Vagrant The Noachian#
A rumour spread around certain corners of the internet in 2020 which stated that Josh was responsible for a little-known NSBM project by the name of Vagrant The Noachian.
It was stated categorically that this is him, and that involvement in the black metal scene in the 90’s verifies these claims, despite VTN looking and sounding absolutely nothing like Josh.
VTN was actually a man called Jordan Stark, as verified by the head of the label who released a VTN demo, and would presumably know this for a fact. The only thing they have in common with Josh and VC is being based in Portland, Oregon.
Giza Uchawi#
Rumours began circulating in the early 2000s of a one-man Tanzanian black metal band called Giza Uchawi (“black magic” in Swahili), with a 3-song tape release called Kizuu. No music was ever attached to it, just the image of the cassette’s J-card. The rateyourmusic entry
for this tape is somewhat suspicious too, uploaded by user johan1984
in 2010, whose only activity on the site was making a page for the album and then rating it half a star out of five (interestingly, in their collection it’s also listed as an 8-track tape, rather than a standard cassette). Also, the cover image of “Benjamin Mka” is suspect itself, and seems likely to be a modified picture of Geezer Butler from Black Sabbath. There is discussion about the release on the Metal Archives forums, with some comments speculating that the release was made up by Josh.
Last year, a release under this name was uploaded to Youtube. This is almost certainly fake, as the title of the track uploaded doesn’t even match the track list on the cassette cover, nor is it in cassette quality.
Angela/LVG#
All interviews and forum posts attributed to Angela are clearly written by Josh himself and images which are allegedly of Angela also show several different women. It seems likely that certain women, such as Miranda Lehman, inspired some aspects of the aesthetic portrayed, but Angela herself is a hoax.
The name LVG, is slightly more complicated. When VC assembled and
released Dextronaut, the intention was much less serious than on Genevieve, an
alternate list of joke song titles were provided, with SGL and LVG being abbreviations of Sir Grim-a-Lot and Lord Very Grim. During the Genevieve cycle, these were changed to Sandon Graeme Laurent and Lazare Veronique Garnier, ornate French names chosen to connote a sense of luxury, fitting the already established initialisms.
SKV#
Another fictional member, allegedly SKV was the band’s original drummer, who died by falling from a height while drunk. This person was fabricated, and no acoustic drums appear on any VC or CC material.
Further Fake Female VC Members#
I’m sure most of you have already heard, but Victoria, Josh and Alexis left Velvet Cacoon last week. The three recently let the rest of us know that they were very unsatisfied and had been quietly making music together on the side since April 2005. This was around the time Marcy, Anna, Tessa and myself began writing material for what would become the “Sky Like A Pearl, Halfmoon Curl, Starlit Twirl” album. We did notice the obvious absence of Victoria, Alexis and Josh but didn’t think much of it. In hindsight, their distant and aloof behavior makes perfect sense now. Their hearts just weren’t into this band anymore.
Josh told me the main reason they left is their desire to only work with natural wood and stringed instruments without any processing or digital enhancements, which is quite the opposite direction of where Velvet Cacoon has been heading lately.
Nobody is bitter here, but sometimes drastic measures must be taken or else it is the art that suffers. Josh and I have always thought art is the essence of life and even though we are now heading in different directions we can both assuredly nod in agreement that the right decision has been made.
All yours, Angela
2006-7 was a strange period for VC, and when the most plagiarism and blatant falsehoods occurred. The background to this statement is that VC began to circulate rumours that several new, female members had joined the band, many of whom played classical instrumentation. The names given were - Tessa (bass), Anna (guitar), Marcy/Heidi (Piano & vocals), Amy, Victoria (guitar), Francine (percussion), Alexis (cello) and Little Rachel. Later, a few statements were issued in an uncharacteristically informal writing style on the official VC site, also credited to Alexis.
July 29th, 2007
Hi. We are Velvet Cacoon. We’ve never addressed you in this way before, but I guess there is a first time for everything! We have some news to tell you. Our 2nd album is coming out soon! It is called “P aa opal Poere Pr. 33” and we think it is a really good album, hehehe :). Maybe you will think the same? We spent a really long time working on writing interesting black metal music for this album and experimenting with various recording techniques to attain sounds that do not occur naturally in the human environment. It was a slightly difficult process that took us a little over three years but we think it was worth it. It is a very warm and poignant record. “Genevieve” was a harsh, cold record - something for the sea and drugs. The new one is us sounding a little matured, something to cozy up next to the fireplace and enjoy with a pipe and your favorite dark rum. Our new album will be out on the marvellous Full Moon Productions record company label sometime this autumn, just in time for those rainy drives to your Oregon coast cabin. Also, a couple months ago a record label called Southern Lord put out a couple of vinyl albums from us. This company has very creative ideas for packaging! You can order them from Southern Lord or Full Moon Productions, or check your local shop. If you have any questions you can email our record label at general@fmp666.com or you can email alexis@velvetcacoon.com
Thank you very much for reading our webpage and for supporting unique black metal music principles, and have a great day!
Alexis
The official VC site went down for a while from September 2006 to February 2007. A few months after it was reinstated, two statements from “Alexis” were posted to the news page, and this new email address was used as a “private” contact - press were directed to garden@velvetcacoon.com - these replaced previous email addresses “rachel” (webmaster contact) and “luxivoraine”(distribution/label/publication contact) from the old front page.
July 31st, 2007
Hey, me again! A lot of e-mails came my way after I updated the site, too many to respond to all. Many people were saying that websites on MySpace were popping up, using the Velvet Cacoon band name and featuring songs supposedly from our new album. Our fans are very sly like that! heeeheee!
As always, the very website you are reading this message on, velvetcacoon.com, will be the only place anyone from the band ever puts any valid and official information up on. It is where you will first hear music from the new album as well, see concert listings, and anything else related to Velvet Cacoon. That should go without saying, but over the years we have managed to acquire some very very obsessive fans who, I guess, think we enjoy their attempts at flattery when we really sorta wish they’d never discovered us in the first place.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) the new album is still in post-production and we are looking at a late September/early October release date. As with “Genevieve”, there will be no “internet leak” of the album since both we in the band and Full Moon Productions have certain plans in store. So until then, any songs you hear on MySpace or wherever your internets may guide you are not from us or any album we’ve made.
Velvet Cacoon once made use of MySpace in order to “reveal” a “hoax” about material we “stole” to the largest audience possible, and once that revelation was made we took the site down. We think MySpace is a bit tacky and would never use the site to promote Velvet Cacoon in a serious manner. MySpace is “a place for friends”, certainly no place for us.
Furthermore, the website known as MySpace is owned by News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch), who bought MySpace just over two years ago. While this may mean very little to the average teenager who just wants to click away and hear his or her favorite black metal bands putting up their latest and (hopefully) greatest songs, what it really means is that anytime you click on those ads that blink, bounce and generally bombard you on MySpace, you are generating revenue for the same company which has made significant investments in things like:
Wal-Mart
Fox News
George W. Bush
McDonalds
What a fantastic list, no? Those companies eat, sleep, live and breathe black metal ideals!
In the age of convenience where corners are cut and sacrifices are made in the name of ignorance, we just wanted to point this out. Many black metal bands likely contend they are somehow “screwing the system” by using a right-wing, Christian owned website like MySpace to “spread the word of misanthropy and Satan”, but we know that’s just a deflection of hypocrisy. Why respectable bands continue to invite fans to a website which keeps tabs on the activities and preferences of its registrants in addition to exploiting the “Private Message” feature in the name of “Captive Target Market Research” is beyond us, but we think any band who uses MySpace to promote themselves really cares more about receiving attention than their supposed message.
All it takes is a little research and investigation into the things services and companies you interact with on a daily basis to realize that a lot of them are funded by and supporting causes, ideologies, political and religious groups who aim to disservice you in the end.
But hey, why be bothered with all that seriousness? Black metal is supposed to be fun! I’ll stop talking about issues reserved only for scary interviews and mid- gig rants, and finish up by saying thank you very much for using your email application to communicate vocabulary with ourselves.
Alexis
This is the second and final message credited to Alexis, both of these messages were deleted from the site on April 1st 2008.
Bete Noir#
This ambient closing track from the Genevieve album is perhaps the first instance of plagiarism from the band, it is in fact a slightly slowed down version of Mathias Grassow’s track “Soham”.
The Dieselharp#
Perhaps the most infamous VC hoax is the so-called “Dieselharp”, a fictional instrument described in the band’s first interview, in August 2004.
The guitar itself is actually made out of steel. It was created for us by a craftsman in Seattle. We needed a guitar made of metal because diesel fuel, flames, and wood are not a great combination, especially in an uncontrolled environment such as a concert. With this guitar, we drilled 33 holes from back to front and inserted small silver tubes through the back. All of these tubes are connected to small wires which carry the fuel to the base of the tubes. 3 large steel braces seal the top of the tubes (which are just under the strings), and on each brace is a homemade pickup which was created by d.Marvin of the Baltimore dark ambient project Vienke. When the flames come up through the tubes and heat the bottom of the coils it charges the pickups and transmits the resulting sound through a band of fiberoptic cords into a large aquarium. We change the size of the aquarium if we want a different sound. A 15 gallon aquarium gives a very active sound with lots of distinction and sharp action. For the recording of “Genevieve” we used a 75 gallon fiberglass box filled with water, a few gallons of seawater, some wine, and a bit of SGL’s blood. This wasn’t for sound reasons, obviously, but for our own sanity. The 75 gallon box, however, certainly was for sound reasons. This creates a very still and deep ambience to the tones, a thick and murky sound. These sounds are then recorded and distorted until we are satisfied. We didn’t want it to sound overwhelming though. We wanted it to bear traces to an electric guitar, but the secret is in the subtleties. In the middle break of “1” we stripped all distortions from the guitar lines, then slowly layer back on various distortions so if you want to hear its natural sound, listen to that.
Less than a year later, in a 2005 interview, this obviously fabricated story was explained by Josh:
The dieselharp is really a hype machine. It’s one of our many stories we used to toy with the black metal scene because we knew it would work. It’s just a big inside joke to us all. Anytime we see a glowing review for Velvet Cacoon we just chalk it up to another string on the dieselharp. The dieselharp is like CNN for black metal, it’s the newspaper you get up and read each morning. It’s the metaphor for our 365 day voyage from “who is VC?” to “Shut the fuck up about VC”. It was a marketing ploy to prove we could fist fuck a dead scene full of idiots. It’s not that we hate the people, it’s that we find the message of black metal to be worse than Christianity and we wanted to mock every ounce of this community. Of course, this only relates to the interviews and shit we did where we gloated about the ecofascist dieselharp playing nonsense. The mood of Genevieve and the drug use, I can assure you, was and is very authentic. In a way we were playing characters of ourselves… some of the authentic parts of ourselves, and other parts were pure fabrications.
Fake Demos#
VC attempted to create further mystique and credibility by inventing a series of unheard demos and albums, which would prove impossible to find, many of which becoming fan forgeries, for various reasons. Most of these are assembled, with track lists and supposed release dates. Find out more details about this in the fake section of our discography page.
Pumkiva#
The veracity of Pumkiva and their supposed album “Bats In The Belfry” was often debated by VC followers. The initial story was that it was an all-female raw black metal band, made up of three witches from Portland, as seen in the Hand In Your Face article. Later, Josh said that he made the album himself, with vintage instruments from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, and considered releasing it through Full Moon Productions, but decided against it on the grounds that it was unlistenable. People have made claims online to have copies or have heard this cassette, and it seems possible that something similar to the Werewolves of Venice release could exist, even if the music isn’t “Pumkiva” proper, and the origin has nothing to do with VC, although this is just speculation. It doesn’t seem likely that either version of Pumkiva ever truly existed. A Pumkiva interview was published that you can read here.
Bats In The Belfry
| 01 | Eidolic Churchyard |
| 02 | Candlelit Crescent Moon |
| 03 | Bats In The Belfry |
| 04 | The Priest Is On Fire |
| 05 | Coffin Hides The Pale Faces |
| 06 | Perishing Parishioners |
| 07 | Blood In The Maid’s Quarter |
| 08 | Application Of Belladonna Berries Before The Nocturnal Flight |
| 09 | Midnight Spell |
Sterres#
Sterres (pronounced “Stars”) was another ruse from Josh. Cover art for an album titled “Moone Like A Stellar Bone” spread through the community, and a single song, titled “From a Murky Brume Sleeps Into Northforest” emerged, even being posted to Youtube from an account which Josh ran himself. Josh said this about the sole Sterres track, on the old Full Moon Productions forum:
The entire song is actually a collage. The intro is from Yann Tiersen (with loads of reverb), the bass is sampled from a break on Tulus’ “Pure Black Energy”, the drums from who knows what, the break is from “Sympathique” (our pals in Pink Martini) and the cave dripping sounds and screeching from some Halloween sound effects CD. It is the essence of evil at its finest. I think the song titles (inspired by entirely by that German band Necrofrost) outshined the song.
Moone Like A Stellar Bone
| 01 | sunnesets claret embere stains the skie a lustre frigid blush |
| 02 | from a murky brume sleeps into northforest |
| 03 | vale kindelene snowing stars to drope like feathers at a pineneedle floor |
| 04 | lofty wintrus of seafrost aerate procede a causatume gossamer caesura |
| 05 | slake nectareouse burgundy cruor coddled in its cauldrone |
| 06 | incadesce midnighte sterres shone a crilliant coruscate shimmer |
| 07 | blusterous frore gale of decembers lurid breath boreale |
The Werewolves Of Venice#
The Werewolves Of Venice is a fake band, likely made up by Josh at the height of the deception and mischief-making from VC (circa 2006). In 2007, a cassette was released in an edition of 66 copies via the Eradication Process label, out of England, although the actual number maybe lower, as the release was pulled from sale once the hoax came to light. A split with VC acolytes Godemiché, it is thought that this tape was an elaborate prank directed at their sole member Bryan, although Bryan claims he found the WOV material online, and released it without consent or contact, in a bid to discover the origin of the material,
which seems unlikely. Whatever the truth behind the cassette, the WOV tracks
are actually plagiarised from two demos by the experimental black metal band Ahulabrum, The Transivity Of Strangeness and Magonia. Another release from The Werewolves Of Venice, titled October November December exists only as a jpg album cover.
Seahorse Chyrsanthemii & “Silver Dust Drifts In Silence”#
Seahorse Chrysanthemii was a fake project, probably dreamed up by Wilhelm, owner of the Khrysanthoney record label. Ostensibly a Portland-based black metal/dream pop duo, their one available track, “A Fading Cry From Ocean
Depths”, was in fact re-purposed material from Schrei Aus Stein’s
album “Tsisnaasjini”, and a train sound and the wolf howl that appear at the start of the track are taken from “Unbearable Romance” by Korouva, another Khyrsanthoney release. The prior Schrei Aus Stein album, “Talus”, was also released through Wilhelm’s earlier label Starlight Temple Society.
Two releases were said to exist by this band, a 10" LP titled “Dreams Of Tea, Wine and Gypsymoth” and a CD called “Ivory Smiles On Summer’s Eve”. These were supposedly going to be released on one of Wilhelm’s labels, but obviously, never were.
Later, he pulled a similar scheme by circulating a track from a fake VC release titled “Silver Dust Drifts In Silence”, which was also material by Schrei Aus Stein, this time their song “Couloir”. Josh actually played along with this one a little on last.fm, saying they should work together, suggesting he was aware of the plan and consented to it. It seems likely that these were attempts at publicity stunts to raise the profile of one of his label’s artists. Unfortunately, few people latched onto Schrei Aus Stein in the way Wilhelm might have liked.
Bright Grey Oil Paintings#
One of the strangest things related to VC is Bright Grey Oil Paintings, a supposed album from which a single rare song stems, titled “The Royal Nocturne” - a completely different song to the one of the same name that appears on Clair Cassis' Luxury Absolute. This track is entirely instrumental and nearly 8 minutes long, split into three sections - a guitar-led opening section with strange, somewhat arrhythmic and slow paced drums, an ambient section not dissimilar to “Kir Royal” featuring guitar resonance and a spoken word sample, and a coda where the drums re-enter and the guitar plays a closing melody. The cover image is the given artwork from the Last.fm page for this release
.
Holly Fogg#
Images of the model Holly Fogg
were used by Clair Cassis as artwork, some altered, and others left as is. There are quite a few images of Holly that the band used, but the most well known are a set with Holly playing a trumpet, and another set shot in a graveyard. These were taken by the photographer Eleanor Hardwick, and used without permission. Here follows a message from Eleanor herself:
“dear clair cassis, i spoke to you about this quite a few months ago and you said that it would stop and it hasn’t. you are repeatedly stealing my photographs from www.eleanorhardwick.com, and various other photographs of Holly Fogg from www.models1.com and using them for your artwork, without permission from me, nor Holly’s agency or the other photographers Holly has worked with. I already asked politely if you could stop using these images for promotional purposes and you said all images would be removed immediately, and they have not. Months later, I find that the photographs are still being used here and on other websites, and as I said before, I may have to matters further if continue to use others photographs without any permission whatsoever. They are fashion photographs that are in no way associated with your band and you have no right to use them. Thank you. Eleanor”
Dreamy Lanterns#
Likely a ruse from Wilhelm, Dreamy Lanterns was supposedly a collaboration between himself and Josh. These statements were made on the VC last.fm group.
We have the recording finished along with a 5 track EP that I still need to properly mix and master (this will take some time). I’ll post the cover art by the end of the week along with a complete track listing. I think you guys will enjoy the EP. It has a very intoxicating atmosphere similar to the first Clair Cassis album - really deep, smokey, somewhat bluesy with tons of bass, and (real) live drums…. but the girl who’s singing on three of the tracks brings in a special kind of melancholic element sorely missing from the music of VC and CC.” “Oh yeah, we have around 9 songs finished/semi finished right now, but we’re still working on them. Our intent is to make the best music we can so what we release turns out to be something truly unique. We decided to record the last four DL tracks at Secret Society. When mixed, the four of them put together came out to be around 22 minutes in length, and we think that will make for a perfect first EP. Everything ended up being very experimental yet coherent with a focused fusion of various styles. The sound is rich, complex, abrasive and atmospheric. It’s pervading urban jazzy ambiance mixed with extremely raw and droning black metal styled guitars, heavy bass and a combo of male and female vocals (both clean sung and forced in a slightly- BM style). We also incorporated instruments like the saxophone, a vintage bass and xylophone to create a kind of decadent neonoire [sic] aesthetic. Nothing like this has ever been done before either, so now we have a new name for this unusual style of music- “Dark Urban”.
Cicuta#
Some time in the last five or so years, https://ivorysnowfish.bandcamp.com was
established. Initially sharing the fake version of “Pieces Of The Cold Sea…” and asking around for high resolution scans of the Northsuite CD-r artwork.
Since 2018, the site has hosted the sole EP by Cicuta, “Apiaceae & Algae”, an ambient black metal project which sounds similar to later era VC and CC. The EP was initially released on cassette three years earlier, via Obscure Propaganda, out of Norway.
Also worth noting is that their logo seems to originate with this Bandcamp page, and doesn’t appear anywhere on the original Northsuite CD-r. Recently it was revealed that this is a project by Kenneth Ravko.