TERMINAL Talks New Album, Musical Memories And More

Industrial / glam act TERMINAL have just released an album of instrumentals entitled ‘The Hush Of Cannons Cold’ on Metropolis Records. TERMINAL spoke to JLTT here:

When did you begin writing music?

I had a couple of false starts in my life. I wrote some as a teenager when I just wanted to be a part of it, and I had my first synthesizer but not a lot to say. I took another stab in my 20s but it didn’t really come into focus until a few years later, when I finally realized I didn’t have to match up with all the pieces of a given genre. You don’t really get to decide what genre you are anyway; the audiences and DJs will do that for you. Meeting the people who connect with my music has been a frequently surprising joy.

What is your earliest musical memory?

A lot of music was played in our house. I always enjoyed the experience of putting on vinyl, looking at the album art, reading the lyrics and liner notes. Years later as a music production student dealing with noise and hiss I was more than happy to embrace digital, but we really never replaced the commitment of actively choosing to listen to an album instead of having music just kind of come to us a track at a time while we’re doing something else.

Your new album ‘The Hush of Cannons Cold Instrumental Re/Works’ is out now. How did you want to approach the making of the album?

I’m fortunate to have worked with some great artists over the years as a remixer and collaborator, so after two albums of original material my question was, “how can I make a remix album not like every other remix album?” A common thing I heard about my instrumental interludes was that people wanted them to carry on longer. So when I approached my collaborators with the task to develop these 1-2 minute short bits into longer (but still instrumental) pieces, it was for most of them a unique challenge.
I didn’t know what to expect from the finished products but the variety and depth of what they came up with is remarkable. RailWRX said their rework of “Collateral Damage” was inspired by video game battles. Spankthenun’s glorious mangling of “Asymmetric Warfare” is a dancefloor banger. The frantic, crazed take on “[Redacted]” comes from my bandmate Dave aka Searching For Survivors and it’s not quite like anything else. It’s brilliant.

Where did you record the album and who produced it?

I was more of an executive producer on this, my main task being to kind of build a cohesive statement through the song order and volume dynamics. A shout-out to Stahlschlag for helping me solve a mixing problem just before the deadline. Anyone who enjoys instrumental electronic music should absolutely check out his stuff.
The one all-new track, which closes out the album, was written near Philadelphia where my bandmates live. “The cradle of liberty,” they like to say around here. It’s all relative I suppose.

What two things do you hope to have achieved once you have left the stage?

As pretentious as this sounds, I feel like making this music—sounding an alarm about our world and its troubles—is my purpose. There are people who have rightly given up on the news, and for whom geopolitics is justifiably too tedious to study. But they might listen to my music and dig deeper into what I’m writing about. So maybe I’m a messenger of sorts.
I don’t have any children, so my music is my legacy. When I’m gone it will prove that I was here, I had something to say, and in my own way I tried to make a difference.

Do you have any favoured stage instruments, effects, pedals, microphones etc?

When I record guitar I’ve never been happy with any amp modeling software, to the point where I still stick 2 microphones in front of my little Vox amp instead. But live, through a PA system at high volume, it’s somehow a different story. I have a Line6 stompbox that can give me just about any sound I’m after. It’s not perfect but there’s no going back once you have a single lightweight unit that does everything.

Where is your hometown and could you please describe it in five words?

Pretoria, South Africa.
My heartbreak. Wounded, slowly healing.

You are given the opportunity to write the score for a film adaptation of a novel that you enjoy. Which novel is it and why?

This is a great question because I started off studying film scoring in school and while it wasn’t for me, it kind of lurks in the back of my mind as unfinished business.

I could really sink my teeth into scoring any of those great Swedish crime novels by Henning Mankell. Tense, bleak, dark and harrowing. Lots of opportunities for both dense dissonance and sparse desolation.

Who are some of your musical influences? Do you have any recommendations?

Protest music has a long tradition that spans multiple genres and I acknowledge that in terms of subject matter I stand on the shoulders of giants from The Clash back to Woody Guthrie with his “This Machine Kills Fascists” guitar and I guess eventually to Verdi. Musically, I think I have a couple of deep roots. I think my sound is heavy on the dark noise- and synth-driven world of Gary Numan, Killing Joke, Cabaret Voltaire, Test Dept, ClockDVA. But my songwriting, focused on lots of rhyme and sing-along choruses, is more borrowed from glam. Man, I love glam. T.Rex, early Roxy Music, Suzi Quatro, Mud. All of it. There’s no mistaking that glam influenced goth heavily too so I get some of that by osmosis.
Current artists… I really love what Nuda is doing and we’ve talked about working together at some point. Flesh Field came roaring back with a new album last year and not a moment too soon; I think we share some opinions on the current political climate. Randolph & Mortimer are somehow both gloriously retro and a breath of fresh air; they remind me of all the things I love about hard driving unabashedly electronic music.

Do you have any live dates planned in the UK/Europe in 2024/2025?

Probably early 2025, but we’ll get over there sooner if everyone can get it together. It’s tough, the live scene never fully recovered from COVID and I wonder if it ever will.

Was it a difficult album to write?

Along with the 7 reworks by other artists, I wanted to contribute a full-length original instrumental—in part just to kind of prove that I could do it. About three months after Israel began their massacre in Gaza I was still in no mood to write music, but then was reminded that 25 years had passed since we lost Bryn Jones, the enigmatic and prolific Manchester musician known as Muslimgauze. His use of Eastern scales and found sound was a clear influence on me, and the driving passion of his short life and prolific musical output was the Palestinian struggle for freedom. So that convergence of events was kind of how it came together. “From the River to the Sea” is a tribute both to him and to the people of Palestine.

What makes TERMINAL happy and what makes you unhappy?

Nelson Mandela told South Africans that our freedom was incomplete without the freedom of Palestinians living under apartheid. So it’s mildly infuriating that 30 years after South African apartheid officially ended, the plight of Palestinians is even worse. And of course apartheid left an ugly ragged wound on South Africa that will take generations to heal.
A lot of people who listen to Terminal music think it’s sort of an elegy for the planet, that I’m writing our obituary, but I’m really not. I enjoy raging against things not because they’re insurmountable but hopefully to put a target on them. There are passionate activists in this world fighting for good and we need them. The message of Terminal is that yes, there’s more darkness up ahead, but we don’t have to go down that road.