Fryktelig Stoy - ‘’Incandescent came to me as a dream''
- Sparky
- Apr 1
- 13 min read
Calamitous, Provocative, transcendent, alive. Superlatives do not apply to the force of nature that is Fryktelig Stoy (Translation: Horrible Noise) the creative vison of solo instrumentalist Em Stoy, music that is simply visceral, tangible, a presence on the psyche. The new album is Incandescent, a masterwork of improvisation, deep thought, and sheer aggression. The themes of upheaval, death and motherhood are delivered in such an honest uncompromising manner that it redefines the term extreme. From ‘’Black Swan,” ‘’ The Ocean’’, ‘’Radiant” and ‘’Manifest’’, furious yet radiant tempered with moments of beauty. Does "Incandescent" represent a complete vision for FRYKTELIG STØY?
Em Stoy (Everything) ‘I feel it represents a progression from the last album. The first album was, for the most part, an answer to the question “can I do this?” This album is me extending myself, asking “can I do this better?” and from my perspective, the answer to both questions is “yes.”
‘’Funny that you ask, using the word ‘vision’ - with each of the albums a lot of them come to me in dreams. I see images, hear things in my head and then I have a moment to either capture these ideas or they disappear. Creative ephemera caught and released or lost. Through my life I have always been plagued with or blessed with (depending on the day) extremely visceral dreams that I carry into my waking life as well as a form of synaesthesia where I experience certain sounds as unusual physical sensations.
‘’I have a final chapter for Fryktelig Støy in my head that I have been drawing some sketches of, writing some pieces for. I like doing things in threes. Whether that comes to anything is uncertain, as I haven’t completed any songs for the next album yet. The early concept is dark and challenging, so much so I don’t know if I am physically able to make what I have in my mind’s eye.
‘’So, Incandescent is part of a bigger concept as well as a stand-alone artefact. As I grow into my middle age, new experiences and ferment from the past give me new ideas and possibilities. We are only complete when we’re dead.
Is it a cohesive concept? Upheaval and betrayal and grief told through your own experience.
‘’Incandescent is not as overtly conceptual and cohesive as Disappointment, which had the weft of mythical and historical women, and weave of family violence and child abuse themes.
‘’This one is a bit more me in my own skin. I drew upon memories of a time of personal turmoil and mused upon how I navigated my way out of a period of loss. I called upon the mysteries and philosophy for strength and connected to intuition and knowledge to find my path. In that return to my true self, regained threefold what I had previously felt was lost to me.
‘’In making this album, I felt I had gained courage and perspective. In becoming a mother, I gained a tether to my life, no longer living in my own pain. In accepting my responsibility for my children and their growth, I found resolution and unassailable duty.
‘’There is a necessary letting go and making space for new seeds to sprout before you can experience growth. Abundance only comes when fear of scarcity can be confronted. If I had never let go of my fear of being alone, I would never have discovered what my destiny had waiting for me.
It almost feels like the songs were played in order with a freeform sensibility where the idea and passion overtook traditional structure?
‘’Incandescent came to me as a dream, I saw it one night in my deep sleep, the bronze-lit swan wings, and the songs, and woke up knowing what I wanted to do. Because of that, in its essence and through all its creation, it always had dreamlike qualities, and I made that sense of a dream state, floating through different vignettes, by working with tempos, held notes and reverbs to deliberately link or separate songs, and to create the feeling that this was not a forced performance or a disjointed collection of unrelated thoughts.
‘’These objects of beauty and ferocity burst forth as spontaneously as a flame. Side A is the tumult: fire and destruction, facing into loss. Once the change has happened, it can never be the same again. Cursing the deserving and mourning those gone. Moments of fear as the sum of your losses is felt.
‘’Then, side B is coming back to life, alighting the water in calm, alive to your own power, the swan’s wings folded in rest. Finally, a meditation on birth and death, these two events are often so close – both my birth stories for my two children were a frightening dance along that razor’s edge.
‘’I often meditate on my love for my children, as they provide a lot of impetus for continuing to honour my music and to not fade away and die as a creative entity. When faced with moral challenges, they provide an anchor. I live for them, and I am richer for it.
‘I’m a mother and I am a creator. These roles can accommodate each other but I still see too many people - male and female, but particularly women - who feel that they need to sacrifice their individual pleasures to be a good parent. Or worse yet, those that sacrifice their family and leave their children to lead a self-centred life – the classic deadbeat dad. I just don’t think the two roles or parent and creative are mutually exclusive. There are enough hours in the day for both. It’s such a false binary.
Was it intentional to be bolder and more experimental?
‘’I made an intentional attempt to spend more time on this album, as my children are more grown, and I didn’t need to rush and cram recording sessions into infant nap time quite so badly. The progress that this record represents is partly because I become better at recording and playing as I learn more from each process I complete.
‘’I have had friends, two of whom I’m thinking of here, who have spent over ten years tinkering with and perfecting their debut solo albums. One of them finally released their album, the other one is still tinkering. But if they had finished their works – just put a line under an earlier version, released it and called it ‘done’ – they would have been able to move to their next work. There is a balance between putting the necessary love and care into a creative work and just finishing it. I focus on progression, not perfection – and I expect that with each work I complete, it will build on the foundation that the works before provide.
For a ‘’horrible noise”’ it is not without its moments of melody, harmony.
‘’I wanted to explore more melody in my composition this time and use some of the different tones and registers of my voice rather than just screaming and growling. Less deliberate atonal grating, more conventionally pretty harmonies, and melodies. But I wanted to use these more conventionally ‘listenable’ passages as a juxtaposition; a sense of calm and security before heading back into the blaze. The pretty passage descending into some enormous distortion cave is one of my favourite contrasts. Brittle sounds and layering. Phil Spector wall-of-sound meets drone with distorted guitar.
‘’ I’m mixing with Dav, he names some of my guitar tracks ‘wobblers’ or ‘growlers,’ and ‘graters’ or ‘trebblers’ – wobblers and growlers create the base of the mix, graters and trebblers create the melodic interest. I like layering the guitars to make simple melodies more curious and provide sonic interest for repeat listening. I try to find the balance between repetition and hypnotic passages with surprising elements that provide a crescendo or a little tasty bit of pleasing songwriting.
‘’At the end of the day, I make something I would like to hear. If other people enjoy it, then that’s nice – but that’s not the only thing I’m focusing on here. If I was doing it for other people or for money, I’d be trying to write pop bangers to sell to Rhianna (no shade, I love Rhi-Rhi).
Does it tie in the idea of discovering harmony and overcoming? Finding something or tapping the inner strength?
‘’I wanted to move in a more classic doom direction, and I’ve always enjoyed tuneful singing. There’s a long history of female clean vocals in doom, and I wanted to create a range of harsh and melodic sounds. There are a lot of horror film tropes that utilise clean meandering female vocals and I wanted to bring some of those eerie sensations to the album too.
‘’I have no idea how many octaves I’m capable of hitting with my voice as I am not trained at singing at all, but I know I can do a lot with that. Finding ways of creating new and different textures and sensations with the screech, growl, whisper, or pure notes my voice is capable of is fun and interesting. I’ve always loved vocal harmony – choruses of voices to evoke awe and beauty.
‘’I know it sounds cheesy, but you’re right. A lot of Incandescent is about inner strength and independence – that Luciferian concept of self-knowledge and rejecting convention – being authentic to your individuality and value-system. Being afraid and doing it anyway. Resilience is measured best through experiences of adversity, and I’ve well tested my inner strength in my life.
It makes a mockery of fantasy ideas of horror when life experience can be the most horrific of all.
‘’I think you can draw from a vast pantheon of stories, ideas, concepts – all to brilliant effect. Stories, myths, news, philosophy, psychology. It would be limiting to discount a source of inspiration. Fantasy and reality are not necessarily two opposed camps – but perhaps linked, reinforcing – one can predict or scaffold the other. The practice of using parables from the past to tell modern stories has been around for a long time.
‘’Black Swan, the first song on the album, is partly inspired by an economics lecture I attended about unpredictable events that herald in a new epoch. I also have a special connection to swans from childhood. Ten years ago, I had to burn everything that had held me in place to release myself. It is a terrifying moment, to lose everything you thought you knew. You cannot predict a black swan, that event that will uproot and upend everything you thought was an unassailable truth – and once it has arrived, you can never return to safety.
‘’Be Cursed is kind of obvious. Did they think I’d go quietly? Did they think I was finished? That without them I would just fade away? That by ignoring me and pretending I didn’t exist that I would be nullified? I continue to exist, create and curse them all for their cowardice.
‘’I wrote the words to Twilight Kingdom in the palliative care ward as I was accompanying my mother to the end of her life. Sleeping in armchairs, hearing the hushed activity of nurses and doctors bearing witness to and softening the pillow for people passing through the end of their lives. In hospital, it is never truly dark. Never truly silent. Death is an ugly mask, and those memories do not fade. Cancer has taken both my parents very young and some of my friends, and I wonder if and when it will come for me.
‘’The Ocean was written inspired by the ocean of tears in Alice in Wonderland, and Coleridge – but I also spent a lot of time as a teenager sailing and rowing around in my bucolic hometown in southern Tasmania – and during those trips, I have been in a few storms. I had recurring dreams of drowning in my teenage years, salt water and death are a constant in my similes and metaphors throughout my writing practice. Salty, bitter tears – sad and alone, dogged – not knowing whether there is a safe harbour to find.
‘’Radiant sprung from a dream – alight, alive, burning and being rebirthed – a phoenix rising. Sacred geometry, the arc and form, a curled neck from the ashes, coming alive in will to power and spreading wings in flight.
‘’Guide is drawn from freezing nights, walking around in moonlit frost and forest in Tasmania as a child and young adult, but also draws its first line from a Lovecraft story. The divine inspiration leading away from safety and into an unknown destiny.
‘’Birthing is also kind of obvious. More hospitals. I had an emergency c-section for my son, and he was born with his cord wrapped around his neck. He was quickly revived, but that small moment there where there was no sound, it was one of those freeze frames that I will never forget.
‘’Finally, Helix – lying in the golden sunset on my bed, nursing my children to sleep in my arms each night. Feeling hope and horror in equal measure, that this precious person will grow to experience both the love and ecstasy, abuse, and sadness, that this world will undoubtedly unleash upon them at some point.
‘’I agreed with I, Voidhanger to include a bonus track on the CD only as little bonus for those who pay for a physical copy. You should be rewarded for supporting labels, as they take tremendous financial risks by helping artists to distribute their works. Manifest is the secret track for those who dare.
And spiritual relief? Is it important?
‘’At my core, I am an existentialist. In my view, emotionally mature and worthy life is lived by finding meaning in your individuality. Accepting responsibility for your actions and holding yourself to your values can be done in complete isolation from religion. For me, I find spiritual connection with nature, art, my children, and music; these experiences and expressions give my life meaning. My experience of spirituality is based on connection – and is less a form of relief or blinkers to my vision to help ignore moral shame or explain suffering – my version of the spiritual is a source of energy, an acceptance of the mysteries and a reason to continue with the struggles that life can present.
‘’In contrast, religious dogma is an authoritarian overlay that is a form of slavery without chains. Fear of punishment by a vengeful God is an awful thing to inflict on your children and loved ones. To be threatened with being ostracised from your community for questioning the canon is a hideous revenge for curiosity. The fear that religions trade on is repugnant to me.
‘’It is important to separate the spiritual from religious institutions. I have always been atheistic, but I am appreciative of ritual, solace, and communion as practices. At the end of the day, the truths of life are in its unavoidable sufferings and extinguishment.
‘’Or more pithily put, death and taxes.
The idea to balance light against chaos?
‘’I would be hesitant to acknowledge a binary of light against chaos – the natural world is full of what appears to humans to be chaotic and inexplicable – but when viewed in its full scale we only observe part of a much larger system of causes and effects. To embrace chaos and uncertainty is a part of the left-hand path – the arcana is beyond a simple good/bad binary or even a continuum. It exists beyond morality.
‘’The human urge to put explanations around things, look for reason and patterns, create comfort with the unknowable, that’s how we end up with Abrahamic religions, pointing at an invisible God for a life beyond death and an omnipotent panopticon to drive moral subscription. Their emphasis on faith over inquiry, acceptance of answers over questioning, is a one-way ticket to mental slavery. These ‘good’ and ‘light’ codes of morality have overseen colonialism, genocide, mass murder, clergy abuse and countless other crimes. Maybe God’s forgiveness is not what is needed, rather a less shaky grip on how to be a decent person at the outset would drive better lives.
‘’If you embrace the chaos of the universe, devoid of motive or ethos, operating on a mind numbing scale – and let go of the childish urge to attribute human characteristics to non-human actors – you can find as much solace in an unknowable infinite as you can in clutching to made up Gods in punitive temples that seek to impose power and slavery in exchange for absolution and a place in a made up heaven.
Your sound continues to grow and be diverse yet still incredibly visceral, do you know here this comes from?
‘’Incandescent, as a concept came from both being incandescent with rage but also with finding and following the light – reflected from black feathers or emitted by a frozen distant star – the filament of a naked bulb in a hospital corridor, or the golden solar blaze as the setting sun heralds the dusk. I felt incandescent. Burning with desire, licked by the destruction of flames, reflecting in a darkened meditation pool on the tiny mote of light in the stillness. The dual meanings of this word infected the whole DNA of the album.
‘’My creative practice always moves between mediation and focusing inward, and inspiration and drawing ideas from what is around me. It comes from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
You are unafraid to unsettle people with your music, should all music challenge and create a reaction?
‘’I think the range of purposes for music are unbounded – that some music will soothe, excite, express joy, love, sadness, and rage.
‘’Not to say there isn’t a whole bunch of boring dreck out there. And I will happily rant about how AI art is an abomination. That it requires such enormous investment of natural resources to run these gigawatt hungry data centres, to pillage all the art of human history, pay no fucking copyright to anyone to make an algorithmically driven impersonation of art… how is there such common acceptance of this situation as OK and normal?
‘’So that’s a reaction, not to the art and music made by AI, but by the cost – human and environmental – for a plagiarism machine that has no limit or love. With no creator, the creation is void.
Is extreme, the idea that is more that you put yourself and feelings into music?
‘’Psyche and inner knowledge interest me and so, yes, I put my essence into my creation. Witchcraft and rituals can provide prompts for inner learning and reflection. Remembering and forgetting, letting go, moving forward and memorialising what came before. I heard someone say once that you spend your first thirty years or so figuring out who you are, and your second thirty years becoming really good at being that person. In that second stage, I am finding that authenticity I pondered as a younger person and finding an inner peace and confidence that was unknown to me as a younger person.
‘’Maybe someone else will also feel a connection to what I make. Or not. I’ve been listening to Incandescent as a finished product since last year. I really like the album, so I feel like I’ve achieved what I set out to do. To make something I like.
Plans to promote the album?
‘’I will work with I, Voidhanger to identify some suitable promotion approaches, though I realise as a solo artist who no longer plays live, a lot of the traditional promotion opportunities don’t really work. If you have any ideas, happy to hear them 😊
Final thoughts?
‘’Thank you to Dav and Mike for their help with making this album. Many people walk by our sides for a while in our lives – those two, they’re a couple of the good ones.
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