Dawnbreaker – From Blasphemous Music to Making Christian Black Metal (Part 1)

Hello, Dawnbreaker! I am not very familiar with your discography. Your current black metal project Dawnbreaker began in 2018, but you’ve been making black metal music since 2003 or perhaps even before. I have read that Dawnbreaker is Christian black metal music, but that before 2018 your black metal music was explicitly anti-Christian, with an extremely blasphemous and violent satanic message and purpose. This change, this journey caught my attention. However, before we tackle the music of Dawnbreaker, if you don't mind, I would like to begin with your early life and musical endeavors. How would you describe your childhood? Do you feel like overall you have happy memories of school, with childhood friends, and of life at home, with your parents and siblings? Where did you grow up?

When I think of my early years, I think of that Toy’s R Us song “I don’t want to grow up, I just want to be a kid.” I had a very happy and perhaps even “privileged” middle class upbringing. I grew up in a New Jersey shore town with a population of 100,000, bordering the town where the “Jersey Shore” was filmed (and where I currently live). It was a nice house with a finished basement and an in-ground swimming pool. Totally safe suburban neighborhood, close to the beach. Bicycle rides, sports, playing the Nintendo NES.. But my childhood was great, no issues, no traumatic events, it was almost too good. I guess for many millennials, we were so spoiled in our childhoods that adult life never could quite measure up. Not a lot of extended family nearby, but close family friends. I didn’t move to New York City until my late 20’s.

Did your parents have music playing around the house? If so, what do you remember about the music that you heard at home and in the car with your family? Looking back on it now, what effect did it have on you?

I don’t recall hearing music often around the house. My parents had a record player/cassette player combo. My mom was into 60’s rock, mostly the Beatles. She played a 12-string guitar in a band as a kid but phased out of it pretty quickly. My father was into the Motown sound almost exclusively. I never got into either of those genres. But the biggest influence of music in the house was classical music. My mom read a study that playing classical music the night before a test led to higher scores. So I would fall asleep to classical music on the radio when I had an exam the next day. That’s where it started.

Were your parents church-going people? What do you remember about your upbringing in terms of religion and spirituality? How would you say that it affected you later on?

My father was a practicing Catholic and went to mass every week, and he kept all of the holy day fasts. My sister and I were raised Catholic, went to Sunday school. My mother was from a Catholic family, but her college experience resulted in her having more of a pantheistic “all religions are good” view. She didn’t believe the tenants of the Catholic faith. So there was some dissonance there, I was learning one thing from my father but another from my mother. It was confusing. But because of the upbringing of my father, I reverted to Catholicism and Christianity when I got older. This is actually a common thing for the sons of Catholic men.

Did you grow up taking music lessons, like piano lessons or in band at school? Did you grow up playing instruments?

My elementary school had music classes where we learned to play the recorder. Towards the end of elementary I started playing saxophone and getting lessons for it. I don’t think I could play one now though if I tried! I started guitar lessons at I think 15 years of age, when I got my first guitar.

You began making black metal music in 2003, but you must have had previous works, songs and ideas that you had done maybe in the 1990s, perhaps?

Nope, I was maybe 12 or 13 years old in 1999, I had absolutely no contact with black metal until maybe 2001. My first band was a death metal band when I was 16, and I was the vocalist – I had been playing guitar for about a year, but a took a long time for me to not be terrible at it. No, 2003 I believe was the beginning – first demo, first concert. Maybe I had some riffs in 2002, that was my first time playing guitar though. I kind of jumped right into it as soon as I could make something barely passable.

How was high school for you? When think about high school from your perspective now, how do you see yourself as a young man? What kind of mental state were you throughout those years? How were your friendships in those years?

High school is where everything went off the rails. As I said before I had a good childhood free of issues. But due to various circumstances I ended up losing the friend group I had at the time, and I didn’t really fit in anywhere else. The reasonable sorrow I had in response to this was mistaken for depression, and so I was put on a lot various experimental antidepressants and other pharmaceuticals. Because my parents trusted psychologists, even though they were getting kickbacks for prescribing this stuff. One of them – a drug called Geodon – the pharmaceutical company Phizer had to pay millions in a settlement because they were paying the doctors to prescribe it, including my doctor. And these drugs were soul killing and made me absolutely crazy. So I was a loner, and outcast in high school. I had changed friend groups a few times, but ultimately I was pretty isolated. People were afraid of me, and rightfully so. I wore all black, leather, band shirts every day. This is when I started getting into metal, and kept wanting more extreme metal. Eventually black metal became my favorite genre of music. I would walk around graveyards, looking like a psychopath, listening to Mayhem and Burzum and Emperor. I found some weird commonality with these bands, and in a weird way it gave me hope and a sense of belonging. I felt like I wasn’t the only one thinking these crazy thoughts, obsessed with these dark things. It was a weird journey. I was just a nerdy kid as a freshman, in sophomore year came the dark clothes and metal music, junior year I was wild and fighting and missing class all the time, senior year I just smoked pot and checked out. No, I can’t say that any of the friends I had in high school are in my life anymore, even though I moved back to this area recently. But there was one friend I had from hanging out on AOL instant messenger, that I met in some metal chatroom, that’s still a good friend of mine. He even did the artwork for the last two Dawnbreaker albums! Were you more into metal when Slipknot came out? Or, before that, did you like rap rock like Limp Bizkit? I got into metal through Korn and Limp Bizkit, haha! This was maybe the very end of the 90’s. I didn’t buy CDs yet, but I listened to the radio and liked the metal and hard rock that was on the radio. Godsmack, Static X, stuff like that. That was my entryway. Metallica and Megadeth would come later. In the early 2000’s is when I started really getting into music and buying and burning CDs.

As far as I can tell, your first metal music on Metal Archives seems to be Angelcide, a gruesome and grim black metal project that was all about glorifying evil in the most graphic and violent ways possible. So, what has happened in your life up until that point, 2003, 2004, 2005 that you are all-in on the glorification evil?

I was a lonely and awkward teen, so I was bullied a little in my early teens. And my parents were strict, unreasonably so at times. So I started gravitating towards violence in movies, music, and video games, because it gave me a sense of empowerment and strength. And as I mentioned before I was put on antidepressants later that worsened absolutely everything. I felt like I was being physically weighed down by the drugs, and dead to the world. And I had anger with everything from the top down – God, my parents, authority figures, most of my peers. My parents were really strict and I started rebelling fiercely with everything – getting violent, unpredictable. Threatening people, saying the most horrible things imaginable. I went from someone bullied to someone who bullied others. I renounced my religion and didn’t care if I went to hell, because I felt like life was already hell. I barely kept it together in those years, and listening to and playing death and black metal was one of the only things giving me real joy and excitement. So it was a lot of things happening at once. I was shy at first, didn’t know how to talk to girls, how to dress. I lost my friend group, and searching to a new one lead to edgier and edgier people influencing me. Then I got into metal and started creating a true identity and persona for the first time. And that persona was just being extreme, into all the most extreme and dark and horrible things. Just being obscene, offensive, chaotic, and destructive. Those things gave me excitement, and made me feel like I was rebelling against the world that I felt left me behind. The glorification of evil was because I hated the world, was at sometimes suicidal and at other times homicidal.

Do you remember your life back then around 2003-2005? You were clearly productive, making music. But what is happening with your mind and your soul?

Yes, I remember it very clearly and often reminisce and sometimes even romanticize it, in a weird way. This were my junior and senior years of high school. Probably the most turbulent years of my entire life. Wild and chaotic, but not necessarily entirely bad. I found new friends, had my first girlfriends and everything that went along with that experience, got my license and car which led to freedom and adventure. But also incredible strife with parents, teachers, with other musicians and bands. The bands in New Jersey were always in competition and trash talking each other. It was war all the time! I started using marijuana and stupid drugs like taking large doses of cough medicine. I wouldn’t do spells or anything, I was afraid to mess with evil spirits, because I still believed in them. But I would try things like astral projecting, remote viewing, trying to have lucid dreams and other weird psychic and spiritual phenomena. I was fascinated by it all! I watched horror movies all the time, looked for the most extreme violence I could find, not just in regular movies but in pornography too. I would travel to haunted places looking for a scare. I was obsessed with everything dark and unorthodox. I don’t believe I was possessed, but I believe the pharmaceuticals I was prescribed were blocking me spiritually and killed my spirit. I’m sure there was some demonic influence, but the cause or root isn’t entirely clear. In the beginning I was extremely depressed and didn’t have many friends. But in 2005, I graduated high school, and something strange happened. Everything suddenly got better. I stopped taking the prescribed drugs, I fell in love with a beautiful girl who I was together with for many years. I started making tons of friends, I was out partying every night, socializing, having fun. I networked like crazy and started getting to know a lot of the people involved in the local black and death metal scenes. I was profoundly happy after suffering the most depressed years of my life. But a lot of this was captured in the music of the time. And yes, I was productive, but the music was low quality. The riffs were basic, song structures were basic. I didn’t know how to engineer music, I was just totally self-taught, messing around with computer microphones and basic music software. My first black metal demo didn’t even have bass, the snare drum was barely present, I was sloppy and out of tune. It was a mess. But I had so much passion for it. I think about that passion sometimes, I remember the mentality I was in. Chaos everywhere, but the music I was making made me feel like I was doing something so exciting. My way of steering through the storm. I eventually re-recorded a lot the music of these early demos into two albums with my “Hosts of Lord” project, “Prophetic Visions of Harrowing Despair” and “Afflicting Blackness of Day.” I think about the riffs and melodies, even to this day.

At least from the music, it certainly looks like you hated anything having to do with Jesus, anything related to God. In the Bible the apostle Paul persecuted and killed Christians, then converted to Christianity, and after his conversion, he suffered many things, like severe beatings and multiple imprisonments. In your case, too, there is a shameful past to deal with. In your case, why were you so angry with God?

I did hate Jesus, yes, I was angry. It was different from Paul – Paul was a scholar of the Jewish religion, and felt Christianity was a blasphemy. He was trying to do the right thing, and he believed killing the early Christians was protecting what he believed to be the true religion. For me, I was angry and wanted revenge – I blamed God, the church, the priests for all of my problems, even though I didn’t really seek out their help. Since my whole childhood was good, I didn’t understand why it wouldn’t be that way forever. I felt like I believed, and was abandoned, so I was angry. I felt that the faith and the church were my enemies, because they let me be cast aside to isolation and depression even though I believe in them and tried to follow the rules. But ultimately I chose to sin, chose to turn away, chose to not forgive. I mentioned before that I lost my group of friends – it didn’t have to be that way. I could’ve chosen forgiveness and stuck with them. But I chose to hate, to be bitter, to not forgive. And it cost me dearly. The suffering that came to me, looking back, I chose it. It was completely self-induced. I don’t know what God saw in me to go to such great lengths to bring me back. I didn’t deserve it at all, but maybe he saw the lengths I would go and the sacrifices I would make to do the right thing in my older years. I’m so grateful to be welcomed back into Christianity that I really put a lot of effort into spreading the good news through my music and other means.

What happened in your life to make you turn to God?

I spent many years genuinely looking for “the truth” in spirituality. I read parts of the Koran and a lot of New Age books. Books on paganism, witchcraft, mythology. But there was always an emptiness in my life, a lack of meaning and purpose and direction. A lack of hope. I never really had a clear answer or a clear direction. And when I was in my late 20’s I was just tired of failing. It just seemed like I was never going to assimilate, never figure it out – how to just, I don’t know, be a part of society or the world or anything. There were little breadcrumbs being fed to me. I started hearing God’s call little by little. One time I was having a severe panic attack after a night of heavy drinking – I had a long drive back to New Jersey from Florida. And I said “God please help me not die on this drive, and I’ll come back.” And this would happen other times. Something awful would happen and I would walk into a church, but would get too emotional to stay for the service. But I would rationalize myself out of it every time “I’m in a black metal band, I can’t go back.” Then one day I sought someone’s consul and they said, “You’ve been trying all these different spiritual beliefs, reading these books, why don’t you try praying to Jesus?” And it just struck me like – I’ve tried everything and gotten nowhere, why don’t I give this a chance? And so I started praying. And immediately these doors opened in my life – many of the things I was looking for. I did read that story you asked yes, quite incredible. But I didn’t have that experience. For me, it was just a simple gesture, just “why not? You’ve been trying so long, why not?” I guess it’s similar to what Jesus said to Paul “why do you kick against the goads?” And I thought, “maybe I’ll give this a chance. Maybe this is what’s been missing.”

To be continued.

Banisher of Unlight by Dawnbreaker

https://www.facebook.com/dawnbreakerworship/

Here are some old pictures from the period of time --the youth-- covered in this first part of the interview.