Morean: "Writing music for me starts with an intuition"
Known for his work with Alkaloid, Dark Fortress and Noneuclid, Morean has developed a compositional language shaped by progressive extremity, conceptual structure and a constant resistance to repetition. His work moves between technical precision and abstract experimentation, often drawing inspiration from cosmology, nature and psychological tension while maintaining a strong sense of atmosphere and narrative cohesion.
In this conversation, we discuss compositional systems, creative limitations, long-form structures, experimentation, and the balance between total artistic freedom and cohesion within Alkaloid’s evolving body of work.
Answers: Morean
Place of birth: Germany
Occupation: Musician & Composer
What does Alkaloid allow you to do creatively that your other bands don’t?
First of all, I'm super lucky to get to make music with this level of players. There are very few limits to what these guys are able to do on their instruments. That's like permanent christmas to a composer, because they're gonna make everything better that you bring to the group.
And everyone in the band contributes to the songwriting - to varying degrees, but always with a clear creative personality. This forces us to find common ground, and adds to our individual visions. We feel that the result becomes more than the sum of its parts in this way, and it makes every album creation an adventure of which we don't know the outcome until it's done.
Why are you drawn to scientific and cosmic themes?
I was always looking for "the worlds" beyond our reality, ever since I was a little kid. And since space offers amazing quantities of beyondness, not just for our wishful projections as ants on a little hopeless planet, but with mind-blowing stuff that's actually out there, I took to space stuff like a fish to water early on. At times, there's an almost symbiotic relationship between science and science fiction. Your imagination has to work very hard to comprehend the hermetic abyss we're spinning in, and it stimulates creativity because it gives us so many blanks to fill in.
When you like grand stories on unfathomable scales, the cosmos has to be the king of all muses. And where I'm finding worlds without any end whatsoever is not just on this humongous scale or the very tiny worlds of subatomic particles, but literally anywhere in between as well. For example, my wife and I got into plants during the pandemic, just as a hobby, and when you pay attention to the weeds growing from cracks in the sidewalks or a lone little stem of moss being the first to conquer a volcanic desert, you awaken to a much bigger, more interesting and more beautiful world than anything we can fabricate in our heads. Everywhere is full of mind-blowing mysteries and rabbit holes and unanswered questions, and every day, our knowledge of what we don't know grows. I can't think of anything more worthy to write songs about than the Great Big Everything and everything in it.
When writing music, what usually comes first — mood, concept, or music itself?
For me, it starts with an intuition, which can be anything. Often, it's just the vaguest, most fleeting feeling or association, half a thought or a sensory perception, internal or external. When something deeper in me starts to resonate with that intuition, I zoom into it and let it grow until I can start perceving something more detailed about it. Up to this point, it's usually totally amorphous, so you could say "mood" is first, but it's really just a sensory perception. What is next can be either of these things, words, sounds, shapes, images, and they happen in different orders. But much like mushrooms, ideas are just the transient outer, visible parts of the mycelium of the full work underneath. If you believe that this thing already exists in the universe of possibilities, you just need to perceive it, rather than create everything in the hollow chamber of your own mind. It's a different kind of spiritual process, you could say. And then you just keep zooming in until it's ready.
How do you balance complexity with simplicity these days? Do you still feel pressure from expectations around technical musicianship?
Excellent question. The eternal battle. But it's been shifting towards simplicity. Not in skipping the interesting bits, but in purifying them from every unnecessary addition that dilutes them. This might be the hardest thing to do in creative work, and it takes a master a whole life to figure out how to make complexity sound simple. Maybe you have to go so far into complexity that you come out the other end, and the Great Green Arkleseizure knows we tried! We're also getting older and more exhausted and less prone to stressy playing challenges if you can also try and write a better song that needs fewer hyperspeed notes to say what it has to say. For example, I see a remarkable development towards giving ideas more space in the songs Hannes has been writing for the band lately, and it's so welcome.
I'm still falling off the simplicity wagon regularly. It's an uphill battle, and the instrumental craziness is an appreciated building block of Alkaloid. But since it has always been about the song for us, not the sport of playing it, we use technique to express ideas, not vice versa. I would hope that after so many decades, shows and albums we've done between us, we don't have to prove our musicianship anymore in our scene. So we just enjoy being able to go wherever we want, because we can actually arrive there now. It took a great many years to get rid of the shackles of expectation, and they're not coming back on.
What studio gear has become essential to your recording process over the years?
I guess I'm not the right guy to ask, this is 100% Hannes' domain. He says everything we use is important, but that you can replace everything by something else, and still get the result you want.
How do external influences and creative limitations shape your compositional approach?
I take a lot of inspiration from nature, who to me will always be the greatest artist. Trying to capture even a fraction of nature’s complexity and detail takes enormous effort, so I avoid formulaic approaches to composing. I like music that reveals more layers over time, even after repeated listens.
In my Dyson saga for Alkaloid, I try to reflect the story within the structure of the music itself. The earlier chapters on The Malkuth Grimoire used spherical forms for notes and rhythms, while the newer material on Numen, inspired by the warped spacetime around supermassive black holes, became a brain-frying maze before anything musically sensible emerged. But that challenge is exactly why I became a composer.
Using unusual structures and self-imposed limitations is also one of the best ways to avoid repeating yourself creatively. Sometimes that means building a song around an almost random compositional principle, or simply avoiding familiar chord choices. Limitations define the direction of what you're creating, and I find them more useful than restrictive.
That mindset also defines Alkaloid as a band. We're always looking for things we haven’t done before, while keeping enough of a common thread that even our more extreme experiments still feel connected to the rest of our material. The whole idea has always been total creative freedom.
What part of your musicianship are you still actively trying to improve?
On your instrument, the work never ends of course. On guitar, I've come to accept I'll never be a shredder like my band mates, and that was never my goal anyway. But I've been working on a less idiomatic approach to the guitar for myself. Often, I'll have some song in my head, so I'll try and find a way to play it, even if the original has nothing to do with guitars. In this way, I hope to free my playing from doing time and time again just what the fingers already know, but rather find a way to let any musical idea just stream through to the instrument, even if you have to be creative how to get that from just a guitar. And as far as vocals are concerned, I'm still learning a lot. I'm happy with my growls in general, but for clean vocals, I feel I still have a lot of ground to cover, and I'm having fun in the process. As I said, the work never stops. For a composer, there's never an end to what you can learn and develop of course. And you don't wanna get bored with your own output.
How do you handle burnout, creative doubt, or periods where nothing excites you?
Massive question, which would probably require an encyclopedic answer. Creative doubt is not such an issue for me. Ideas are a dime a dozen; it's working them out which is so time-consuming. So if I'm stuck on one idea, I just try another one. The essence of the process is to keep the flow going. I blindly follow my intuition in that, and it has never let me down. And I've always had this creative compulsion. I can barely remember moments when nothing excited me.
Having to burn yourself out constantly, always in danger of collapsing under the mounting impossibilities of being a professional musician in these (frankly, shittier and shittier) times for the likes of us is a whole other question. I can handle struggles with the music itself. But all those external factors you can't change, like the catastrophic erosion of our music industry and the robbery of essential budgets and income possibilities by our kleptocratic slop factory overlords and insane social media algorithms have become so overwhelming by now that I wake up and go to sleep every day with the feeling that it's over, and that nothing I've achieved or can offer to the world is worth anything anymore. I know that that's not true at all as far as our listeners are concerned, or the art itself; never has there been a time with such an incredible choice of music going on, and the public that comes is maybe more supportive and enthusiastic than ever. But the structures that sustained music are collapsing in earnest, and it gets worse every single day. The pit seems bottomless at the moment; not a good state to go looking for beauty and the right notes.
What I do know is that every minute spent with loved ones, playing music together, or going out into nature, is like medicine. So that's what I do. It works for a time, but of course it doesn't solve any of the massive problems we're dealing with, fighting for bare survival in this profession.
What still excites you most about making music today?
For sure the fact that there's always something to be found, something to be said that you haven't said before. Music is never finished, and the further you get in it, the more you're aware how much there is left to explore. Sharing that ongoing adventure with my incredibly talented mates and kindred spirits is not only the best reason to get up in the morning for me, but the very heart of what music is. If it wasn't for music and the joy it brings, I guess I'd be in a hole so deep now that I'd never be able to get out of it. So for better or worse, I guess I'll ride it out till the end.
Looking at the bigger picture: What do you see as humanity’s biggest blind spot right now, and how do you view the future of creativity in an increasingly automated world?
If you ask me, humanity's biggest problem right now is that we're losing the will and the ability to talk to each other, and actually listen to what the other side has to say. The idiots in charge have spent enormous efforts to convince us that there are only two sides, that everything wrong in the world is exclusively the fault of the other side, and we're so scared or dumbed down that we want to believe this lie. Out of sheer vanity, we prefer living in a dystopia based on lies and madness, to accepting the consequences of our own actions and maybe admitting a mistake here and there as well. This - as is painfully obvious by now - will lead nowhere but into even deeper global psychosis and destruction.
We need to realize that however upset we are with the other side, the only way out is together, however painful that is. Only if we start taking each other seriously again and become open to the possibility that the other may have a point as well can we find the best solution for everybody. I have lost all hope that the people we put into power will see the light any time soon, alas. So for now, all we can do is be better than that, start small, and quit the retarded game of just throwing shit at the monkeys in the other tree and hoping that will make anything better. I know it's hard, frustrating and infuriating, but there is no other way.
As for AI: I'm never against technology, and I'm sure this new toy will allow for amazing stuff to be created when used in the right way. But also here, the problem are more the people who control this whole paradigm shift than the technology itself. There's no plan, no even remotely sustainable vision yet of how this is gonna help us take the next step as a civilization. People can produce all sorts of new of garbage with AI now, but something so soulless, based on pure statistical averages of stuff people created before, cannot in a million years replace our creativity. It is quite literally the opposite of it. So I know that what we do won't be replaced by AI. And I have to hope that very soon, everyone gets so tired of being force-fed garbage instead of the psychic nutrition we provide that the world remembers why it needs actual people creating purpose and vision. I just hope I'll live to see the day man. Because this explosion of lies and crap has gone on for long enough now.
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