(written by Islander)
In late August Transylvanian Recordings will release a second album by Agonanist, which is the experimental music project of multidisciplinary artist Tyler Henthorn, who is based in San Francisco. The album’s title is The Spirit of Gravity, and the label describes its contents as: “Dark, Hypnotic, Dissonant & Mystical Black Metal. Somewhere between a fever dream and a claustrophobic nightmare. Sonically unruly, jarring, & entrancing.”
The album has many unusual aspects, which we explored with Tyler in an interview you’ll find near the end of this article. It was produced in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where Tyler lived for many years. Further, in creating the music he used microtonal instruments, experimenting with EDO (Equal Divisions of the Octave), cutting the octave into numerous steps, with side A of the album described as “a mix of 17ET and 12ET, and side B of 22ET” (with ET standing for “Equal Temperament”).
Moreover, Agonanist enlisted the participation of some notable guests. He sent demos of the songs to Andrew Lee (Ripped to Shreds), Colin Marston (Krallice, Gorguts, Behold the Arctopus), and Kevin Paradis (Benighted, Svart Crown), and gave them the freedom to put themselves into his compositions.
The results are indeed sonically unruly, jarring, and entrancing. Tyler explains: “The Spirit of Gravity represents inevitability, our experience of time being an illusion, causality being a continuous web that spans the entire universe where everything exists at once in a splatter of liquid.”
In reading those words, and in listening to the album, it’s not surprising to learn that Tyler is a fan of the great Polish science fiction author Stanisław Lem (1921-2006) and that the name Agonanist is derived from an episode in one of Lem’s stories. But more about that later (much later). For now we should turn to some of the music on The Spirit of Gravity, including a song named “The Gateway” that we’re premiering today.
The first single from the new album, “Effacement“, was revealed through a video premiere at Decibel. (That same feature included a short interview with Tyler, with questions we tried not to repeat in our own interview.) Immediately, drums blast away; horrid growls, vicious howls, and crazed screams explode; and dense riffing and synths sear but also manage simultaneously to sound dismal. Deep below, something immense undulates. High above, other frequencies convulse.
When the drumming rocks and the bass throbs, the upper range of sounds become nova-like in their blazing but feverishly writhing intensity. Eventually, brightly pinging notes dance their way through the buzzing and burning abrasion, reminding me a bit of something from L.A.’s Drab Majesty, and gnashing growls chill the skin. Gradually the song expands again — vast, eerie, dangerous, and deleterious.
You may have a very difficult time moving on from this song, as I did. When I first heard it I continued listening repeatedly, trying to understand better all the ingredients and how they worked together. It’s not conventional black metal by any definition, but it sure got its hooks in me.
And now let’s turn to “The Gateway” — a song about “death and infinity” that invites listeners to contemplate the impermanence of life and the inevitability of what follows.
This song is quite different from “Effacement“. Here, the drums are slow and steady, the bass is a low hum, and the guitars and keys spread a swath of stellar magnificence. The music flows in grand cascades, and within those sweeping sonic panoramas guitars brilliantly shiver. The atmosphere of these sounds is wondrous, but also daunting and even frightening.
The music becomes more frightening (and even oppressive) as deep, bestial growls gritty screams, and wrenching howls voice the words and as the riffing begins to dismally throb, miserably wail, and feverishly burn. The scale of the music still remains vast, and its sheen becomes near-blinding again. Haunted singing can be heard as if from a distance within the shimmering celestial expanse.
The rhythm section remain steady and solemn, but everything else combines to send shivers down listeners’ spines and open eyes wide.
Transylvanian Recordings will release The Spirit of Gravity on August 28th, and they recommend it for fans of bands like Xasthur, Leviathan, and Wormlust. It’s available for pre-order (on vinyl LP and digital formats) at this location:
https://transylvanianrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/agonanist-the-spirit-of-gravity
The lyrics are influenced by a photography project that I was working on at the time. After losing a cat that I really cared about, I made lots of connections in the rescue community and the cat meat industry. I was meeting trappers who were coming to my neighborhood at night to set wire snare traps near populations of strays, and next to food and water bowls outside people’s houses. I photographed a secret market which meets from 4 – 5am every night where a single buyer comes by and takes whatever was caught. I worked with friends and community members to photograph cat slaughterhouses, tiểu hổ restaurant owners, rescue shelters and animal lovers. 28mm with flash. Some of my work was given to an animal welfare organization, and some of it went into a photo book which I have not yet published.
How would you compare the music on the new album with the first Agonanist full-length, “The Cynicism of Solitude”? How would you describe the music’s evolution?
My writing process is exactly the same. I try to follow raw impulses and listen to where they take the music, and I subtract what isn’t working. The Cynicism of Solitude is the result of an earlier collection of experiments with 17EDO. By the time I started writing the material for The Spirit of Gravity, I had more familiarity with that tuning, and I had also done some experimentation with 22EDO and 15EDO. I’m trying new things all the time, and I’m throwing away ideas which aren’t any good.
I’ve read that the new album was produced in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and that the first Agonanist album was also created, in part, in Vietnam. You lived in the country for many years. Do you think its history, culture, and people have influenced Agonanist’s music, and if so, how?
I was creatively isolated, and that’s really what I wanted. My friends don’t know anything about my music. We drink coffee, and we ride dirt bikes in the forest where we get stranded half the time because somebody’s bike caught fire or there’s a hole in someone’s engine, and then it’s completely dark and we’re out of drinking water, and we’re sleeping in the mud with our gear on. The subject of shiteating experimental music never comes up, and so I am completely free of that sort of social distraction when I write.
Your music is quite intricate, stylistically multi-faceted, and I would say frequently quite surprising. Is there a process you follow in conceiving and constructing the songs?
The Spirit of Gravity is filled with riffs and ideas that are actually pretty simple, but they’re arranged in layers spanning two or three guitars. As for the changes in atmosphere over time, I think those are just something that the music is supposed to do. The album is a sequence of spaces distinct enough that one influences how you view another.
The intricacy of the music is rooted in part in your use of microtonal sounds and experimentation with EDO (Equal Divisions of the Octave). How did you learn to do this?
I spent time living out of a guitar case with only 17EDO instruments, some books and like 5 shirts. I forced myself to think through solutions using this tuning. I became familiar with its limitations, and developed patterns to help me put down coherent ideas in ways that leverage some of its more interesting qualities. My goal isn’t to be as dissonant or as alien as possible. I’m just making art with a different set of tools. I have no intention of creating music that sounds like my favorite bands.
And can you explain EDO and your use of it to people (like me) who are musically untrained and ignorant about the techniques?
My connection with tuning is more spiritual than analytical. For whatever reason, our brains like to hear pure ratios of small whole numbers. 12EDO happens to approximate a good number of them within a relatively small number of tones. 17EDO can approximate some of the same ratios to different degrees of accuracy, but it can also approximate a few more which sound very good and simply don’t exist in 12EDO. It’s a different set of colors and angles.
From my own listening to the new album I detect a range of stylistic influences. Are there particular bands or musicians who have influenced you more than others?
I don’t spend a lot of time learning other people’s songs. I love what Xiu Xiu is doing, Xasthur, Arvo Pärt, Stars of the Lid, Krallice. I grew up listening to The Smashing Pumpkins and Napalm Death. I don’t know to what degree any of these things on their own influence what I’m doing, but I try to pay attention to what happens internally when something interests me. I love combining music with books, though I try to be careful when I do it because the binding that results can be very powerful. Reading Kafka on the Shore while listening to Tangerine Dream’s Zeit for the first time as Kafka Tamura steps into the forest… I will never be able to separate those two works, and that experience probably influences me all the time.
You have some very notable guest appearances on the new album – Andrew Lee, Colin Marston, and Kevin Paradis. I’ve read that you sent them recorded demos but gave them creative freedom to put themselves into it. I assume they didn’t just mimic the instrumental parts you had included in your demos. What was the process like of working with them and incorporating their performances into the finished songs?
The demos are how I write the music. All instruments are included in some form at the time that the guitar parts are written. Every part exists in support of a vision. The music is then interpreted by artists who have creative outputs that I am familiar with, and the album is reinvented in ways that are far more interesting to me than if I had done it all myself or had used a drum machine.
What are your further plans for the balance of 2026?
The Spirit of Gravity is one of three albums that I wrote simultaneously. They’re all different. I also worked on an experimental release with the drummer from The Cynicism of Solitude where we wrote everything backwards from a seamless improvised session that he did. I have another release mastered for a drone music project of mine which incorporates microtonal synthesizers, field recordings and a quarter inch tape machine. And there is a photo book. I haven’t decided when any of these things will be released, or under what names.
STANISŁAW LEM
Now, as promised, we go back to the influence of Stanislaw Lem! He is best known for his novel Solaris, not only because it’s a tremendous book but also because it was made into a phenomenal 1972 film by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (and a 2002 movie by Steven Soderbergh that pales in comparison to Tarkovsky’s masterpiece). But Lem’s extensive writings included other novels and numerous short stories, all of which are worth your time.
Many of those short stories narrate the exceedingly strange, often satirical, and constantly thought-provoking adventures of space traveller Ijon Tichy. English-translation collections of those stories have been published in two volumes, The Star Diaries and Memoirs of a Space Traveller: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy.
Tyler Henthorn has said that the name Agonanist is taken from an English translation of a short story by Stanisław Lem, “wherein a civilization has engineered itself beyond recognition and robots have created a monastic religion which promises nothing.”
This rang a faint bell, which I thought might be ringing from within my copy of The Star Diaries. After a period of pleasurable searching, I found the story described in that quotation.
When I first drafted this article I identified and summarized the short story and explained the process of Agonanism described in the story, from which this project derived its name. But I decided to delete all that because I gather that Tyler prefers that people read everything by Stanisław Lem until they find the source for themselves, which I agree is worth doing!