WEB-EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: KARL SANDERS ON REPTILES, MONKEY BONES, AND INTERNET NAYSAYERS

The guitarist and chief songwriter behind Egypt-obsessed death-metal tour de force Nile, Karl Sanders has spent the last 16-odd years throwing himself into his love of those things ancient and arcane. On Nile’s ground-breaking 2000 release Black Seeds Of Vengeance, the axman went as far as to fill the lyrics booklet with detailed explanations of the stories behind each song. Now, with his second solo release, Saurian Exorcisms, Sanders continues his foray into traditional Eastern music, trading his electric guitars and brutal death-metal tracks for acoustic instruments and atmospheric dirges. When Revolver meets with Sanders shortly before his record release party in New York, he is bright-eyed and friendly, an intense devotee who speaks with all the enthusiasm and honesty of an eight-year-old discussing dinosaurs.

REVOLVER How are you feeling about Saurian Exorcisms?
KARL SANDERS I’m really, really excited that it’s getting to see the light of day. I had a lot of fun making it. Really, that’s what the whole album’s all about anyway. It’s just music that I relax and have fun with. Nile is kind of a high-pressure death-metal thing, but Saurian Exorcisms is music to chill with.

Nile has a lot tracks on its albums along these lines—why not just put more of this kind of music into Nile albums?
I think there’s a balance somewhere. If there was too much of this stuff on a Nile record, it wouldn’t really be death-metal. I think that Nile still has to retain enough violence to satisfy the heavy metal folks who love what we do.

With the solo albums, are you specifically trying to cast off the violence?
If you listen to Saurian Exorcisms, you’ll hear a lot of relaxation music, but also a lot of…acoustic violence. Before electricity, when [musicians] wanted some dark evil shit, they had to make evil music from acoustic instruments, which is a much tougher proposition than plugging into a Marshall stack and hitting the distortion pedal. It’s very pure—you’re using nothing but the musical notes themselves to generate the atmosphere. I’m a big fan of the opening scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the monkey picks up the bone and kills the other monkey with it, and then realizes, Hey, we can conquer the world with monkey bones! That’s kind of the spirit here. It’s all done in my spare time, at my own pace, at my own place. It was really fun. If I’m gonna play something a hundred times until I get it right, so what? No big deal.

On the new album, you do a lot of work with a three-stringed Eastern instrument called a Baglama Saz—where did you find one, and how’d you learn to play it? What adjustments do you have to make stylistically?
The best place to get [a Baglama] is Turkey. Short of that, there are plenty of world music shops. I got mine in Seattle. It comes with a little Baglama manual, but it’s all in Turkish, so I kind of just listen to the stuff on YouTube, watch the real guys do it. Baglamas come in a variety of styles. Mine is actually six-stringed. All the necks are in different places, and there are frets between the frets that give you micro-tuning that gives you the general Eastern scale.

Are you an Eastern music listener?
Decently so. I have a friend in Iran who sends me stuff all the time. I have stacks of obscure Iranian music, with guys—you can imagine them, just a wizened old man in a cave, singing and playing this little two-stringed deal, playing some crazy shit, stuff that Melechesh would go ape for. There’re so many bands that have come before us… I think it’s time to do some new things, take people to new places, but try to retain a metal spirit.

You play drums on this album. How was that?
Fine. Put me behind a drum kit, I can’t do anything. But give me a little hand-drum and say, “You’ve got a year to lay this down one track at a time”—well, I can do that! Yeah! With the wonders of computers, I can build up a thunderous drum circle one track at a time! To me, it’s kind of a fun way to work, and I don’t have to get into those arguments with the drummer. “Dude, it ain’t about that, I need you to do this.” That shit gets old.

Your previous album was Saurian Meditations—where’d things turn from “meditations” to “exorcisms”?
Well, I already did Saurian Meditations, so that was done. Also, I wanted to play more—actually, physically, within the structures. Some of that is because for the past couple years, I’ve been playing like a madman, and I got really mad at a lot of the Internet naysayers that would decry some of my technique. So I thought, All right, well, I’m gonna play some of this stuff on a fucking acoustic guitar, where there’s nowhere to hide. I mean, people can say, “Oh, it sounds great ’cause he’s playing it through a big Marshall and a great guitar,” but with an acoustic guitar, you’ve got to hit each note perfectly to make it come out. So with this, god dammit, no one will be able to say dick about my technique. To hear a bunch of punk-ass bitches on the Internet talking shit really cheeses me off! It gets in the back of your head and eats away.

Both your solo albums are Saurian something. What’s your personal connection to the reptile?
I’ve always kind of been fascinated with snakes, crocodiles, dinosaurs. They’re cool—they’re completely anti-human. They ruled the earth for 250 million years…a lot longer than people have. But other than that, it’s not like my life revolves around saurian worship—it’s just a fun way to approach it.

Interview by Chris Krovatin