On April 21, 2026, ant-zen will release act482, ‘The Shadow of the Torturer’, a collaborative work by Flint Glass and Ah Cama-Sotz inspired by Gene Wolfe’s monumental ‘The Book of the New Sun’. But this is no simple adaptation, nor a decorative literary exercise. What emerges instead is a three-act sonic structure shaped by decay, ritual, memory, moral ambiguity, and the strange afterlife of technology in a world where the future has aged into myth. Bringing together two artists whose vocabularies have long moved through industrial ritualism, dark ambient gravity, cinematic composition, and ceremonial atmosphere, the album feels less like a compromise than the birth of a third language. We spoke with Gwenn Trémorin and Herman Klapholz about Gene Wolfe’s influence, the paradox of archaic futurism, collaboration as transformation, and what it means to build not just an album, but a world.

Flint Glass & Ah Cama-Sotz interview

Q: ‘The Shadow of the Torturer’ is rooted in Gene Wolfe’s universe, which is famously dense, elusive, and morally ambiguous. What drew you both to this particular work, and what did it offer sonically that a more straightforward narrative world would not?

GWENN TRÉMORIN / FLINT GLASS: I first read The Shadow of the Torturer as a teenager, and it hit me in a way very few books have since. At the time I didn’t fully understand everything Gene Wolfe was doing, the unreliable narrator, the deliberate anachronisms, the way ancient and futuristic elements blur into something unclassifiable, but I felt it viscerally. That sense of a world on the edge of extinction, heavy with ceremony and forgotten meaning, stayed with me for decades. When I finally proposed this project to Herman, it wasn’t really a calculated artistic decision. It was more like finally giving voice to something that had been waiting inside me for thirty years.

HERMAN KLAPHOLZ / AH CAMA-SOTZ: Gwenn came up with a great idea, a story that perfectly fits our musical context. The ambience and atmosphere act like a soundtrack, guiding the listener to create their own film in their imagination. What Wolfe’s world offers sonically is precisely its density and ambiguity. There is no clean narrative to illustrate. That forces us to work in textures, in suggestion, in emotional architecture rather than story illustration, and that is exactly where our music lives.

Q: This album feels less like a simple adaptation than like a full atmospheric translation, almost a parallel architecture built in sound. When working with such a layered literary source, were you more interested in illustrating its world, or in reimagining its deeper emotional and philosophical texture?

GWENN TRÉMORIN / FLINT GLASS: Illustration was never the goal. We are not composers for cinema, painting scenes for an audience that needs visual cues. What interested me was the feeling of being inside that world, the moral unease of Severian’s position, the strange beauty of ruins, the weight of ritual detached from its original meaning. These are emotional and philosophical states, not images. I wanted the listener to inhabit something, not to be shown something. The album is less a soundtrack and more what I would call a parallel architecture, a structure built from the same emotional material as the book, but that stands on its own terms. Someone who has never read Gene Wolfe should be able to enter it fully and find their own truth in it.

HERMAN KLAPHOLZ / AH CAMA-SOTZ: For decades, as both an artist and an ambient music enthusiast, I’ve always aimed to tell a personal musical story. I don’t rely on templates like many film composers do. An idea can emerge from something as simple as a sound, a musical structure, or a spoken sample. When shaping the foundations of a piece, the structure needs to generate a positive musical energy, one where the mood tells me, “Yes, this is exactly what I want it to be.” In short, our collaboration led to something truly great.

Q: Both of you come from distinct but equally uncompromising artistic backgrounds, with very different shades of ritual, darkness, rhythm, and cinematic tension. What made this collaboration feel necessary, or at least irresistible, at this point in time?

GWENN TRÉMORIN / FLINT GLASS: I had been carrying the idea of this project for years, but I think I knew instinctively that it required a collaborator. Not because I couldn’t do it alone, but because the world of The Book of the New Sun is too vast and too contradictory for a single voice. Wolfe’s Urth needs tension, between the cold and the warm, the mechanical and the organic, the martial and the ceremonial. Herman and I have very different aesthetics, and those differences were not an obstacle. They were the point.

HERMAN KLAPHOLZ / AH CAMA-SOTZ: There was also something about the timing. I think both of us had reached a place in our respective careers where we wanted to push beyond what we could each do individually. This project was a way to go somewhere neither of us could reach alone.

Q: Your inspirations clearly extend far beyond one narrow industrial vocabulary. There are traces here of cinematic composition, ritual music, dark ambient, electronic body architecture, and something almost liturgical in the pacing. How do your individual inspirations differ, and where did they unexpectedly converge on this record?

GWENN TRÉMORIN / FLINT GLASS: My references have always been rooted in cinematic composition, Morricone, Herrmann, Zimmer, Vangelis, the weight of silence in film scoring, as well as electronic body music and the harder, more architectural end of industrial. I tend to think in terms of space and tension, of how sound occupies a room and what it does to the body. Herman’s world is more ritualistic, more ancient in its textures, with that very particular ceremonial darkness that Ah Cama-Sotz has always carried. Where we converged unexpectedly was in the pacing, both of us instinctively understood that this material demanded slowness, gravity, breath.

HERMAN KLAPHOLZ / AH CAMA-SOTZ: There are no shortcuts in Wolfe’s universe, and we agreed from the start that there would be none in ours either. I couldn’t put it better than Gwenn does, the timing was right for us to join forces and bring this project to life.

Q: The world of The Book of the New Sun is built on paradox: a future so distant it feels ancient, advanced technology mistaken for relic, cruelty existing beside beauty. Did that tension between the archaic and the futuristic resonate with your own musical languages from the beginning?

GWENN TRÉMORIN / FLINT GLASS: Completely and immediately. That paradox is almost a definition of what both Flint Glass and Ah Cama-Sotz do: we work with electronic tools in ways that carry the memory of something much older. There is always, in our music, a sense that the machine is haunted. The Book of the New Sun gave us the most perfect literary metaphor for that, a civilization where advanced technology has become indistinguishable from ritual, where no one remembers what things were originally built for. That is the relationship many of us have with electronic music itself.

HERMAN KLAPHOLZ / AH CAMA-SOTZ: Indeed, the collaboration between Flint Glass and Ah Cama-Sotz opens up new ways of interacting, a meeting of two musicians that might seem like a clash, but one that ultimately leads to a positive evolution. I’ve known Flint Glass for many years, and I’ve always been intrigued by his ritualistic approach. We’ve shared a long history, and with Wakan Tanka album, the moment finally felt right.

Q: The album is described as unfolding in three acts, which immediately suggests dramaturgy rather than just sequencing. Did you approach this release almost as a theatrical work, with its own internal staging, progression, and psychological lighting, rather than as a conventional album?

GWENN TRÉMORIN / FLINT GLASS: Yes, from the very first conversations. The three-act structure was not imposed retrospectively to make the track list look organized, it came from the nature of Severian’s journey itself. Act I is institutional, martial, oppressive, the Guild, the ceremony, the weight of a system. Act II opens out into desolation and solitude, the exile across a dying landscape. Act III moves into mystery and revelation, the Cyber-Khanate, the meeting with destiny. These are not just moods; they are psychological stages. We thought about each track as a scene, and about the transitions between acts as genuine dramaturgical events.

HERMAN KLAPHOLZ / AH CAMA-SOTZ: It’s an intriguing concept, shaping tracks into acts, like chapters in a book. For me, it was the first time working within such a structure, and I found the idea fascinating. It felt like writing a book, but expressed through music.

Q: Both Flint Glass and Ah Cama-Sotz have always carried a strong sense of presence, not only musically but almost ceremonially. How important is this idea of presence to you, and does it change when you create music intended primarily for listening versus music that you imagine in a live setting?

GWENN TRÉMORIN / FLINT GLASS: Presence is everything. A record without presence is just content, and I have no interest in making content. For me, presence means that the music demands something from the listener, attention, stillness, a willingness to enter a space that does not accommodate distraction. Whether I am working on a studio album or preparing a live set, I am always asking the same question: does this command the room? The difference with a live context is that presence becomes physical and shared, it is a contract between performer and audience. On record, the listener has to be willing to meet the music halfway. With this album in particular, I wanted to create something immersive enough that halfway would feel insufficient. I wanted the listener to go all the way in.

HERMAN KLAPHOLZ / AH CAMA-SOTZ: My first live performances in the nineties were very different from what I do today. It took time to translate my music into a live format. I don’t create music with the question, “How will this sound live?” in mind, some tracks naturally work in that setting, while others don’t. Certain pieces can elevate the listener to another level, but it ultimately depends on the live context.

Q: Your work has often been powerful on stage precisely because it does not reduce darkness to posture; there is gravity, immersion, and a real command of atmosphere. When you think about performing this material live, do you imagine it as a concert, a ritual, a narrative journey, or something closer to a piece of sonic theatre?

GWENN TRÉMORIN / FLINT GLASS: Sonic theatre is the closest term, though even that doesn’t fully capture it. What I imagine is something where the three-act structure becomes physically present, where the audience feels the shift between acts not just aurally but atmospherically, almost architecturally. I am thinking about lighting design, about staging, about what it means to enter the world of Urth in a live space. It should feel like a ceremony, but not a static one. There should be movement, transformation, a sense that something has happened by the end that could not have been undone. Whether or not we can realize that fully depends on the context we are offered. But the vision is there.

HERMAN KLAPHOLZ / AH CAMA-SOTZ: You can check out our very first concert together at Wroclaw Industrial Fest in November, a special moment for us, marking the beginning of this project in a live setting. It’s an important experience where the music truly came to life on stage and connected with the audience in a unique way.

Q: A collaboration like this can easily become a matter of compromise, but the most compelling ones create a third identity that belongs fully to neither side. Did this album feel like a meeting point between Flint Glass and Ah Cama-Sotz, or did it become something stranger and more autonomous than either of your solo languages?

GWENN TRÉMORIN / FLINT GLASS: Honestly, yes, and that was both the most surprising and the most satisfying thing about the process. There are moments on this record that I could not have made alone, and I am certain the same is true for Herman. The album has its own identity, its own logic, its own emotional center of gravity. It is recognizably rooted in both of our worlds, but it does not belong to either of us exclusively. I think that is the test of a real collaboration, not whether the seams are invisible, but whether something genuinely new has emerged that neither party could have built alone. The Shadow of the Torturer passed that test.

HERMAN KLAPHOLZ / AH CAMA-SOTZ: I would say our first collaboration was a truly pleasant surprise. I’ve worked on many collaborations before, but this one felt particularly intense and deeply engaging. We took the time to carefully shape both the sound and the structure, allowing everything to evolve naturally. It became a process of exploring musical emotions and inner feelings, rather than rushing toward a result. Naturally, it took us more than a year to fully develop what became our shared “new” sound.

Q: At its core, ‘The Shadow of the Torturer’ seems fascinated by transformation: of power into ritual, of memory into ruin, of technology into myth. When listeners enter this album, what kind of transformation do you hope they undergo by the time they reach the epilogue?

GWENN TRÉMORIN / FLINT GLASS: When I read the book as a teenager, I came out of it feeling that something had shifted in how I understood time, memory, and mortality. Not in an abstract intellectual way, in a felt, almost physical way. I would like this album to do something analogous. Not to deliver a message or resolve into comfort, but to leave the listener in a different place than where they entered. A little older, perhaps. A little more aware of the weight of things. Severian carries the memory of everything he has witnessed, without the mercy of forgetting. I want the listener, by the epilogue, to feel something of that, the beauty and the burden of a world that refuses to disappear quietly.

HERMAN KLAPHOLZ / AH CAMA-SOTZ: Well, in the end, it’s all about a personal approach. I believe this album truly reveals itself over time, the more you listen to it, the more layers you begin to uncover. The blend of sounds and emotions runs quite deep, inviting a more immersive and reflective experience with each play. It’s something I’ve often felt with much of my earlier Ah Cama-Sotz work as well. When I revisit those pieces after some time, I sometimes find myself wondering how I actually arrived at the final result, as the creative process becomes almost impossible to retrace. That sense of mystery is part of what makes the journey so special, it’s not always about remembering the path, but about feeling the outcome.

Karo Kratochwil

Based in Wrocław, I work as a music journalist and photographer covering electro, industrial, EBM, gothic, and darkwave. My work includes features and live coverage, as well as concert, portrait, promo, and theater photography. What interests me most is the connection between artistic intention, what the work communicates, and what unfolds live on stage, all in pursuit of the bigger picture behind the music.