Burial Hex, founded in 2004, is the solo project of Wisconsin-based musician Clay Ruby. Burial Hex combines heavy ambient drones, analogue electronic noise, melodic keyboards and black metal influences to form an intensely dark sound which has been dubbed ‘horror electronics’. A self-titled debut LP was released by Scratch And Sniff Entertainment in 2007, to be followed by a plethora of micro-edition cassettes and CD-R releases on a wide variety of labels, released throughout 2007 and 2008. The second Burial Hex album, Initiations, was released by cult English label Aurora Borealis in 2008 on both vinyl and CD, and was followed by a split LP with Zola Jesus in early 2009.
Heathen Harvest: Hello Clay, how’s it been going for you here at the Equinox Festival?
Clay Ruby: It’s been great so far. There’s a lot of interesting things to see, although we’ve been pretty busy, so we haven’t been able to see a lot of what we were planning to see.
HH: So what performances have you seen that you really enjoyed? Or are there people you’re particularly looking forward to seeing later on?
CR: I thought James Ferraro was excellent. I've been a good friend of his for years, and I'm very into his music, so I thought that was great, to be able to see him play solo, and I was looking forward to seeing David Beth, although I guess we’ve missed his talk. I'm looking forward to seeing Comus play tonight, of course.
HH: Yeah, it’s a rare opportunity, to say the least. I think this is their first UK show for well over 30 years!
CR: Sure.
HH: OK, can you give me some details of your musical background – the kind of stuff you grew up listening to, when and how you started making your own music etc?
CR: I started making music at the age of five. I heard ‘Ebony And Ivory’ on the radio, and asked my mother what instrument that guy was playing, and she said that Stevie Wonder played piano, so I said that I wanted to learn piano. I started off by learning hymns, like ‘When The Saints Come Marching In’, and stuff like that, or pulling pages from the church hymnal, but I would always improvise on the themes, I never really played straight. I started learning ragtime piano, and as I grew older I got into jazz and more freeform types of music, but always with keyboards. I then had a brief stint of giving up keyboards, and playing punk rock and metal for a while, then I got interested in keyboards again, and synthesisers. I just started making my own compositions from there.
HH: Were there any specific inspirations or influences behind the formation of Burial Hex?
CR: Yeah, the initial impulse was that I'd been making improvised electronic music for a number of years under different project names, and then kind of gave it up, because I felt like it was pointless to make sounds that my instruments could make. So I wanted to have specific themes to my compositions. Burial Hex was created with a particular intent in mind, so any composition that I made, or any sounds that I created under that name would be inspired by those particular themes. I guess some of the people that got me interested in that kind of composing were Maurizio Bianchi and Mauthausen Orchestra, and a lot of early industrial and power electronics and stuff like that. And I was also inspired by earlier electronic composers like Morton Subotnick and Conrad Schnitzler.
HH: A lot of Burial Hex work employs occult symbolism and themes. Do you have a personal involvement in occultism, or is it just an aesthetic that you enjoy using?
CR: I've been involved in what I guess you’d call occult activities since I was very young. Esoteric Christianity has been an interest of mine since pretty much around the same sort of time that I started learning piano, around five or six. I had a couple of experiences that I would describe as being sort of mystical. And after that, I learned about the Golden Dawn and Hermeticism around age 11, and just kept exploring from there. I've always been involved in solitary practices of my own devising.
HH: The Burial Hex discography is vast, and it includes a large number of cassettes and CD-Rs in tiny editions. Is there a deliberate strategy behind this, or is that just the way you prefer to release your work?
CR: No, the strategy is that there are certain major compositions that I wanted to create, and I knew that in order to do that I was going to have to practice and experiment a lot in between realising those compositions. So the Burial Hex self-titled LP and the Initiations LP were very deliberate things that I wanted to create, but a lot of the cassettes and CD-Rs that were released in between them were experiments, working towards trying to create the sounds that I wanted to eventually incorporate into the compositions that I was devising.
HH: So you see your work as dividing up into major works and secondary works?
CR: Exactly, exactly. And that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to put stuff out in a limited edition format, because I figured that only really hardcore fans or people that were particularly intrigued would be able to check some of those things out. But I knew that the major compositions would have a much wider distribution. So if you picked up one of the Burial Hex albums, you’d experience what I wanted you to experience, and if you wanted to dive a little deeper into it, and track down some of the limited edition stuff, you’d be able to hear some of the background to those pieces, and what went into making them.
HH: Do you have a special affection for cassettes as a format?
CR: No, not necessarily. I do think that they are a more tangible format than something like a CD-R, but really it’s just about distributing the information itself, reproducing those experiments, so it doesn’t matter to me what format they’re on, really.
HH: The releases you’ve made on Aurora Borealis have had a higher profile, though – certainly, I first heard of you after the release of Initiations. How did you come to work with AB?
CR: Andrew from Aurora Borealis actually tracked down my first cassette, called Curses Of The Earth, through another UK distro a number of years ago, and he approached me about trading and getting more of my stuff in his webshop. Then, after we’d had a few amicable trades and exchanges, I told him that I was composing Initiations and that it would be a double LP, and it might be something he might be interested in. And right away he said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,’ and that kind of gave me the final push to get the piece finished and get it to him.
HH: So Initiations was conceived of as a double LP rather than as a CD from the outset?
CR: Yeah, it was four compositions that were each approximately 20 minutes in length, so I knew that it was going to have to be a double LP. Andrew was kind enough to offer to press it as a CD also.
HH: So do you have any further releases planned with Aurora Borealis?
CR: We just released a split LP with Zola Jesus, which collects two of my favourite more current Burial Hex tracks, and I have a final triple LP which will kind of complete the cycle of Burial Hex material, and I'm pretty sure that Andrew is interested in releasing that once it’s finished.
HH: You don’t have a particular timeline for that, though?
CR: No, I understand that I have to go through all the experiments that will add up to what will become that final piece, so the timeline is just in the air, really. There’s no release date planned, or anything like that.
HH: ‘Go Crystal Tears’, your first track on the split LP with Zola Jesus, is a radical departure from anything I've heard by Burial Hex before. Is this the way that your sound is developing – towards a more structured, song-based approach?
CR: Well, that was kind of always part of the plan. The idea was to be able to bring together all these disparate elements that I was interested in into one thing, and songs like ‘Go Crystal Tears’ and ‘Storm Clouds’ are really about trying to get as personal as possible and bring together things that really touched me personally, and that I haven’t heard other people do, but which I know would make interesting combinations, like combining synth-pop with Renaissance poetry, or things like that. In my mind, they lend themselves to each other, and that’s kind of what the Burial Hex project has always been about, it was to try to get as personal as possible, and to really be pouring out from my own interests different things that could be brought together. [At the time of writing, both of these songs could be heard on the Burial Hex MySpace page.]
HH: I interviewed Silvester Anfang for Heathen Harvest recently, and they mentioned that you’d recorded some stuff with them for a release which will probably be appearing on Skulls Of Heaven. Can you tell me anything more about that?
CR: Well, we already did a split 7” single, and I'm singing on their new album, Sylvester Anfang II, which are both released on Aurora Borealis. Whenever I'm overseas, I try to perform with them as much as possible. We’ve also recorded a collaboration that I'll be releasing on CD-R through Skulls Of Heaven. I'm basically just working with them as often as I can, either in person or through the mail. There’ll be more collaborations in the future, I'm sure.
HH: How did you come to hook up with them in the first place, given that you’re based in Wisconsin and they’re in Belgium?
CR: They would probably be much better at telling you this story, but my band Davenport Family had released a CD-R on Lieven Martens’ label Imvated in Belgium, and they heard that release – this was probably around 2004 – and they wrote to me and asked if I'd be interested in hearing their music, and they sent it to me and I liked it a lot, and helped them distribute it, produce it and whatnot, and we’ve just been working together ever since then.
HH: It seems as if your home state of Wisconsin has a pretty healthy experimental music scene, what with people like you, Kinit Her (who are also playing at this festival), Bruce Carkiss, Dead Luke and Zola Jesus, plus the Autumn Wind Productions label being based there. Do you have much involvement with your local scene?
CR: Oh yeah, I'm extremely involved in the local scene. My friends and I have been doing shows and releasing local artists since about the year 2000. It’s nice now, because in the last three or four years, a whole new crop of kids have been coming out of the woodwork, and they’re all familiar with what we’ve been doing, and it’s helped encourage them to become part of the local community also. It’s really expanded a lot. All of the shows have been really well attended, and the scene’s really been thriving recently. I've just been happy to be in the centre of it for all these years.
HH: Are there other Wisconsin artists I should be aware of?
CR: The band Drunjus is really great, they’re good friends of mine, it’s a kind of synth-based, prog-type thing. And DB Pedersen is really worth checking out also. Craig Microcassette System is an old favourite of mine from the area. Second Family Band is the kind of community outlet, like a jam project, that’s really worth looking into. Those are probably my top four, offhand.
HH: So what’s next for Burial Hex? What further releases do you have planned for this year? Any more collaborations, tours etc?
CR: There are some releases coming out that have been finished for a while, and they’re just tied up with whatever labels are handling them, but other than working on the triple LP, I'm totally at the end of the cycle, where at this point Burial Hex as a personality or idea or set of ideas is dissolving, so there aren’t a whole lot of new things that I have in the pipeline, other than realising the triple LP, and whatever experiments may lead up to that final project.
HH: How about your various other projects? I know you’re part of Wormsblood, who had a retrospective LP recently released by Aurora Borealis. Are you mainly concentrating on Burial Hex at the moment, or are you doing other stuff as well, or maybe anticipating starting a new project?
CR: Well, in terms of starting a new project, I guess that Burial Hex is just kind of dissolving, and future compositions after the final triple LP are just going to be under my own name, as Clay Ruby. So I'll continue to compose, and sometimes it will be on the same themes, but it will just be under my own name. I work heavily with the Second Family Band, and probably always will continue collaborating with them, and I hope to continue expanding on my work with Silvester Anfang.
We will also be recording a new Jex Thoth album this year. I'm going to be flying out to LA when I get home and spending a couple of months with Jessica. She’s written over 25 new songs, so we’re going to start picking through them and going into the studio as quickly as possible to make the follow-up to the debut album, which we’re already really excited about.
Wormsblood is something that I've doing since about 2003. It’s a slow-moving project, but we have recently played our first live show at the Matchitehew Assembly festival in Chicago, and a lot of the material we wrote for that will be recorded for a new Wormsblood album, which I'm also talking about doing with Aurora Borealis, and I also work with Journey To Ixtlan, who are also on Aurora Borealis.
HH: That’s really interesting, because Journey To Ixtlan is a very mysterious, anonymous project.
CR: Yeah, I've been in contact with them for a long time, and I kind of get the impression that I'm one of the only people that they actually trust, in America at least. They have a completely open line of communication with me, and I'm doing everything I can to get their music out to people. I immersed myself in their world, and they’re great. I'm glad that people are finally getting a chance to hear their stuff.
HH: Yeah, I reviewed the Journey To Ixtlan album and I really liked it, but when I was researching for the review, it was almost impossible to find any information about them – which in a way makes them more interesting.
CR: Well, it’s funny, because Aurora Borealis said in their label description for the album that some of them are living outside of the law, and that’s absolutely true. The different things that they are involved with, their lifestyles and their spiritual interests, have just rendered them completely incapable of communication with the outside world. They don’t use the internet, they don’t really have any interest in talking to outsiders, as they would describe it, and it does add to their mystique. I'm not sure if it’s something they’re actively trying to do. I mean, they’re completely unaware of any scene. They were actually really surprised when I suggested that people would be interested in their music.
HH: Anything else you want to add?
CR: I would just like to thank the community here in London for putting together this festival, I think it’s really important to bring out as much of this information as possible, especially when you’re dealing with occult subjects or underground music. There are so many little corridors that you can get lost within that a festival like this brings to the surface, so many new ideas that all of us can learn from and be inspired in our individual journeys. I think it’s a really great experience.
This interview with Clay Ruby of Burial Hex took place face to face at the Equinox Festival, London, in June 2009.
