Bestial Devastation (no, we don’t know his real name either) doesn’t like being in the limelight, at all. Luckily, with his prime band Negative Plane he doesn’t have to be, since he’s “just” the drummer. But since he’s responsible for basically everything, from recording to performing all the instruments, on Funereal Presence’s first real full-length and since said album is one of the best damn proper black-metal albums of this spring, we had to ask him about it, even if, to his own admission, he doesn’t like doing interviews, thus rarely does any nor agreed to have any form of promo pictures taken; “I don’t think that any of this adds anything to my music or that I have many interesting things to say that the music doesn’t… I also prefer concise and esoteric album layouts immensely and some boring picture of myself would only interfere with letting one’s imagination run freely.”

Clocking in at 48 minutes yet featuring only four tracks, three of them being over 12 minutes long, ‘The Archer Takes Aim’s force is to (re)capture that Darkthrone dirty guitar tone and vibe circa ‘Total Death’ (even if the artist would rather cite the old German extreme pioneers Poison or Killing Joke’s Fire Dances’ as influences) while giving a new definition to the word ‘epic’ and letting some melodic yet creepy elements slip beneath the cracks, turning the whole voyage into a seriously brain-damaging trip. But don’t you use the term ‘psychedelic’ nor question why, although Bestial Devastation is officially based in New York, two tracks have a German title. “Psychedelic to me conjures images of some dreadlocked asshole swaying along to The Grateful Dead, so our definitions must be immensely different. I listen to everything so I can’t tell where what comes from honestly… As for using German, the lyrical themes and atmosphere of this album were heavily inspired by medieval eschatology and all the brilliant art, woodcuts and so forth, that it spawned. I may live in New York but I’m a German immigrant to this country and German is my native tongue so yes, there are several sections sung in German as well and some ‘borrowed’ Goethe poetry. I can’t tell if the nature of this question is actual curiosity or patronisation, I’m assuming the latter.”