Death Valley Burial Ground is the most recent project of Andrew Mortensen. With Death Valley Burial Ground, Andrew explores the dark and atmospheric genre known as ‘doom’.
Taking inspiration from doom/drone acts as well as going back to his blues roots, this project looks to be an interesting one, and one he also hopes to perform live with.
10 – Death Valley Burial Ground – ‘Weather’
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original song from ‘Fleisch’
10. DEATH VALLEY BURIAL GROUND – Weather
Produced, arranged and performed by Andrew Mortensen
Recorded at AM Frequencies August-October 2009
© 2009 Andrew Mortensen
This track, and project came about by total accident.
It’s such a great feeling when something new comes from a musical ‘accident’.
Basically I had planned on doing a dark-noise remix of ‘Weathermen’.
I had performed a bunch of synth noise and was mixing in the guitar line from the original when I soloed that guitar line.
I really liked the effects and tone, and thought I’d like to maybe add some more guitar, so I picked up the guitar & got ready to lay some down.
What happened next was great. I think I had a phone call or something & had to put the guitar down & leave the room. As I left, my foot caught the lead & the guitar fell over. When I returned and went to play, the guitar had been knocked way out of tune, and randomly too, as the machine-heads had hit the amp before hitting the floor.
The result of this was a bizarre & random tuning. I played a random chord and it just happened to sound great (needed very minimal fixing to be in tune with the recording) and fit perfectly with ‘Weathermen’.
Around this time, I’d also been listening to quite a bit of Earth, Sunn O))) and Bohren & der Club of Gore and I heard this chord I had made, I knew I wanted to write more music in this vein and based around this tuning.
I’ve written a few songs so far, and even also went back to some old compositions that were originally written for Adam Pringle Band – obviously APB was groove-blues, not doom/metal – but playing with tempo, feel and arrangement has made some work. I plan on getting guests on the tracks too, mostly guitarists. I hope to get Adam Pringle, Julian Curwin, George Rigatos and Lachlan Dale to play on some tracks. I’d say it will be more ‘blues/roots’ than metal, but will still have heavy elements to it. I hope to start recording later this year, and even get some live shows if I can. It will most probably be instrumental music, unless I come across a vocalist who wants to be involved.
Shouts outs (who have helped or helped influence this project) go to Adam Pringle (give me some baritone brown note), Julian Curwin (the spaghetti twang man) and Lachlan Dale (my brother in DOOOOOM) and Junko Mortensen (愛してる).