Through our efforts with the subreddit, archive site, and contacts and connections both old and new, the moderator team were recently able to establish contact with Josh himself, and submit the following questions for a brand new interview, his first since 2010. Having waited for over a decade for any musical movements from him, the silent weeks which followed almost led us to lose hope in this materialising at all. This weekend, without warning, we got our answers, with three previously unheard VC tracks posted to the band’s youtube channel. The following is presented unedited, but for spelling corrections.
Enjoy.
Q: Hi Josh, you’ve been away for a long time, at least regarding music. What were you up to all this time, and what exactly triggered you to revive Velvet Cacoon?
Josh: After Genevieve was released I started trying to replicate the olfactory hallucinations I was experiencing on various dissociative chemicals, which somehow led to creating a perfume house. It wasn’t my intention. I initially thought this would be yet another random experiment of mine that I would have fun with but ultimately fail at. The goal was never to create a perfume or soap or candle or whatever, and it certainly wasn’t to start a business or even sell anything. But as the months turned into years I found myself obsessed with how strange the process in my head felt when authoring perfumes and it started to become all I could think about. In the beginning I was selling them to people in the underground music world who I knew had eclectic tastes and were open to new ideas, and then slowly word spread to the perfume world and when they discovered me Slumberhouse quickly turned into a very big part of my life. I still continued to write and record rough demos almost nonstop, but the desire to put out an album proper wasn’t there. Others members undertook their own creative endeavors as well, but we knew we would reconvene when the time was right. I also wanted to take some time to explore our little thought garden of what ideas could be used to leapfrog that cold/grey/seafoam aesthetic of VC and the earworm necropop approach of CC into the next logical iteration. Lots of bands are rushed and feel obligated to put out new music every couple years but that approach is unnecessarily formulaic for us and totally counterintuitive. Personally I believe it's rare to brute force great ideas in a time crunch like that. It's true that some creative paths are instant, they can happen overnight even, but others require years of conscious and subconscious incubation. It was definitely the latter for us.
Q: We collected some questions from fans, mostly regarding the past of VC, and some very specific details. Looking back at that time now, how do you generally feel about the history of VC?
Josh: I’m really proud of everything, though obviously some things we took too far. Musically, things like Genevieve, Atropine and P aa opal I wouldn’t change anything about, and that’s surprising because I tend to look back at almost anything I create and find lots of things I would’ve fixed or adjusted were I to recreate it now, but those albums had so much thought and time put into them that I feel we got them 100% correct. It also helped to have others who were contributing and always bouncing ideas off of. I sometimes come up with insane ideas that just aren't right but in my mind I don't see anything wrong, like a creative blindspot. I have these individuals in the perfume world now too, my "handlers", basically people who know my brain well enough to know what I'm getting at and help me over hurdles if they see that I've made an error somewhere. Quality raw creativity/ideas are not difficult for me, but the refinement process often eludes me. You can see it in both my music and perfume worlds, the early stuff exposes the general idea, but it took a while to get things into focus. I know talking about raw talent is gross and sounds arrogant, but I still believe that it's the truth. Dextronaut is a different story, I'm not a fan at all. I had almost zero contribution toward that album, didn't write a single guitar line, a single anything. It’s not really something I ever listen to. It has its charms but it’s highly flawed at every turn. We actually almost gave most of the riffs from that album to Tena from Triumphator and Shane from Abyssic Hate, who were fully aware of our project and two of the people we sought advice from when we were very new.
Q: How do you personally feel Velvet Cacoon sits in the history of Black Metal, especially in the United States? You have an extremely dedicated fanbase, considering how niche the music is. However, due to all the controversies, the music itself is perhaps not as highly regarded as it should be. How do you feel about the lasting impression your music and antics have made, and the band’s legacy more broadly?
Josh: I’m not sure what legacy there is around VC, I don’t look around online at what people say about us and it wasn’t until recently that I realized there was still sustained interest in our music. I have no regrets about the insane behavior as it filtered out the wrong fans, and really only kept the door open for people who appreciated the music for what it was, and didn’t require a checklist of underground credentials to be taken seriously. We were in contact with a lot of other USBM groups at the time, Krieg, Xasthur, Nachtmystium, Negative Plane, I Shalt Become, Weakling, etc.. and all of them were very down to earth and I appreciated their contributions, but I always felt we were always in our own lane and nobody knew how to find us there (in all honesty, few probably wanted to at the time). I think a lot of people wrote us off as too simplistic or monotonous, but repetition with an effective atmosphere like that is a very potent way to go to those strange spots within. I'm certain that no matter what, the vast majority of people will always hold hostile opinions toward us; not because of musical critiques but because of everything else.
Q: Is there anything you could tell us about the recording process or equipment used to achieve the unique sound you’re known for?
Josh: I don’t want to get too specific, but when I became the primary songwriter (writing songs for Genevieve) I started viewing the guitar differently. I actually didn’t record any guitar on Genevieve, two other people did the recording. I wrote the songs except the title track, but I realized I wanted little riff morsels, not entire tracks. I would write them, others would record them, then I would take those recordings and cut these riffs down to little saturated building blocks, and each one I would create multiple copies of and then use various DAWs to dissect these walls of saturated dissonant distortion, basically fractionating each riff into individual layers, and some of those layers I’d add a series of really drastic noise reduction modulations and then increase the bass and reverb of them, essentially splicing a riff into 12 different onion layer frequencies, individually sculpting each one and then re-assembling them to create a super deep murky type of sound, and then using these building blocks to essentially build the songs from. There's a break midway through the song "1" that showcases this 'onion layer' style of guitar assembly. Some of these riffs were completely frankensteined together by yours truly, hard to explain but these weren’t songs when the riffs were recorded. It was the product of heavy dissociative use and a curiosity to try a different approach to making music. No other album we recorded was done this way. It gave the album a very precise and perfect transition between riffs. To me it sounds like the least sloppy work we put out. It had to be perfect, perfectly timed, perfectly rounded, everything had to be positioned perfectly. The guitars, the drums, everything is precise to the nanosecond, which is in direct contrast to the imperfect, rough, ‘human’ qualities of most other bands at the time, even our other albums. P aa opal was the first album where I actually wrote and recorded the guitar parts for VC. I used a Gretsch White Falcon hollow body for that (and used that same guitar on CC Luxury Absolute, which is why the two share a similar blurry tone) and ultimately decided to bring Cain in to do the vocals on P aa opal. I’d spoken to him for a number of years and he was quite detached, and his personality just fit perfectly. Were he still alive today we would absolutely still be working together. Fortunately, we had him record a bunch of vocal tracks, vastly more than what was released on the album, so there's a number of tracks we've done where those other vocal performances are used. Since 2008, I have considered him almost like a co-vocalist. I won't go into the backstory about these vocal tracks, but he was in a place in life that was bleak, and the raw vocal tracks are incredible to me. I knew he was quite an intense individual and would deliver something authentic, but his performance on P aa opal blew all of our minds. We couldn't wait to put the album out once we heard him on the songs.
Q: Are you still in contact with D Marvin or Miranda Lehman?
Josh: Of course. I’ve known D Marvin for almost 30 years now, that’s a bond that will never break. I last spoke to Miranda a couple months back. She is brilliant - her art, photography, music, just a ridiculously talented and multi-faceted creator who draws on something from within that I haven’t seen in others. I strongly encourage everyone to look into her work, it’s really something else.
Q: Was your supposed collaboration with Wilhelm, Dreamy Lanterns, just a ruse?
Josh: I’ve honestly never heard of Dreamy Lanterns before? It’s possible I did at one point and it has slipped my mind since then (my memory is quite bad for obvious reasons), but the name doesn’t ring a bell at all.
Q: What happened to Ethyl Maltol Vignettes and Bright Grey Oil Paintings? Are there any other ‘abandoned’ projects like this, and will they see the light of day?
Josh: Yeah there’s a ton of random demos and reference track eps spread out over a number of hard drives. I recently had much of that material fished off and archived and my plan is to go through it, put together various collections and upload them for curious people to check out. Lots of CC demos too. I also have all the VC stem sessions, Cain’s vocal sessions, pretty much everything that VC was built from is there, so I’ll put it out once I have time to properly sort through and organize it so it makes sense. It’s many, many gigabytes of .aif and .wav files so most need to be converted to something smaller first. Even just moving these large files to and from external drives takes hours.
Q: What, ultimately, was the appeal of infusing a feminine, cosy, quaint or even quirky aesthetic with traditional BM imagery?
Josh: All of us were huge into anything pretentious, French poetry (Baudelaire especially) and then we were stupid fanatic over experimental/dreampop stuff like Cocteau Twins, lovesliescrushing, Cranes, This Mortal Coil, etc. All that quality 4AD stuff. Combine that with the urgent need for word painting on dissociatives and it made sense to use words as a means of evocation. I’ve never liked the idea of using words literally when it comes to song or album titles. I think words alone can impart a kind of tone or emotion, even just the way the word looks visually, right down to the font itself. All these things are important in how they are translated by the person on the other end. The music we made was like being in a velvet cocoon, a dark womb, cradled by the desolation of it all, and what complimented that the most was wordplay that was a bit soft and escapist, heavy ‘princess in a painted castle’ atmospheres.
Q: We’re aware that the Atropine album was made with extremely time-stretched tracks from artists like Anja Garbarek and Faith & Disease, do you remember any of the other artists used, and why you chose to interpolate their work?
Josh: Those were the main two I remember as well. We had hundreds of songs we had slowed down for our own enjoyment but the ones selected for Atropine I would need to really go through them attentively to remember what the source material was. Several of the songs are original works by Veinke as well. There has always been a lot of sampling. The piano on Laudanum’s chorus is Chopin, the outro is a slowed down loop by Bows. All the drum sounds from Genevieve were sampled from albums I owned. I would record the particular drum sound I liked and plug it into the drum machine. The “explosions” heard on Genevieve are field recordings of mortar fireworks we lit one night in Falcon Cove.
Q: Are there any dream projects that went unrealised?
Josh: All of us involved were always huge fans of trip hop stuff, especially the cold gritty Bristol sound (self titled Portishead for example) and I’d always wanted to do a project that was essentially a bit of Adrian Utley meets Nancy Sinatra type old school 60’s black & white glamor/gangster soundscapes, but lean in heavy on traditional cold northern dissonant aesthetic, but with sampled beats, the real slow foot dragging traditional heartbreak trip hop beats that are infectious. We just started demoing ideas for this last night. During quarantine all of us found ourselves back on the same page, buying tons of guitars, amps, pedals and making music again. We missed it.
Q: Do you know who is responsible for the Cicuta EP Apiaceae & Algae? It’s been speculated that you were behind it. You can find it here: https://ivorysnowfish.bandcamp.com/releases
Josh: I have no idea what that is, definitely not something we would record though. They even used the Ivory Snowfish name too, so I guess they’re fans?
Q: What inspired you to get involved in crafting scents and perfumes and how has VC influenced Slumberhouse (and vice versa for any potential future VC material)?
Josh: As I said earlier, I was experiencing some profound olfactory hallucinations, a phenomena that’s experienced by many dissociative users and for whatever reason I found them quite moving and eventually reached the point where I wanted to see if I could recreate them on my own. One thing led to another and here I am today. I don’t think much about perfume informs my songwriting, but black metal as a whole had a huge influence on me when I was building my scent vocabulary and it ended up informing a lot of the emotion behind the fragrance I make. Even to this day, much of the tone of my work is directly tied to the atmosphere of certain music from those early 90’s groups, the really special stuff like Ved Buens Ende or Angizia, super potent, cold nihilist/misanthropic aesthetic, snobby, elitist, aloof, self worship, everything dark and beautiful and high quality, disregard for all other people and what they create, ie arrogance and feeling content to be alone above the fray, as squeamishly tacky as that probably comes across. Ultimately I feel very lucky that I got into perfume the way I did, but perfume really has no way to affect or contribute to the music side of things. I love perfume and I love how imaginative and transportive it can be, but I don’t find smells inspiring the way other perfumers probably do. It’s a rather conservative industry that prides itself on coloring within the lines for the most part, though the whole indie perfume thing has turned into quite the cottage industry over the last few years, and some of them are helmed by other colorful characters.
Q: In a previous interview, it was stated that you came up with the name while writing music in the Shanghai Tunnels. Were there other band name ideas before deciding on Velvet Cacoon?
Josh: Actually the name came from another member, not myself. All of us kept a bunch of writings of random stuff we would jot down with a blown mind, some were these huge blocks of rambling and others were short 2, 3 or 4 word combinations that we found colorful or interesting. One of the things I came across was Velvet Cacoon (misspelling and all) written down in the corner and I thought it was the perfect descriptor.
Q: It is believed that VC was behind the joke group named Raventank. Two songs were released on the FMP forums in 2005 for an album titled, Beaks and Bullets, with an accompanied tracklist and album cover. Could you confirm if this was a project you were behind and are there any more songs besides the 2 that were released?
Josh: Oh I had completely forgotten about that. That was mostly the people behind Dextronaut and if I remember correctly they were made in about 15 minutes as a complete joke. I think there were a few other songs as well but I'm not sure. The idea was definitely to create something horrible, drums that sounded like popcorn popping if I recall correctly. It was a total earache.
Q: It was mentioned that the master for Chapelflames was given to the person behind Ivory Snowfish Music for 3 vials of rare tryptamines. What were the names of those specific tryptamines? And did they have any direct or indirect influence on any VC recordings?
Josh: I’m amazed that this story is floating around, as only a few people knew about that. I believe AMT and 5-MeO-DIPT were two of them and the last was an analog of ketamine. That was back in the dawn of the whole research chemical scene, before darknet markets & crypto were even a thing. You could literally buy these chemicals with a credit card back then. The internet really did feel like the wild west in those days.
Cover of The Saltwater Etheries
Q: You have recently released the track “Prelude / Avalon Polo (instrumental)” from the EP trilogy "The Saltwater Etheries". Are these newly recorded tracks or unreleased material? If this is new material: Did you record it on your own or did other people contribute to the music? How and when do you plan to release the EPs?
Josh: Those EPs were recorded between 2014 and 2018, some were just me, and some involved D Marvin and others. I think the plan from now on is to simply put the material up online on a Google drive and let others download and share it however they like. I personally don’t feel like physical media releases are that important to VC fans, but I may be wrong. I have a massive vinyl collection at this point and love the format so much, but I’m not very excited about it when it comes to our own music and physical releases. Some involved with the Saltwater Etheries EPs have suggested to simply put the music out with a total Creative Commons license so that anyone could take it and press it as a CD or record and make their own money from it, that way those who are putting in the effort to press it can make money, and in the process it will create a physical medium for those who want it. We are very picky about who we work with, and after we lost Wilhelm, it made more sense to just give the stuff away, and if someone wants to take on the task of creating artwork and having it pressed, then they can enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Q: Aside from Velvet Cacoon, are you involved in other musical projects?
Josh: Seidene and Clair Cassis are both alive, the former being a bit of an atmospheric post punk group and Clair Cassis almost serving as my music sketch book for ideas.
Seidene Artwork
Q: You now have an instagram page where you mentioned archival material that will finally see the light of day. Does the archive only consist of music or does it also contain other VC related stuff?
Josh: It’s a lot of music, a lot of images, artwork and liner notes that we never used, various text files, guitar tabs, all kinds of random odds and ends. I was really surprised to notice how well documented everything was during all of this, almost nothing was ever deleted so the archive is quite vast and I have been taking bits of time here and there to put it all together into volumes that can be downloaded.
Q: What can you tell us about the music that you used in those instagram posts? Are those samples of old unreleased VC tracks?
Josh: Exactly, older unreleased material. I posted those as soon as I discovered some of the material, and then there were some dead hard drives that had to be taken to a place in Portland that specializes in transferring/saving data from corrupted hard drives. Some stuff was inevitably lost, but a lot of it survived. There’s two alternate versions of P aa opal in its entirety, one was my vocal mix across the songs (I find the version with Cain to be far better), the other is the alternate set of guitar stems that were ultimately never used or released. Most people have the original set of guitar stems for that album, but not the alternate set. Some of these recordings are 20-30 minutes per song, multiple takes, conversations between members during recording, etc.
Q: Are there any plans to release the music of VC/CC to the streaming platforms (Spotify etc.)?
Josh: For some reason Sony Music is adamant that they own the rights to VC and CC music. From what I can gather, Sony and a host of shell companies under their umbrella (The Orchard) do these wide swaths of ownership claims, and then it’s on the artist to pull teeth to get an unresponsive monolith like Spotify to do anything about it. At this point we have prevented Sony from listing VC and CC, and they’ve refused to submit any documentation to Spotify proving they own the rights (because they don't), so until it gets settled there will be no music from us on there. I’d honestly rather just put the zip files online so that people can download them. Spotify isn't really an ideal place. None of us are looking for a big audience, we just want to make sure the music gets into the proper hands. Any VC/CC fan who wants to upload, host, share or torrent our music has our full endorsement.
Q: What is one thing you've always wanted to reveal about VC or something you'd have expected people to work out or discover but never have?
Josh: Until recently it was that about half of Atropine was resampled. Those of us involved in VC couldn’t believe how long it took. People seem to have all kinds of black magic ways of unraveling our antics rather quickly but that one lasted for so long. Maybe it was a case of something hiding in plain sight. I still love that album to death though. Source material irrelevant, it is one of my favorite albums to zone out to on a rainy night, and still the perfect soundtrack for a k-hole.