Vitals

Harmozel is a Doom/Trad/Psychedelic Metal project inspired by the likes of Elder, Cirith Ungol, Candlemass and Gregorian chant. Furnace-forged riffs hammered into a kaleidoscope of blood and hallucinatory visions.

Introduction

So if you ended up here, my best guess is you encountered some of Harmozel's music out there somewhere and you were so perplexed/baffled that you decided to google me (or you're into Gnosticism and about to be sorely disappointed). The best way I can describe this project is as a kind of tell for my entire musical development. If you've never heard of a tell, the term comes from archaeology. They are artificial mounds that look similar to hills, but are formed from stratified layers of human development in long-settled areas. People build new buildings on the foundations of previous buildings, and what you end up with is a thousand layer cake that captures the city as living entity.

I like to think of Harmozel as something similar. It is the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime spent immersed in music: as a fan, a musician, and nerd who has always been way too interested in dissecting the hows and whys of the art form that left such an impression on his life. Heavy metal is the bedrock upon which this project has come into being, and while doom and traditional metal are dearest to my heart you will see plenty of evidence of most of the other major subgenres here, including some left field choices like thrash metal that don't you don't see blended with doom metal as often as their blackened and deathened cousins.

Then there are the, shall we say less conventional additions. The atonal piano solos and solos with seven rapid fire key changes squished in. In them, you can hear the evidence of the first time I ever got stoned and had my skull blown open by the Rhodes piano on No Quarter or the slow-burn romance with Krautrock that was fermented in my adolescence and aged into something purer and more refined with each passing year. Just as the ruins of earlier civilizations can be divided between things that were built for practical purposes to address specific problems, such as roman aqueducts, and those that were built for beauty alone, some of my musical decisions were based on neccessity while others were done purely in service of the sounds they create. The Gregorian chant was born of my struggle to make my deep voice fit with the genre I'm working with, while my decision to use a Johnny Marr inspired guitar part overtop a black metal style riff was the result of a lengthy search to musically represent a hero triumphing over the bleakest odds.

Anyway, I hope that gave you a better sense of how this project came to be, and I really hope you enjoy it. Thanks for reading.