Compositions of Dissonance and Disintegration

Razor-sharp attention to detail, typography, a deep understanding of form and colour and the ability to create iconic images which reflect the music so precisely – these are not easy things to accomplish. Saint Merat combines existing and self-made visual elements into stunning, carefully balanced collages. His expression contains perhaps some of the most common visual elements in metal music (and art history more broadly): skulls, skeletons, anatomical details,  but somehow he manages to present them in such exciting, clear, sophisticated ways that they become deeply evocative and memorable, rather than trivial or cliché.

There is a specific aesthetic pleasure in witnessing disintegration, collapse, destruction, just as in witnessing creation and lightness. For artists, to be able to understand both, and to be able to discuss universal, and heavy topics like grief, death and catastrophes unflinchingly and honestly, is to accept the truth of being human. In my opinion, Ulcerate succeeds in these areas precisely due to the solid support of Saint Merat’s mixed media designs (and photography).

J Saint Merat: Expression, but explored through technique and with reverence to tradition and the context in which you’re creating.
100% aligns with my outlook on music. If you eschew any of these constraints you’re doing it for the wrong reason, and, people can tell.

Always intuitively, but perhaps hung on a skeleton of intellect, as I don’t really view our visual work as art, it’s much more of design project – a problem to be solved.  This is less about pure expression, as there’s always guardrails in terms of thematic objectives, and rigid constraints in terms of format and physical dimensions.
Throughout the writing process, we start to form a vision for the album in totality – which is, usually once we have a handful of songs completed orchestration-wise.  We always pre-produce in batches, and I can immediately sense when things are starting to form the ‘pattern’ of an album.  It’s at this point, in conjunction with Paul’s lyrics (and hopefully a working album title) that I start to see flashes in my mind of some sort of visual inspiration.
I will never sit down to start experimenting until we have this level of compositional solidarity, as it absolutely feels like I’m just pushing pixels for no good reason.  And I honestly think it’s this sensation (for me at least), that sharply defines our visual work as design, not art.

We always start with the music writing first and foremost.  And yes, I’ll always moodboard ideas and start building a library of visual elements that can be somehow connected to where I see and feel the music going.
I’d say I will be working on the cover art alone for 6 months or so usually, perhaps leaving things for weeks at a time to gain distance and perspective, and then try to come back to it with fresh eyes. My timeline is always dictated by recording studio bookings and label hand-in deadlines to meet our proposed album release.

I have a Bachelor in Media Arts, which was a degree that covered everything from fine art to motion graphics and web design.  In hindsight, probably too broad for where my head is at these days, and too geared for moving people into commercial work.  But as a result, my 9-5 is indeed in the web space, for better or worse.

My style has developed purely out of trial and error, and over time learning how to correctly deploy minimalism and maximalism where they’re needed. And naturally, our taste and sensibilities with what we’re trying to do musically have changed vastly from our early albums, and with it so has the visual side.

When the band started really, early 2000’s in our final years of high school.  It was born purely out of necessity — same goes for the music production itself.
This was brought on by a lack of funds, geographic isolation, and nowhere near the level of internet connectivity that we have now.
And more importantly, a visceral stubbornness to release music on our own terms, at a quality level that we thought we could achieve without needing to outsource.
Since then, this DIY mentality grew organically into the identity of the band, and has become something that we’re immensely proud of.

We’ve done four videos with Dehn Sora, ‘Dissolved Orders’ from ‘Stare Into Death and Be Still’, and three from ‘Cutting the Throat…’.
All four were worked on in the same manner, which was the initial creative direction from my side, but with total freedom for him to work his magic.  So we’d kick off with a video call, I’d have a moodboard prepared, and usually WIP visuals and lyrics, and preproduction audio. We have very similar (if not identical) aesthetic and sonic sensibilities, and within minutes we were finishing each other’s sentences with how and where we could take the work.
I remember for ‘Dissolved Orders’ we talked a lot about Jonathon Glasser’s ‘Under the Skin’ – we were both quite affected by the 3 death scenes, one in particular that absolutely had an influence on a bunch of the scenes. So after the original kick-off, he’d go away and present me usually with a couple of stills that would inform the direction in terms of atmosphere, colour grade etc – and I have to say I was immediately blown away.  So from then my input became more around pacing and shot choices in terms of how it synced with the music – actually fairly minor or pedantic changes really.

For the ‘Cutting the Throat…’ work, I had worked up an infinite / fractal concept that’s used a lot through the artwork (the quadratic cross motif, used explicitly, and also figuratively as masks to crop visuals), and I recall mentioning ‘Russian dolls descending into hell’ as a starting point – and what he came back with floored me.
Lyrically there is an underlying current of a self-replicating hell, so exploring something fractal seemed like a no-brainer to me, I just didn’t want it done in the typical Mandelbrot-esque style that has been done to death.

We stay in regular contact, and I’ve even tracked drums for a special single for his Throane project a few years ago. He recently helped us out with some live visuals, so the collaboration will be ongoing, it’s an absolute pleasure.

Actually never to be honest. Censorship to me simply maps to a spectrum of moral acceptability – most of which is far too conservative and has an adverse repressive effect, the exact opposite outcome of censoring in the first place.  But I do believe that our moral framework reaches a point where all bets are off, where there is a sharp line not to be crossed, and those that dabble in exploring these areas through provocation absolutely require censorship to not harm the wider consciousness. For example, anything remotely related to child abuse should never ever be without censorship.

I’ve never really thought about it, but yeah I can totally see that.  I’ve always had a goal in mind of trying to situate our visuals in a way that feels neither contemporary nor ‘classic’ – in hindsight with varying success.
For metal music, I am absolutely not into the presentation of being of the now, it sharply places it into a ‘pop’ context which is just not for me.  I’m a huge fan of noir aesthetic, hard contrasts and shadows, leaving a lot to the imagination etc. The early crust, punk, black metal visuals all tied in with this – collaged hard-contrast album covers, zines – and it all falls in line with the ‘Begotten’ reference I mentioned earlier. So we just mirror this with our photography too, everything has to be in alignment.

Always listening to music at high volume, usually accompanied by some excellent whiskey.

I can only really speak on how I see things from a musician’s standpoint (as I don’t exhibit or sell the visual material in isolation), but there’s certainly an overlap.  To me the intersection of commerce and art in underground music is absolutely fraught.
For a counter culture with such an ideologically subversive imperative, it’s only natural that the paying audience will be an absolute niche. So bands start to make commercial choices over artistic choices – there are very few that resonate deeply with a broader audience and can be financially stable while staying the course.
This is something that very much rubs me the wrong way, and why we are now in an ecosystem where we have essentially ‘pop’ bands playing ‘metal’. So you may have the genre gimmicks on display, but there’s no core underground ethos. The heart is missing. And there is an air of desperation to it all – Patreon accounts charging fans for utter bullshit, VIP packages, and in one instance I’ve seen, a ‘programme’ where fans bring the band food in exchange for being able to witness the almighty soundcheck. This is the antithesis of art to me.

Now, from an ethical standpoint – how any artist can knowingly use this technology given the pool of training these systems have is completely beyond me. As it stands, all of us are being deeply exploited by tech platforms, and this is so beyond the pale it’s actually outrageous.
We don’t (I guess fortunately) make a living from our creative work, as even early on we knew that creative ‘industries’ cannot be relied on – and here we are 20 years later with the Spotifys, Sunos and Midjourneys of the world et al all doing their best to gut what little compensation there was for artists in the name of the ‘democratisation of art’.
At least in our case as musicians, you can stand in front of us and we can play our songs in real-time to the level of our albums, with zero bullshit or trickery.  For purely visual artists or illustrators… the outlook is grim. Also, the bands who have used it to create cover art (very, very poor cover art by the way) and for some reason have chosen to remain steadfast against their own fans are either too stupid to understand the hypocrisy, or are seemingly happy to advertise to the world their lack of scruples.
Either is fairly offensive!