By Arne Sjostedt
Last year Rock City Jester profiled Northbourne Flats, and discussed their single Paralysed....
Read as band member Kahlil discusses the song and catch the video for said single here!
Did you intentionally design the track to have the kind of sonic structure you hear in Stairway to Heaven, or is that a coincidence?
Interesting that you should say that. It was designed around a sonic structure, but the idea originally was that of being half, you know the two songs Hey Hey, My My (Out of the Blue) and My My, Hey Hey (Into the Black) by Neil Young's Crazy Horse? It was supposed to be half one, ie. the quiet one, and half the other.
It does have some kind of gradual build, but the idea of it being very black and then white comes from those two Neil Young songs.
A story about a witch that visits you at the end of your bed. How did that come about?
It the was originally inspired by an episode of sleep paralysis, and that episode triggered a lot of research at my end, and really delving into a lot of information on line and a few books about sleep paralysis and its history and how its effected millions of people all across the world. And throughout time you can see various explanations for it in different cultures and mythology, with demons that sit on your chest when you wake up. In Scandinavian and Germanic culture there’s witches, and fairies in Ireland and stuff like that. And that really interested me.
And making it a witch was true to my own experience but at the same time it has a really broad archetypal significance that resonates with a lot of people. It’s an image that a lot of people get when they have sleep paralysis. And it’s a way of drawing on those familiar stories that people have to explain the experience. And I think that’s why I chose the witch specifically.
Collective supernatural experiences sound fascinating. It’s hard to understand how they happen, yet they do!
We are so lucky to have modern science to point to and talk about how your body hasn’t woken up from paralysis but your brain has woken up from dreaming or something like that, but back when those stories or those myths and legends formed, that’s all people had to describe the terrifying experience that they had had, and this petrifying vision at the end of your bed. So fair cop to them, going ‘That was definitely a demon, that thing that woke me up.’
