LIFE AMNESIA: Breaking down Ritual Aesthetic's new album "Wound Garden" with Sean Ragan

Seemingly coming out of the blue in 2014, Sean Ragan brought a cacophonous thunder unto Earth when his project Ritual Aesthetic was born. Blending the best of both industrial laced dark electronics and the bewildering bits of extreme metal, Ritual Aesthetic shocked and awed with their debut album "Decollect". A formiddable powerhouse of destructive noise, the album went on to receive a fantastic eight out of ten from us as well as critical praise throughout the land. Four years later and Ritual Aesthetic is ready to descend upon the Earth once more with their new album "Wound Garden". Due out on Cleopatra Records on July 27th (pre-order that HERE), we got the chance to talk with Sean Ragan about "Wound Garden", his maturity in the music scene, as well as what the future holds in store for the band. Be sure to hit that play button directly below to listen to and check out Ritual Aesthetic's music video for 'The Analog Flesh'. 


Sean:  As a drummer performing in the shadow of other people’s visions I observed a lot about how to and how not to run a crew. I observed the stresses and the splendor of a group effort stemming from ones personal vision. With both projects there was a lot to be said about observing how one can go about offering a healthy Democracy while simultaneously staying on a true path to one's vision. A frontman is nothing without his band. A band is nothing without their frontman properly steering the ship from obstacle and tribulation. A true balance must be maintained in the ship while riding on a sea of chaos. As I grew as a drummer for these projects, that bled into my songwriting capabilities. I would say that was mostly due to the differences in genre between the two. On one hand I was honing my skills with Industrial drumming and song structure and on the other hand I was sharpening my edge with technicality by playing Black Metal and this greatly shaped my ability to break from genre molds during the song writing process with Ritual Aesthetic. I always knew I was destined to do a solo project but opportunity kept calling with these projects and forced it to go on the back burner. It’s something I intend on not repeating as this has become my life force. However if Blondie called me tomorrow it would be a different story.  
Sean:  Four years too long!  In the time since “Decollect” I have certainly had a lot of time to grow as a listener of music. My horizons of taste have broadened and I am open to a lot more things musically than I was four years ago at the age of twenty-four. I have matured as a musician as far as not being afraid to take risks with crossing influences. I worry far less about who will “like” what I am writing and focus more on what feels correct in my heart. “Decollect” was a trial by fire of sorts. I was taking a stab at doing things myself for the first time and had a lot of angst and ignorance within me I have matured as a producer in that on a technical level behind a DAW or whatever tools I am using it is vastly easier for me to accomplish creating what I am envisioning but that’s just time and habit taking effect. I feel that Ritual Aesthetic as an entity has matured in that it has found it’s calling card. I think that it has found its proper sonic footing to which someone could easily identify it’s us on a first time or background encounter with listening. In between “Decollect” and now I experimented with scoring work, scoring several plays for The Urbanite Theatre in Florida and just that experience alone was a huge maturing process because it forced me to come at writing from a completely different angle. It’s a crazy beast to be given a script you have nothing to do with and be forced to churn out thirty to forty minutes of music solely based on the words you are reading and the images and sounds they create in your head. That experience forced me as a song writer to write more from my internal resonance and trust and less from the safety of a pre-constructed blueprint.

As far as the industry goes - I don’t think anyone FULLY understands the music industry right now. It is such an explosion of madness and confusion that is ever changing like Trump’s Twitter account. In one way - yes I do feel I understand the industry more than ever simply because never before was I leading a project going down the label route and so forth but the question that remains for myself and I think many others of all genres is WHAT is this beast were trying to understand? The implementation of the streaming model has helped artists greatly while simultaneously fucking them at the same time. A label still has it’s power to bring loads of attention and benefits down on the artist but at what cost? Now we are seeing artists getting roped into horrendous 360 deals where their label is taking cuts from every single aspect the band has to make money outside of just their records. There is the path of independence to self finance for less debt and a longer stretch of recuperation time at the risk of less exposure and opportunity, and then there is the path of partnering with a label and having them do the heavy lifting for you while counting on them to fulfill your desires in the best way possible that aligns ultimately to a schedule and fixed bracket of finance and time. One has to ask themselves, “Which will this machine do more of?  Scratching my back or ripping my guts out or both? What is the ratio here between pleasure and pain?” It’s such a strange time for the music industry and there’s thousands and thousands who are vastly, vastly above me and this genre who are scratching their heads in the same fashion.  The means of accessing a platform are easier than ever which inherently turns the volume up so loud it becomes nearly impossible to pick the diamonds out of the rough.  A kid yodeled in a grocery store and played Coachella a week later for Christ’s sake.  
Sean:  The images we see on the album cover are speaking directly to the internal message or feeling of Wound Garden which is pleasure and pain, beauty and disgust. We see torn flesh which is disgusting to the eye and yet it holds an odd beauty from a photographic standpoint. We see roses which are indicative of beauty and growth. We see the diamond face bound by a ball gag with absent eyes which is both menacing yet beautiful or sleazy depending on who you ask. Wound Garden is a reference on a literal scale to exactly what it reads as - a garden of wounds or a collection of scars brought upon by life experience. A garden blossoms, matures, withers and dies much like humans. On a deeper level, Wound Garden as a title is reaching into our ability as human beings to endure great traumas both physical and psychological while still growing beyond them into a new being while wearing the same exterior skin. Every human walking amongst you is a garden of life bearing dozens of wounds hidden from the eye. It is up to us to decide which part of an individual we wish to observe and take into consideration. The bleakness and the vulnerability of what wounds they carry? Or the beautiful and ever growing garden of life within them?

Sean:  I’ll take that as a compliment Haha!  Originally Wound Garden had a different title and was supposed to be my breaking back into doing solo music after spending the down time between “Decollect” and now as I had been drumming for other projects. Like “Decollect” it was originally coming from a  place of fantasy and poetry much like film or fun you could say. That was my original way of doing things creatively. Writing and recording was well underway between 2015 and 2016. A followup was supposed to come a lot faster than anticipated. That all came to a screeching halt in the spring of 2016 when my best friend of fourteen years put a bullet in their head and ended their young beautiful life because the highly ignored monster of depression got the best of them. It was easily the most traumatic experience I have ever endured. What I was left with at that time can only be described accurately as a total, all engulfing and crippling sense of reality. No longer did I feel even capable of doing things the old way that I did them. I was so filled with sadness, rage, hate, frustration and nearly every other range of extreme emotion. I had a new skeleton of an album sitting there but it felt like a cartoon compared to what I was feeling in reality. It didn’t feel honest and so I began tearing things out of it. I started gutting lyrics, changing titles, throwing compositions out. I was driven completely by grief and rage. I couldn’t write fantasy anymore. In a figurative sense I was blacking out this fun entity I had created with some kind of emotional spray paint and was just pumping venom into every cavity I could reach. The songs became a diary of grief. It was the first time in my life I was bringing the real world into a sacred place of fantasy for all of the filth, evil and repulsion it bares. Morphing these compositions into what they are now was the only outlet that brought some relief. I shortened it down to the six hardest hitting tracks of pure honesty that I had, cut out the fat and assembled it into a to the point, relentless and unpleasant punch in the mouth. I didn’t care about singles, catchiness or appeal. I wanted to assemble an audio bear trap under the guise of Industrial that forces the listener for a short moment to hear and feel the anger and despair I felt grieving through a suicide. At the end of making the selections I was very much okay with it being on the shorter side as I would rather one hear the best of what I’ve got and be done with it than make them listen to any filler. In place of filler I thought I would just grab some killer artists to provide some remixes to enjoy on the dance floor and Xentrifuge, E.S.A and Seraphim System did an amazing job with providing that. Remixes featured on the release is a tradition I aim to continue. When it was all said and done the wicked irony that came to me through the whole process was the realization that true darkness can’t be found in a book or a film.  It isn’t in records or how scary one can do their makeup - It’s right here in the real world and were living it every day.  
Sean:  'Life Amnesia' was one of the first songs I wrote knowing it would make the cut as it went along. I was envisioning something driven by electronics yet still riding a wing of organic by having acoustic drums and guitar. That song was born out of the first synth hook that shows itself in the early seconds. Once I had that laid out I started reaching in my head for a marching, grinding melody that one could either dance or head bang to. I jokingly call that juxtaposition the “Fight Or Fuck“ method. On a technical level I wrote that with an MA Venom 49 using a slightly tweaked poly saw patch ran through a tiny kiss of analog delay.  The lyrics in 'Life Amnesia' are about an individual coming to the realization that nothing truly matters for better or worse and that the best course of action is to evolve into their purest form. The lyric “Witness the end of your one sole form, an illusion of time’s malevolence“ is a reflection of this notion. The verse carries the lyric “There is no side to choose / There is no being right / There is no one despair / There is no even mind“ and that is an allusion to the fact we as humans in society have no real jurisdiction over right or wrong, civil or uncivil. Beyond the rules of common morality everything else is a subjective storm of chaos and I feel that chaos is the only true reality. I feel that there is nothing more intrinsically chaotic in a quiet classroom than there is in a civil riot, it’s just all how we define things and the side we choose to be on. 'Life Amnesia' as a title is about one going through this evolution and forgetting the old life they lived before shifting into a new form whether that shift was brought upon them by pleasure or pain.
Sean:  I don’t do that. When I am on stage I am not a character or exaggeration of reality. I am at most just at an emotionally heightened level and using that time as a punching bag to purge myself of unpleasant emotion so I can get about my night after and focus on the positive. I have zero disrespect for those who do though because it’s something I somewhat did before with “Decollect” and let’s face it: it’s fun. Before I came to this realization I was influenced by little stories I would think up in my head as I would extract inspiration from film and poetry but now that I have arrived at this juncture of writing from the heart based off off my experiences in the world it just feels like what's best for me.  As a listener of all genres I gravitate towards those records that are more rooted in reality than fantasy. Don’t get me wrong though, I love the way out there character acting / fantasy stuff.  I am a devout fan of Black Metal and especially love some of the cheesiest stuff out there. There are some days where you’ve had enough of Karin from finances' shit and just want to be taken to the battles of vikings and pillaging of churches in black spandex with your balls hanging out while clad in shining armor and grease paint! 
Sean:  Easily Track #4 titled 'Divided'. It was written from the ground up specifically as a dialogue to my dear friend who fell victim to suicide and now some time later as I have grown to a happier and much more healed place I enjoy putting it on and performing it because it feels like a little “What’s up“ from the other side. Plus, it’s a damn good track to head bang and spill drinks to.
Sean:  We are currently working behind the scenes on touring in support of the album. It will just be a matter of pairing with a really killer headliner to make the best show possible. The remixes present on the album are probably what will stay for now but if the wind is right I would love to explore some remixes of the few songs that don’t have them. I am really interested in from this point on in moving farther away from the album format and more into the Rap territory of releasing individual singles of focused power so that is something you can most definitely expect this fall. One thing I love so much about Industrial and all of it’s forms is that it sure as hell has no rules.