Gallia Fornax was a black ambient solo project formed by Triskalyon member Der.Walsch some time in 2005. Like the members of Les Legions Noires, I wanted the members in Triskalyon to have side projects together. Der.Walsch originally came to me in January of 2007, suggesting we do “Vision Funeral Doom” together using the newly recorded songs that would become Vision Éternel’s first album, “Seul dans l’obsession”. But those songs were too personal to me and I turned down the offer.
A month later he came back with another proposal. He wanted me to compose black metal guitar and bass parts over this medieval black ambient project he had been working on. He had named it Gallia Fornax. I’m not sure where the name itself came from, but apparently the “AF” initials in the logo were a reference to Action Française, some French movement I knew nothing about.
He sent me three lengthy keyboard pieces, amounting to about forty-five minutes of material; a culmination of material he had been working on over the last two years. Right away there was talk that this was to be Triskalyon’s first full-length release, as we had only released demos and EPs up to that point.
This was the first time that I was going to be recording bass. I had never actually played bass in a band before, although I had been asked on a couple of occasions. And I wasn’t confident with my abilities. So to conceal my identity I created a pseudonym, Peine. Peine was then the newest addition to Triskalyon, and would be used to conceal my identity for all the bands that I was to play bass in; Gallia Fornax and Soufferance. It was also at this time that Der.Walsch opted to use a pseudonym himself, Lansquenet.
I was nevertheless very excited to play bass. This new instrument gave me a lot of room for creativity and improvisation. A lot of my bass parts’ ideas came from Faith No More and Billy Gould’s style of playing. I began working on the second keyboard part first. There was a part in the song that really influenced me to write folk and depressive black metal. The general sound of the guitar would be black metal but strummed in folk style, something that may have been influenced by Vision Solitude. All together I demoed six different song-parts ideas, most of which were very raw; “Ambient Pick”, “Faith No More Rock N Roll Pick”, “Fingers and Pick”, “Folk Like Fast Pick”, “High Chords Pick” and “Nordic Ambient & Pick”.
“Nordic Ambient” and “Fingers and Pick” perfectly fitted that second keyboard song. Almost as soon as I attempted to record proper takes, new ideas and styles of playing these parts came to me. This involved me learning to play bass using my fingers instead of a pick, and even some parts that required switching from fingers to a pick halfway through a strum. My lack of ability became extremely frustrating. Back then I didn’t know anything about metronomes and time signatures, and chances are that Der.Walsch probably hadn’t used any in his recordings anyway. And I was too inexperienced as a producer and unequipped as a studio to realize that I could have recorded the bass lines in multiple tracks. It took me so long to get a good recording of “Nordic Ambient” with both guitar and bass, lining up with the keyboards. And even the best take that I managed to get wasn’t perfect enough for my liking.
Up next was to be “Fingers and Pick”. But neither this nor the rest of the other ideas managed to evolve into songs. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to make Gallia Fornax stand out. I wanted my recordings to be perfect. At the same time tension was building up in Triskalyon between myself and the other members regarding the new Vision Lunar material that I had recorded. They didn’t like it at all and that upset me greatly. So I decided in late February of 2007 that Triskalyon was over and I was taking a hiatus from music. I told Der.Walsch that he was free to do whatever he wanted with the Gallia Fornax material and that I was out.
On March 3rd Der.Walsch and I came to the conclusion that Triskaylon should be given a proper farewell, on top of the last (at the time) Vision Lunar demo which had just been released. I let him compile Gallia Fornax material which I was to release through Mortification Records. I was under the impression that he would send me the full album featuring the keyboards only. Instead he sent two Gallia Fornax demos; “Gallia Fornax”, which featured a fifteen minute song of material recorded in early 2006, and “Gloria Regnum”, which featured another fifteen minute song made up of keyboard material recorded in late 2006, plus the demo version of “Nordic Ambient” that I was never happy with.
At first I wasn’t very happy that he used it but I was so fed up with the scene and music altogether that I didn’t argue with him about it. Both demos were released on March 5th as MT010 and MT011. I was also working on the “Triskalyon Promo Pack” compilation, on which I planned to use an edited version of “Gloria Regnum”, shortened to nine minutes. This edited version resembled more closely to the second keyboard part I was sent in the first place. Der.Walsch also wound up using “Gloria Regnum” on a compilation he put together later that year, “Obscure Synergy Chapter I“.
I have no idea what Der.Walsch did with the remaining fifteen minutes of material, but as for the other ideas that I had, I briefly considered using them on a Soufferance album. The influence of playing bass that Gallia Fornax had on me was reflected on all the Soufferance bass parts that I recorded from then on.
In the summer of 2010, while I was conducting interviews with ex-Triskalyon members in order to write the biography of the circle, Der.Walsch and I flirted with the idea doing a third Gallia Fornax demo. I believe that I came up with the idea to name the new demo “Galore Eterna”. Initially I asked him to send me the remaining fifteen minutes of material that did not appear on the demos but he mentioned that most of which had been used in the demos, had been used elsewhere, or had been lost. Instead he sent me eight pieces which amounted to almost ten minutes of new keyboards and samples material.I wasn’t very impressed with the new material and I wound up putting my efforts into Soufferance’s next EP, “Bonjour Tristesse“. That recording session closely resembled what the Gallia Fornax session was like in 2007. Who knows what the third demo may have sounded like if I had made the effort.
Gloria Regnum artwork front cover
- Gloria Regnum
artwork by Lansquenet/Der.Walsch
recorded July 2006-January 2007 (keyboards/samples), February 2007 (guitar/bass) at Mortified Studios (NJ)
released by Mortification Records (MT011)
released on March 5th 2007