The Burning Hell - A folk tragicomedy

A brilliant, “moderately agoraphobic” songwriter, an eccentric ukulele player, a (former) history teacher, a child at heart. Mathias Kom, leader of the Canadian folk band The Burning Hell, is all of this and much more.

Currently on tour promoting his latest album “Happy Birthday“, Mathias kindly granted OndaRock this interview.

The first (warm-up) question is almost obligatory, since it concerns the choice of the name “The Burning Hell”. On your official website it says the band's name was taken from a passage in the Bible. Could you quote it from memory? Jokes aside, what were the reasons behind this choice?

The name “The Burning Hell” actually comes from a Bible booklet – a pamphlet – that a man on the streets of Toronto gave me. This pamphlet claimed that anyone who hoped to be saved through good deeds alone would end up in hell. I later also discovered the existence of the evangelical film directed by Estus Pirkle that bears the same name… and the whole thing made me laugh a lot. So I thought “The Burning Hell” would be a perfect name for a folk band, both because it doesn't seem to have anything to do with a folk group and because I like the idea of mocking the religious perversion of evangelical Christianity, which obsessively focuses on torment and on motivation achieved through instilling fear.

I have a complicated relationship with spirituality: I'm deeply religious, in the sense that I believe in the existence of God, but at the same time I feel that religion as an institution, with all the dogmas that support it, has been at least partly responsible for a considerable amount of human suffering throughout the centuries. So I suppose choosing the name “The Burning Hell” was a playful way of slapping religious fanatics around a bit.

The Burning Hell is a kind of musical ensemble, where a few relatively fixed members are joined by numerous others who come and go, making the band's line-up a constantly shifting "mare magnum". You're the only fixed point in the group; what's it like to have this endless coming and going of musicians around you?

This is the band's biggest strength – we're always testing ourselves with new instrumentation and unusual combinations of different people. There are never two identical shows, and while some combinations work better than others, I think most people respond positively to never having to see the same band twice. If you want consistency, eat at McDonald's!

Browsing the internet, you come across strange associations, like the one between Mathias Kom and Mathieu Comme. Mathias Kom is the frontman of the country-folk-rock band The Burning Hell; Mathieu Comme is the frontman of the french-folk-pop band Mouquirous. Looking closer, you also notice they're both Canadian, both have a "theatrical" approach to music, and looking even closer… they even look alike! How do you experience this "artistic split personality"?

Wow, nobody had ever discovered my secret identity before now! Mathieu Comme is actually the lead guitarist of Mouquirous, not the vocalist, so my two roles are quite different: in Burning Hell I have to hold the centre of the stage, while in Mouquirous I stay in the background and let the spotlight shine on Mr. Guilhem Loustalot-Forest, the enigmatic and mysterious frontman.

After graduating from Trent University you had the opportunity to teach History, also at Trent, but for some time now you've abandoned academia to devote yourself entirely to music. Are there any aspects or elements of your university experience (both as a student and as a teacher) that have proved useful in some way to your approach to music?

I taught History for two years, and then I really did drop everything completely to devote myself to music. I still teach sometimes, though – nowadays I teach ukulele!

Teaching History and playing music are essentially the same thing: to be a good teacher you have to "give a good performance", and in the same way, to be a good songwriter you need to be a merciless critic of yourself and an excellent editor. Also, studying History gives you a certain sense of negativity by the end of the day, and I've tried to channel that negativity into my songwriting – that way at least it can get out of my system, allowing me to be a relatively normal person in everyday life!

In an interview published a few months ago you describe yourself as a fan of musical genres, and shortly after you describe the music on your latest album “Happy Birthday” as "folk-flash dark gospel". Can you explain that definition to me exactly?

I think the term "flash" was down to a typo made while writing up the interview.

I define my music first and foremost as "folk", because if you think about it, a good deal of music is essentially folk music – Louis Armstrong once said something along those lines: since he'd never seen a horse play a trombone, he concluded that all music was "folk". The "dark" part of my music lies in the worldview contained in the lyrics – a kind of cheerful despair. The original meaning of the word "Gospel" is "good news": Christianity uses this term in reference to the "good news" announced by Christ; I use it because we try to be a celebratory kind of music. Even when the lyrics talk about death (as they mostly do), we try to be celebratory in the way we play. So I'd say we're essentially a folk band that plays cheerful songs with lyrics about death.

⟦Q1⟧ This line, taken from a track on "Tick Tock" (the album that preceded "Happy Birthday"), captures pretty well the "funny-noir" atmosphere that runs through your lyrics, where the theme of death comes up very often. How do you approach the concept of death and immortality from an artistic point of view?

Some people accuse me of being "obsessed" with death. I'd counter that our own modern Euro-American society is obsessed with death – perhaps even more than the people of ancient Egypt were. We worry about death, we spend countless hours and tons of money trying to postpone death, we shop till we drop dead, we're consuming the planet to death… and on top of all that, we tell ourselves that what we're really doing is focusing on improving our quality of life!

Art will always be a reflection of the society that produced it, implicitly or explicitly, so I just act as an echo chamber for all those death-obsessed consumers out there – after all, I'm just one of the crowd. Lately, though, the perversity of the lies we tell ourselves to keep from accepting the reality of aging and death really makes me laugh. And I've heard that laughing prolongs life!

Still in the same track, which is something of your spiritual last testament, you sing: ⟦Q2⟧ When and how was your love for the ukulele born?

I bought a 30-dollar ukulele in a shop – I'd buy anything for 30 dollars – and I instantly became addicted to it. Anyone who's ever played a ukulele will tell you the same thing: the ukulele is perhaps the only instrument that makes you smile while you're playing it.

A propos of ukuleles…

“Ukuleles For Peace” is an Israeli peace association. The organization's founder, Paul Moore, personally visits schools to teach Arab and Jewish children how to play the ukulele, the kazoo, and other “fun” instruments, with the goal of eventually bringing them together in a single orchestra to put on charity concerts. You met Paul Moore online, through a shared passion for the ukulele, and not long after you took up his cause and flew to Israel to teach children how to play the instrument you love most. Can you tell me something about that experience?

Working with “Ukuleles For Peace” was a profound, life-changing experience for me. I don't know what kind of information about Israel reaches Italy, but here in Canada we only ever hear bad news: another suicide bombing, another missile attack, another stalled peace process. Working with “Ukuleles For Peace” made me realize that the reality in Israel is far more complex than all that: I learned that in Israel there are hundreds and hundreds of Jews and Arabs who not only want peace, but are actively working toward it, and I understood that the only way forward is to set politicians aside and focus instead on the power of ordinary people to bring about peace. The core idea behind “Ukuleles For Peace” is to try to build coexistence and hope among people, no matter how unrealistic that might seem, and the idea works – on a small scale, sure, but it works. Israel's situation is usually described as hopeless, but the kids from “Ukuleles For Peace” taught me that there are no hopeless situations, only hopeless people.

On your website you describe yourself (ironically?) as agoraphobic. Is irony an effective antidote when you get up on stage?

Honestly, I'm not trying to be ironic with that statement – I really am agoraphobic. Either way, there is something inherently ironic about a person who spends most of their time in public places being agoraphobic. Life is funny sometimes. I don't suffer from agoraphobia as much as I used to, and I think being on stage has actually helped me a lot in overcoming it. I'm basically an introvert – shy and socially awkward – who occasionally gets drunk and turns talkative.

You promise your audience a show that's always different: “sometimes noisy, sometimes quiet, sometimes rock, sometimes roll. Always folk, never anti.” What do you think of the anti-folk movement?

I love a lot of the music that falls under that label – Jeffrey Lewis, Kimya Dawson, and so on – but I think the term “anti-folk” is ridiculous, and I certainly don't consider anti-folk to be a movement. If anti-folk music counts as a movement, then so does new-country music. I want to see a manifesto.

From what I've read, you love reworking other people's songs, and on YouTube I came across a couple of your very personal covers – Bowie's “China Girl” and Outkast's “Hey Ya!”. What aspects of a song strike you the most?

Lyrics are the most important part of a song for me. They don't have to be clever, but they need to be able to communicate something to me. I don't consider myself very good at writing catchy melodies or hooks, and while I appreciate that side of songwriting, I tend to gravitate toward songs that tell a good story or play with language in a fun or otherwise interesting way.

The title of your album is best explained by what could be considered its title track, where the greeting becomes “Happy Birthday To The End Of The World”. The lyrics of this song reveal an “end of the world” that was born and has grown alongside humanity, accompanying it forever through plagues, wars, and catastrophes. Hypothetically, if the definitive end of the world were to arrive tomorrow, and today you were given the chance to save one album, one film, one novel, and one painting as a “fossil” testimony to human ingenuity, what would you choose?

Well, the world has been ending ever since we came up with the concept of the end of the world. There's no need to imagine an Armageddon, since we create miniature Armageddons every single day. But if there were a scheduled, chronologically defined End Of The World, and I had just a few moments to send things into space to be preserved forever, I would choose “Pet Sounds” by the Beach Boys, Reiner's “The Fantastic Story”, “The Phantom Tollbooth” (a 1950s children's novel written by Norton Juster), and Der Schrei (The Scream) by Edvard Munch. I think, taken together, these four artifacts would sum us up pretty well. Or at the very least they'd make aliens laugh and teach them something about popular harmony.

The sharp irony of “Everything You Believe Is A Lie” conceals a truth that can be read from both a socio-scientific and a philosophical angle. Broadly speaking, would you describe yourself as a skeptic? And how does that outlook come through in your music?

I consider myself absolutely a skeptic. On the other hand, I believe there can be so much beauty in faith. Skepticism is an essential survival tool, but so is faith, and both end up shedding a lot of light on my songwriting, even though that light can produce conflicting feelings. A good example is “I Love The Things That People Make”: I truly love all the things I list in that song, but at the same time I'm skeptical about whether they're actually necessary, and I'm just as skeptical of a culture built on consumption as a form of fulfillment.

The symbolism of the front cover of “Happy Birthday” intrigues me a lot: alongside the birthday cake that immediately grabs your attention, there's a Halloween pumpkin, a skull, a torch, a bottle, and several glasses of wine. The faces depicted show a whirl of very different emotions, and despite the festive setting, a dark atmosphere seems to hang over the whole scene. Can you tell me the story behind this artwork?

Unfortunately I don't know much about its backstory – the artist, Gabe Foreman, often paints the visual equivalent of a literary stream of consciousness. Foreman himself might say that even he doesn't know the story behind this artwork. Still, I like to read that image as a party that contains every kind of party within it, including wakes and funerals, birthdays and weddings. Whenever people come together to drink, there's always both joy and sadness, after all.

On your MySpace you can read an amusing chronology, on a geological scale, of The Burning Hell's discography, where each album represents a fossil find from a well-defined period. “Happy Birthday” is placed in the Cenozoic Era, more precisely in the Neogene, when The Burning Hell “get serious, discover fire, and become aware of the inevitability of death”. What will be (if it's already possible to make predictions) the historical placement of The Burning Hell's next project?

I think we'll soon reach the Pleistocene Epoch. We'll probably migrate a bit, and maybe we'll discover disco.

The final question of an interview is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get. On The Burning Hell's website you say that your music will definitely make us smile, until we “want to quit”. Well, to be completely honest… I don't want to quit. So (smiling) let me ask you: can you assure me your words aren't like Cassandra's?

Well, actually, I'm glad you don't want to quit. I don't want you to quit at all. I don't want to quit either. There are too many things in the world to laugh about. So I guess you can call me Cassandra.

(22/09/2008)

Ride the wave of great music

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Alessandra Trirè, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition