American Backworld is definitely one of the most important representatives of the neofolk scene. We are more than happy that we managed to talk to Joseph, who is not only an exceptional artist but also a very interesting and demanding partner to talk about music, life and being an artist in NYC. Enjoy!
Wojciech Żurek
Wojciech Żurek: Last year, after a very long break, you came back with the album “For The Life OfThe World”. I would like to ask what was the reason for it? Do you remember themoment when you decided to start working on a new album?
Joseph Budenholzer: I never really take a break from writing music. I’m always working on the next album,but my creative process is very slow and drawn out so it takes a long time to finish it.Sometimes it can take years to complete a song. I tend to do things in batches so I’malways working on few songs and a couple instrumental pieces at once. However,there were several events that contributed to starting “For the Life of the World.” During the Covid lockdown I was approached by the German label Dark Vinyl asking to release a ‘best of’ Backworld compilation. They invited me to select the tracks and also include to two previously unreleased songs. As I was deciding on the bonus tracks, “Love and It’s Disintegration” was one of those songs that had been sitting on my desktop for years unfinished, and I wrote “New Dark Age” specifically for the compilation. ”New Dark Age” reflected my view of the pandemic and the lockdown.
Writing it gave me the concept for the album, and once I have a motif in mind the entire album takes form in my head and it just becomes a matter of following it through to completion, which also includes a very long editorial process. Even though neither of the bonus tracks were on the new album they were really the gateway into a new cycle of songs. The main inspiration for this album was watching the culture war seduce people into a false sense of security, tucked safely in their opposing camps while the middle way becomes an isolated road. The Witch Finder General’s of the past have returned as influencers and trolls directing self-righteous anger at their chosen targets. The song, “The Return of the Burning Times” is not a metaphor. It’s about the re-emergence of mob mentality in the public square. Are public executions before a cheering crowd far off? This week we all watched the public applause for the execution style shooting of an insurance executive. An easy target to be sure but now that the crowd has tasted blood who will be next? Carl Jung said that religion is the counter-balance to mass-mindedness. This might seem counter intuitive when we think of religion at its worst, but I still believe he’s right. At its best religion gives the individual a psychic point of reference to make their own judgements and decisions based on a higher ideal rather than social commentary or political directives. I allude to this same idea in the song Pleasure Park, “I need indifference to feel like nature does. No black and white or left and right, beyond all good and evil.” Hopefully “For the Life of the World” offers a small antidote to the madness.
W.Ż.: The hallmarks of Backworld’s music has always been its beauty and lyricism, and onthe other hand emotionality. What is more important to you in the creative process – themelody itself or the emotions you felt at that time?
J.B.: As long as I can remember, listening to or making music has always been how I process contradictory emotions like sorrowful joy, anxious love, or angry fear. Melodies are like a spiritual thread or vine that weave in and out of the emotions. Songwriting is a very instinctive process for me, meaning that it begins organically without much thought. It just happens. In the end it’s the melody that transmits the emotions to listeners so that’s what’s most important to me. When writing lyrics I try to avoid describing emotions explicitly but hopefully let the imagery of the words combined with the melody and harmony strike strong emotional chords for the listener. I also spend a lot of time crafting and polishing the raw material into a f inished song or instrumental piece to intensify its emotional power.
W.Ż.: Since the beginning of your existence you have been considered a neofolk / apocalyptic folk band. Do you think that in today’s times this music can still have the power that it had in the 90s of the last century? Or has it simply became a part of classic pop culture?
J.B.: In my experience audiences are just as impacted as ever by the power of live shows by apocalyptic folk artists, but the old experience of finding that mysterious LP or CD in the underground record shop has become undermined by social media and downloading. My own interest in neofolk grew out of the experimental electronic / industrial music scene. I remember in the 80s and 90s seeing incredible shows by SPK, Swans, PTV, Current 93, Death in June, usually in underground venues or art galleries with a relatively small audience, with the exception of Diamanda Galas’ Plague Mass at St John the Divine Cathedral, that powerfully addressed the AIDS epidemic and which I was lucky enough to attend. It was a major event at the time. A big part of the attraction to this music for me remains the ‘outsider art’ factor and witnessing something truly countercultural and transgressive. For apocalyptic folk to become part of pop culture it would have to lose the emotional complexity and strangeness that makes what it is. I think people who play this type of music are not out to entertain an audience so much as to share their anxiety with others and not feel so alone, which is also a good definition of intimacy. As much as some artist have tried to cross over into pop they are still just a bit too odd to fit in there.
W.Ż.: Although the title of your latest album is “For The Life Of The World,” eschatologicalthemes have always been present in your work. Do you think that awareness of theultimate things allows us to be more optimistic about life itself, here and now?
J.B.: All of the recent global upheavals starting with the pandemic and the growing rise of nationalism and religious fundamentalism have created an even greater sense of living in the end times than in the Post-Reagan late 80s and early 90s when I was writing the songs for “Holy Fire.” Of course the timespan from 1990 and 2024 is the blink of an eye in the scope of history so it’s all the same period. I’m not certain whether we’re witnessing the death throes of civilization, or the birth pangs of a new utopia. On a good day I see one, and on a bad day I see the other, but both are probably true to some extent. As an artist I look at the undeniable brutality of the world and try to reveal the hidden beauty or chance for redemption contained in it. It’s an exploration of spiritual light and shadow.There’s more of a sense of urgency now that I have two boys growing up under the present conditions. As a father it’s very hard to imagine the world we’re passing onto them. On one hand everything is better than ever, more people are living in undreamed of wealth and luxury than at any time in history; on the other hand it appears civilization is on the brink of collapse, the forests and oceans are dying while world leaders frantically try to squeeze the last penny out of everything before it totally collapses. The key to this contradiction lies within the laws of nature, evolution endlessly adapts everything towards perfection while at the same time entropy tirelessly breaks it all down. Unless enough energy is expended to hold it all together it will fall apart. So the ultimate question becomes, what are we willing to do? Or, why aren’t we willing to do it? And how can we transcend our ‘all too human’ obsession with materialism? These are spiritual questions and the answer will have to be a spiritual revelation/revolution. The book that the album takes its title from was a gift from my wife by the Orthodox priest, Alexander Schmemann, who writes beautifully about the transformational power of liturgy and sacraments. I remain optimistic about humanity fulfilling the p romise of our higher nature.
W.Ż.: You started your career at a time when New York was dominated by No Wave andguitar noise. Did you feel like you were in opposition to that scene or was it simply aparallel musical world for you at that time?
J.B.: I was attracted to New York in the mid 80s by much of what I saw happening there like Lydia Lunch, Diamanda Galas, Swans, William S Burroughs. I was also very into drugs in those days and went there with the intention of being a heroin addict in New York City. Of course at that time New York was very different than it is today. I lived in the part of Lower East Side called ‘Alphabet City’ that was vey much an apocalyptic landscape of abandoned buildings and shooting galleries where you would sometimes walk past dead bodies in the street, and along with the West Village it was also the epicenter of the AIDS crisis. It’s a miracle I escaped relatively unscathed. I was hanging out at CBGBs and met all my heroes like Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and Patti Smith, but I never really felt the rock scene was my spiritual home. I was more drawn to the experimental film and performance art scene. In 1989 I got clean from drugs and alcohol and started on a spiritual path that led away from the Hungry Ghosts that had been steering me toward death. Through this recovery process I studied shamanism and ritual magick, developing spiritual discipline that has stayed with me ever since.
Once I was no longer incapacitated by addiction I soon re-emerged closer to where I felt I belonged, working in the ‘Cinema of Transgression’ collaborating with filmmakers Richard Kern and Beth B. There I met Lydia Lunch and JG Thirlwell who were sort of the queen and king of the underground scene at the time. I ended up touring as keyboardist for Foetus and collaborating with Lydia on the “Matrikamantra” album. New York in the 1990s was a cauldron of outsider artists. I found myself sitting in a cafe with Diamanda Galas and performance artist Blood Boy, discussing the virtues of using stage blood versus animal blood for “Plague Mass.” I also enrolled in NYU studying music for film in the music technology department and performance art in Experimental Theater Wing (ETW). Backworld grew out of my school projects staging ritual performances in ETW and the first live performances at CBGBs Gallery weretheatrical works along the lines of “The Hound of Heaven.” “Holy Fire”, “Isles of the Blest” and “Anthems from the Pleasure Park” were conceived as ritual theatre pieces that could be staged. Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s manifesto “Towards a Poor Theatre” made a big impact on my work as well as Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death. In the final analysis Grotowsky was not interested in theatre, per se, that is, not “performing a play” but in creating psychic conditions by which the actors and viewers could experience a certain type of revelation or apotheosis together. Theatre was simply the apparatus he chose to use. Kantor’s work was similarly mystical by invoking a perspective of eternity. This ineffable state is what I’m always aiming for, sometimes more successfully than others.
W.Ż.: This year you’ve toured both the US and Europe. Do you see any differences if it goes about the reception of your music depending on the continent?
J.B.: My music has generally been more accepted in Europe than in the US. When starting Backworld I found more kindred spirits at World Serpent in London. At our early shows in New York we’d get negative responses from audiences, which in those days consisted mainly of our friends who would criticize the lack of low end and heaviness in the mix, which of course completely missed the point, but that was what they all looked for in a good band. No one appreciated our delicate arrangements and not having a drummer was considered blasphemy. It was just not the proper aesthetic at the time – Sonic Youth was the measuring stick. Even when Swans were performing songs from “The Burning World” live they would bludgeon them into heaviness that didn’t sound at all like the elegance of the studio album. I was deliberately leaving lots of empty space in the arrangements and not nailing it to the ground with a beat to allow subtle energies to come through, but no one got it. But in Europe you understood. The Wave Gotik Treffen has been a tremendous supporter throughout its existence. As far as I know there is no festival like it in the US. You asked earlier if neofolk has become part of classic pop culture. In America it’s still barely on the map, or it’s just started to appear in recent years. In the past at least, I’ve found very few opportunities to do shows here which is why I’ve mainly played in Europe. Also there were no American bands to play with and European bands rarely toured here. But now there are some very good American bands like Blood and Sun, Cradle of Judah, and King Dude that have shown interest in Backworld’s music and legacy which I’m grateful for. As far as the audience is concerned, in recent years Backworld has gained more of a following in the US which I attribute to longevity. If you do anything for 30 years it’s bound to catch on to some extent. So while I still attract smaller crowds in US those who come are just as enthusiastic to see Backworld live as anywhere.
W.Ż: In the album’s closing track “The Lamb And The Lion” we hear the voice of yourfriend David Tibet. Did you write this composition with the intention of inviting David ordid the idea come later?
J.B.: The vocal is a recording I did with David many years ago for a piece on a Backworld EP released on World Serpent in the early 2000s but I was never satisfied with the music and wanted to re-do it so I wrote the composition specifically with his vocal part inmind. When I began working on the new album I sent him the new version which was much improved and he was very happy with it too. Most importantly, the theme of his poem was the perfect finale for the album. I then did a second arrangement with piano to open the album that my wife, Laure Kyle did a beautiful reading over. The musical motif bookends the album nicely I think.
W.Ż.: Since the release of the new album you have been touring a lot, does this mean thatBackworld has gained new energy to play? What are your next plans?
J.B.: I became a father later in life and took a long time off from touring while my kids were too young for me to feel comfortable leaving them. Having said that I did write, produce, and stage “The Hound of Heaven” and two other operas during that time. Now that the kids are older I’m excited to be able to play live more often. On the 2024 European tour I brought them along to most of the shows and anyone who attended probably couldn’t miss them standing front row center. My plans for the next 30 years are to tour as much a possible, keep making new albums (I have a new batch of songs on my desktop as we speak), and if the opportunity ever appears I would love to direct “Holy Fire” as a one act opera. I also have endless ideas for other operas but that requires much more resources.
W.Ż.: We all know that you have a quite big group of devoted fans in Poland. So I have toask, is there a chance that you will visit our country as well?
J.B.: I’m planning another tour for 2025 and would definitely love to visit Poland again. We played at the Industrial Festival in Wroclaw in 2007. I also played there with Lydia Lunch in the mid-90s on the “Matrikamantra” tour. I remain a devoted fan of Polish film, music, theatre, and literature. “Requiem for My Friend” by Zbigniew Preisner was a big influence on “The Hound of Heaven.” If any promoters are interested they can contact me through my instagram page.
W.Ż.: Thank you for the interview. The last word is yours.
J.B.: I am very grateful for the community that Backworld has brought me into contact with around the world, including Poland, which, as I said, definitely feels like a spiritual home to me. My future goal is to keep in closer contact, both in person and on social media, with everyone who loves Backworld’s music. I welcome people to reach out to me directly on instagram.com and I have a Patreon page where I’m posting unreleased videos, music, and writing. I hope to see you all in person in 2025!