Khadavra is a progressive rock band from Sweden with its roots in progressive rock. They dig deep into the untapped subconscious and seek the unknown.

Black Widow Records released their second album, ‘Hypnagogia’ in 2020.

Khadavra is a project that has been active for quite a few years now. Would you like to talk a bit about your background?

Alexander Eriksson: Yeah, sure! In the spring of 2012 I was working at a small music store in my hometown, Arvika, where I met Sebastian (not my brother, who currently plays guitar in the band). He played guitar and was really keen on starting a band, and so was I. He wanted to play some kind of doom-metal, which was kind of cool for me as I just wanted to play whatever, to begin with. This was when my prog-exploration and appreciation peaked, so I kind of knew what I really wanted to do in a band, but I had to start with just finding a setting that would allow me to play drums. Loudly. We needed a bass player so I asked my artist-brother, Seb who joined forces with us. We started jamming some songs by Sleep and Black Sabbath. We then found a singer, Marcus, who just showed up to like 20% of our rehearsals… but well, we wrote our first song! (Sadly not recorded, but bits of can be found on YouTube, in a video of our first concert). After our debut show that summer Seb was fed up with playing bass (after all, he was/is a guitarist) and wanted to change to guitar. This led me asking Jón Klintö to jam with us. A classical musician (he played French horn in orchestra ensembles and studied music at that time) I met through a friend at music school the year before when we all three jammed some riffs while being drunk one random night…whatever. He was keen on trying it out! So he came by at a rehearsal. We started to jam. All three of us was firing each other up in a way I’ve never experienced before, pushing, at least me, to play things that I never knew I could or even wanted to play! We were ecstatic. Not Sebastian though… not amused at all. He had just turned off his amp, sat down on the couch and watched us. A couple of days after he came by to tell me he had no idea where we were heading but he was not interesting in joining, and quit. And there, in the autumn of 2012 the Khadavra-seed was planted. We were very different individuals. Different from each other, but from everyone else in that little town as well. That has always been something we have been trying to encapsulate, emulate and enforce in our music. Strangeness. The unique, rare, obscure, mystic, alien. What worked as a bridge between us though was: Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and Opeth. And our love and appreciation for those three together.

“Our sound is a lot about dynamics, contrasts, emotions, expression and organic ways of doing things”

We can hear that you were influenced by progressive rock from the seventies. How would you describe your sound?

Yes, that is in part very much true. The one progressive rock band we share admiration for is Pink Floyd, and that band has in many ways worked as a template for us. More for their approach to music, atmospheric and cinematic sounds they used to produce live around ’69-’72. When I started the band in 2012 I was totally absolved by all things progressive from the 70’s. And what I was most drawn toward was the eclectic, more harsh and heavy sound of bands like King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator but also the exquisite complexity of Gentle Giant, Yes and Frank Zappa. Genesis was most days my go-to band though. Peter Gabriel can always make me shiver a bit… I worked in a store selling music instruments back in those days, and as we didn’t really have a lot of customers I spent most of the time exploring music (we had speakers in the store which I could blast out any tune of my liking). This is also the time when I found Anekdoten, Gösta Berlings Saga, Änglagård and Beardfish! Bands that revived prog up in the north. When ‘Heritage’ by Opeth came out I became obsessed by that sound and then explored more of their previous work, especially ‘Damnation’! Which became immensely important for our writing of our debut album ‘A True Image of the Infinite Mind’. At the same time my brother went to art school and listened to completely different kind of stuff, like: Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Tool, Opeth, Shels, ISIS, Sleep, Om and a lot of other stuff. We exchanged a lot of music with each other, and even more so when we started to play in the band together. Jón brought yet another side of music to us when he joined. Apart from Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and Opeth, which we shared admiration for, he was talking more about Black Metal acts like Mayhem, Dissection, Watain and stuff like that. Also, as he was playing in symphonic orchestra settings with his French horn he also had the classical side of things, coming up with ideas in the vein of Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, Shostakovich et cetera.

All this together made up a very exciting mixture of ideas for us to try out and try to blend together.

Our sound is a lot about dynamics, contrasts, emotions, expression and organic ways of doing things. Keeping things open for reimagining and reinterpretation, never really closing the gate to our unconscious imagination. It’s about blending the dark with the light, the complex with the natural instincts and human limitations. It’s psychedelic, playful and can sound jammy, but it really is very carefully structured in its inner core with just sprinklings of intuitive leaps and stretches. We always try out every idea in different ways, tweak it until it feels right, both when it comes to tempo and punctuation but also when it comes to lengths of every individual part of a song.

What does the name ‘Khadavra’ refer to in the context of the band name?

The name Khadavra: in Aleister Crowley’s book Thelema the word “abrahadabra” is a magic formula

something dead = cadaver

“Kha” The void, the empty space of the heart, suṣumṇā-nāḍī, or cranial vault, is also termed kha: hole, cavity, empty space (Sanskrit)

In other words; we wanted something that feels associated with mysticism, archetypal symbolism, death and stuff like that. In the beginning we took a lot of inspiration from horror films, so we wanted to have a name that represents the atmosphere where our music stems from. Our dark trouble minds… haha

How do you usually approach music making?

Well, mostly we have a very organic and humble approach to how we shape our songs. They are very carefully structured, after a long procedure of trying everything out in different ways and so on… We very carefully choose the length of everything and how it should meld into every other part of a song. With that being said, the way we try this out and also how we find most ideas we choose to form into a part of a song is through more or less pure improvisation. Sometimes either Jón or Seb brings something to the rehearsal that we use as a platform to jump off into a lengthy jam where we try everything we would want and also don’t want to do with idea, before progressing by shape it into a song or a part of one. But in some cases the ideas for songs comes from some recording of a jam. I have developed a habit of doing multichannel recordings of most of our rehearsals, which I do a simple mix of and that we contemplate on. We usually try to be fair and democratic while writing our songs; best idea wins! We try to keep ego out of it, but it’s getting harder for every year… haha!

We also try to always be playful and a bit humble about it all, it really has to feel right and give us that certain kind of tingle you know? That’s more important than any technical quality of it. But with that being said, we indulge in a lot of pretentious brain warping while constructing, and especially arranging parts! We want to use odd numbers, and do sudden jumps and changes a lot, but that is also to get that special feel deep within, that just makes you shiver and smile.

One other aspect of it all is that we are very visual when we make a song, draw out themes and sometimes cinematic scenes to accompany with sounds, especially when we started to play together. And we still talk a lot in metaphors or with colorful language to describe our ideas to each other.

“It’s about the borderland between dream and reality”

Can you share some further details how your latest album was recorded?

Sure. Like everything we have recorded this far (except ‘Possession’, which was recorded at Nacksving Studios) we recorded ‘Hypnagogia’ in our own rehearsal space. With our own equipment. Using the microphones I’ve collected over the years and record with them through two connected Zoom R16 Recorders/Audio interfaces. A very primitive setup really. But well, we have always been low on funds and especially me and Seb lives through a constant struggle between doing this, that we actually need to do to stay sane and on track, and to work and get what we need to keep alive and this going, haha… so yeah, we use what we have. And we learn to do most of the necessary stuff ourselves, like how to record, mix and so on. But on this album, our dear friend Anton Sandell Bergqvist did the mixing duties, and Tobias Carlsson did the master. The recording of the drums and the guitar I did, and Jón and Nils did their stuff on their own. The drums were recorded “live” with all the instruments playing, but in headphones, to get that vibe and also to manage and do all the weird turns and changes between parts.

<a href="https://khadavra.bandcamp.com/album/hypnagogia">Hypnagogia by Khadavra</a>

Some of the songs were split into parts to release me from such a big workload a little bit. And I prefer to do as little takes as possible, and even though the list of takes get long I almost always choose one of the first three, and this was also the case with ‘Hypnagogia’. I do this because I have built most of my perspective on musicmaking through countless hours of listening to 60’s and 70’s recordings, and the magic of those eras in music isn’t really the writing (according to me), it’s more about the production, both pre- and post-production but mainly the moment of recording. I want to capture the same kind of “magic” that they did back then. Mainly the magic appears from intuitive outbursts of unconscious energy, probably because of a holy mix of excitement, stress, physical and mental strain and just momentum. I guess. All this, and because I’m really lazy… Haha!

What kind of equipment did you use and who was the producer? How many hours did you spend in the studio?

We didn’t have a producer. Never have tried that actually… we would probably have some issues with letting some of our control go, to be honest. But we had Anton Sandell Bergqvist mixing and Tobias Carlsson mastering (he also mixed and mastered ‘A True Image of the Infinite Mind’).

The equipment we used to record was:

Microphones: 2xShure SM57, 2x Röde M5, 3x Beyerdynamic TG D58, 2xEV PL 33, 1x Röde NT-2A

Interface: Zoom R16

Instruments: Sonor Drums, Samick bass, Korg Keyboards, Greco guitar, A lot of pedals! (Can’t really list it all… but there was one Strymon Big Sky involved), Church Organ, Acoustic piano, French horn, Didgeridoo, Symphonic Gong, Congas, Sitar

We can’t possibly count all the hours we laid down on this… I recorded my drums nights after work for like 2 weeks, the guitar was done during a 2-week period the summer of 2017, 8 hours a day… The bass was done really fast. But the keyboards took a really, really, really long time. That’s one of many issues that led us to part ways with Nils that did all the amazing keyboards on the album. We have a problem with slowing down and losing oversight and control over our projects, and he felt pressured. So yes, hard to put a number on the amount of hours as the keyboards was done over like a 1 year period. Oh well, it was cheap! As we did it ourselves in our own rehearsal space.

How pleased were you with the sound of the album?

Overall, very pleased! Especially with the time that has passed, and extremely pleased with the new master Black Widow did. Wow! But if you ask me personally I would have had it a bit different… The mixing took so much time as we hade problems coming to terms with everyone’s needs and we all had to compromise. But with a little distance from it all, I would like to say I am very pleased! Especially with ‘Down the Rabbithole’. Great work Anton did with the mixing on that one!

We were at least more pleased with this one than our first album, which is kind of obvious as that one was recorded in the most basic way possible… I am not 100% pleased with the drum-sound to be honest, but I never am, really. It’s a struggle! But it works with everything else in a neat way.

How would you compare it to your debut released from 2014, ‘A True Image Of The Infinite Mind’?

Well…The first album we did was my first serious effort when it comes to songwriting. Me and Seb are self-taught and do everything on feel and therefore ‘A True Image’ worked as a playground for us where we could try everything out, test our boundaries. We lived in Arvika back then, and I was actually very unhappy. Had a really hard time dealing with poor mental health and an eating disorder. The band became my obsession, and my source of strength and hope, but also as a cathartic channel. That’s why it, in comparison to ‘Hypnagogia’, is more angst-ridden and well, very angry and direct. We listened to more aggressive music as well back then. And after writing that I moved to Gothenburg, changed my lifestyle and social life and a lot of adventures came ahead. Fast-forward a couple of years: Jón and Seb moved here, and we started writing new stuff. This stuff we were kind of happy and psyched about life and everything that could happen and for what we realised was hidden inside us. That’s why ‘Hypnagogia’ holds more of a theme of hope than despair, that you could say that ‘A True Imag’e did.

Also, ‘A True Image’ was music based on a concept made beforehand. So we kind of made a soundtrack to our imaginary mind-film. ‘Hypnagogia’ is more of a collection of different songs, interconnected with a more loose and vague theme – which is the concept of the title of the album itself. It’s about the borderland between dream and reality, about sensations that is weirdly both natural and universal but still feel unique and profound.

Black Widow Records issued a wonderful double album on vinyl.

Oh yes! Fantastic moment in our life. So happy with the release. We have been dreaming about holding a vinyl copy with our music on it for quite a while now, so this is pretty damn amazing, for sure. We never managed to do it ourselves as we are broke all the time and to chaotic and occupied in our brains to try to reach out to labels and so on, so we almost gave up this dream, for now. But then all of a sudden! Mauro Degrassi asked us if he could play ‘Down the Rabbithole’ on his small little radio-show, and of course we said yes. The people at Black Widow heard it, liked it, and wrote to us on Facebook about wanting to their own pressing of ‘Hypnagogia’, both CD and vinyl. And fast-forward to now, where at least I have a couple of copies of the vinyl (now even some of the limited edition ones, coloured vinyl with a poster included!). It’s amazing how it can work out! “You build it and they will come” rings so true in relation to this. We didn’t really push this album ourselves, too much. Just did some gigs as usual and made all our friends and relatives listen on Bandcamp and Spotify. But some people really want to contribute to the music scene, in every way they can. I’ve sensed this from the guys at Black Widow that has been so kind, understanding, respectful and at our service from first contact. Some of the best people over there! Love them so much. They have given me a lot of hope, appreciation and motivation to go on and do it with even more energy!

How are you coping with the current world situation? What are some future plans?

Well, we are coping fine I guess. Still rehearsing and writing as usual. The main difference is the lack of shows, but we have actually managed to some this year in spite of the situation, small private party-stuff though. The isolation-thing works fine for us creativity-wise, but kind of sucks for the social side of this band. With do need to feel connected and that the music matters beyond our realm. So well… hopefully shows will be a thing again, I hope? But otherwise our plan for now is to finish the writing on our upcoming EP that we will record this winter. We write it now at this moment with Marcus Holmström from Mother Gaia (very cool local band!) on keyboards. It already feels like it will be something really special!

Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

Ahhh! Let’s see… I’ll try to have our background and the others in the band in mind while answering, which is hard because my own taste has been taking it’s own little adventure the last few years… I will divide it in 3; 1 list of albums that shaped the band in the early days, 1 list of my current favourite albums and 1 list of newly found cool stuff that I would suggest awesome persons to listen to.

Some of the most important ones for shaping the band:

Black Sabbath – ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’/’Vol. 4’
Opeth – ‘Blackwater Park’/’Damnation’/’Heritage’
Tool – ‘Lateralus’/’Aenima’
Anekdoten – ‘Vemod’
Mastodon – ‘Crack the Skye’/’Leviathan’
Pink Floyd – ‘The Piper at the Gate of Dawn’/’A Saucerful of Secrets’
King Crimson – ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’/’Lark’s Tongues in Aspic’
Isis – ‘Panopticon’
Mayhem – ‘De Mysteriis dom Sathanas’
Motorpsycho – ‘Timothy’s Monster’
Camel – ‘Mirage’

My own (Alex) favourites at the moment are:

Russian Circles – ‘Blood Year’
Do Make Say Think – ‘Stubborn Persistent Illusions’
Motorpsycho – ‘The All is One’
Gösta Berlings Saga – ‘Konkret Musik’
Red Saprowes – ‘The Fear is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer’
Oranssi Pazuzu
Daughters – ‘You Will Never Get What You Want’
Emma Ruth Rundle – ‘On Dark Horses’
Opeth – ‘In Cauda Veneum’
Dungen – ‘Allas Sak’

When it comes to newly found gems:

MJ Guider – ‘Sour Cherry Bell’
Oiseaux-Tempête – ‘Al-Án! (And Your Night is Your Shadow/A Fairy-Tale Piece of Land to make Our Dreams)’
Black Midi – ‘Schlagenheim’
Rodan – ‘Rusty’ (Yeah, I know, it’s old BUT incredibly new to me!)
Tangled Thoughts of Leaving – ‘Dread Sessions – Vol. 1’
Waste of Space Orchestra – ‘Syntheosis’
Pixie Ninjas – ‘Colours Out of Space’
Hedvig Mollestad – ‘Ekhidna’

Klemen Breznikar

Khadavra Facebook / Instagram / Spotify / Bandcamp / YouTube
Black Widow Records Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / Bandcamp / YouTube