Ancient VVisdom Play Acoustic for Satan

Nathan Opposition is the guitarist, vocalist and de facto leader of Ancient VVisdom, a band from the notoriously devilish Midwest of America that manage to make acoustic guitars sound like Beezlebub screaming. We called him up to talk about the old days when he played guitar in Dwid Hellion's Integrity, his new band and why everyone in Cleveland is obsessed with Satan.

VICE: Nathan.
Nathan: Andy.

Hi.
How's it going brother?

Yeah, I'm good. I just got back from North Siberia. We shot a documentary about moonshine heroin there. They make it out of petrol and codeine. Very dark things.
That's fucking crazy. Wait, when did I see you last, was it the Old Blue Last night? Aw man, that was great.

The Matthew Brewer [ex-Integrity guitarist, Blue Man Group sex tourist] days. Do you still talk to Brewer?
Not too often. He's doing pretty good, though, touring with his own band, doing his own thing…

Tell me the story of how your new thing Ancient VVisdom started, because I remember Dwid told me something about it about a year ago, maybe six months ago.
Yeah, we started writing tunes about two or three years ago. Then Mike moved to Austin and we met up with Ribs from Iron Age, and we all had acoustic guitars and stuff and started jamming. We wanted to do a Danzig-style blues rock and roll style thing with it.

There's maybe even a bit of Alice in Chains in there, too – which is not an insult in any way, because I love Alice in Chains.
Oh yeah, absolutely, Alice in Chains; Layne Staley, Jerry Cantrell, the dual vocal thing going on, the harmonies and stuff like that. Definitely a big influence for us, too.

Sort of gnarly, Midwest barroom rock, but with all the lyrics about worshipping Satan.
Yeah, basically, ha.

Where does all that devil stuff come from? Cause I know Dwid has his links to certain things, but what are your links to them?
I guess I've always been fascinated with the occult and things of that nature.

Why is it that people from Cleveland are fascinated with the occult?
I think one of the reasons is that it's heavily populated with Catholicism and Christianity's bred into what you do every day as soon as you're born. And as soon as you have the choice to free your thought, you rebel towards the naughtier side, or the darker side, of things.

Do you remember the first time that happened to you?
I was probably about 14 or 15. As soon as you get a taste for it, you don't turn back.

Are you talking about Dwid?
Maybe it was, you know? There was a shop called Ultrasound Records where Dwid would hang out and I'd go buy records with my brother and stuff. We had a couple of run-ins, and then I started working at Peabody's Concert Club so I met him through that, because he was working there, too. He's a really cool guy, an inspirational character for me, too. We had a lot of fun at Peabody's.

There are fun characters in hardcore, but not many that really stick out. I guess that's what makes him an original, even if it's caused him problems, that's why I like him.
Absolutely, that's what makes him stand out. Sometimes you have to play the other side of the coin, you know? And that's what he does. Two of the first records I ever listened to were Misfits, Walk Among Us, and Integrity, Systems Overload – they're the first albums I really got into, when I was really young. That's probably what sparked that interest in the occult in my mind.

How does that stuff come out in your day-to-day life? People say, 'Oh, spooky spells' and all that kind of stuff, but what does the occult mean to you?
The freedom to be and exist and create and destroy at my own free will. The more esoteric you get, the more you get into supernatural things, but those types of things are pretty 'out there' for me. I'm more into personal-individual freedom, spiritual freedom.

Blue-collar Satanism. Radical blue-collar Satanism.
I like that, I like it a lot.

What are you planning to do with the record?
Tour for a while. We have a bunch of new stuff we're working on, an LP's worth of material and we're gonna do a split with Vermapyre, Dwid's new group.

I saw Vermapyre in Oslo, actually. I went to see Boyd Rice. What's up with the double 'V' in your name? Where does it come from?
It's one of those things that works visually and is also an 'old worlde' spelling that seemed really appropriate. We chose the name when there was another band called Ancient Wisdom, so we were like 'We're not changing our whole thing because of someone else's band going on'.

That's a good way around the problem.