You described asking each remixer to uncover something “hidden” within Treachery rather than simply reinterpret it. What did that approach teach you about your own songwriting, and were there any aspects of the song that genuinely surprised you when reflected back through these collaborators?
I wasn’t interested in hearing four alternate versions of Treachery. I asked each artist to uncover something within the song that I hadn’t fully expressed myself. One thing I’ve learned is that an image usually contains more than its creator understands, so I wanted each remixer to discover something, rather than simply reinterpret it.
I’ve outlined this in one of the press releases, which I think you’re also alluding to in your next question, but it bears repeating for your readers: William Faith’s production opened a new emotional center, Daniel Myer’s DSTR remix became the search, [melter] intensified the crisis, and Tweaker explored its aftermath.
What surprised me most was that together they revealed a narrative I never consciously planned.
The EP traces a kind of emotional arc – from William Faith’s production through DSTR, [melter], and Tweaker. Was that narrative intentional from the beginning, or did it emerge as the remixes came together?
It emerged completely on its own. None of us planned it, everyone worked independently. It reminded me of the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse, where each artist contributes without knowing what the others have created. When everything came together, a larger narrative emerged that none of us could have consciously designed.
Hellenistic astrology isn’t a reference point you often encounter in industrial music. What drew you to those ancient texts, and how did the concept of “treachery” become something you wanted to explore artistically rather than intellectually?
I actually think esotericism has always been part of industrial music’s DNA. What’s less common is Hellenistic astrology specifically.
Long before I studied astrology, I was fascinated by bands like Skinny Puppy and Coil. I remember hearing references to Mercury, the Black Sun, and other esoteric imagery. I didn’t fully understand them at the time, but I sensed they pointed toward a symbolic world beyond the surface of the lyrics. I think industrial music was already pointing me toward that world, long before I had the language to describe it. Coil deepened that fascination because their engagement with esoteric traditions never felt borrowed. It felt lived.
What drew me to Hellenistic astrology was its symbolic language. Prediction was never really the point for me. By the time I wrote Treachery, the emotional experience already existed. Astrology didn’t create the song. It helped me recognize the symbolic pattern I was living.
Saturn is a good example. People often associate Saturn with restriction or old age, but it’s equally connected with structure, endurance, decay, and the passage of time. That’s why decaying architecture became such an important visual motif throughout the videos. I realized those images carried the same symbolic qualities as what I was trying to express.
Your work brings together Hellenistic astrology, James Hillman’s archetypal psychology, Jungian thought, and Coil’s esoteric philosophy. How do you keep those influences from becoming purely conceptual, ensuring they remain emotionally immediate in the music?
Sometimes it begins with an intuition, a dream, or an emotional experience that arrives with such force that I can’t ignore it. Other times it begins with an idea – a symbolic possibility or a question that I don’t think has been fully explored. In either case, I look for a starting point that asks to be followed somewhere.
One of the central questions I’ve been living with is: What does it mean to inhabit a meaningful cosmos? I tend toward a Hermetic worldview, so I’ve become increasingly interested in the symbolic dimension of everyday life. Rather than seeing meaning as something we invent, I’m interested in recognizing patterns that reveal themselves through experience.
Rather than generating the songs, these traditions have taught me to recognize that ideas and images can arrive as visitations from the imaginal layer of being. My role isn’t to invent them so much as to pay attention, remain in dialogue with them, and discover what they’re asking of me. The music becomes one way of responding to those visitations.
Whether someone recognizes James Hillman, Carl Jung, Henri Corbin, or Hellenistic astrology isn’t important to me. I hope they simply feel the reality of the experience. The symbolic dimension is there for anyone who wants to follow it further.
You’ve said that these archetypal forces are explored through your perspective as a gay man. In what ways does that perspective reshape or challenge industrial music’s traditional engagement with transgression and the occult?
If there’s a symbolic or archetypal dimension to life, then those patterns are present everywhere – in every relationship, every encounter, every life. The myths we’ve inherited express them through the language of their own cultures and times. I’m interested in how those same patterns continue to reveal themselves in contemporary queer experience.
I’m not trying to rewrite mythology to fit a queer perspective, though. I’m asking how timeless patterns continue to find new phenomenal forms. What does the drama of Eros and Psyche look like between two men? How do longing, trust, betrayal, separation, devotion, and transformation unfold today? Those questions have become the work itself, rather than remaining purely intellectual.
Traditional astrology offers another example. Saturn and Mars have often been understood as difficult companions. Yet I find myself asking whether contemporary life reveals relationships between those same symbolic energies that ancient authors couldn’t have imagined. Rather than treat astrology as a tool with which to explain people, I’m interested in how those archetypal patterns continue to find new expressions through culture and lived experience.
Chicago has one of the richest industrial music histories, but your new DSTR video also consciously places itself within that landscape. How has living and creating in Chicago influenced Tatv Gral beyond simply inheriting its musical legacy?
Being from the Chicago area, it’s simply the atmosphere I’ve always inhabited. The Midwest has often been described as the Rust Belt, so steel mills, railroads, concrete, abandoned factories, and aging industrial architecture have always been part of the visual language around me.
As I became more interested in symbolic ways of seeing, I found myself recognizing those landscapes differently. I began to see them as symbolic spaces as much as physical ones. The endurance of concrete, the decay of abandoned buildings, and the weight of history embedded in the landscape all began to resonate with the emotional and archetypal themes I was already exploring in the music.
Then there’s the remarkable legacy of Wax Trax! and everything that followed. That history matters to me. It feels like another layer of the same landscape. Filming the DSTR video here was my way of acknowledging that lineage while allowing the city itself to become part of Tatv Gral’s symbolic world.
William Faith, Daniel Myer, Chris Vrenna, and [melter] each occupy different generations and branches of industrial music. What connected them as collaborators for this project beyond their individual reputations?
Names were less important to me than working with artists whose musical instincts I genuinely trusted. Reputation alone can only tell you so much about that.
I’d been a fan of Daniel Myer’s work with Haujobb for years. I’ve always loved his use of atonal textures and knew he would hear something in Treachery that I couldn’t. [melter]’s work is incredibly raw, and I really admire their spirit of sound experimentation. Chris Vrenna’s history with Nine Inch Nails is undeniable, but what mattered most was where his remix took the song. It found the aftermath of the story in a way that affected me very deeply. William Faith has a remarkable ability to reveal the emotional architecture of a song while creating space for it to breathe.
Each of them comes from a different branch of industrial music, but what united them was that I trusted each of them to uncover a different dimension of the same symbolic image.
There’s a noticeable tension in Tatv Gral between mechanical, almost brutalist production and a very exposed vocal delivery. Is that contrast something you consciously cultivate, or has it emerged naturally as your artistic voice has developed?
I’ve always been drawn to the brutalist minimalism of classic industrial music. Something about those stripped-down machines, repetitive rhythms, and architectural spaces resonates with me on a very deep level. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand why that is, but I’ve never been able to explain it. The attraction always comes first.
The more interesting question became: What is my relationship to this tradition? I wanted to discover how that language expresses itself through me, without simply reproducing its aesthetics.
I found myself making something more emotional. I love the discipline, structure, and restraint of classic industrial music, but I’m less interested in presenting a vision of inhumanity than in asking what happens when genuine vulnerability inhabits those structures. The architecture remains, but it’s inhabited by something deeply human.
Coil’s work often treated occult practice as something lived rather than aesthetic. In an era where esoteric imagery is frequently reduced to visual branding, what does it mean to engage with those ideas sincerely as an artist today?
One of the things I’ve always admired about Coil is that their work suggested years of reading, practice, and lived engagement with esoteric traditions. The symbolism never felt borrowed. For me, astrology, Hillman, Jung, and Corbin changed the way I pay attention to experience. My goal in referencing them is therefore to reflect how the presence of that symbolic life underscores my creative process, rather than to simply decorate the work with symbols.
Looking beyond Treachery, do you see this remix EP as a standalone exploration of one song, or has the collaborative process shifted the direction of where Tatv Gral goes next?
It completely changed the way I think about collaboration.
I used to think of a remix as another version of a song. Now I think of it as another perspective on the same symbolic image. Sometimes another artist reveals something that’s been present all along but invisible to its creator.
Treachery taught me that a work of art can continue revealing itself through other imaginations, and that its creation cycle can extend beyond one definitive statement. That realization has completely changed the way I think about collaboration.
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