Q&A with The Austringer as new album released on Friday

Sienna Bentley sits down with Corban Skillånder, aka The Austringer

What can listeners expect from your latest project, thematically and sonically?

I think sonically it’s a natural next step for me. I’ve always described this music as “unconcerned with genre”, or – when people push me – indie prog rock – but how do you even begin to explain songs like ‘The Chef’? Soul… but also ‘oompah’, a bit of stoner rock and demotiko, dressed up in a ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ style package? It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

There’s a bit of everything on here and I’ve taken the greatest care to make sure that it’s all cohesive in the ways that matter – and that it’s fun, too. There are some very heavy, emotional moments on the album, but I also want people to be able to listen and think, “oh, wow, this slaps“.

I think the song that best sums up the evolution of my sound is ‘Intravenous’; it starts out sounding like a track from The Austringer, and ends in a place that sounds like The Medium.

Thematically, the first half is about looking back on the past. A few of the songs I’d written almost 10 years ago, and came from misplaced frustration, and sometimes even anger. I have now been able to re-approach and rewrite them slightly, which has resulted in this interesting thing where sometimes both the past meaning and current feelings are reflected at the same time.

The story line also continues from The Austringer, but this time it focuses on a new character, The Medium. He is tricked into taking a Robert Johnson-style deal in which he has to face literal physical manifestations of his past and is chased by these otherworldly wraiths, which eventually leads him to the cliff-edge scene that The Austringer sees in his vision at the end of that album.

And that’s just part one! The other two parts will become clear very soon…

What aspects of this album are you most proud of, and what were some of the biggest challenges in the creative process?

Well, the entire thing – from initial writing, through production and right down to making the cover art – has been a one-man project, which has been pretty intense! But I’m insanely proud of it.

The feeling of having put so much of myself into something, being incredibly emotionally vulnerable and unabashedly me throughout, and then being able to look at a finished product and think, “yeah. This is really good” is pretty wild. I think all artists are doomed to hate their art a little bit and in lots of ways, but overall, I’m happy that I had fun and made something that’s really important to me. I’m a musician and a storyteller, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.

How does the final product compare to what you originally envisioned for it?

It’s surprisingly different! The Medium has taken a few different forms over the years. I’ve already had a few messages from people today [release day] saying, “hang on, that song is on there?” about a few songs that I put out years ago – before I really knew what I was doing properly. That was called Liminal Spaces; I listened back to it recently and it’s very interesting hearing the songs and story line that I was telling in its infancy. It was a lot more edgy and definitely much less nuanced!

More recently, I’d envisioned The Medium as a two-part release – one as an album with a much shorter run time and the second part as an audio drama released episodically as a podcast. You can still hear remnants of that on the album with a few pieces of dialogue and speech, and there’s still something in the same vein, shall we say, that’s currently being produced and will be ready very soon for people to sink their teeth into.

What’s next for The Austringer?

A few things! I think it’s going to be a little while before the third part of the trilogy comes out, but of course I have already started writing for it because I just can’t stop!

The very next thing is what I mentioned before – I’ve always envisioned The Austringer as a multimedia project, and this is going to be a good introduction to that to see how it goes.

Musically, I’m planning on some smaller things at the moment. Earlier this year I put out the PROXY EP, which was an interesting little side story, and I want to do a couple of things like that where I can explore some other characters a little more. One is The Outlaw, a wild-west style outlaw who performs a heist on a train – not for any money, but to beg for absolution from a priest. I think he’s a pretty cool character and I want to see where he takes me.

There’s also another project that I’m getting very excited about, which will serve as a direct continuation from the last scene in The Medium. I’ll be working on this with… a very special guest. I’m really looking forward to sharing that one.