Mark Garrett: Vocals
Nico Mirolla: Guitar
Alex Rieth: Bass
Sean Lang: Drums
The eight sonically and lyrically immersive songs on Kardashev's Alunea album have set yet another high-water mark for the dynamic lineup. Known as the progenitors of the "deathgaze" genre, that descriptor is evolving as Kardashev continually explores and pushes boundaries. "Words you could use to describe our music are 'atmospheric, progressive, emotional, dynamic, and contrast,'" explains drummer Sean Lang. "Our music attempts to sonically portray the emotions of anger and sorrow which creates a palpable but natural dynamic contrast."
Guitarist Nico Mirolla concurs, but adds, "The Almanac and The Baring of Shadows were the beginning of our development into the 'gaze' side of Deathgaze, as we were already pretty well known for the sonic similarities to Death Metal, but with Alunea, we're coming closer to progressive death metal, with leanings in the 'gaze' only momentarily." For his part, Garrett finds the new music more prog-leaning. "Alunea has much more experimentation when compared to previous releases. It's a very proggy album."
The LP's first single, "Reunion," is an allegory for hope, the track's musical DNA rooted in the sounds of bands like The Contortionist, Cigarettes after Sex, and Fallujah, with intense death metal aggression, whimsical atmospheres drenched in reverb, and uplifting, bigger than life melodies.
Music is certainly a universal language, but Kardashev creates their own lyrical language, adding depth and meaning. "I've loved tinkering with languages since I was a little kid," says singer/lyricist Mark Garrett. "I'm not an expert when it comes to constructed languages, often referred to as "conlangs," but I find language to be a really interesting aspect of humanity."
"I was dabbling in the beginnings of the language of Alunea years before we added it to our record The Almanac. I would sit at my desk at work--a call center at the time--and make up interesting grammatical rules to pass the time. One of my favorites was having the length of a vowel add plurality to a word. I didn't create that concept, but it was fun to play with. Years later when Nico and our previous bassist suggested I bring my interest in conlangs to our music, the vowel length concept was what I started with. It all grew from there."
"Alunea is a direct sequel to the events of The Almanac and picks up right where the song "Beyond Sun and Moon" leaves off. The first releases in The Kardashev Mythos were broad and conceptual, but they've morphed into something more granular and specific. Alunea tells the story of the main character from The Almanac meeting a being created in the song "Continuum" from Excipio. Their meeting is a philosophical examination of where responsibility and duty intersect. We don't try to answer those questions, but we do examine them deeply in this album."
Keeping with the more granular approach, the band went beyond the previous simple and abstract. "We wanted characters, story, setting," says Nico. "With this album it was important to show that place as we see it, and there's no better artist than Karl E. to realize that vision. As a longtime fan and longtime collaborator, we have numerous works from him in our shop; he's done three album covers for us now."
Adds Karl: "The album cover embodies that entire process of exploring into the unknown and diving into what's out there and what is uncharted, all the while learning more and diving into oneself in the process of venturing out."
To lay the songs down, Nico acts as the primary engineer and shares working files with the other guys via Milanote, and he also writes music live via their Twitch channel. Until the summer of 2024, Nico lived in Arizona with Alex and Mark, so the trio worked in person, with drummer Sean, working from his home in Canada.
Fortunately, they've been making albums remotely with one another since 2018, so they've established a secure, confident, and trustworthy process. However, on this record, they took a more granular approach and worked with a new mix/master engineer (Zack Ohren, Entheos, Machine Head, Demon King, Fallujah). "We consciously chose to work with a mixing engineer for this album who would add a more modern, clean sound than in previous records," says Lang. "This changes the dynamic considerably--this album has an energetic quality to it that adds to the Kardashev sound. Additionally, bassist Alex Rieth performs vocals on a few songs on this record."
The first song written for Alunea was in July 2022 with the working title "CSI MIAMI" which became "We Could fold the Stars" just as Liminal Rite was released. The final song on Alunea, "Below Sun and Soil," was the last to be completed. Kardashev was challenged to keep the spirit of the 2012 track "Pillars of Creation's" spacey emptiness and turn it into a story closer for this record, as it opened the album Peripety, then on piano. Kardashev supporters are able to view this process through the band's Enlisted Traveler Program, where Nico creates a sort of storyboard of how this collaboration works and the development it goes through.
"Honestly, I love every track on this album. I think that "We Could Fold the Stars" and "Edge of Forever" are the oddballs of the bunch, but they are two of my favorites," says Garrett. "We really took our ability to create massive, soaring moments and cranked it to eleven."
"Truth to Form" was originally written on piano for Nico's wife Jenny. "I took a numbers-to- keys approach and tried to make a melody out of our wedding anniversary," says the guitarist. "I assigned numbers to the piano keys, a la, tablature, and then inserted the date of our wedding to then discern a melody which you hear played throughout this song." The end of the track features his rough performance on an out of tune 1943 Wurlitzer baby grand piano in his family home.
And the two stunning guests on Alunea were true serendipity. "I first found Erin from Genital Shame on a late-night YouTube deep dive," says Garrett. "I saw the artwork for her single 'I Met Kerri Colby.' It's this high-contrast, sorrowful yet confident woman staring at the camera and the image is entirely red and black. I had no idea what genre it was going to be, but I clicked and was immediately hooked. The music Erin writes in Genital Shame is, in my opinion, some of the best stuff happening in black metal right now. I reached out and was like "Yo, your voice and music are amazing, let's collab." and she agreed. She is the voice at the end of the song 'Speak Silence.'"
"For the song "We Could Fold the Stars," there is a wonderful moment in which everything "intense" falls away and we're left with a smokey sound akin to moments in The Baring of Shadows," says Nico. He recalled Christoph Closer (Bohren & der Club of Gore) and his sax contribution on Liminal Rite. So, the guitarist crowd-sourced via the band's Discord community in search of a wind instrument player and Pawel JJ Przybysz answered the call. "And we're so grateful to have his haunting duduk performance on the song."
It's the rare lineup who pushes beyond accepted musical and lyrical convention as far as Kardashev does. "We've been doing this a hot minute, and with that reflection, we've completely abandoned real amplifiers for VST's, acoustic drums for digital drums, and about the only thing left that's acoustic are the guitars and voices you hear on the record," says Nico. "Musically, we were a space-deathcore band for the first two releases, then a sort of prog-death band for two releases, "deathgaze" for a few records, and now we're writing without much genre-direction other than internal moments of reminding one another that we shouldn't fear writing a song!"
The new album and band also seek to forge a worldwide connection, as Nico explains. "Alunea to me serves this idea of culture that we often see as "us and them" perspectives; it's a fictitious language, from a fictitious story somewhere in the SUPER future, and I give it the time to hear it, learn it, understand why it works the way it does. I'd just hope that others take a similar perspective when hearing REAL languages and learning about REAL cultures that are all around us, and full of depth, history, and meaning. I hope," he concludes, "that people slow down and try to understand the depth we've put into Alunea and then project their experience into the world around them."
