Standard Interrogation Techniques: Five Questions for Wilderun (Interview)

Although I’d ideally love to be able to conduct hard-hitting, in-depth interviews, who has the time these days? In lieu of this, I’ve thrown together the below question template, hopefully to gather some interesting and informative results, without taking up too much of anyone’s time.

Introduce yourself – who are you and what do you do?

My name is Evan, and I sing and play rhythm guitar for Wilderun. I am also sort of the main songwriter for the band, although it is a very collaborative process. I simply provide the skeletons of the songs, and the rest of the band helps arrange and colour them to make them what they are now.

Tell us about your latest release and why people should listen to your music

Our latest album is called Epigone, and it is our 4th studio album. For anyone who hasn’t heard us before, it is hard to describe quickly, but the most succinct way I could probably put it is “cinematic metal”. I know that sounds pretentious, but I wouldn’t say we quite fit into the category of “symphonic metal”, even though that’s probably the closest tag we could give ourselves among the more well-known genres. That specific tag sort of points to certain tropes that I don’t think we necessarily fall into. We are indeed big fans of epic, dramatic, over-the-top music, but we try to do that style of music in a way that feels genuine and meaningful to us, not fleeting, and uses both escapism and introspection together as a unit. We started out as a much more straightforward folk metal band, and we keep a lot of those influences and aesthetics, but our songwriting has changed a lot over the years, drawing inspiration from progressive music, film scores, electronic, indie music, and a lot more.

What’s the most important thing to you about your music? What meaning does it give you and what purpose does it serve in your life?

I’m probably once again going to sound fairly pretentious, but I think it’s ultimately all about transcendence in some form. I don’t even necessarily mean that in some life-altering, profound way, we definitely don’t have any great lessons to teach anyone. But the music that I personally get the most joy and love for is music that takes me out of the day-to-day, earthly neurosis that plagues most of living, and makes things feel more in flow and harmonious (pun intended). It’s hard to put into words, but that’s exactly why it’s the thing that matters most.

Tell us a lesser-known interesting or funny anecdote about your band or music

I can’t think of anything very funny at the moment, but I do wanna highlight Katie Müller for her guest vocals on Epigone, since I don’t think we’ve mentioned her nearly enough. She is actually Dan’s wife (our bassist/synth guy), and in addition to her great vocal abilities, she is also an excellent artist and designed a t-shirt for our last tour. Her work can be seen at https://www.instagram.com/k.muller.art/

Finally, what are you listening to at the moment that you especially enjoy and wish more people knew about?

I’ve said it many times, so I’ll say it again here, but Major Parkinson is the most underrated band I have ever heard in my life, so I just wanna use as many platforms as possible to get their name out there. They are an arty, proggy, experimental rock band from Norway that takes a lot of influences from dark cabaret and surf rock music, and they are just masterful songwriters. The fact that they aren’t more well known is the greatest evidence I have for my utter confusion as to what gets popular or not, even amongst smaller, niche circles. It’s relieving in a way, cause they make me less confused about our own difficulties getting noticed, cause I don’t think we hold a candle to them musically. Another example is Clarence Clarity, a really unique and colourful glitchy-pop producer. Always surprised how few people are familiar with his work.