Hexvessel
Hexvessel’s fourth album of avant-garde folk and pastoral psychedelia saw founder Mat McNerney pausing to really focus on their purpose. From synchronicity to symbolism, rituals to letting go of inhibitions, Prog takes a step into their enchanting world…
Being at one with their surroundings is key for the Anglo-Finnish outfit…
For anyone who’s already encountered Hexvessel over the past seven years, it will come as no surprise that band founder Mat McNerney observed the recent winter solstice at Stonehenge. “I was with my wife [bandmember Marja Konttinen] and our son, and it’s something we were doing actively as a family,” he says, sitting in the rather more urban location of a cocktail bar in London. “I’m getting him engaged by it and excited by it, so it was more like a wholesome thing, like everything feels connected. So that’s how it’s been actually in the three years since he’s been born, is trying to get more ritual into our lives. It’s how we want to make albums, too, as a spiritual journey. So we’ve made the new one a ritual. We want to make sure we observe all these things and we’re not just pagans by name.
It’s a way of life.”
Having first cut his teeth in the more progressive outposts of the underground metal scene in the early 00s, McNerney found his true calling when he relocated from
London to Finland, where the Celtic folklore related to him in his childhood found an echo in the forests surrounding Tampere. Gathering a collective of like-minded souls, his first outing under the Hexvessel banner, 2011’s Dawnbearer, fused mysticism, bucolic folk and a distinct avant-garde sensibility that’s since matured into more accessible but richer, more rapt songwriting and has found its apotheosis on new album All Tree. Here you’ll find the wistful pastoralism that ran through both English and Finnish 70s psychedelia fertilised anew by the kind of conviction, scope and fearless, fully immersive world-building you don’t achieve without some dedicated belief system driving you on. From the album’s opening traditional Finnish song, Blessing, that you could imagine the villages of Summerisle chanting to herald a new dawn, through the frolicking and fiddle-strewn Wilderness Spirit to the mournful, Brecht-tinged Liminal Night that harks back to their debut and the aching beautiful wake of Closing Circles that provides a final act of heart-heavy liberation, All Tree can sail close to the wind in terms of outright hippiedom, but it’s navigated by musicians with a finely calibrated internal compass.
A band bound to the cycles of nature and such a personal journey for its founder, Hexvessel albums tend to be spiritual marker points. After three albums exploring different aspects of the band, this was an opportunity for McNerney to both take stock and rediscover its true essence.
“I went out to the summer house, and I wrote this in the countryside,” he explains. “I did it as a daily exercise, and with the countryside in mind and the influences around it, and that isolation, I was thinking a lot about what Hexvessel meant to me, and why I started this project in the first place.
I’d been finding it really difficult to get inspired by anything in music up to that point, and I really thought that maybe I was just going to give it all up and retreat into a different way of living, that maybe I’ve had enough or I’ve done enough, achieved enough, and for me at this level that’s as successful as things would get. But me and the band had been talking about the old songs, old poetry and old stories and me getting interested in my past, those Celtic tales, so it’s from those that the inspiration came. I started thinking what it is about songwriting that I really appreciate, not just going into a studio and making a noise, but how a song can impact and change your life. I wanted to feed back into that eternal song, that eternal story and give back to that somehow.”
Recording again with renowned producer Jaime Gomez Arellano, McNerney felt that the best way to avoid falling into repeated patterns was to terraform the studio into a space where something magical could arise.
“We talked about how we wanted to do the rituals at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day, and when someone arrives and when someone leaves. I asked him, ‘Can we turn your studio into a temple, are you going to be weirded out by this?’” And it was really important that nobody joked around and everybody took it seriously.
“I really wanted this to be a magic, special thing that I read about in England’s Hidden Reverse [A Secret History Of The Esoteric Underground] when you hear about Coil watching spirits come in and out of the studio while they’re listening to mixes. And it really became that. We did those rituals and when we said goodbye and deconstructed the altar, we did a closing ritual. We went out and the spirits that were helping us make the album, we let them go into the fields, and this wind flew back through us. I’m almost going to cry just thinking about it. I got this real sense of gratitude and the spirits flew back, they were happy to be free, but they were also happy to have been a part of it, and I felt so happy that we had done this thing this way, and I was instantly crying. I turned around and everybody was crying as well, and no one had said a word. It’s like that when you make something that everybody is spiritually invested in. You can call it what you want, it’s spiritual and it’s something magical, and I think that comes through on the record.”
As with Opeth and Katatonia, Hexvessel’s journey from the metal scene their members were founded in to broader audiences more aligned with their psych, folk and progressive influences has been gradual, but it has become increasingly defining. For McNerney, the inspiration he took from prog wasn’t just musical, but also a cue to let go of inhibitions.
“It’s brave,” he says, “all those old [prog] bands took things that people said, ‘Those can’t go together,’ but they did, and it works, and I like that. At the time it probably sent people nuts, but now it’s normal. You should not be afraid of being exposed if you’re doing something honest; you’re not doing something stylistically people can easily tune into without giving something of themselves to.”
That connection took on a more personal resonance with the recording of the album. Having recruited a flute player for All Tree, it was only when Mat started researching him later that he found out his pedigree.
“When I started doing the credits I wanted to look him up, I discovered he’d sung in Uriel, been in National Health and he was on the classic Egg albums. He’s a UK prog legend, Mont Campbell he used to be called, and now he’s called Dirk Campbell. Arzachel by Uriel is a prog gem, it’s one of my favourite records.
“It’s such synchronicity, but it happens with Hexvessel a lot, where these connections come together,” he continues. “His parts on the record are really key, but just when he finished his flute playing, his daughter was killed in Syria defending the Kurdish rebels. Changeling, one of the songs he played on, was about going into the forest and disappearing, where you leave something of yourself behind and you become something else. It was sort of how I felt moving out to Finland, going into the forest and letting that become part of me, losing my old self and changing into something else. But when I thought about how she lived her life, how she’d been a rebel hippie for years, and then felt she had to get involved and do something, it became her story.”
Symbolism is a thread throughout All Tree, not least in the cover art, depicting two hands joined together in front of an oak trunk, suggesting both that sense of connection and a protest that reflects Hexvessel’s activism on behalf of nature conservation. As McNerney explains, there’s also a more specific reference.
“It’s a symbol of poetry and storytelling in Finnish mythology called Kalevala. It’s told in a meter rhyme that you’re meant to hold hands like that and you rock backwards and forwards as you tell the Kalevala, and in the earliest forms, all Finnish poetry was sung. They would hold hands and each would sing these stanzas. It’s poetry, but poetry is storytelling, is song, is connection. What is telling in the artwork is what we’re telling in the songs. It’s about what we have in common. That’s the symbolism of the title; we’re all part of nature, we’re all connected and there’s something we can fundamentally tune into, and it’s that very early storytelling. I want to get to that source. I want to dig there in the same way that jazz musicians want to get down to the core.”
All Tree is out February 15 via Secret Trees/ Century Media. See www.hexvessel.com for more.
THE BAND AND I HAD BEEN TALKING ABOUT THE OLD SONGS, OLD POETRY AND OLD STORIES, AND I WAS GETTING INTERESTED IN MY PAST, THOSE CELTIC TALES, SO IT’S FROM THOSE THAT THE INSPIRATION CAME.