Jesse is what you might call a prolific writer. It’s not uncommon to find his pieces topping 8,000 words on a single subject. Fastidious in his physical publication of Black Ivory Tower, Jesse also speaks, writes and edits in a number of languages. Aside from being intelligent and verbose though, Jesse provides something in music journalism that is often lacking: brutally honest, opinionated, often contrary, well-reasoned arguments that are enticing and captivating (whether you agree with him or not). For a time Nine Circles was fortunate enough to have Jesse on staff. Those days are now long gone as his sabbatical from music writing has led him to do some podcast work for Heathen Harvest (another publication he used to write for) and I guess focus on soccer and room temperature beer or whatever else Dutch people tend to do these days. Hop over the jump to read one of the most honest, unrelenting profiles we have published to date.

How did you first get into writing and podcasting and have you achieved all your wildest dreams?

Pretty lame story actually. Like many kids, I was into gaming when I was young, and I found it fascinating to read magazines with huge (likely bribed) reviews of my favourite releases. When I was in my early teens, I started to write video game reviews, which luckily weren’t published anywhere. I even wrote some of them in half-broken English for some weird reason.

Bad as they may have been, writing had always been one of my main talents. Or at least, teachers and relatives noticed I excelled in it relative to other skills, such as the gleeful art of finger-painting. As such, I was always writing about whatever was occupying my mind. Initially this resulted in short stories and the afore-mentioned shoddy video game reviews, but eventually I started writing about films, books and (when I reached uni) academic matters. I always aced my writing assignments at university, and I think some of the skills I acquired there seeped into Black Ivory Tower, which was my first major effort to get into music-writing.

Podcasting is something I’d been wanting to do for a long while, but for some reason I never got around to doing it before some guest appearances at your Nine Circles place. When I was younger, I would record fake radio shows with my cousin and some friends, which were all about weird voices, fart noises and prank calls. Since then, I’ve always had the latent desire to sling bullshit into the airwaves once more. Apart from my cameos at 9C, this became a reality only recently, when I started co-hosting the Heathen Harvest podcast.

What’s the most you have ever debased yourself to get a promo, guest list or interview that you really cared about?

I can count the times I’ve responded positively to promo requests on one hand. (And for the record, I do only have 5 fingers on each hand.) I have never once requested a promo myself, leading me to conclude that this question is not suited for a sincere person such as moi.

Still, as an old rap group put it: “only homos sell promos”.

Since you live in Europe I have to ask you about European things. What’s it like to enjoy a soccer match? Do you have a team that you root for in particular? Have you ever been involved in a soccer riot? Are you a hooligan?

FOOTBALL matches can be quite entertaining, granted that the stadium atmosphere is good enough. I’ve noticed there’s a big difference between the sports cultures of North America and Europe, in that club loyalty in Europe is much more tied to the local roots and culture, and therefore much more intensely experienced. Compare this to the US, where the basketball team the Charlotte Hornets went through numerous relocations and rebrandings before returning to their original location and name. That simply wouldn’t be possible in Europe. Here, there have even been examples of the city council bailing out the local football team.

I like several teams. My local club is AZ, who became national champions a few years ago but have since been gradually been sinking back into their neutral state of mediocrity. Foreign clubs I enjoy are Schalke 04 (Germany) for their EXCELLENT atmosphere and fans, as well as Real Madrid for reasons that I find increasingly difficult to justify.

In the end, though, I care less about football with each passing year. Watching football is ultimately just another passive distraction, and I prefer to spend my time on more productive things. I’m definitely a hooligan, though: my name instills terror at the local hopscotch club.

What are some of the most important issues (social/political/humorous/etc.) for you and how do you (or do you at all) insert those issues into your writing/videos? Since I know you a bit, I would love for you to expound on politics in metal writing and how pervasive it has become lately for writers to judge bands so harshly based on their lyrics or personal lives.

This will take a while to explain, so bear with me.

It has always amazed me how what I thought was a fringe ideology is so prevalent in metal “journalism”, namely the social justice-oriented liberal left of the US. In my initial perception, such topics as white privilege, microaggressions, transphobia and The Patriarchy™ were restricted to murky, peripherical Tumblr blogs that may or may not be poor attempts at satire (Poe’s Law reigns strong in those regions). Yet as I connected with more colleagues residing on the other side of the Great Puddle, it dawned upon me that this is the go-to set of ideals for metal writers, at least as far as the more prolific ones are concerned. Whenever publications such as MetalSucks, Noisey and CvltNation (who can, by the way, all suck my balls) delve into the realm of politics, they always approach it from the same angle of snarky, smug liberalism that leaves little room for intellectual contemplation as it merely dictates (often poorly) what we should think.

Now, said ideology is largely alien to Europe in and of itself, but even by local standards I’m on what many would call the ‘right’ end of the political spectrum (or the ‘wrong’ side of history according to many of your readers). That is to say I am strongly in favour of maintaining traditional values, I prefer nationalism to globalism, and I do not believe in democracy, equality, multiculturalism, feminism or any of the other totems of the post-religious West. Not a lot of imagination is required to see how this may motivate me to pursue an approach that differs greatly from the narratives that most of my peers like to cling to.

Taking the above into account, I see the modernisation / Americanisation / globalisation of Europe as something which undermines all that I love about this place. Since the end of World War 2, the US have held most of Europe in a political and cultural chokehold, to a point where I would consider most European governments mere vassals (save for brave nations such as Hungary, Belarus and Russia). The heralded European Union, too, is a grotesque institution that destroys nation after nation with its detrimental neoliberal agenda and anti-European, mafia-like behaviour. This Europe is a bastardisation of everything our ancestors have built across millennia; a brusque interruption of our natural cultural evolution, which is now simply being replaced with androgynous American gutter culture instead of being developed organically. I hope history will have no mercy for those who have allowed for this to happen.

Giménez Caballero, a Spanish philosopher and politician I like to namedrop a lot, posed that a crisis in art and a crisis in politics are interwoven; effectively, they are the crumbling, crooked branches of the same rotten tree. While his observation reflected on the Interbellum period, it can just as easily be applied to the present day. Just as an example, I see the nihilistic, self-destructive policies of Merkel’s Germany on one hand, and the superficiality of activistic performance art on the other as distinct manifestations of the same mentality – that of perceiving anything in the most mundane, one-dimensional light. This is also why there is such an abundance of sanctimonious ‘think pieces’ on what a musician or other public figure might think about [insert current affair here]. When the world of politics panders to the lowest common denominator and is inevitably dumbed down to an outright vulgar degree, it is no wonder that people will also strip down art until they can categorise it according to the same platitudinous morality. Hence why the question of whether Inquisition play good music suddenly becomes irrelevant in the light of a juicy story about what they might’ve said about Hitler to a random bloke in a tour bus.

To (finally) tie this all back to yours truly, a lot of my work as a music writer can be seen in this light. Many of my articles lament the decline of European culture, while establishing a connection with the music at hand. Metal, being a fringe genre at the end of the day, attracts a relatively high number of people who feel disconnected from mainstream society, which is why it is a good source of artists who – if you permit me another gratuitous namedrop – “revolt against the modern world”. The best metal bands out there should in some way transcend the mundane connotations of political and personal ponderings, and allude to higher truths and values. This is why I have openly talked about / with bands on the far ends of the political spectrum (communists, national-socialists, anarchists, etc.) without ever feeling the need to insert a disclaimer to convince the audience I really, really, really am a good guy who #feelsthebern. I don’t “call out” bands on spicey statements, also because I don’t expect my readership to consist of hypersensitive toddlers with self-diagnosed PTSD. To me, the question of whether or not I agree with the artist’s political views, extreme as they might be, is moreover wholly irrelevant. I find it more interesting to look at how these ideas interact with the compositions and the many other facets that together make the music an artistic whole.

What, or who, got you into metal and how old were you? Was your family supportive?

Part of my family was definitely supportive, because it was my brother who got me into the likes of Metallica, Slayer and Sodom when I was 13 years old. I even remember the exact moment I wanted to get into metal: my brother was listening to Metallica’s “Creeping death” (the version from Live at Blindman’s Ball 1997) and I asked him to make a copy for me, undoubtedly much to the dismay of Lars Ulrich.

It didn’t take long before I discovered the more extreme stuff, which eventually resulted in me getting stuck in the wonderous world of black metal. While that is still my favourite subgenre, my tastes have shifted quite a bit over the years. Of course I started with the accessible poppy BM bands such as Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth, before moving on to the Norwegian classics, the Greek and French scenes, and eventually the Slavic greats. Now my favourite bands include Peste Noire, Kamaedzitca, Drudkh, Nokturnal Mortum, Isa, Hate Forest, Sühnopfer, Zemial, Agatus and Kawir. And I just realised that, being 27, I’ve now been into metal for the bigger part of my life.

What’s the stickiest you have ever been?

I work out 5 times a week, so if you want to see what sticky is, just drop by my gym sometime.

There’s probably a lewd double-entendre in there somewhere, but I’ll leave the honour of finding it to the creative whims of a malicious editor.

What advice do you have for aspiring music critics out there?

As Shayne Mathis said in your interview with him, there is no such thing as an <<aspiring>> music writer. Any retard can register a domain and type away about whatever music he’s into. That’s what I did anyway.

While it’s starting to become a bit of a cliché to bring this up, it is important to realise that there is very little money in music writing in general, and even less in the metal niche. To illustrate, I’ve been writing about metal for various publications since 2011, and I haven’t made a dime off it. Part of this has to do with me not wanting to attach my name to most of the professional publications out there because I think they’re terrible (telling them to suck my balls probably doesn’t help much, either), but even those gigs wouldn’t have been enough to afford as much as a month’s rent.

Once you’ve accepted the reality described above and you’re still willing to give music writing a go, for God’s sake, try and be original. Read other publications and ask yourself what you are missing, and what you could really add to the endless ocean of reviews, interviews and editorials already out there.

One way to distinguish yourself is of course to write about underground bands that do not get coverage by the bigger publications, but you should also think about the way in which you will discuss these bands. Are you going to stick to the standard 150-word blurbs you see in every magazine, or are you going for something more substantial? I highly recommend the latter, because while the sheer volume of metal publications is overwhelming, quality is scarce. What I personally like to do is to try and get readers to think about the music at hand in a different way, so that, even if they may already be familiar with an album or artist, they’ll still want to go back and re-evaluate their opinion. Even the finest detail may greatly alter the way we listen to an album, so I make it my mission to unearth these small nuggets of relevant new information, because they’re always out there.

In any case, it is important to try out new things and rise above mediocrity in any facet of life, and it is no different for this quirky hobby.

Oh, and one last thing. There are a lot of people out there who will tell you about the “do’s” and “dont’s” of writing about music. Common tips are not using the first-person perspective, avoiding certain words, adhering to an [x] word-limit… My advice? Ignore all of it. Good writing is good writing, and even if you end up using a redundant, vague, stupid word like ‘ethereal’ in one of your reviews, it won’t make or break the inherent quality of your craft.

You produced your own Zine for a while, Black Ivory Tower. It was actually really good. But then, after only two issues you decided to cut bait and run. Does being a quitter go hand in hand with being European? Just kidding, on a serious note, can you let us know why you stopped writing that marvelous zine and what some of the difficulties were in publishing those two issues?

I don’t know if being a quitter is typically European, but it’s still more honourable than the American tactic of dropping in as the battle has been all but won, and then taking full credit for the victory.

Anyway, I stopped almost all music-writing activities for the time being, simply because I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to. In the past, I would gladly sacrifice a weekend of heavy drinking to write a 4000-word editorial (whilst drinking heavily), but now it can take me weeks to even pen a small blurb.

The magazine was a particularly time-consuming ordeal, as apart from handling at least 50% of the writing, I was also in charge of the design, the (copy-)editing, most of the finances and all logistics involved. All things considered, I would spend about 2 months sacrificing nearly all social activities and considerable amounts of sleep and peace-of-mind in favour of creating the magazine, plus another month of playing mailman when I had to send all those copies around the world. While the idea has always been to break even, I made significant financial losses on both issues. They were losses that I could handle, but when I realise I could also spend that amount of money on a holiday or whatever, it just becomes decreasingly attractive to dedicate myself to such a time and money-consuming process. I’m glad the reception of both issues has been good, but for now I prefer to concentrate on other things.

Finally, what are some of your favorite not-metal listening favorites?

Folk rivals metal as my favourite genre of music, so this list will include quite a bit of that:

Knyazhaya Pustin / Isa / Lesnoy Tanets – Spletenye: This excellent split of Siberian folk offers the ultimate tribute to Russian nature and spirituality, and does so whilst adding a hint of metal. My album of the year of 2015.

Osuna y leña – El sol de los venados: The debut EP of the new project of my friends Antonio and Francisco from Cóndor. Post-rock/folk that’s very classy and heartfelt.

Spanxti – Dievo žirgai, laimės ratai: Lithuanian folk with a good range of emotions, going from melancholia to joy. The singer’s voice is excellent.

Kamaedzitca – xQzTN 3087: Experimental album by my favourite band, which combines electronic music and traditional Belarusian folk. A true experience.

Horyń – Da padaj, Boža, klučy…: Traditional Belarusian folk group that travels around the countryside learning songs from peasants. With this release, they preserves some of these songs on record for future generations.

Stary Olsa – Heraichny epas: Another folk band from Belarus. Their traditional repertoire is excellent, and for those who don’t care about such ancient songs, nowadays they also regularly cover bands like Deep Purple, Metallica and Nirvana in medieval style.

Darkwood – Notwendfeuer: Nostalgic neofolk which captures the true essence of the German spirit, whose physical manifestation has long since died. More valuable if you understand German.

Dernière Volonté – Devant le miroir: Military pop from the ever-stylish Geoffroy D. Again, a basic understanding of the native language (in this case French) is recommended.

Rome – A passage to Rhodesia: Rome’s magnum opus. Very poppy and catchy, yet sophisticated and dark. The excellent poetry and music make this an artistic highlight.

Yanka Dyagileva – Styd i sram: Dreary folk and (post-)punk by a woman who died many years ago. Hard to handle if you’re already feeling down, but fatally beautiful nonetheless.

Grazhdanskaya Oborona – Dolgaya schastlivaya zhizn: Psychedelic rock/post-punk by the most legendary band from the Soviet Union/Russia. If you aren’t going to listen to this fantastic album, at the very least read up on their peculiar history.

KINO – Posledniy geroy:  One of the most influential pop/rock bands from the Soviet Union. Everyone in Eastern Europe knows them, so in addition to being great to listen to, they’re also a good conversation starter in those regions.

Zhaoze – 1911: Instrumental post-rock from China that incorporates heavy influences from Chinese traditional music and Western classical music. 1911 in particular is nothing short of a masterpiece, and you’d be an absolute fool not to give it a chance at least.

Lönndom – Viddernas tolv kapitel: While Lönndom started out as a black metal band, this release contains only rustic folk ballads that panegyrise nature. In the vein of Ulver’s Kveldssanger, but considerably better.

Halgadom – Heimstatt: A German neofolk album that doesn’t stand out in terms of technique or performance, but nonetheless provides a good dose of singalong material. That is, if you know your German from your Dutch.

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Thanks to Jesse for his time!