Screaming Projector Episode 7 - Fires in the Distance

Fires in the Distance guitarist Yegor Savonin and vocalist/guitarist Brendan Hayter join the show to talk about "Harbingers" — and what starts as a theory about sacrifice turns into something neither of us expected: a Russian poet's fatal duel, an Icarus myth, and three horror films (A Quiet Place, Lights Out, The Mist) that all somehow live inside the same eleven minutes of music. We also get into whether beauty and darkness are ever really in tension, why "horror" might be the wrong word for what this band does, and what it means to dream in the last seconds of a life.

Jump in for the deep dives — sometimes ethereal, sometimes visual, but always fun. That's the unexpected exploration at the heart of Screaming Projector!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Welcome back to Screaming Projector, the podcast about two art forms that always understood each other. Order and metal. This is it. You're back. You're here, I'm here, and I'm so glad you are. This is it. This is the podcast. All things metal, all things art, and everything in between. The interviews, the deep dives, all of it. Spoiler alert. This podcast discusses three films and their endings in full. You've had some time, but if you haven't seen them yet, check them out. Come on back. I'll be here. I want to give a shout out to Marge, who gave me my radio voice. Alright, let's get into it. Today's pairing, without naming names yet, one is a melodic Death Doom band from Connecticut, whose music deals in something more rare than most extreme metal ever does: pure emotional devastation. Not performed darkness, not aesthetic grimness, the real thing, mortality, mental health, the weight of life examined. I sat down with two members of that band, and what came out of the conversation went places I genuinely didn't expect. Three films today. The first, a 2018 horror film directed by a man who said he couldn't even watch horror movies before he came a father, and then made one of the most emotionally devastating creature features ever put to film. The second, a supernatural horror film that hides one of the most honest portrayals of depression ever put to the horror screen, inside what looks like on the surface a monster in the dark film. The third, a film from 2007, with an ending so bleak it's been debated by critics for decades. The thread running through all of these, sacrifice, the willing exchange of one life for another. And underneath all of that is a question about beauty. If the most gorgeous parts of a song can carry real weight, or if darkness and beauty are always in tension with each other. Here are today's pairings. Fires in the Distance, the song Harbingers from the album Air Not Meant for Us, 2023. The movies Quiet Place, 2018, Lights Out, 2016, and The Mist, 2007. Fires in the Distance. A diary, not a mythos. Fires in the Distance formed in Connecticut as guitarist Igor Savin's solo project before growing into a full band. His favorite death metal record is Nightmares Made Flash by Bloodbath, and you can hear that in some of the more raw, more exposed, more aggressive passages in Harbinger's. The other reference point that came up from both Igor and guitarist Brendan Hayter was Opath, specifically Blackwater Park, as the model for a very particular trick. A passage of real beauty, sitting next to something genuinely sinister, with nothing in between them, seamlessly. This year the band released a new album, Circadian Promise, and I asked Igor about it before we got anywhere near Harbinger's. New music, new chapter, literally, thematically? How would you how how does that feel?

SPEAKER_01 3:14

I mean it it it feels like an evolution for sure. Uh but at the same time I feel like every album feels like an evolutionary stage. It's never really um never really the same. I mean there there are common denominators that stay uh across the all the records, but uh something always changes in the well at least in in my eyes in the for the better. So um whether it be like structurally or um I don't know. I I mean uh thematically it's it's still pretty much the same. It's uh uh deals with a lot of just just uh just raw life shit, you know, just living with uh I mean for me personally, like coping with depression and uh just specifically on this album. Um just uh you know, one of the one of the bigger themes is is acceptance and and not fighting something that's inevitable. Uh and and just coming to terms with it and learning to live with it. Um and not just necessarily depression in general, but just uh anything really that's uh be an impediment in your life. So you know, that's a big part of what I heard.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

That theme, acceptance rather than resistance, coming to terms with something rather than fighting it, turns out to be the thread that connects the entire catalog, old song to new. I asked Igor directly what writing something so emotionally honest costs him and what it gives back. Yeah, I mean, um, you know, writing something this emotionally honest about mental health and death and uh you know what what does that cost and what does that give back? Like is it it I imagine it's extremely helpful.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Um but Yeah, I mean personally, like uh it's it keeps me out of therapy. It's uh it's it's it's it's my way of um externalizing it, you know what I mean? And uh I find it a lot more beneficial, uh at least in some ways, than uh talking to somebody. There's some things that you can't convey in words to somebody. Um but through through music that door is wide open.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_03 5:47

I think it's a matter of kind of uh like kind of like practicing what is what is preached, I guess, with metal, but like to a really, really strong, like pure degree, meaning um people that are into extreme music that are kind of if they have to explain it to someone that isn't into extreme music, the the kind of common principle is is that it's that it's like an outlet. It's like taking all these things putting them out there so that they're not inside of you, but um I just I just think uh fire the fires is like really potent with with really following through with that.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

Later in our conversation, I asked about the album cover itself, Circadian Promise, and where that came from. So what before we move on to um to Harbinger's, I just I'm curious about Circadian Promise and the name. It sounds to me sort of cyclical, it sounds like um like uh dreaming and sleep cycles, and I know you guys touched on that with iconic dreaming at the end. Um how how how did that how'd that name come about? What does that mean to you guys?

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Well, it is about something that's cyclical. I mean, if you consider just your life in general and routine, and a lot of it does follow follow like uh a cyclical pattern, and uh you know the circadian rhythm, I mean something is always guaranteed, right? And then you think about uh just existentially about life in general, I mean um there are certain things that um are inevitable, you know, and they are guaranteed and they're not so so easy to to come to terms with, but you will have to figure it out at some point. That's that's the the source of the name.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Is that uh sort of like a memento mori kind of kinda uh um phenomenon that death is inevitable, like know that you two shall die one day.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

I mean, yeah, sure they can factor in. I I just um you know I just feel that uh it makes living a lot easier once you accept uh something that that is not so difficult to accept.

unknown 7:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:55

Once you stop fighting with it, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

At one point in our conversation, I floated a theory that across three albums, fires in the distance might be building something like a mythos. Not a concept album in the mastodont sense, but a living, breathing body of work that sits within its own world. Eager pushed back on that immediately, and this is what he said. It's like it's more than a body of work. Like it's you it seems to me you guys are starting to tell or you've been telling this really amazing story, and there's characters, and there is um it's like a tome, like a and it's a living volume. It keeps it keeps being added to and and referenced back. Does that am I off base here? Does that sound how does that sound?

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Yeah, you could look at it that way, but it's it's just a diary of my life, man. Yeah. There's no real characters. Like I said, the lyrics are extremely vague for a reason. You know, I it it's I I would want people to be able to um relate whatever they want to it. Um because you know people have their own experiences, and like the what I'm trying to convey, I don't want to make it so finite and detailed to where somebody's you know, it takes away that ability from from a listener. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:13

Yeah, that that's kind of the problem I've always had with like can like entertaining the idea of concept albums and and and stuff like that. Like as soon as I start, you know, exploring that uh I feel like I'm like kind of just superimposing myself on the music in a way that's like rude. Or like or like like non-accurate too, because I mean like like the music, like the riffs are like what is they they're saying, like a million different things to a million different people. So and plus there's like the phenomenon of like okay, so the biggest concept albums being like, I don't know, Tommy by the Who, and uh you know, Pink Floyd the Wall. A huge fan of both those albums, and uh the thing about it is um the songs themselves far transcended the concepts that those dudes put together. Like Pinball Wizard is like has reached this level of like human adoration that has nothing to do with like the the deaf, dumb, and blind kid, and the same with comfortably numb. I mean you have the wall, but then you have comfortably numb, which is one of the most celebrated songs in human history, right? And like it that does it doesn't have anything to do with the story anymore.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

That distinction matters enormously for how you should hear everything that follows. This isn't a story being told to you. It's a document of an internal state, left deliberately vague enough that you can pour your entire self into it, which makes what I'm about to tell you even stranger. Harbingers, what it was actually called. So I asked Igor directly where Harbingers came from. Not a theory, not a reading, just where did the song start? So uh turning to uh Air Not Meant for Us, I want to ask you guys about um specifically the meaning behind Harbingers directly, because I have a theory um about it, and I'm genuinely not sure I'm right. Uh where did that song come from for you? Harbingers.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

I mean, i honestly, man, it's it's really hard to identify these sources. Like when I write songs, it's it's just something that I feel at the time. Same thing with every record. It's it's just a reflection of what I'm going through, what phase like my head is in, and it's uh it's it's all in like an internal thing, and just to just pinpoint something specific, it's it's a bit of a loaded uh question to be honest with you. It's like I said, these things come like music first, and then you know, you kind of almost want to say decorate it with words. So where I was in my head in the at that time is what that song is. It's been what four years no three years now. I shit, I I don't fucking remember to be honest. It must have been something something deep.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Fair. That's a real and honest answer, and it should be respected as a final word on the origins of the song. But then something remarkable happened. When I offered my own reading on the song, that the narrator makes a choice to accept death to protect someone he loves in the mode of a quiet place, Igor said something that stopped me completely. To me, the the narrator makes a choice. I'll never see daylight, but I've seen enough. Um the the threat in the song is never described physically. It's pursuing, it's gaining, it's ancient. But it's not a monster in the conventional sense. Um One read I had, and tell me if I'm off base here, was something like a qu the movie A Quiet Place, um, the father who makes a sound in the world where sound means death just to save his kid. So basically, I I hear um a sacrifice to save a loved one. Um I'll never see your face again. That's a price I'm willing to pay. Is that is that is that a fair read?

SPEAKER_01 12:59

It actually is. You know, it's uh funny you say that, because initially that song was supposed to be called Alexander, and it was about a Russian poet named Pushkin, who had a very tragic uh love life. Um so the fact that you make that connection and analogy is pretty insightful. Uh how that song ended up uh, you know, at the end of the day, uh doesn't necessarily reflect the idea that I started it with, but that's that was a root.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

So the song we know as Harbinger's is actually about the single most important man in Russian literary tradition, Alexander Pushkin. A man who died at 37 in a duel defending his wife's reputation after a long, publicly humiliating campaign about rumors of her fidelity. Pushkin knew the duel would likely kill him. He fought it anyway. A tragic love life ending in willing, foreseeable acts of sacrifice. That's not the song's finished meaning. Igor was very clear that the final version of the song does not necessarily reflect where it started. He left the lyrics intentionally vague enough so that the listener can bring their own life and their own perspective to it. That's the root, but it changes how I hear that central lyric completely. I'll never see daylight, but I've seen enough. Not just a soldier or a father in a horror film. A poet, deliberately walking into a duel he knows he probably won't survive, to save something he values more than his own survival. Brendan had his own image of that same feeling, and he brought it up even before I floated my theory, and it's stuck with me ever since.

SPEAKER_03 14:35

I I wondered at one point about a potential, like kind of uh Icarus type of influence there, with like the the wings ablaze and kind of just like crashes imminent, you're you have wings, but you're falling from a great height. I'm like a wonder if this is like an Icarus type of thing, you know.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

For sure. Yeah, I can definitely see that. Two different mythologies a Russian poet's duel and a Greek boy's wax wings, both landing on the same gesture, knowing what the cost is and willing to pay it anyway. A quiet place, lights out, and the mist. Three shapes of the same sacrifice. Now, with that context in place, let's go through the three films properly, because Igor engaged with all three of them and the through lines across them. A Quiet Place, 2018, John Krasinski's film about a family surviving creatures that hunt by sound. In the film's climax, Lee Abbott draws the monster away from his children by screaming. The only sound he has left is his own death. Lights Out, 2016. A film about the monster Diana, who is explicitly an allegory for depression, attached to a woman named Sophie, isolating her from the ones who love her. The ending: Sophie chooses to die so that her illness does not affect her children. And then the mist, 2007, the darkest of the three. David Drayton, believing that there is no hope left, kills his own children and everyone in the car to spare them a worse death, only for the military to arrive moments later. When I brought up how unfortunate this timing was to Igor, he completely reframed the ending for me. Um also the mist, um, it's a little different. Uh the that's actually really unfortunate because um, you know, he he he ends his kid's life just before help is actually about to show up.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

But yeah, but I mean, what is more real than that scene, though?

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Absolutely. Of course. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

Uh yeah, I mean, great analogies. Oh. But I think all of those have uh a little little bit uh, you know, uh uh to do with the the concept of the song for sure, even though it might not have been overt, but yeah, absolutely, all the all those feed in.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

What is more real than that scene? Not how tragic or how ironic, real. He was interested in the truth of a person acting on the information they have, with total conviction, regardless of what the universe might have in store for them. That reframes Harbinger's also. The narrator falling through the blizzard isn't wrong about anything. The sacrifice doesn't require happy ending to be real. There was a fourth image too, one that I brought up myself and that I'll be honest about. A Hodor Game of Thrones comparison. A man who turns out to be in the service of holding a door so that others might get through. It's not a horror pairing in the strict sense, it's more sci-fi, but it does belong in the same family as everything else here, a life justified for what it gave up for someone else. Beauty is the message, not the decoration. So, I wanted to push past the lyrics for a moment and discuss the music itself. Whether the guitar was doing something as structurally important as the much discussed pianos and strings. So I want to push on something specific about the music itself, not just the lyrics. Uh, everyone talks about the piano I mean, the piano and the strings in in um in Air Not Meant for Us really, really stand out. But I also think uh and as they should, but I think um beyond the beautiful arrangement, the guitar work is doing something just as beautiful in its own way. The the chug and the melody sitting on top of it, it has a beauty. Um was that was that intention like do was were there some choices there um to sort of marry the emotion with uh with the uh orchestral sounds and the piano and the uh the guitar work?

SPEAKER_01 18:20

Uh yeah, absolutely. I mean it it goes back to that contrast that we were talking about about the power with the subtlety. Um and uh you know s slowly like layering things like strings and uh especially if you think about Harbinger's in that middle section.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

It starts with uh that piano melody, which halfway through is modulated into a higher octave, and it brings it up to a much more explosive and stronger emotionally uh point. So yeah, I mean all of that uh is intertwined and uh you know, just song structure, basically. So you know, I mean it's uh takes a while to finally settle on um a structure that you're happy with, because I mean Brendan can tell you, I send him ideas back and forth, like I don't know, once I'm gonna roll like 20 times a night, and be like, oh sorry, you gotta delete this. Here's here's the updated version, and like five seconds later, it's like sorry, I thought of another change, here's here's the updated version. So I'm you know, all my guys are sick of me fucking doing that when I'm like really in the zone there.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

But uh I ask directly, does the beauty in the composition reinforce the theme of sacrifice and release, or does it pull against it? Is there tension or is it unified?

SPEAKER_01 19:42

No, it's all one thing, it definitely reinforces it, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

One message, not two things in conversation with each other, one expressed simultaneously. I brought up a film that I think about exactly with this question Midsummer. Ariaster's twenty nineteen folk horror film, shot almost entirely in saturated daylight, drenched with light, a wash with flowers. Where the beauty isn't in contrast to the horror, it is the horror, and at the end, the protagonist's release. He never quite framed it that way, but he didn't disagree. But it was Brendan who made the connection that actually mattered.

SPEAKER_03 20:18

I haven't seen Midsummer yet. Um I guess what I kind of gathered is that it might be kind of generally Wickerman-ish.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

He was exactly right. Midsummer is essentially Wickerman updated for a modern audience. Right down to the warmth of the community that was hiding something no one ever saw coming. Absolutely. It's it it it is essentially Wickerman updated for sure. Um and I'm we're actually I'm gonna talk about Wickerman in uh in the episode after this. Um gonna talk about um Decapitated Um and their sort of you know, rail against organized religion being a cult, and you know, a line that's that's drawn to the cult that's in Wickerman. Um but yeah, Midsummer is it's uh and I think it does it justice. I I Wickerman's a little better, maybe, but Midsummer's pretty solid. This isn't a coincidence for the show. The very next episode features decapitated and the Wickerman directly. And Brendan had one more film nerd credential that I was not expecting.

SPEAKER_03 21:23

I mean, you got Christopher Lee, and you know, you have those you have those great like kind of philosophical um religious debates that the cop and Christopher Lee are having the whole time about God and stuff. It's just like he can't beat that stuff.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

Yep. Exactly. Um yeah, for sure. Um so you know, j sort of circling back to to what we were talking about before about um you know, horror is place in metal and metal's place in horror. Um, if a horror director came to you guys and said, Score my film, what does that film look like? What's what's what's the story there?

SPEAKER_03 21:58

I don't know about you, Igor.

SPEAKER_00 22:01

What's left when you strip the horror label away? Before we got to that question, I asked something more basic. Horror has always been a place we put things that we cannot talk about directly. Does metal do the same thing? Brendan took this one. So uh horror has always been a place to put things that we can't talk about directly. Do you think metal does the same thing?

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_03 22:26

You know?

SPEAKER_01 22:27

Yeah, you go ahead, Brendan, you can ask one.

SPEAKER_03 22:29

Oh, I mean, I was just gonna say, I mean, like, um, like maybe in in general, yeah, but probably in completely different ways. And I do think maybe explore like both mediums have things that can be explored that the other can't, kind of, where yeah, I mean, like just visual art versus sonic art, you know, there's obviously there's a mass massive difference there, but it's just like yeah, like going for the things that are unsettling or that you don't understand. And um it's kind of like with music it's kind of the same as like like like poetry or like prose poetry where um a poem, like it's like a good lyric or poem or something can you can illustrate what you're looking at in great detail, but then like at the same time, like that same stanza will have like a a part about how you it's making you feel, or like what you're relating it to that's like completely personal to you. I like that kind of back and forth of of like prose poetry and stuff like that. And I feel like maybe that's what music has that maybe movies don't unless unless there's an obvious like narrator or something like that, or if it's that type of movie.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

But his actual comparison was to poetry, how a lyric can describe something in detail, and in the same breath tell you exactly how to feel about it. Something that film cannot do without a narrator. But he did give film one cred due. It has the ability to shock visually.

SPEAKER_03 24:06

Movies are have the advantage of yeah, just um visual design and visual shock, obviously. I mean like the you know, like there are moments that you're gonna see in movies that like nothing you're ever gonna listen to anything that's gonna like freak you out quite like, you know, the the images.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

So that's a real considered answer, not a talking point. Music can hold description and feeling together, line by line. Film can put an image in front of you that a lyric could never do. Neither medium wins, they're doing different jobs. As covered earlier, Brendan had his own strong instinct about not wanting to define an album as a story. He called defining it too specifically superimposing himself on the music. Is there a horror tradition in this music at all, or is horror the wrong word entirely?

SPEAKER_01 24:54

Definitely something existential and philosophical for sure. Um horror though, I don't know. I don't see a lot of uh really connections to horror in in our music in particular. I mean if you if you think of a band like Karak Angren, for example, that's your perfect horror band. Uh but but with with with fires, it's it's not really uh there's no real connotation there.

SPEAKER_03 25:19

It's more Yeah, the closest it could get, I think, would be kind of like um kind of like like a ghost movie that isn't necessarily like scary, it's more like almost like a like emotional, supernatural type of thing.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

That distinction matters for this entire episode, and honestly for this entire show. Harbinger's isn't horror in the sense that a haunted house or a slasher film is horror. It's something more ethereal, more existential. Not something supernatural in any literal sense, but reaching for the same territory that horror reaches for, giving the unbearable a shape that you can actually look at. We touched on this earlier too when I brought up films about achieving something beyond yourself through death. Flatliners. That idea of playing God to get you somewhere flesh and bone can't do. Brendan lit up on that one. Right? So it if unless you're making a horror film, you can't go the other way. It's it's it's a it's a one-way street.

SPEAKER_03 26:17

Like martyrs, basically.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 26:20

Flatliners is is is fun. That's a great movie. Totally. I really like the concept, uh, because um it's a new way of it's more like the playing playing God type of thing.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

Totally.

SPEAKER_03 26:32

And just like, yeah, I mean, because they all suff suffer some serious consequences for what they did, too. You know.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

Playing God and paying for it. That's Frankenstein. That's Herbert West's reanimator. That's an old story, and Brendan is entirely read in on it. That the real horror isn't the transgression itself, but the shape of what it cost you, that is exactly the thing that this show exists to talk about. Agonal Dreaming came up too. The medical phenomenon behind the title of the song. The possibility that in the final dying moments the brain has one last vivid dream. I'm curious about the name um igonic dreaming. Uh uh When I think of igonic breathing, you know, that's sort of like those are the last few gasps that the body sort of tries to the the the lungs are no longer processing oxygen, but the body is twitching um in the throes of death. Uh am I uh is there is there some wordplay there with igonic dreaming and the whole circadian like no of course.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

I mean coming from uh medicine, like I just knowing what that term means, like I've always for some reason connected it to like is there something like uh an agonal dream in the last few seconds of your life, uh you know, into a DMT trip or something. Does something like that happen? You know, maybe it does. I I think I don't know, might have been already proven that it that it does happen, but uh I don't know for a fact or not, but uh but that that was basically the concept of like in the last few seconds. Like what what do you what do you see? Like, what do you think about what is your brain process?

SPEAKER_00 28:14

Nobody knows the answer. That not knowing is the entire territory this band works in. Brendan had the real last word on the subject, and it's worth sitting with.

SPEAKER_03 28:27

Um, I mean, I was like, I I I like talking about that song because I think it's a really, really interesting um addition to the the the Pantheon. And yeah, I mean there there's a lot to that concept that that can be explored and unpacked, and it makes it really potent, I think, like with this type of music because I mean a lot of similar, like generally similar styled um bands, like I mean, it's just sort of like all like sadness all the time, right? And and and that's great, and it's like very releasing for what it is, but then to kind of it kind of like gives the that struggle a new dimension by acknowledging that sometimes things are okay, and that kind of makes the babble more real when you start to sink back into things not being okay. You know, like showing just enough of the sun to like make the dark that much more dark, you know, that much more real.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

Alexander Pushkin, a duel he didn't have to fight, a poem that became in the room with me, three different horror movies, an Icarus myth and agonal dreaming, something that neither of us fully resolved. Igor put it more simply than I ever could, right before we wrapped.

SPEAKER_01 29:43

I mean, basically it just boils down to you know, there's no light without dark, so how would you know the difference?

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Next episode we go to Poland, and the Scottish island where absolute belief burns hotter than any monster. Decapitated and the Wickerman. Who's really the call? Until then, stay heavy, stay scared, and hold your loved ones a little tighter tonight. Full two lips. That's a wrap on this one. Thank you for listening to Screaming Projector. New episodes drop regularly. You can follow us on Instagram at Screaming Projector, and you can find everything at Screaming Projector.com. I'd like to hear what you have to say. I want to know what your thoughts are. Hit me up at Dave at Screaming Projector.com. And if you're watching this on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe. It generally helps new people find the show. If you'd like to help support what we're building here, we're on Patreon. Every little bit helps. Until the next time, stay heavy, stay scared. Tulchie Lives. Screaming Projector is a production of Screaming Projector Media. Music by D218 and Dave.