Lustmord interview: ‘I still have things to say’

A Side-Line conversation with Lustmord’s Brian Williams about sound, silence, collaboration and the necessity of creating art

When I approached Brian Williams about an interview for Side-Line, he had one particular request: he wanted an actual conversation instead of another promotional interview. Not an exchange governed by a new release or a succession of carefully prepared questions, but an opportunity to talk, explore ideas and see where the discussion might lead. Considering the extraordinary range of his work, from the early industrial underground and Lustmord to collaborations with Tool, Karin Park and Dave Lombardo, and his contributions to film and video games, there was certainly no shortage of subjects worth exploring.

What struck me almost immediately was how little distance Brian placed between himself and the person asking the questions. Despite his considerable experience and influence, there was nothing guarded or ceremonious about him. He was direct, articulate, frequently funny and refreshingly unconcerned with maintaining the sort of mystique that sometimes surrounds artists with such extensive careers. He listened, challenged my assumptions, occasionally questioned my approach and seemed perfectly happy to let the conversation wander into unexpected territory.

We were speaking from two rather different corners of the world. Outside my window in Wrocław, a foggy November evening was settling in; on Brian’s side of the screen, California was enjoying a beautiful sunny morning. At one point, his dog Jackson became interested in somebody outside, and Brian briefly showed me the view. It was a small, spontaneous interruption, but one that seemed entirely in keeping with the informal atmosphere of our exchange.

I’d originally allocated forty minutes, conscious of his many commitments. Brian found that limitation rather amusing, wondering what would happen if he only began saying something interesting at the thirty-eighth minute. As it turned out, our conversation continued for nearly an hour, moving naturally between music, personal experience, creative instinct and the sometimes complicated realities of making art.

Somewhere along the way, it also became unexpectedly meaningful to me. Brian spoke about creativity without romanticising it, about the importance of friendship, the value of one’s work and the freedom that comes from following an artistic instinct over external expectations. There were moments of humour, some candid observations and thoughts that stayed with me long after we had said goodbye.

Perhaps that was the most rewarding aspect of the encounter. I had prepared to ask Brian Williams about his work, but what unfolded was a conversation with someone who has spent much of his life making art on his own terms, and who remains willing to question what that means. The result was considerably more interesting than anything I could have planned in advance.

Lustmord interview

Karo: I wanted to begin with something personal. I saw you perform with Karin Park at Wrocław Industrial Festival in 2024. I was photographing the show, and afterwards I stayed near the stage, sitting on the stairs. Karin was perhaps a metre away from me, and I remember being moved to tears by the performance. How do you remember that night? Was it close to what you had imagined when you first developed “ALTER” together?

Brian: No, it was exactly how I imagined. But it was very special, very magical is the word I would use. There was a time I wasn’t able to say this, but I’ve been around long enough and I’ve been doing what I do long enough that I know that I’m good at what I do. I used to doubt that, but I know I’m good at what I do, and I know she’s very special and she has an amazing voice, and I knew that if we worked together we would create something special. And the same goes with doing that live show. I knew it was going to be special because it’s a combination that – how can it not be? I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed listening to her.

Karo: From where I was sitting, Karin’s voice seemed to occupy a very different space from those enormous low frequencies. Did you have to work carefully to establish that balance, or did it emerge naturally?

Brian: It was very natural. You didn’t really have to think about it. I’m not trying to avoid the question. Pretty much everything I do is done by instinct. You just know. The music I do is easy to do. It’s just a matter of choosing the right sounds. A lot of people do similar things and they don’t choose the right sounds. When you’re working with somebody else like that, you have to give them space within the sound. But that’s not difficult to do. It’s not a great answer, I know.

Karo: Is there a chance you will perform live together again?

Brian: We have. I don’t know if we ever will. I was speaking to her on Monday, actually, and we’re both going to be in the UK next July. I would love to do more stuff with her, but she’s just busy all the time. She does her own music, she’s in Årabrot, and we’re really good friends. That’s the main thing. Friendship is as important as the music. The friendship is more important, in my opinion. I would love to work with her again, but she’s busy, and I’m going to do other things.

Karo: You place considerable importance on friendship. Does that influence which collaborations you choose, or is friendship something that develops through working together?

Brian: Oh yeah, very, very much so. It’s a big part of it. I’ve spent more of my life being outside of things. I’ve always been an outsider. So it’s really special when you meet people on the same wavelength. They understand you and you understand them. Creating something is always very rewarding, but it’s so much more fun with friends. For me, either I work with friends or I work with people who become friends. As enjoyable as some collaborations have been, it’s the friendships. Coming away with a friendship, that’s special. You mentioned the Wrocław festival. I’ve been there a few times, and I’ve become friends with those people. It’s good to go back to see friends.

Karo: We’re actually speaking on the eve of the twenty-fifth edition of Wrocław Industrial Festival.

Brian: It won’t be the same without me being there!

Karo: I’ll definitely tell them.

Brian: They know. I hope they know. I’ll be there in spirit (laughs)

Karo: You’ve described a Lustmord album as a place that exists only for as long as the music is playing. When you begin a composition, are you working towards a place you can already imagine, or discovering it as you go?

Brian: I do. I have an idea, but the point is that I’m not going to tell the person listening what it is. It’s for them to decide. I’ve done a few interviews recently, and quite often when you have a new record out, people want you to explain what it means. For me, that’s not the point. If I wanted to explain my ideas, I would maybe write them down. Maybe I would write a book or write an article. There are lots of ideas, layers of things in there, but I’m using music to convey those ideas. If I explain what the music is supposed to be, that defeats the point of making the music. The music is for you to listen to, to immerse yourself in ideally, and let it take you where it takes you. I have no control over where it takes you, but I hope it takes you somewhere and it’s a positive thing. And they’re also supposed to bring you back as well at the end. The albums are almost all meant to be one continuous experience. They begin, they take you somewhere and then they bring you back. That’s the intention anyway.

Karo: So, the album provides a way into that experience and eventually a way back out, but without telling the listener what they’re supposed to find there?

Brian: Yeah. These are very abstract things we’re talking about, obviously. People’s reactions to music are really interesting. We react to lots of things in different ways: sports, books, movies, landscapes. And music has a very strange quality to it. It evokes memories, it triggers memories. People have music they don’t necessarily like, but they’ll hear it from their past and it’ll immediately bring back memories of that period in their life. People can get very melancholy with music. People can get very happy, have really nice memories. As far as my thing is concerned, like I said, I try to create this space. I’m not claiming to do these things, but the attempt is to create something that the listener experiences. And obviously it’s only while the music is playing that this place exists. When the music is finished, that place has gone away. It’s still there if you want to listen to the music again. It’s one of those things where you’re trying to use language to describe music. Well, music is a language in itself and it doesn’t really translate. Not the way I think of it, anyway.

Karo: That’s also a problem I encounter when writing about music. We’re trying to use words to describe an experience that doesn’t necessarily belong to language in the first place.

Brian: Stupid to write about it then, isn’t it?

Karo: Sometimes it feels that way!

Brian: You can still write about it, of course. It depends on your approach. There are different kinds of music. There’s very traditional music that has a very rigid structure. The music you’re writing about conforms to that, or it doesn’t, or it improves on it. You can analyse it, you can critique it. You can be very pretentious about it, but you can discuss it. You can describe why music is working, because it goes faster, or the melody is nice, or the chord changes are really interesting and they speak to you. With bigger symphonies and things like that, you can describe what’s actually happening, but you can’t necessarily describe the experience of listening to it.

Karo: What about the things you deliberately leave out? In your compositions, silence and the space between sounds often seem as important as the sounds themselves. Is that something you consciously construct?

Brian: It’s a very important part of what I do. The things that are not there are just as important as the things that are there. I’m a big Kraftwerk fan. I always really enjoyed when a new Kraftwerk album came out. I listen to a lot of dub music. The music I listen to the most is dub, mostly Jamaican dub from the mid-to-late 1970s. And with both of those kinds of music, the space between the notes is really interesting.

At this point, Jackson noticed somebody outside. Brian called him over, briefly turning his attention towards the window. The California daylight appeared on the screen, a striking contrast to the foggy evening outside my window in Wrocław.

Karo: Beautiful day.

Brian: Yeah, it’s nice. California! Anyway, sorry about that. The space between the notes is really important. I think you have to leave space for things. The space also brings more attention to when things come in. Especially with my music, we have these great big events coming in. You can do a big sound for twenty minutes, which would be really boring, or you can have a space and things come in and out. It’s more intriguing. There’s more atmosphere. I’m glad you asked, because the space is very important. Not many people pick up on that.

Karo: You mentioned the way music can bring back memories almost involuntarily. Does that happen to you as well, or is it something you’ve noticed more in other listeners?

Brian: I can’t think of anything specific. It tends to be random. We all have songs from our youth or a particular occasion. Couples often have their song, the song that was playing when they first danced or things like that. I don’t have anything specific, but it’ll be totally random. Maybe you’ll hear something on the radio, or you might not even hear it. Something else triggers this memory of this song. It’s very interesting how music exists in our memories. And also the idea of the earworm, when a tune gets stuck in your head and you can’t get it out for days. Often it’ll be a really annoying song that you don’t even like, but you’ll have this catchy thing. You don’t get that with painting or poetry, or you don’t relive a scene from a movie over and over in your head. The way we interact with music – or maybe a better way of saying it is the way music interacts with us – has some interesting elements that there’s no real comparison for in other things. You can’t deliberately create those things. They just happen.

Karo: The only comparable experience for me is smell. A particular scent can immediately transport me to a place or moment from the past.

Brian: Exactly. Good point. Smell can do that too.

Karo: I’d like to talk about “Trinity” as well, particularly its long development. I know we agreed this wouldn’t be a conventional promotional interview, but the history of the project raises some interesting questions.

Brian: Oh, we can still chat. You can pretend to chat or you can just chat and in passing mention that. So let’s just mention that in passing.

Karo: I think I’m being a little too disciplined with my notes. I’m trying to fit everything into forty minutes.

Brian: Why forty minutes? That’s a very strict, very narrow limitation.

Karo: I usually set aside forty minutes because I don’t want to tire anybody out, especially when artists are busy.

Brian: So at thirty-eight minutes I’ll start saying really interesting things and you’ll have to stop! I don’t make the rules.

Karo: I don’t want to overstay my welcome.

Brian: Most of them are just pretending to be busy because they’re trying to impress you.

Karo: Maybe they don’t have anything to say.

We are both laughing

Brian: Exactly! Language and conversation is a living thing. You can plan it to a degree, but personally I’m always going off on a tangent and then a tangent on a tangent. That’s quite often the nature of a conversation. You’re talking about something and you follow that and go down a different path. And quite often that different path can be really interesting. Not always, of course.

Karo: Usually those side paths turn out to be more interesting than my original questions.

Brian: That’s what conversations are like.

Karo: Then let’s follow one of them. How did “Trinity” develop from the original Unsound commission into the album that exists today? Its history seems to have been anything but straightforward.

Brian: Well, it’s a long story, so I’ll try not to take all the forty minutes talking about it. You’re familiar with Unsound there in Poland, the festival. I’ve performed at Unsound festivals around the world a few times and in the process became really good friends with Mat and Gosia, the organisers. They were in America. We met at a festival in Colorado, I think it was. They were in America for a few days afterwards and they’d rented a car and were driving around that area. They knew that we drive to the desert, we explore in America. We have a Jeep and we go off-road. They knew I know some interesting places in the middle of nowhere in America. They were asking for suggestions for things to do while they were there, and since they were close by, I suggested they go to Los Alamos, where the nuclear bomb was developed. It’s a really interesting place. It has an interesting history. The Los Alamos laboratories are still there. They’re still developing nuclear weapons with supercomputers, but they’re also developing supercomputers. Historically it’s a fascinating place to visit, but as a landscape it’s also really beautiful. I was suggesting they go there, and in the process of telling them why they should go there, I was giving them the whole history of the place because I’d been there a couple of times years ago. They went and spent a few days in that general area. When they got back to Poland, Mat called me up and said that when I was talking about that place it was really interesting, and obviously I had a real knowledge of the subject. He thought it would be really interesting if Unsound commissioned a project based on the idea of Trinity and perhaps brought somebody else in as a collaborator. Mat’s idea was to bring Geir from Biosphere in as a collaborator so the two of us would work on it together. For me that made a lot of sense because I really liked what Geir was doing. Unsound got funding from different places, which paid for Geir and me to go to Los Alamos. He’s based in Norway, so he flew in from Norway, and I flew over from LA. We spent a week there recording in the area, exploring and going to places where you shouldn’t have gone because there were big signs telling you not to go. We got some really good location sounds and atmosphere. But it was really interesting because when we started talking about the collaboration, for the first time I had an experience I hadn’t had before. He was talking about a collaboration being a thing where I do a track, he does a track, I do a track, he does a track. I said, well, that’s okay, but it’s much more interesting if we work together as a team and create a joint thing. Which was very alien to him. We had different ways of looking at it. Then we did a few shows for Unsound. We played New York, Boulder, Colorado, and Amsterdam, I think it was. We did a few shows, and it was really weird because Geir wasn’t really doing anything. He was doing very little. I mapped out most of the album and he contributed very little, which was really disappointing because if he’d contributed more it would have been really interesting. Then we did a multitrack recording of the show in Boulder, I think it was, and there were huge gaps when he wasn’t doing anything. There was conflict. I was trying to get him more involved, and he wasn’t very happy with it. Then we were booked to do a show in Adelaide in Australia, at a really big festival there, which was part of an Unsound festival within the Adelaide Festival. That’s about a twenty-two-hour flight from LA to Adelaide. When we arrived, Geir hadn’t arrived. He hadn’t got on the plane and said he wasn’t coming. The festival people were extremely angry and also very disappointed. I said, I’ll just do the show by myself. I did the show, and the guys from Unsound were very surprised because they said, well, it sounds just the same as when there’s two of you. I said, well, yeah, that’s because I was doing all the work. He wasn’t doing anything. So Geir was gone. We did that show and that was it. The project was over. Over the years, it seemed such a shame because it was such a good project. I had all this material based on Trinity. When we went to Los Alamos, I went to the archives and asked them for everything they had, which is a hell of a lot of gigabytes of material, and they gave it to me. There’s a thing here in America with freedom of information. If you’re an American taxpayer, this material belongs to you as much as anybody else, so you have the right to access it. I asked for everything. It took a long time for them to transfer things onto hard drives. I had hours and hours of audio, hours and hours of footage. It seemed pretty stupid not to finish the project. So eventually I finished it and released it as an album. And now, all these years later, it’s coming out as a CD with a booklet from Stefan and Seneca. Hence your question, I assume. So that was a long answer!

Karo: Quite a story, though. The album ends with Hiroshima, which gives it a progression from the development and testing of the weapon towards its actual use. Why did you choose Hiroshima as the final point, rather than ending with the Trinity test itself?

Brian: Well, the project is about Trinity. Trinity was the development of the first atom bomb and the testing of the first atom bomb. Once that was done, Trinity was over. Everything proved to be correct. All the maths and physics turned out to be correct. They could make the bomb. A lot of people didn’t think they should have made the bomb, but there were also a lot of people saying, well, if we don’t make the bomb, the Germans, the Nazis, are going to make it, so we have to make it. Almost nobody who developed the bomb wanted to develop the bomb. They just felt that they had to. And of course nobody was very happy about the idea of using it. But the project Trinity was over. As far as my album is concerned, when the Enola Gay, which is the plane that was carrying the bomb, took off, that’s the end of that story. What happened after that is the beginning of the next chapter, which is this horrible chapter that we live in today where we have atom bombs. Hiroshima is the future. Making an album about Hiroshima just seems to me something where you have to be respectful and leave that alone.

Karo: There’s a difficult aesthetic question here as well. The images of nuclear explosions can be visually extraordinary, even though what they represent is horrific. Did you ever worry that making the music beautiful might distract from the history behind it?

Brian: The bomb itself is fascinating. It’s horrible, it’s ugly, but the work that went into it was extraordinary. It was the biggest thing ever developed until the moon landing. There were thousands, tens of thousands of people involved, and most of them didn’t even know they were involved because it was highly secret. Only a smaller group of people actually knew what they were working on. They didn’t know how big it was going to be. There was all the maths that suggested it. When the bomb was detonated in the desert, it was on a tower. We’ve all seen footage of those nuclear explosions and they’re fascinating. They’re scary, but they’re also very beautiful at the same time. When you’re looking at this big, beautiful ball of fire, it’s amazing. But there are also a lot of animals getting killed right there on the ground as you’re looking at that. These things are made to kill people, and to kill people in very large quantities. I think I allude to that in the sleeve notes. As a species, we’re pretty horrible. Never mind how we treat the world or how we treat animals, but the way we treat each other. We’re very good at going to war over really stupid things. People get killed over very stupid things like their colour or their religion. People die for really stupid reasons. We’ve become very good at going to war and building war machines and making it possible to kill more and more people quickly. But when the atom bomb came along, suddenly we had this amazing power. We’d gone to a whole other level of just how much killing we could do, to a degree that’s hard to comprehend. Everything changed after Trinity. From an industrial point of view, we’re capable of destroying the planet with pollution, but that’s something the planet would recover from pretty quickly once we’re gone. But with nuclear weapons, we’re capable of doing a huge amount of damage that would last a very long time and would wipe out many species on the planet. For a species that’s supposed to be pretty smart, we’re pretty stupid.

Karo: What strikes me is the gap between our technical ingenuity and our willingness to take responsibility for what we’ve created. We developed this extraordinary destructive power, yet I’m not sure we’ve become any better at managing its consequences.

Brian: Oh, there’s no responsibility. That’s why it’s scary. It’s the world we live in. Everything we do is influenced by it. Obviously you’re in Poland, and with everything going on in Russia and Ukraine, it’s directly affecting you. It’s affecting me too, but not as much as it’s affecting you. You can’t pretend those things aren’t there. The way we live our lives is influenced by those things.

Karo: And yet we can’t give all our attention to those threats without losing sight of ordinary life. How do you make room for anything else?

Brian: Well, it is important to focus on nice things too, because those are the things that make it all worthwhile. If you just focus on the shit, you’re going to be pretty depressed. But there are really good things going on too. We’re this really fucked-up species that’s capable of destroying ourselves and all the other species, but we’re also capable of creating great beauty. And there are some very good people out there. Not everybody. There are some crazy people out there who would be quite prepared to use an atom bomb, but there are also many people who would much prefer to be doing something else, like creating beauty and things that will last a long time. Culture.

Karo: That brings me to another aspect of your work. When you reinterpret something as recognisable as Tool’s “Schism” or “Parabola”, what tells you which elements of the original are worth preserving and which you can take somewhere else?

Brian: It’s a good question. I don’t have a really good answer for you, I’m afraid. I just do what I think is interesting. When they asked me to do those things, they gave me the multitracks, and I listened to what was there and picked the things I thought would make an interesting extension. I mentioned before that a lot of the things I do are by instinct. I might like this bass loop. It’s kind of nice. Let’s keep this bassline. Let’s make it longer because it’d be interesting to make it longer. It’s really basic stuff. It’s not mathematical or analytical. It’s more about feeling. Everything is done by feeling. Even when you see me perform live, I improvise those shows. I like that everything could go wrong at any moment. I don’t want it to go wrong, but it keeps everything on edge. With the Tool songs, it was just choosing things I liked and thought would work if I extended them and tried to create a different mood from the original. Not too different a mood from the originals. I was going to say maybe the Tool audience wouldn’t like it so much if I changed it completely, but then again, I don’t really think along those lines. I don’t really care what other people think. I just do what I want to do. Does that answer the question at all? I’m not too sure.

Karo: It does. What I’m getting from your answer is that these decisions aren’t calculated. Even when you’re working with a band as popular as Tool, you trust your instincts rather than approach the material with a fixed strategy.

Brian: And it doesn’t matter how popular they are. It doesn’t mean anything.

Jackson returned to the conversation, this time because a delivery had arrived.

Brian: We just had a delivery. The mailman has just arrived. Jax, that’s enough. Oh, good boy! Anyway, there are a lot of successful people in the industry, and there are two types, I think. There are people who want to be successful, and they’ll do anything to be successful. Those people are usually horrible. They’ll sleep with anybody, they’ll stab their best friends in the back. They’ll do anything it takes to be famous. They’re usually not very nice people. And then there are other people who just want to create great music, and sometimes a by-product of that is that you become successful and famous. I think Tool are very much in the second group. They’re a really nice bunch of people who happen to be very talented, which helps a lot. But there’s so much luck involved in being successful unless you’re very ruthless. They’re lucky that they became very successful and popular, and that’s really cool. Being popular is good because you have a bigger audience and a good lifestyle, but at the end of the day it doesn’t impress me. How you are as people impresses me. They’re really good people. I became good friends with Tool before I knew how popular they were. We used to hang out all the time. We used to get together at Christmas and on weekends and socialise a lot because they were recording, they were between tours and hadn’t toured for a while. Living in LA, I knew they were popular because you’d see their name on a sticker on a car, or I’d catch a video sometimes. But I wasn’t really paying attention. I’m not a rock person. Then they set up a tour again and invited us to a show in LA. I think it was about an eighteen-thousand-seat venue that sold out in fifteen minutes. We had fancy VIP tickets and VIP seating, and it was very interesting to see just how popular our friends were. It turns out they’re pretty huge. Their album went to number one in the chart in the first week. But when I’m working with them, that stuff doesn’t matter.

Karo: Did seeing that level of popularity change anything about the way you approached working with them?

Brian: No. Well, they impressed me, but it didn’t change how I work. You’re really pleased for your friends, but you don’t judge people by how popular they are. You should judge people by how they are as people.

Karo: Across your work with other musicians, film and television, have you ever created something for somebody else that you wouldn’t have considered using in Lustmord?

Brian: Good question. I can’t think of anything. What I do tends to merge or blur. When you’re working on other things, or paid work, film or television, it’s still me doing my thing. Because I’ve been doing this for a while, people come to me because they want what I do. Film is a good example. When you’re working on a film, you’re working for – well, technically, you’re not working with the director really, but that’s the person you’re talking with. The people who are paying for the movie are the ones you’re actually working for because they’re the ones who could fire everybody, including the director. But when you’re working on the movie, you’re actually working for the movie. You’re doing what the movie needs. The director might want something, and usually you give them that because that’s why you’re there. But a lot of the time I’ll tell the director, well, what you want is okay, but I’m looking at the movie and the movie wants something else. The movie wants silence over here, for example. And you talk about it. Sorry, I’m not sure where I’m going with all of this, but the simple answer to your question is no.

Karo: Does working in film or games ever bring requests that you wouldn’t encounter when working with another musician?

Brian: No, not at all. People have, over the years, built up a reputation for creating a certain kind of thing, and usually when people come to me, they want that or something similar. So I’m lucky in that sense. There have been times in the past, especially with film, when somebody wanted me to do things that were more orchestral or more traditional in terms of composition. I always tell them they’d be better off talking to somebody else who’s really good at doing that. I’m good at doing what I do. But if you want something more traditional, you’re much better off going to somebody else. Let’s not waste time.

Karo: You’ve talked about people seeking you out because they know your work. What about the other way around? Have you approached artists because you wanted to explore something with them?

Brian: Oh yeah, of course. Quite a few of the things I’ve done are because I’ve talked to somebody. Going back to the very beginning, I think one of the reasons I started doing what I was doing was that Chris and Cosey from Throbbing Gristle were encouraging me to do my own thing. The way I got to know them is because I wrote to them. You always approach people. Some people are really hard to reach because of the situation. Usually, if you’re lucky, you know somebody who knows the person you’re trying to reach, so you can ask a friend. Sometimes they have management, and that’s not really a good idea to go through management because it’s just too much. Most people are not that hard to find, but there are a few people I’d like to work with that you’re not going to be able to reach.

Karo: Can you give me an example, or are you deliberately keeping those names to yourself?

Brian: Maybe that’s deliberate. Have you thought about that?

Karo: Of course, but I have to ask for some details!

Brian: Sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes people are busy, they have their own projects, and some people might not want to work with you, which is perfectly fine. I think it’d be really interesting to work with Maurizio, for example, who used to be in Basic Channel. He’d be really interesting to work with, but he’s got his own thing going on. I like contrast, working with people who do something really different from what I do. There are a few people who approach me who, for want of a better word, copy what I do and want to collaborate with me. I just don’t see the point. If they’re just going to come and copy what I do, I can do that by myself. It’s much more interesting working with someone like Karin, who’s very different from what I do. Working recently with Dave Lombardo, working with a drummer, that’s very interesting. Not something that was high on my priority list, doing something with a drummer. But then you talk to somebody like Dave Lombardo, who’s not just a drummer. He’s a very good drummer and has a very specific history and talent and style, and that’s too interesting to say no to. I like trying different things. I really like collaborating. It’s just finding people to collaborate with who are really interesting and bring something to the process themselves that’s harder. I’ve worked with people who were just waiting for me to tell them what to do. That’s pointless. I love somebody coming in with really good ideas, or taking my ideas and pointing out which of my ideas are not that good, or taking an idea of mine and making it better. That’s great fun.

Karo: With Dave Lombardo, there was also a very particular production challenge. His drums have such a physical presence, while your compositions depend heavily on space and low frequencies. How did you bring those two elements together when you were mixing “The Pulse Of Atoms”?

Brian: Well, it was very difficult. It seemed very difficult because I have no experience in mixing drums or recording drums. Not that type of drum anyway. Dave has a really big sound, which I like, and he’s worked with some really big names, producers as well as musicians. He has experience working with really good professional people who know how to mix drums. I’ve never mixed drums like that before, so I considered it a challenge. How do I make his drums sound really good? We laughed about this because he did his drums initially after I gave him some material. He very quickly did his drumming on them and then came back to me and said he wasn’t very happy with what he’d done and wanted to try a different approach. So he went away for a while and was trying different things. He’s a really busy guy, always touring and recording, but whenever he could, he was trying to do the drums again properly. After a year, he came back and said, well, the very first thing I did was the right thing. I kept saying to him, just go with your instincts, Dave. Do whatever feels right. Just go for it. Don’t overthink it. But he overthought it. When he finally did it, he was happy. He redid the original, but recorded it better quality. His second pass was a bit better, but it was essentially the same thing. Then he gave them to me and I was trying to think how the hell do I mix things, because there were multiple channels of drums. I was trying to make it sound good for quite a while. I was busy too, so every now and again when I had a chance, I would work on it. I was getting really frustrated because I was overthinking it. How do I get that big rock production? It took about two years to do the album, and it actually should have taken about two months. Not two years of constant work, but coming and going away and coming back. Then after about a year of me working on it, I just said, I’m going to mix it the way I think it should sound. I wanted Dave to like it, but I didn’t really care what other people thought, as long as Dave and I agreed that it was the sound we wanted. I just mixed it and sent it to him, and his response was, oh, this sounds great. Some of the best my drums have ever sounded. The moral is, don’t overthink it. I should have gone with my instincts too. I usually do, but because I had a lot of respect for what he was doing as an artist and as a person, I wanted to do justice to his abilities. I’m very much punk rock, it’s like I just do it. So I mixed it how I thought it should sound, and he thought it sounded great. He’s been very complimentary, so that was a good feeling.

Karo: Did Dave’s contributions ever make you rethink the structures you’d originally created, or was it mainly a matter of creating enough space for his drums in the mix?

Brian: I didn’t have to rethink it. I knew this in advance, because we both have such a big sound. We knew there were going to be areas where those sounds would clash. After doing the mixing stages, the only changes I really needed to make were in some places where I needed to make more space in my sound for the drums. There were some big bass sounds in my sound that needed to be taken away in some sections because the low drums and my low sounds were cancelling each other out. It was getting really muddy, and it was easy enough just to remove some of my really big low bass sounds so the drums could punch through better. But from a structural point of view, nothing was changed. The structure of a track would stay the same. Maybe some minor tweaks.

Karo: Your work has also taken you into video games. My son and husband are both gamers, so I’m often watching them explore these worlds. Unlike an album or a film, a game doesn’t unfold at a fixed pace. How does that change the way you compose?

Brian: It’s more challenging. Well, I’m a PlayStation guy myself. I had PlayStation One, I’m on PlayStation Five now. I play a lot of games too. The first thing I do is turn the music off when I play a game. I find it too distracting. I don’t like it! But it’s a challenge and it’s interesting. It’s good to be challenged. If you’re working on music for a film, there might be a scene with two people at a table, or one person at a table in a room. Somebody comes through the door, sits at the table, says something, or they might reach for a glass of water, put that down. Then somebody gets up, goes to the cupboard, and that scene ends. We go on to the next one. That scene has a rhythm. Where the glass gets moved, when the person sits in the chair, when they come through the door. That’s the tempo, like in music there’s a tempo. One, two, three, four. All those things happen. So what you do in a film is work out what the tempo is in that scene, and then the music has to be at that tempo. Well, it doesn’t have to be at that tempo. The audience won’t notice it being on that tempo, but if it’s not on that tempo, the audience will notice there’s something wrong. Even if it’s really subtle ambient music, if you have some changes in it, these should happen at the same tempo as the scene is happening. If you don’t, there’s something wrong. People won’t necessarily know that the music is changing in the wrong spots, but it’ll feel wrong. Whereas in games, somebody might enter a room in a game, turn around and walk out again. Or they might go into the room and explore for four minutes, or they might explore for twenty minutes. The music has to be constructed in a way that it’s triggered when something happens, like somebody going into the room. If they go out of the room, it changes. If they stay in the room, it loops. And if they stay in the room for a long time, it loops for a long time. But if it loops for a long time, it has to loop and change in a way that you’re not noticing it’s looping. It’s usually about two or three minutes of music. It’s more like playing cards. There’s a pack of cards and you’re shuffling it. You’re not just looping two or three minutes. You’re taking sections within that music and looping them separately to everything else to create the illusion that there’s actually more than three minutes. Different parts of the music are looping in different sections over each other. Somebody could play a game with my music in it and hear a twenty-minute piece of music where I only actually did three minutes. There are elements in that three minutes that are designed to loop against each other to make it seem longer. And there are elements in that three minutes that get triggered randomly over a period of time to make sure they only come in every now and again. So the three minutes I compose doesn’t actually get played. It gets sliced up and looped by the game engine. I found it really challenging originally to figure that out, to make it work. But I find it much easier now. It’s an interesting process. I like it. It’s fun.

Karo: After so many different projects, are there ideas you’ve been carrying around for years that haven’t yet found the right conditions to become music?

Brian: Well, that’s a good question. I can’t think of anything at the moment. There are a few things I want to explore further. It’s not so much new things. There are some areas I’ve explored that I want to do more music with. You mentioned Karin earlier on. I did an album quite a few years ago using vocals with no words, and I want to go there again. Well, I am going there again because I’ve started recording it. Why the hell do you write this thing about music? I’m asking for an answer. We do these things because this is what we do. Maybe if you ask me tomorrow I’ll have a different answer.

Karo: I’m going to do that!

Brian: Don’t tempt me! I’ve got lots of ideas. Sometimes I’ll have an idea and it’s not possible to make it happen for a long time, twenty years or whatever, because of technical reasons, or I don’t have access to things. Those ideas stay in the back of my head. Sometimes you have an idea to do a really cool project, and then when you’re thinking about doing that, suddenly you have some other ideas, or maybe you forget those and go somewhere else. There was a long period when I wasn’t doing much of my own music because I was working on a lot of film stuff. Sometimes life tends to get in the way too. There’s a couple of albums I’m planning to do, there’s one I’ve just started now, but I’m still exploring the same kind of general area, I suppose. Collaborations are great, and if an interesting collaboration comes along, I’d certainly be into doing that. But I haven’t quite finished. I’m kind of almost finished, I think. Going back to what we talked about earlier about describing the music, the music I make is me saying something, and I still have things to say. I’ve got a little bit more to say yet, but I think I’m almost at the time in my life where I’ve got nothing else to say. I’ve said what I needed to say in music anyway. But that might change next week. I still have some things I want to explore. At the end of the day, I like to make money. I like to put food on the table and be able to have a place to live. But when you’re doing this kind of music, you don’t do it for the money, because if you were doing it for the money, you’d be doing something much more commercial. You keep doing this stuff because this is what I do. This is how I express myself. I’m happy, I just do it for myself. It’s been a really interesting journey because early on other people seemed to like what I do and listen to it, which is great. But there are a lot more people who don’t like what I do, and that doesn’t matter. As far as myself, I’m just expressing myself. If I do an album and people like it, that’s great. If nobody likes it, I don’t care. I’m going to do it anyway.

Karo: What you’re describing sounds like a particular kind of freedom: continuing to create because it’s something you need to do, regardless of whether it brings success.

Brian: Yeah, it is. When you’ve been doing something like this as long as I have, you’re getting older and you have experience, you have a catalogue. You do get asked by younger people, how do I become popular? There are a lot of people who would like to make music for a living. Going back to what we talked about in the email too, writing about music, same thing. You don’t do it to make money. It’d be nice if you could, but it’s the same. There are people like us who do what we do because this is what we do. We can do other things, but we’d be really unhappy if we didn’t do this. So we do it regardless. If you want to make a living doing music, you’re much better off doing something else because the chances of being successful and actually making money, money to be able to live on, are very remote. There are many examples of people who have succeeded, but there are many more examples of people who have failed. If you want to make music or art or be creative in order to make money, do something else. But if you have no other choice but to create and do things, by all means, go for it. You’d be very unhappy doing anything else. There are times when people like us who do these things don’t have any money, and it’s hard. It can be a really difficult life, but we do it anyway. Because we’re crazy! A sensible person would do something else. But we’re not sensible. We have to do this thing, and if you’re lucky, you get some success.

Karo: You’ve actually answered a question I’ve been struggling with myself recently, about whether to continue with music journalism and photography. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for the past few weeks, and you’ve just given me a rather unexpected perspective on it.

Brian: The writing stuff?

Karo: Yeah. Writing, photography. It’s all passion.

Brian: Well, photography, you have to do that, so that’s good. Writing is hard. If you can get press credentials, you can get into shows for free as well, which is good. But writing is a tricky one. Your photography is the way you’re expressing yourself. I’m assuming you take photos of bands, but obviously you love taking photos. Writing is harder. I mean, not the act of writing, but writing for publications that publish your work. Of course your work is worth something. Your time is worth something. It’s important not to let people take advantage of the fact that you love doing it. It’s tricky. If somebody’s demanding three thousand words instead of a thousand, what’s it worth to you? If you’re enjoying it, keep on doing it. But if you feel obliged or you’re under pressure from other people to do something you don’t really want to do, don’t do it.

Karo: I suppose that’s one advantage of not being paid very much. If I don’t want to do something, I can simply decide not to.

Brian: Well, okay, good. Fair point!

Karo: That’s the positive side.

Brian: You’ve mentioned family, I know you have a son. I’m sure you have your priorities. They come first. But obviously you like music because you go to shows and things like that. It is a good way to get to shows for free, maybe, or meet some people that you normally wouldn’t get to meet.

Karo: Like finally having this conversation, after a rather bumpy road getting here.

Brian: That’s life. Life is like that. Life is one bumpy road. And if you’re lucky, you have some good company with you so you can at least have some fun.

Karo: Exactly.

We might have finished there. Instead, Brian unexpectedly turned the questions around.

Brian: What’s your favourite music?

Karo: My favourite music? Oh, don’t ask me that kind of question!

Brian: You spent an hour asking me questions!

Karo: It doesn’t work like that!

We laughed, and I attempted to answer by talking about the music I was looking forward to hearing at Wrocław Industrial Festival. Among the performers was The SPKtR, featuring Graeme Revell and his son Robert. Brian immediately recognised the names and volunteered an unexpected detail from his own past.

Brian: I used to babysit Robert Revell when he was a baby.

It was one of those moments when industrial music history suddenly became surprisingly personal. We continued briefly into the different music that had accompanied various periods of my life, from classical music to grunge, metal and electronic experimentation, and the importance of exploring more than one genre.

Brian: It’s like a meal. It’s really boring if you just eat the same thing all the time, isn’t it?

As we finally said goodbye, Jackson made one last contribution.

Brian: My dog says goodbye.

Karo: Tell him goodbye from me too!

I had begun with forty minutes in my calendar and a carefully prepared list of questions. By the time we finished, the conversation had moved well beyond its original boundaries. Brian had been right to question my time limit. Sometimes the most interesting things emerge when you stop trying to determine exactly where a conversation should go.

About Lustmord

Lustmord is the musical identity of Welsh-born composer and sound designer Brian Williams, widely regarded as one of the defining figures of dark ambient. Emerging from the British industrial scene in 1980, with early connections to SPK and Throbbing Gristle, he developed a distinctive sonic language built around subterranean frequencies, manipulated field recordings, vast spatial environments, and an unsettling sense of scale.

His 1990 album “Heresy” helped establish the foundations of dark ambient, while subsequent works, including “The Place Where the Black Stars Hang”, “The Word as Power” and “Much Unseen Is Also Here”, continued his exploration of sound beyond conventional musical structures.

Beyond his solo recordings, Williams has collaborated with Tool, Melvins, Robert Rich, Karin Park and other artists, while contributing to film, television, and video game sound design. His more recent projects include “Trinity”, inspired by the history of nuclear weapons, and “The Pulse of Atoms” (2026), a collaboration with drummer Dave Lombardo.

Throughout more than four decades of work, Lustmord has challenged the distinction between music, physical sensation, and psychological experience, treating sound less as entertainment than as a means of exploring the unknown.