Vitals

Harmozel is an experimental doom metal project from central Connecticut. Their debut album, “Songs of the Hungry Ghosts” will be released sometime in 2022. All instruments, vocals, songwriting, and mixing were done by Pat Jenkinson at Fantok Studios.

Introduction

So this is where I’m supposed to do my “big picture overview” about what metal, Harmozel, and music in general mean to me. The problem is that it’s really hard to talk about that kinda stuff without falling back on half-assed cliches like “music is everything to me”, “it’s my obsession”, or that “I’d be lost without it.” I mean, does music really mean everything to me? Have I ever forgotten to eat food or use the bathroom for days on end because I was so transcendentally immersed in my guitar? Have I ever turned down any life saving medical procedures because I was busy really digging into the latest Elder release? Have I ever pulled a Schopenhauer and thrown a woman down a flight of stairs because she was interrupting a sweet fucking jam session? Of course not. If I woke up tomorrow to a world without music, I figure I could make it at least a few weeks before I offed myself. But while my passion for music might not meet the DSM criteria of an obsessive disorder, it has been there for me when many of the other, more traditional support systems in my life have given out. While I can’t truthfully claim that music is my entire world, I can say without hyperbole that in those darkest hours of my soul, when hope and joy and the promise of a better future left me for dead on the roadside, music was always there. As the Saṃgīta Bhāṣya says, it is “the treasure of happiness for the happy, the distraction of those who suffer, the winner of the hearts of hearers, the first messenger of the God of Love. Easy of access, it is the nimble beloved of passionate women. May it forever be honored.” Harmozel is my attempt to do just that.

Influences

The Harmozel project began pretty much in tandem with my recovery after nearly a decade spent in active heroin and crack cocaine addiction. At first, my goal was to try and play around with a few ideas that had been kicking around in my head during that period that I couldn’t ever actualize with all of my instruments in hock. Among other things, I’d long felt that there was a way to blend the riff-based jam songs used by a number of Krautrock groups (Can) and free jazz acts (Sun Ra) with slower heavier doom metal riffs; I’d thought there was a lot of potential in combining slower, power chord doom metal riffs with double time, black metal style tremolo variations on the same riff, and in incorporating old school Fender Rhodes and Hammond Organ sounds with more modern metal songwriting. As I expanded my focus on trying to turn these disparate ideas into a cohesive album, the scope of my project continued to grow. My quest to find a way to get my deep singing voice to work in a metal setting without resorting to just screams and gutturals led me to Gregorian chant. I started incorporating the Krautrock style freeform stuff as a fresh take on the guitar solo, interspersed between traditional songwriting forms (verse, chorus, bridge, etc) rather than as compositions in and of themselves. Instead of asking myself whether black metal and doom metal riffs could be used symbiotically, or whether old school EPs and drawbar organs had a place in doom metal, I started asking how these ideas could be used in the service of the broader whole. In the process I had to go back to the drawing board more times than I can count, but after nearly five years of daily work I feel as though I’ve reached a sound that draws from my diverse world influences while simultaneously being entirely my own own.

In terms of a more general list of influences, Harmozel has drawn extensively from the work of Black Sabbath, Candlemass, Elder, Can, Om, Slayer, Saint Vitus, and The Doors. There is also a clear debt to artists as varied as Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, Bob Dylan, Death, Thin Lizzy, Ulver, Sleep, The Allman Brothers, Sigh, Bruce Springsteen, Boris, The Smiths, and Deep Purple.