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Two years on from the critically acclaimed third album from Musk Ox, Inheritance, and a lot has happened in that time. Evan, the band’s violinist departed from the band this year to pursue other creative ventures, Raph has continued to tour extensively with both his solo work and Leprous, and the band’s founder and guitar player Nathan Larochette, it seems, has been very busy indeed. On 21^st July Nathan released his second solo album, Old Growth – an austere dark-folk album with an incredible array of tactile moods and an underlining poignancy. I recently caught up with Nathan to discuss his new album, a slew of new content headed our way soon, live prospects, and Musk Ox’s future.

Earth and Sky was seven years ago and since then you’ve done Inheritance, so what made you want to release this album now? 

It’s funny because I recorded the album in September/October of 2020, so I’ve had it for a while now and some of the older songs date back maybe ten years. It’s been a project that’s slowly come together, because the main focus was finishing the third The Night Watch album and then working on Musk Ox’s third album, Inheritance – which were these big projects that took so much effort and work. Whereas this album [Old Growth] had similar challenges, but it was a reaction to those other records; they were albums with big, long songs that made it intense, so I really wanted to challenge myself and create songs that were vulnerable and had this sense of the listener being in the same room as musician, which brings its own challenges. I didn’t think it would take seven years to release, but it’s always weird with albums because you have all these plans to release it at a certain time, but then things end up changing and evolving. Originally, I was thinking of releasing it in the spring, but I had issues with the vinyl printing which caused delays, so things just came together to make this the right time to release it.

It’s funny you say that, because that’s definitely the vibe I got from the album [being in the room with the musician]. I said this in my review for Old Growth, but you need balls to do an album like this, because it’s literally you in a room with an acoustic guitar. There’s nothing else there to help you out and with that, you basically need to have an understanding for the instrument, and you kill it. You genuinely kill it. 

Thank you, it means a lot because I think as the world gets louder and there’s more distractions, it feels like you need to scream louder or do something outrageous to get people’s attention. And as much as it seems like that’s the right path, for me I keep feeling like I want to do the opposite. I think that sometimes in a noisy time, maybe a quiet album is what people will want to hear, something that isn’t all over the place sonically. I’ve been sitting with this material for so long and I’ve wrestled with it and struggled with it and doubted it and questioned it, so that’s why it means a lot to hear from you that it was able to connect, because sometimes it seems like we limit what it is in our minds, you know? Just seeing them as a bunch of simple guitar songs. The original idea was to make these short songs and release a guitar tab book with it, for people who want to work on finger-picking techniques, but listening back to the songs I realized there was this deeper kind of energy moving through it that I wasn’t really expecting. But then, that’s what’s great about the acoustic guitar – there’s a heavy solitude feeling you get from it that you don’t get from the electric guitar. I’m excited for people to hear it; I’ve been in my own head about it, with my own perspectives on it, so it’s nice to hear what it sounds like from other people.

Yeah, like you just said there about the acoustic guitar, I mean, it’s similar to Raph with his cello; they’re instruments where you need an understanding of them, but you also need a lot of heart to get the most from them, to project the emotion, I think. 

I think there’s a reason why these kinds of instruments have lasted for so long. I love the evolution of music and the evolution of technology, but there’s also something very special about this piece of wood with strings and the human behind it. That’s something that will never go out of style. It’s always going to be interesting and have a certain kind of feeling to it that you can’t replicate in any other way. When I originally started playing guitar, I tried electric but it was hard to learn all the metal songs I liked because I was learning. Then I started doing acoustic and that just worked for me, for my hands and brain. I obviously went back to playing metal, but I keep going back to the acoustic guitar and finger-picking, and it’s something that just keeps unfolding for me with new possibilities – like an endless puzzle that sounds so good to me no matter how you play the instrument.

With these songs – over the seven years, did you go into a room, set the mood and bang out the album in one go, or was it something you went back to as time went on? 

All of these songs are like little moments of my life where I would sit down and come up with an idea, and so over time, I just accumulated a bunch of material. When it came to this record, I had something like eighteen pieces there ready and I had it all mapped out, but as we were recording, I was struggling to get them the way I wanted and I ended up scrapping some of the songs and writing new ones; and so, the whole process ended up revealing itself in unexpected ways. By the end of it, I had fourteen pieces and I couldn’t decide on track names or the song order, and I was changing it around that much, my engineer was completely lost (laughs), but I wanted to really get it right and eventually it came through. But yeah, really the material represents years and years of sitting with these pieces and writing them out. It would be fun to bang out an album in one go. I think maybe one day I might try to do that. Although, I will say, the second half of Earth and Sky, “Sky”, I did that in my brother’s studio in three days and later we edited it – which was very in the moment for me, because I tend to really think about the pieces and work on them a lot. So, trying to find that balance to get them right but not overwork them can be tricky.

Since you brought up “Sky”. Earth and Sky was a double album, whereas Old Growth is just a standard LP. With Earth and Sky, for those who haven’t heard it, it isn’t just an acoustic album – the second half of the record has all of these guitar effects and things. What made you decide to omit effects for Old Growth? 

Well, the second part of the first album, that was kind of a happy accident where I had the Earth side, but I got commissioned to create a piece of music that was connected to an app that you would listen to while you were riding the bus in Ottawa. Somebody created this program and they said, “we want you to write some music to ride the bus”. So originally, I went into the studio and I ended up writing a seventy-minute version of Sky, and the idea for Sky came about because of the bus route I take, which takes you to the airport in Ottawa. While in the studio though, I thought it would be a neat idea, instead of just having an acoustic album, having a two-sided sort of thing that represented the music that I like, and then the concept kind of came through for earth and sky: Earth is an acoustic, stripped-down sound, and Sky is electric and really layered. I’m always interested in what I haven’t heard yet, you know? I’ve never heard a dark-folk and a post-rock double album before, and those styles are the DNA of my music, so I thought it’d be neat to separate the two.

It’s good. It actually works surprisingly well; it’s not jarring when it segues into Sky. What made you want to take the risk with Old Growth, to just go straight in there with an acoustic guitar?

The more you work on music, the more you just compile material. I think we’ve talked about Devin Townsend in the past, but he talks about this too, where he just writes music all the time and then eventually, he has a folder of this kind of music, or that kind of music. I think it’s the same way for me – not to compare myself to Devin Townsend – working on music. Eventually I have this folder of short guitar pieces and I think, “okay that’s the next album”. I’m excited to have got it done [Old Growth], because now I have a bunch of other folders for stuff to work on. I also find every project I do has the seeds for the next project without ever realizing it. The last song on Earth is a short three-minute piece and I feel like that planted the seed for Old Growth – as well as the interludes I did for Agalloch. This album is sort of born from that, because one of the oldest pieces on Old Growth, which is the first single [“Ashes”], was meant to be an interlude for Agalloch, but they didn’t use it. I also found that when I wrote those instrumentals for Agalloch, I really enjoyed writing very short pieces, and by the end of it, I had this leftover interlude which I think sparked the idea for making a full album in this vein.

You mentioned before about struggling with track layout and song names. You’ll probably have it in your head anyway, to have some sort of narrative for where the songs go, but from “Path” right up to “Ashes” it’s building up to this intense, poignant sound. Was there an intention to have it build up like that?

Yeah, because I wanted to print it on vinyl. I knew I wanted it as Side A, seven songs, Side B, seven songs. But that’s actually a good point, because the opening of the album is a bit lighter, and then it gradually shifts near the end of Side A. To reference a video game; sometimes in Legend of Zelda or in a lot of video games, you have the overworld and the underworld and it almost felt to me like Side A was more in the everyday world and then Side B is more ephemeral and darker; and I think the titles represent that a bit. Whereas Side A has more tangible concepts with its songs, but then once the rest happens [changing over from side A to B] it becomes moodier. I wouldn’t say I intentionally did it like that, but once I started organizing it, that sort of revealed itself, and then once it gets near the end it comes back around – which, as I always find with most of my albums, I try to have a soft landing and have it all come back in.

It’s funny you mentioned The Legend of Zelda, because that and Elden Ring were the two video games I had in my head for a lot of it. Have you ever played Wind Waker? 

Oh yeah, that’s one of my favourites.

Well, for the earlier tracks, that’s the sort of vibe I was getting from it. The very start of Wind Waker where it has this very upbeat, bright, blue-sky sort of sound.

Yeah (laughs).

To me, this is a much darker album than Earth and Sky, but the songs are a lot sharper and I think you can really sink your teeth into the melodies and the hooks in this one, which I don’t think is quite as prevalent in the last album. That’s my take on it, but how do you think this album differs from your first solo album? 

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think when I did Earth, that material was sort of tied to when I was working on Woodfall, so I see those two as a bit connected. When I did Earth, it was at a time where my progressive-metal influences were coming through more. I think Earth is very dense and technical and it’s constantly spinning – the melodies on that album are there, but it’s a little less clear, it’s more like a cascade of notes. For the first record I was really influenced by this British guitarist, James Blackshaw – he plays a twelve-string guitar and he does a lot of this very fluid kind of playing – and it was definitely influenced by progressive-metal, whereas with this one, after doing the last The Night Watch album – which was also very prog-metal influenced – I think I needed to create a bit of space and really let the notes fall and open up a bit. So for Old Growth, the main challenge was trying not to get too technical with it, and show some restraint.

For Old Growth you trade in technicality for mood. That’s the way I interpret this album. You really focused on setting a tone rather than playing flash for the sake of being flash. It also feels like it’s at the same tempo the whole way through. On paper, you could be forgiven for thinking it sounds garbage (laughs). It’s the same tempo, it’s just an acoustic guitar and that’s it, and you wonder how could that be made great? But it works. It sits in this sombre tempo and things are not really flash, but it’s just so good at crafting a certain mood or vibe.  

I really appreciate that. It’s funny actually, because what I noticed listening back to the first album, I think there’s a lot of insecurity there. The feeling that it wasn’t enough or that I needed to really fill the space. Again, I really love that record, but lately I’ve been playing some of the songs and I think I’m actually going to do a revisit of it, because I think now when I play the songs, I play them a lot slower, so I think it would be fun to compare. But listening back, I can sense the insecurity and it’s taken me up until now to play slower and be confident enough to play like that. Actually, one of my favourite pieces on the new album is the opening track, which is just some very slow strums; and what I’m realizing now is I feel confident enough to make an album of just strums. It’s the simplest things you learn when you first start playing and you don’t think they’re enough, but as you play for longer you realize it’s actually amazing. It’s a whole mental thing and so for the next album I have written, it’s a mix of Old Growth and Earth and Sky – a mixture of long songs, short songs, some simple and technical ones, and it should hopefully bring the trilogy together.

Now Old Growth has landed, what are your plans? 

I’ve got an arrangement of “In the Shadow of Our Pale Companion”, an Agalloch song, I did throughout COVID. Somebody suggested I should do a song from The Mantle and I thought it was a good idea, so I started working on it. Initially I thought “how is this going to work?” This song is like fifteen-minutes long and it’s so layered, but I started working on it and it just worked beautifully on the guitar – like, the melodies and the chords. That’s how you know a piece of music is great, because you can strip it down and it’s still amazing. I recorded it last summer and was going to release it for the 20th anniversary, which was last year, but it didn’t work out. So the plan is to hopefully release it this summer. I also have the original mix of Sky, the seventy-minute version, so I want to release that because I think people will enjoy it.

I have this new solo record which I’m working on and want to get recorded. In the past so many years, I’ve been mostly focusing on The Night Watch and Musk Ox, so I’ve put my solo stuff on ice. Now I feel like it’s time to consistently put things out and keep things flowing. You know, some albums take seven years and that’s fine, but that can be a bit long sometimes. And who knows, maybe I’ll do an Old Growth: Part Two with actual simple songs. I also have this other thing which I want to make, which will be an ambient-dark-folk album, because I’ve never heard something like that before. Like ambient but using acoustic instruments. Usually with ambient music we think of synths or things that can really hold tones, but I want to make an ambient album using only acoustic stuff.

I’ve talked about this a lot before, but a big influence for me were the acoustic interludes on metal albums when I was growing up, even on power-metal records like Blind Guardian or the Italian power-metal band Rhapsody – they had a lot of cool acoustic parts and interludes. One of my favourite metal bands ever is a Swedish power-metal band called Lost Horizon, and they only ever did a record in 2001 and in 2003 and then they disappeared, and they were incredible. They had these two keyboard interludes on their albums and one day I thought, I’m going to try and make a guitar version of this, and it kind of worked out. I started thinking about other interludes on different metal records, and that I could do solo versions of them, so I ended up compiling, I think, nine tracks, so I want to do a little cover album. It’s very short; each of them is about a minute long, but I started working on that and so, that’s something I think I could finish up pretty quickly and get out. I’ve got a bunch of stuff that’s been piling up, so getting this record done will hopefully open up the floodgates a bit.

Are you planning on promoting Old Growth? 

I am yeah. I’m not sure so much right now, I’m trying to see if I can maybe get to Europe in the fall. I’m going to be in Europe doing some guitars with the Dutch group Thurman at Prophecy Fest in Germany, so we’ve been in touch for a little while and he asked me if I could support him live. So, since I’m already going to be over in Europe, I might try and see if I can connect some dots. I don’t have anything planned now, like an Old Growth World Tour or whatever, but I definitely want to play live, because when you’re playing solo, it’s pretty easy. You know, you just show up and play.

With all of this, where does that leave Musk Ox? 

Musk Ox – I mean right now it’s just me and Ralph, and we’ve talked about getting together, just trying to write some things. I think we have similar feelings with Musk Ox where we don’t want it to take so long. You know, we want to get something out. I think we’ve talked about getting together and even just getting into the studio and recording a single or something. Raph’s obviously one of the busiest people I know, so I think for us it’s just a matter of setting up some time and getting together. I think we both agree that we want to take it in a different direction. I think the trio kind of violin, cello, guitar thing, Inheritance made us reach the peak of that style. That was a record we really needed to do because Woodfall was this big experiment, and after that we felt we could level it up a bit – in terms of production and writing. We’ve even talked about going into the studio to record something where Raph doesn’t play the cello and I don’t play the guitar. Which isn’t too much of a big deal, because Raph can play a million other instruments.

I feel like I really need to make some ambient music right now, and I think it’d be fun to make an ambient record with Raph. Something that we can do that doesn’t take too long. And again, I’m always thinking about what we have already done and what haven’t we done, and when we talk about a band like Agalloch, every record they’ve done goes in a different direction. You know, The Mantle is more folk and then, you know, Ashes is more post-rock, and Marrow is more black metal, and then Serpent is almost more of a rock record – and they’re all amazing. I think to me, I’m thinking about what we haven’t done yet. I’ve talked to Raph about maybe doing Musk Ox’s version of Old Growth, like, just me and Ralph – guitar, cello, live, short songs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next Musk Ox record turns out like that.

That would be really cool. So, you don’t intend to replace Evan then? 

For the time being, I think we might go with a session player for when we decide to do that material live, but I think we want to keep it just the two of us as the core and then see what happens. But, yeah, maybe hire other musicians or bring different people in. The future is open and we’re both still very excited about the band. I think we definitely want to do some touring – tour some of the Woodfall and Inheritance material, because we haven’t even done an album release for Inheritance and that came out two years ago. So I think that’s something we would like to figure out – how to actually perform that material. Even if the new stuff isn’t trio, we still want to play trio stuff because I think a lot of people would like to hear that.

Yeah, definitely, me included. Get yourself to the UK, I’m there. (laughs) 

I mean, we have a lot of fans in the UK. So I think going over to the UK would be a good plan, so maybe for 2024. Also, next year is kind of an interesting year because it’s the fifteen-year anniversary of the first record and then it’s the ten-year anniversary of Woodfall. So it seems like a good time to set something up, you know?

Well, thanks for your time, Nathanael, is there anything else you want to mention?

Yeah, go listen to the new Tenhi album.

Yeah, it’s almost as good as Old Growth (laughs)

I really appreciate your support and your enthusiasm for this music, and anyone that likes my music, thank you for listening. The Internet is so overwhelming, sometimes it’s hard to know where you are in any of it. But you know, I keep on going and if people like it, that’s awesome. I just want to continue making things that are interesting, and I hope that people check out Old Growth.  But yeah, just keep supporting all the music that you love and take time to message the musicians that you like. If it’s an independent artist that isn’t super famous, it goes a long way, you know, just to hear that kind of feedback.

That sounds like a great place to wrap things up.

You can stream and purchase Old Growth here, right now, as well as pick up the guitar tab book for the album. Check out Nathanael’s Facebook page, and his official web site here.