more interested in exploring weird places than in the extreme emotions themselves. I think being diagnosed as autistic just two years ago made a lot of sense for me, as I'm uncomfortable with genuine human emotion. The new record doesn't have any of that. It's cold as fuck.Nowadays with the world in the state it's in, there's a lot more important stuff going on than emotion. It's almost more of what you think about things than what you feel. I need to reflect that. I don't have any real political engagement. I'm not that active in the community. The last couple of records reflect the world at large rather than my own petty, personal shit, like my illnesses and emotions. There's a lot of pain in the last few records, but now it's just anger. I think that's one of the takeaways I've heard from a lot of folks who've listened to the record. At least I've achieved that.
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It does feel angry, but it's not directionless.
Curtis-Brignell: Well yes. It's a focused rage. I'm angry about very specific things. I'm not going to be so on the nose as to say what they are. I'm not Propagandhi. I love that band, but I'm just not going to be that guy. There's a lot of stuff that I'm almost impossibly angry about. I can't just be that way.It almost seems to come from a place of exhaustion. You're just pushing to see what will give way and where you'll find relief.
Curtis-Brignell: I mean there's that song "Entartete Kunst." It was exhausting to make. I find it difficult to listen to. It's too fucking angry. I'm not even try to praise myself or self-aggrandize. I worried at some points initially that the song wouldn't be extreme enough but in retrospect it's likely the most extreme thing I've ever done. Of course it's easy to see that now, but when I'm really in it it's not so clear. I have all these anxieties about whether or not I'm doing a good job sometimes.Taylor: The music was written over the space of about a year and I did various drafts of lyrics, less to refine and improve an existing set, but more to update it so that once the time was right to record vocals it would be an honest performance. Musically "Entartete Kunst" is certainly up there as one of the most aggressive Caїna tracks. I think it was exhausting for Andy because he found the riff itself so taxing to perform! All the vocals were recorded in one session in a practice space in Salford, so that was quite exhausting for me. The lyrics deal with people who see their art as more important than maintaining healthy relationships with real people, something I think most musicians and artists have stupidly done at some point. I hate people chasing the "glamorous" idea of the self-destructive artist.
Curtis-Brignell: Well yes. It's a focused rage. I'm angry about very specific things. I'm not going to be so on the nose as to say what they are. I'm not Propagandhi. I love that band, but I'm just not going to be that guy. There's a lot of stuff that I'm almost impossibly angry about. I can't just be that way.It almost seems to come from a place of exhaustion. You're just pushing to see what will give way and where you'll find relief.
Curtis-Brignell: I mean there's that song "Entartete Kunst." It was exhausting to make. I find it difficult to listen to. It's too fucking angry. I'm not even try to praise myself or self-aggrandize. I worried at some points initially that the song wouldn't be extreme enough but in retrospect it's likely the most extreme thing I've ever done. Of course it's easy to see that now, but when I'm really in it it's not so clear. I have all these anxieties about whether or not I'm doing a good job sometimes.Taylor: The music was written over the space of about a year and I did various drafts of lyrics, less to refine and improve an existing set, but more to update it so that once the time was right to record vocals it would be an honest performance. Musically "Entartete Kunst" is certainly up there as one of the most aggressive Caїna tracks. I think it was exhausting for Andy because he found the riff itself so taxing to perform! All the vocals were recorded in one session in a practice space in Salford, so that was quite exhausting for me. The lyrics deal with people who see their art as more important than maintaining healthy relationships with real people, something I think most musicians and artists have stupidly done at some point. I hate people chasing the "glamorous" idea of the self-destructive artist.
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It occurred to me that after your last album, Setter of Unseen Snares, this was a surprisingly "black metal" album to follow up something with so much hardcore inspiration.
Curtis-Brignell: Why was that?I saw people calling it weird and all over the place. There were still surprises. It's not straightforward, but was more "metal" than I anticipated.
Curtis-Brignell: That was the general consensus when making the record was that I wanted to make a black metal record again. Setter of Unseen Snares was deliberately a hardcore record. I referred to it throughout as that, with a bit of that Fall of Efrafa style. I don't know why people call it "crust," because it's not Amebix, but yeah.Setter of Unseen Snares even sounds like it'd be a Fall of Efrafa title.
Curtis-Brignell: Yeah, it's funny. Before I even knew they existed, I had wanted to do a project about Watership Down. It's one of my three favorite books. The others are The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and Dune. None of them are towering literary masterpieces, but for me, they sum up the human experience. I share a large frame of reference with them. I try to get tattooed for every record—it's a ritual I go through—so for Setter I got Bigwig from Watership Down tattooed in the snare. There was a slight worry that they'd be upset, but I guess they're not too litigious.They're probably happy to have kindred spirits out there.
Curtis-Brignell: Yeah. I never know what people know about me. I know that people know that I have socially progressive views, but I don't know how many people know that I'm vegan. I'm really into animal rights activism, environmental stuff, and all of that. It's in a lot of my writing but I try not to make my music about that. I've got absolutely no interest in proselytizing.
Curtis-Brignell: Why was that?I saw people calling it weird and all over the place. There were still surprises. It's not straightforward, but was more "metal" than I anticipated.
Curtis-Brignell: That was the general consensus when making the record was that I wanted to make a black metal record again. Setter of Unseen Snares was deliberately a hardcore record. I referred to it throughout as that, with a bit of that Fall of Efrafa style. I don't know why people call it "crust," because it's not Amebix, but yeah.Setter of Unseen Snares even sounds like it'd be a Fall of Efrafa title.
Curtis-Brignell: Yeah, it's funny. Before I even knew they existed, I had wanted to do a project about Watership Down. It's one of my three favorite books. The others are The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and Dune. None of them are towering literary masterpieces, but for me, they sum up the human experience. I share a large frame of reference with them. I try to get tattooed for every record—it's a ritual I go through—so for Setter I got Bigwig from Watership Down tattooed in the snare. There was a slight worry that they'd be upset, but I guess they're not too litigious.They're probably happy to have kindred spirits out there.
Curtis-Brignell: Yeah. I never know what people know about me. I know that people know that I have socially progressive views, but I don't know how many people know that I'm vegan. I'm really into animal rights activism, environmental stuff, and all of that. It's in a lot of my writing but I try not to make my music about that. I've got absolutely no interest in proselytizing.
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You're also in Crowhurst, and Jay is made of meat.
Curtis-Brignell: Yeah man. He's a tower of cooked meats. We even let him cook meat in the apartment. He stayed here for a couple of months. What people have misconstrued about the political stuff we got entangled in a couple years ago is that I'm not detached from reality. I just want people to be able to be themselves happily and safely without being discriminated against. I'm a liberal completely in that sense. I'm not a political person really though, so to get all this, 'Oh, Andy wants to censor metal' talk is completely the opposite of me and where I stand. In terms of principle, I'm with you guys. You've got that First Amendment, is it? The Freedom of Speech? We don't have that in the UK. We don't have a protected right to free speech. People should be able to say whatever awful shit they feel the need to, but it's also okay to challenge people about it. That's where I'm coming from. I'm left wing, sure, but I don't have time to preach and police people. I've got records to make.So you've got records to make, yet you played your final show ever earlier this year.
Curtis-Brignell: "Ever" is a bit of a strong word. I find myself using it a lot as part of my whole depressive personality. I like to quit. I come back a couple months later and sheepishly slink back into it. The problem was that we were doing things that were quite different from what we've done on the records. It's not out there in recording aside from demos that were on Bandcamp. After touring Setter of Unseen Snares, which felt quite mechanical as there was no improvisation whatsoever, it was like, 'Let's play a few shows for the record and call it good.' So we decided to take it very barebones and do this sort of power electronics stuff. The performances themselves got extremely dark. Laurence would injure himself. I have a lot of fun when I'm making music. It's my favorite thing in the world so I want to have a good time. Laurence and I are amazing friends. He's going to be the best man at my wedding next year. Our working relationship is quite antagonistic though. We tend to egg each other on quite a lot. In the record you can hear this a bit. I'm being pushed and being really extreme. You can hear the tension.
Curtis-Brignell: Yeah man. He's a tower of cooked meats. We even let him cook meat in the apartment. He stayed here for a couple of months. What people have misconstrued about the political stuff we got entangled in a couple years ago is that I'm not detached from reality. I just want people to be able to be themselves happily and safely without being discriminated against. I'm a liberal completely in that sense. I'm not a political person really though, so to get all this, 'Oh, Andy wants to censor metal' talk is completely the opposite of me and where I stand. In terms of principle, I'm with you guys. You've got that First Amendment, is it? The Freedom of Speech? We don't have that in the UK. We don't have a protected right to free speech. People should be able to say whatever awful shit they feel the need to, but it's also okay to challenge people about it. That's where I'm coming from. I'm left wing, sure, but I don't have time to preach and police people. I've got records to make.So you've got records to make, yet you played your final show ever earlier this year.
Curtis-Brignell: "Ever" is a bit of a strong word. I find myself using it a lot as part of my whole depressive personality. I like to quit. I come back a couple months later and sheepishly slink back into it. The problem was that we were doing things that were quite different from what we've done on the records. It's not out there in recording aside from demos that were on Bandcamp. After touring Setter of Unseen Snares, which felt quite mechanical as there was no improvisation whatsoever, it was like, 'Let's play a few shows for the record and call it good.' So we decided to take it very barebones and do this sort of power electronics stuff. The performances themselves got extremely dark. Laurence would injure himself. I have a lot of fun when I'm making music. It's my favorite thing in the world so I want to have a good time. Laurence and I are amazing friends. He's going to be the best man at my wedding next year. Our working relationship is quite antagonistic though. We tend to egg each other on quite a lot. In the record you can hear this a bit. I'm being pushed and being really extreme. You can hear the tension.
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In our live performances, there was so much negative energy. There was this power of negativity and self-harm. After being so prolific, playing so many shows, it just sucked the life out of both of us. I was worrying about Laurence's health because of the shit he was doing onstage. People in the UK came out to see us because of it and we turned some heads by playing that way, but it just got to be too much. We broke up in May and didn't tell anybody. After a couple of really good chats, we decided that we didn't want to break up but that we really needed to alter the way we were working so we agreed that we wouldn't play any shows.Taylor: In our performances as a full band for Temples Fest and the shows leading up to it, I reigned myself in as I didn't want to pull focus. These were Andy's songs and Andy's words and I was just the instrument for that. When we started playing power electronics stuff it was much more of a dual effort so I felt I could act how I wanted onstage to reflect the subject matter and also just because that is how I naturally act on stage with any project I have fronted. Hurting myself and being confrontational with the crowd (always within respectful limits). It's all stuff that's been done before and I guess is pretty tame compared to old Whitehouse performances and the like which inspired me, but it was totally genuine and in that sense very cathartic and positive.Laurence, as a newer member of Caїna, how do you find your own voice within Andy's vision?
Taylor: It is still very much Andy's project. We were fortunate with this album, as we both wanted to address the same things in our respect fields: Andy with music, and I with the lyrics and art. The interesting thing is talking about it afterwards and realizing we had slightly different perspectives on the subject. We wrote the songs to reflect a decaying industrial world, modernism as a monster which grows by eating itself. Andy looks at this in something of a condemnatory way, lamenting the cruelty and stupidity of the world today. I prefer to look at it as a rhetorical device to address certain "eternal truths" of strength, resolution, and survival as opposed to introversion and abstraction. The fact that "Extraordinary Grace" is a 12 minute reading from a Yukio Mishima book over an ambient synthesizer track is the best example of that. That's what made this such an interesting record to make. We're a unit but there are conversations and differences of opinion within that.Finally, for Andy. With Laurence and your concern for his well-being, how has your own mental health been impacted by the process of making Christ Clad in White Phosphorus? It's dark and it's not exactly cathartic.
Curtis-Brignell:: Yeah, it's no real release with a lot of tension. Apart from "Extraordinary Grace," which I had to put on there, there's no outlet. That song's the chill-out room. A lot of this music was inspired by going out to clubs a long time ago, so I wanted to structure the record as if you were having this extreme experience in a room with a bunch of people and it's affecting you physically. That synth song is my attempt to alleviate that stress, but there is no real relief. That's been the case in my mental health, as well. I'm getting better. I've worked really hard. I tried to kill myself three years ago. That's when Litanies of Abjection was done. The day it was finished, I tried to kill myself. The woman who's going to be my wife saved my life that day. I've been working very hard since then to create a positive universe for myself to live in.At the moment there's things like work that challenge me in ways I've never thought possible. For the record, I'm a trainee funeral director. That's what I'll be doing in a year or so. It's extremely challenging and I've only been doing it since April. I'm still in the first throes of that. It doesn't really take a toll, because I feel I'm getting better every day in controlling my destiny, but there's always a blockage there that I need to work through. The only real thing that I know how to do that helps is to keep playing music. No matter how much I want to throw my toys out the pram sometimes and just go, 'Right, I'm done,' it just won't let me.
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Taylor: It is still very much Andy's project. We were fortunate with this album, as we both wanted to address the same things in our respect fields: Andy with music, and I with the lyrics and art. The interesting thing is talking about it afterwards and realizing we had slightly different perspectives on the subject. We wrote the songs to reflect a decaying industrial world, modernism as a monster which grows by eating itself. Andy looks at this in something of a condemnatory way, lamenting the cruelty and stupidity of the world today. I prefer to look at it as a rhetorical device to address certain "eternal truths" of strength, resolution, and survival as opposed to introversion and abstraction. The fact that "Extraordinary Grace" is a 12 minute reading from a Yukio Mishima book over an ambient synthesizer track is the best example of that. That's what made this such an interesting record to make. We're a unit but there are conversations and differences of opinion within that.Finally, for Andy. With Laurence and your concern for his well-being, how has your own mental health been impacted by the process of making Christ Clad in White Phosphorus? It's dark and it's not exactly cathartic.
Curtis-Brignell:: Yeah, it's no real release with a lot of tension. Apart from "Extraordinary Grace," which I had to put on there, there's no outlet. That song's the chill-out room. A lot of this music was inspired by going out to clubs a long time ago, so I wanted to structure the record as if you were having this extreme experience in a room with a bunch of people and it's affecting you physically. That synth song is my attempt to alleviate that stress, but there is no real relief. That's been the case in my mental health, as well. I'm getting better. I've worked really hard. I tried to kill myself three years ago. That's when Litanies of Abjection was done. The day it was finished, I tried to kill myself. The woman who's going to be my wife saved my life that day. I've been working very hard since then to create a positive universe for myself to live in.At the moment there's things like work that challenge me in ways I've never thought possible. For the record, I'm a trainee funeral director. That's what I'll be doing in a year or so. It's extremely challenging and I've only been doing it since April. I'm still in the first throes of that. It doesn't really take a toll, because I feel I'm getting better every day in controlling my destiny, but there's always a blockage there that I need to work through. The only real thing that I know how to do that helps is to keep playing music. No matter how much I want to throw my toys out the pram sometimes and just go, 'Right, I'm done,' it just won't let me.
Ben Handelman isn't giving up on Twitter.