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In 2008, Have A Nice Life released their monstrously bleak double album Deathconsciousness. This record set the standard for what can be accomplished by a couple of guys doing it all themselves. Tying together elements of shoegaze, drone, post-punk, and black metal, Deathconsciousness is a soul crushing experience. Tim Macuga and Dan Barrett were kind enough to answer some questions about this album and their other projects.

Dan mentioned in an interview with Sputnikmusic that you guys initially made “epic, poppy songs about killing people and blowing our brains out” on acoustic guitars that you performed with totally metal fervor at coffee shops. Since then, have you considered recording or performing acoustic versions of Have A Nice Life songs?

Dan:  Not really. A lot of those songs turned into songs we recorded (“Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000″ for instance, and “Who Would Leave Their Son Out In The Sun?”), and they’re much more fleshed-out now. That said, I still write a lot of our songs on acoustic guitar first – it’s an instrument we both feel comfortable picking up and messing around with, and I think that’s when you hit on a lot of your best ideas. The less you try to “come up” with something, the more honest you are. Most of those songs go on to be arranged with different instruments, but that’s not always the case. We’ll probably do more acoustic things in the future.

HANL prides itself in being overwhelmingly depressing, but there always seem to be uplifting moments shining through the fog, such as the end of “Earthmover.” Have you ever tried to make a song that was happy from beginning to end?

Tim: No, though I am a huge, huge fan of Andrew WK (party stuff or not). That band, touring 2003-2004. Holy shit. If we could figure out how to write stuff that sounds like several Christmases happening simultaneously, perhaps. However, I wouldn’t know how to fill it with honest content, which AWK does. Could we get away with lines like “Riding up to the top/Bringing lunch in advance/Riding up to the top/Bringing all that I can”? I just did a pretty primitive backcountry hike through the Grand Canyon last week, and definitely had to use that kind of sentiment to get through. As far as HANL being a mouthpiece for such messages, though, we’ve never sat down to see if we could be convincing.

D: When I am feeling really, really good I have no compunction whatsoever to sit down and make music. I don’t know why that is, but it is.

How does The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David, which you used as the cover art to Deathconsciousness, tie in to the ideas of the album?

D:  I’ve always loved the image and wanted to use it; it just seemed right at the time. It’s an image of death, which dominates most of the themes on the record. At the same time, we very deliberately cropped it to make it as impersonal as possible. It isn’t David anymore, it’s a faceless, featureless body in a bathtub. There’s other imagery in the painting that seemed to resonate with imagery in the songs, like the bathtub imagery in “The Big Gloom” and message imagery in “Telefony.” In the end, though, it’s like most aesthetic choices; primarily subconscious, and explained after-the-fact.

HANL is the second most played artist on Dan’s personal last.fm account. After putting so many years of work into making those songs, what do you get out of hearing them now?

T: I don’t do much with my last.fm account, but I probably revisit our recordings just as much as Dan. For me, it’s a lot of time spent scrutinizing engineering choices, developing an ear for how we can better represent our ideas next time. I’m somewhat beholden to the soundboard-as-instrument tao of Brian Wilson; hopefully, we’re learning to play it better as time passes.

D: A lot of that is from original mixing of the record, but I listen to my own stuff constantly, before and after release. I try to re-evaluate  what I like and what I don’t; I’ll go through phases where I love something, and then suddenly hate it the next time I hear it. I like to think it all coalesces somehow during songwriting.

Your Nahvalr project took the concept of lonely, solitary black metal and turned it on it’s head by having loads of musicians independently record that kind of thing which you and Tim then mixed into an obliteratingly dense piece of music. Who participated and how did you approach them with the idea?

T: We told a number of people about the general aesthetic, and the ones who felt they had matching material submitted it. My brother recorded some brass bits, we built the death gallop in “Chorus of Blasphemes” around them. I really don’t remember too much about the process. A lot of material, a lot of editing, a lot of reshaping ideas – both ours in respect to the ones that came in, and vice versa.

D: We really just posted about the idea and said that anyone could contribute anything at anytime. Stuff came in at various times during the process. It was much, much harder than we expected, but we more or less accomplished what we wanted to accomplish.

What is the sound from hell that is discussed in the sample on the first track?

D: It’s from a radio show called “Coast To Coast AM.” It’s still on, now, but back in the 90′s it was hosted by Art Bell, who would cover all kinds of paranormal, conspiracy stuff. That clip is amazing. It plays throughout the entire Nahvalr track. It just seemed like the perfect introduction.

Dan’s solo project, Giles Corey, takes it’s name from a farmer who was crushed to death on accusation of being a warlock. On Enemies List, the project is described as an autobiographical story of your struggle with suicidal depression. What is the connection between the historical Giles Corey and the project?

D: The Giles Corey image is something that’s used extensively on the recording. The record is actually going to come with a pretty extensive book I’m currently writing; I’m going to go into a lot more there. It isn’t that it “means something;” there’s no simple explanation. Instead, I tried to incorporate it multiple ways, use different meanings, to use it as a jumping-off point. Essentially, Giles Corey is the suicidal-self; a person crushed by life. He represents the person in the songs, a person that doesn’t really exist, anymore. I find it almost easier to deal with the things on the record through that legendary-medium, rather than through straight realism.

What other influence has the history of New England had on you?

T: We have some press pictures from a feral cemetery in Colebrook, CT. Corner of nowhere. Corner of the map in the original Legend of Zelda. Nearby, there’s a headstone set for two children, early 19th century, dead on the same day. They fell through the ice on the lake on their way back from school. That story is there, in that spot, for as long as people care to discover it. New England is our home. With that said, it’s also not terribly special, the whole continent is littered with obscure human interest stories thousands of years old, much older than the lake kids.

D: We’re both historians by training. It influences a lot of what we do, because it’s what we like. I wouldn’t say it’s conscious, though; more that we find ourselves responding emotionally to certain things, and just take it from there.

What sort of impact did seeing fans crying at your shows have on you? Does that sort of reaction make the shows a success, even if you guys didn’t sound exactly as you had wanted?

D: I don’t want to overplay it, but there was an obvious emotional outpouring, both on our part and on the part of the audience. To be honest, I couldn’t see it happening while we were playing, because I was too caught up in my own moment; and I think that’s how it was for the band as well. That was at our first show, and while the other shows were much better, and we had some similar audience reaction, it wasn’t the same for me. I think there were a lot of things building up over a long period of time – that moment of release is what I wanted more than anything, and we got it in a very visceral way – throwing up, passing out afterwards, and so on. It makes it better to know that other people shared that experience – that it wasn’t just us flipping out for no reason – but ultimately, it’s personal, personal for us and personal for them. It can’t be faked or planned, it just happens. It was moving.

Tim mentioned in an interview with Scenepointblank that you guys do an unhealthy amount of reading. Do you have any book recommendations for fans of HANL?

T: Anything by William T. Vollman – Poor People, as well as Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means aren’t always terribly on point, but they’re great argument starters. What else… Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Barrington Moore, Jr. Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, Isaiah Berlin’s Hedgehog and the Fox. I picked up Garry Wills’ Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, which was a solid read, maybe too pat. Nixon Agonistes is definitely one of my all time favorites. I’ve gotten into Philip K. Dick recently, too. I dunno, it’s hard to list this stuff without having it sounding like a pompous pissing contest.

D: I’m in the middle of writing a book about the label, and writing a master’s thesis, so to be honest I barely read anything that isn’t academic. We happen to be drawn to stories, real or fictional, of people doing epic things in epic ways, even if all they’re doing is failing. In the end, though, you should just read what you need to read. Read the book that you’ll feel like a hero for reading.

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