There are more questions than answers: You aren’t the first…nor will you be the last…to ask that question. I myself  hadn’t heard of Ghoul Detail until a copy of  the ‘I want to have your Aids baby’ release came to me for review. Listening to it I thought that here was a guy who would go far. There was a ‘certain’ something…that indescribable gut feeling you get…that this music was special. At the time I didn’t realise that he had released so many other pieces prior to it and wrote it up as a fantastical…or words to that effect…debut release. Time went by and a couple more releases fell on me for review. Each release tackled different genres…I suppose I should mention here that Jon is into the dark ambient / power noise / experimental aspects of music and much more besides…and each showed a different side to the Ghoul Detail façade yet retained a sound unmistakably his. I wanted to find out more and requested an interview. This is where You come in. For normally I would dissect every individual release in microscopic detail but with so many releases…many of which I do not have…I thought that for a change it would be more interesting to get under the skin…as it were…of the artist. To learn how the whole Ghoul Detail phenomena came about and so much more. Read and learn.

Tell me about yourself. Don’t spare the blushes.
I’m 33, born 1972, live in Northampton and I’m single. I’m currently a "digital reprographics department network administrator". I started working here as a trainee printer when I was 17 in 1989. I split up with my ex girlfriend, Sonia, in the summer of 2004 after 15 years together which is what got me putting so much time into my music. When we split up I became an insomniac and just thought that it’d be more productive to spend the extra time on music rather than lying in bed staring at the ceiling. I sleep more now, but back then I was getting about 3 hours every 3 or 4 days and all the time I wasn’t working I’d be doing music… so as you can imagine, I did a lot of music.

How long have you actually been a musician and what…if anything…did you release prior to the first GD release?
Whoa. A musician? Is that what they’re calling me now? I can play a little guitar (play as in “tunes” not just noise) and if you put me in front of a keyboard or piano I could put a smile, maybe a laugh, on Richard Clayderman’s face, but my only real musical background comes from DJing and being able to count. I’m not a musician by any stretch of the imagination. I just get serious enjoyment from taking sounds and twisting them into vaguely melodic structures. It’s all about “sound” for me. A long time ago I found you could do a lot more with turntables than just mixing 2 records together, people like Philip Jeck were a big inspiration to me early on, showing that you don’t just need to use turntables for hip hop based music, you can really go in any direction you want. Did I release anything? No. I did play a lot of my early creations on the Saturday night/Sunday morning radio show I was part of the crew on though. I’d get the slot for the last hour, 5 til 6, to just do what I wanted so I’d mix up these massive soundscapes at home and blend them in with the other kosher stuff that I was playing on the show. It used to turn out pretty nicely. It was all DJing until GD got off the ground and my appearances were getting less and less frequent as the outlets for what I was doing were diminishing all the time, the chill-out room scene in clubs was changing to the point where, now, they’re almost a thing of the past. It’s a real shame because that’s where all the experimenting and creativity was being done. I got my first DJing break at the Hypnagogia Collective monthlies in Luton run by Paul Anomali who I later found out had his ties with The New Blockaders, Merzbow and all that good stuff. Playing there regularly was another big step in opening my eyes to the possibilities of what you can do and it raised my game quite substantially. I did hear the occasional muttered comment about how what I was playing was “too dark” though, that used to amuse me.

What type of equipment did you initially start recording on and how has that grown to help create the music you make?…(tech heads love this sort of shit)
Other than turntables and a couple of tape decks, I had an 8 second sampler to start with, then I bought myself a shitty little Yamaha keyboard in a junk shop, rigged it up to my guitar fx pedals and started building things up on tape in layers. DJing taught me about layering and how to blend everything together, hiding joins and that kind of thing. The Ghoul Detail stuff is all software based. I wanted something easy to use that I could get to grips with in 10 minutes so I use a sound editing program called Goldwave. It cost nothing and it’s basic but it’s got everything I need to do what I do. I’ve got a cheap MP3 player I do my field recordings on, a battered guitar and all the same fx I had 10 years ago when I first started playing around with ideas. I only have what I need and even though I’m primarily software based I’ve no desire to get into midi, software like Reason or anything you need to have plug-ins and VSTI’s to use… stripped down, basic and nothing unnecessary is the way I like it. I’m not interested in using anything where it’ll take me more than 10 minutes to know what I’m doing. I didn’t even have a PC until 3 years ago so I never seriously did anything music-wise until about 6 months after that when I was given a copy of Goldwave and discovered the delights of computer-based production and all the freedom that gave me.

Who were the major musical influences on your life and did they inspire you to strike out by yourself?
My dad played guitar a lot when I was a kid and he bought me my first one. I always had more fun playing with the pedals though so he kind of gave up hope at that point. Biggest musical influences would probably be psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd (at their most experimental before they went all pipe-and-slippers) and the early ambient DJ’s like Alex Patterson of The Orb and the guys from KLF. I always wanted to try and find a way to combine that soundscaped weirdness with something a bit meatier like the grindcore and death metal I’d been listening to up to that point so the whole Godflesh/Techno Animal thing was good for pointers to where you could take it. Once I discovered Phil Easter’s Iron Halo Device and Stone Glass Steel that was the last kind of nudge I needed, and now it’s so cheap to do it all yourself at home there didn’t seem to be much of an excuse not to at least have a go and see if I could find a way of getting out the ideas I’ve had backing up in my head over the years.

Your reply slightly threw me there. I was half expecting the usual suspects of TG, SPK, NWW, Cab Voltaire, Lustmord and all the other acts past / current involved in dark ambient experimentation. IHD and SGS I wouldn’t have put there. Surely you must have listened to those early pioneers and thought…yeah I can do that?
I guess the influences being different is why the music's different. Lustmord was the only one you've mentioned that I ever paid any real attention to. People are often surprised that I don't, or haven't, listened to a lot of what they'd expect me to when I say I make dark ambient(ish) music... to be honest, a lot of that genre of music is really basic and doesn't give the listener anything beyond sonic wallpaper. It's too easy to do that kind of thing and it's never really appealed to me either as a listener or an artist.

You say the break up of your long term relationship drove you to create more music. Was GD formulated whilst you were together?
Yeah, GD had been going on for about 7 months when we split. We’d been progressively living separate lives; while she was out with her friends I was at home in front of the PC. I’d go pick her up, once she’d drunk her fill, and she’d puke in the car coming home. Anyway, when we split it hit me pretty hard as we’d been together for 15 years and I stopped sleeping for days on end… it just seemed better to get my head down and throw myself into the music than to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling all night. Anything emotional I was going through I could channel into the music and work things out in my head that way. I was doing more and more music and sleeping less and less, it was like - brush my teeth, go to work, come home and get on the PC, brush my teeth, go to work - day after day. I was down to around 5 hours sleep a week at that point and I really made some giant leaps forward in the quality of my material… I looked like shit though. Was that more than you wanted to know?

So the actual date that GD was born kicking and screaming into the world was?
January 2004, but it wasn’t named until, I think March.

The name is…well its…ok…Why GD? What do you hope the name puts across?
It’s a thinly veiled Sven Hassel reference. There was a pretty lame film made of one of his books, Wheels Of Terror… excellent book - bad movie… one of the characters says it in a line near the start of the film (I sampled it in Perks Of A Shitty Job on Strung Out In Skogar “as I understand it, Ghoul Detail always gets an extra ration of grain alcohol”). Basically, the Ghoul Detail got to clean up after the battles and bury the dead, it’s a shitty job but someone’s got to do it. There’s some great descriptions in Hassel’s book. It’s like the entire reason I make music; I have to, this is the music I want to hear and nobody else is making it for me so I have to do it myself. The pay’s not good but it keeps me out of trouble. In the books they were the scum of the earth, rapists, thieves, just human garbage with nothing to look forward to except death either at the hands of the enemy or in front of a firing squad. That pretty much sums up life I guess. And I’m no angel.

I also read everything he put out…at school in the early 70’s it was him and the guy who wrote the Hells Angels / Skinhead books that were most popular. Did you not feel he went slightly off the boil in later works and changed his characters names and situations with little regard to fact or continuity?
I read a lot of Sven Hassel when I was at school in the early 80’s and re-reading those books as an adult really was like reading a completely different set of stories, there’s so much more depth and humanity to them than just tales of killing Russians in world war 2. He’s tied in with the whole GD thing, a lot of the early war themed material was inspired by his books, the name, the idea that you can make “dark” music that isn’t taking itself entirely seriously the same way you could read his books and be horrified on one page and laughing on the next. He’s the man. He may not be a completely honest man, but he’s the man all the same. I think a lot of the problems with Hassel lie in the translations from Danish to English. The earlier translators did a great job, it always felt like it was literal, but later whoever was doing it turned them into cockney wideboys and things did seem to feel like it was all dressed up for the readers. You can't beat Legion Of The Damned and Wheels Of Terror but yeah, standards slipped as time passed. There must be only so many stories you can tell that are entertaining. I heard a lot of them were probably embellished from tales he'd been told in prison, but the proportion of fiction to fact does rise progressively through the books. What's he gonna do though? Publishers push him for stories so if he doesn't have any he makes them up. They've never been taken as literal fact anyway, certainly not by anyone with any sense, they're just tall tales from an old soldier.

You say that you put out 20 self released cdrs of about 30 copies each at the start of the life of GD. Did you try sending any of those out to prospective labels in the hope of a deal or were they just early forays into testing the water for you music?
I sent a lot out. The problem with making your own music is that when you first start you’re convinced it’s the best, most original music ever made and you think you should be right up there on the major labels. Of course, you’re blind to the reality that you’ve got a lot to learn and it didn’t take me long to realise that I needed to work a lot harder to get my production skills up to the level where a label would pay attention to what I was doing. The ideas were there but, in retrospect, they weren’t properly formed. After a couple of months I stopped sending cds to labels altogether. The music was getting online and I was knocking out cds off my own back, I didn’t really think about labels after that.

How much…and what sort…of feedback did you get from those early releases?
From labels it varied from “it’s OK” to them really having nothing positive to say at all, that it was all too pretentious and too clichéd (which I still think is missing the point entirely). I sent a couple of cds to Cold Spring Records and I think Justin Mitchell there was possibly the only person at all the labels that would tell me what he thought of each track (being a bit niaive back then I thought that’d be a standard practice)… not an essay, but enough to give me an opinion from an unbiased ear. I’ve got a lot of respect for him for that.

Maybe now would be as good as time as any to send more of your stuff in? I buy a ton of music monthly and your stuff is an equal if not far better than some of the other major labels output. That’s a compliment by the way.
I don't know, maybe it's a hang-up but I still don't really feel ready to step out onto the same playing field as the "big boys". At the moment I put my music out without having to think about whether I'm meeting any expectations other than my own. I'm probably way too close to my music to look at it objectively/subjectively (whichever one it is) and I really don't like the thought of someone coming along and saying "that track's got to go if you want this released on our label". I know it's the temperamental artist in me that's too precious about his work but, fuck it, this music is my life, maybe people don't understand that the cds play out the way they do for a reason that makes perfect sense to me and that they have to be how they are to work right. Maybe I'm just scared that releasing something on a bigger label might change my life in some way I won't like, I don't know, I've got hang-ups, lots of them, and I like the safety zone I feel like I'm in at the moment. Ar tists are assholes, I know I am, I've got a lot of belief in my music... I just can't back that up with confidence in myself as a person. I do think that I'd dry up under the pressure of being on a bigger label. It's fucked up and sending my music to labels like Cold Spring isn't something I could bring myself to do now, I've lost a lot of that "look at me" spark I had when I started doing GD, the desire to be noticed just isn't there as much now.

 I first came across you when you submitted the terrific ‘I want to have your Aids baby’ release. Was this the first time you had submitted your music for open critical review?
I sent a copy of one to The Wire once and heard nothing back about that, but I actually hit paydirt and got a feature on Ghoul Detail in Bizarre magazine in August 2004 after having the distinction of sending them one of just two cds they’d received in the previous 2 months that they actually liked. They reviewed my Whoremaster cd in their February 2005 issue too… they liked that one. The Aural Pressure review was the next big step after that. Funnily enough I’d never submitted the cd for review, I met Jo at a gig for the band I was in, GDR, in January and she pretty much said “I run Aural Pressure, send me a cd and if it’s any good we’ll maybe play something on the radio show”, so I just threw the cd in the mail, no press or contact info or anything. A couple of months later I get an email with a link to the review. Surprised? Who me? Definitely.

I take it that you by now you actively sought a record label who would be happy to release your music. How did you end up on the Roil Noise label?
Roil Noise came to me. I’d collaborated on a track with Random Insults he was submitting for the Roil International Noise Offensive compilation that’ll be out this year and they’d told me they were into what I was doing in general, I just thought they were digging it as listeners, but around Easter 2005 they got in touch and asked if I’d be interested in joining their roster of recording artists. It really came out of the blue, but apparently Ghoul Detail was at the top of their hit list. If they hadn’t come forward with their offer I imagine I’d still just be doing it all myself like I did before.

Are you happy with the way that they release your music?…personally I feel that you should be on one of the bigger labels who could give your release the packaging / promotion your music deserves…which is in no way a bad reflection on Roil Noise.
I’m happy. It’s the small labels that are run on the love of music that keep any music scene fresh and alive. As long as the music’s getting to the people that want it I don’t ask for any more than that. Roil Noise is going to grow and all the artists that are on board will grow with it. At this stage I like keeping things at ground level, I like the punk attitude of getting music out by any means necessary at a price that’s low enough for people to be happy to take a gamble on. Roil Noise are really into their artists and that puts all of us in a position that’d be hard to find on a major label. Maybe in the future I’ll have an offer to release something through a label like CMI but it’s not something I’ve ever pinned any hopes on so I don’t think about it any more. It’s not something I’d go out to look for. I’d do it, it’d be stupid not to, but Roil Noise will always be home for me.

Everything I’ve heard so far from you seems to be constantly evolving. You delve into the different genres like dark ambient / drone / power noise / space shit as though you’re never happy within one or the other. Is this your true modus operandi?…or whatever the fuck its called.
I like to mix it up and I really don’t see any point in churning out the same thing over and over again. The cds are like journeys for me and it’s just a case of doing whatever I need to do to get me from point A to point B. The roads aren’t always straight and sometimes you need to take a detour to get through to the end. I’m starting to think that Ghoul Detail is a style within itself, one without boundaries but one that always resembles itself in the way it’s presented. I’ve been told by people you could blindfold them and just play a cd and they’d know it’s me. Not because they’re clones, it’s the opposite; they’re all very different but there’s a definite signature to the sound

With release number 33 under the GD name now out how much feedback are you now receiving and of what sort?
I guess much of the feedback comes from what you’d call “fan mail”, kids emailing me about how they downloaded some music and then came back to grab as much free shit as they could. I get a few of them a week. It’s funny, some of them act like I’m a celebrity or something like that but most of them say they’ve not heard anything like it before and just want to pay their respects. I do actually find it quite unnerving the level of awe some of them have, I’m sure they wouldn’t be the same if they met me. I don’t have any rock star aspirations so that side feels pretty weird. There’s a couple of radio DJs that play my music regularly that let me know they’re still into whichever tangent I’m going off on this week, but outside of that there’s not really a lot.

Can an artist be too prolific with the amount of releases currently available?
Ask Merzbow.

Good answer. To anyone not acquainted with the music of GD explain in your own words how you lay down the tracks, the thought processes involved, the decisions made into how the sound sculptures will eventually turn out, how you title the releases and work out the art work?…more tech head shit for them to swallow.
I don’t work in the same kind of way as most people, so the thought processes are probably radically different. I’ve been told I do everything wrong, but we’re dealing with art here, you wouldn’t tell Frank Frazetta he was using the wrong brush while he’s painting, it’s all about the end result. Plus, I’m working entirely in sound editing software and treating the music as if I was doing sound design for a film, considering atmosphere and ambience over rhythm or melody every time. I build up from the bottom end. As most of the low frequency layers in my work are drone based I’ll find a suitable (read “any”) sound and slow it the fuck down. Say, record dropping a handful of spoons onto a table and slow it down to 8 minutes in length. Once you get into shaping things with low and high pass filters you can start to make any tonal sound you want from anything. I’ve got so many air miles on the software I know exactly what every fx adjustment will do so I can be intuitive. I’ve got a good memory for sound too, which is a big help because Goldwave isn’t like Acid where you get as many tracks of music as you want and they’re all adjustable all the time. In Goldwave you just get one big fuck-off lump of audio and if you’re going to make an adjustment you better be sure you like it because it’s extremely limited in what you can do post-mix, which is why I’m usually mixing up my music over 10 or so windows that only get overlayed when I’m happy that they’re right. Any sane person would probably lose it right there and have a melt down, but it’s the only way I’ve ever done this so it’s just the natural way to work for me. Once the bass is there the rest builds up from that. I rarely have a plan when I start, it’s always a case of seeing what the sounds say when I start working with the very low end. It’s unorthodox, but that’s only because we live in an age where people are told “you need this to do this” and they actually believe it. Shit, I didn’t make music for years because I couldn’t afford all the gear I needed to try and realise what I was hearing in my head. Once you get away from that train of thought you start to think in possibilities not in limitations. I honestly think I’ve learnt enough about what I do that I can make a track out of anything as a source sound. I did a track for a compilation a couple of days ago that was made entirely from a recording of me taking a piss. It’s as simple as that, you just have to have the right kind of mind to think in those kind of ways. Titles usually come either while I’m working on a track or when I’m listening to the final mixdown. I let the music suggest something.

On your latest release ‘Rattenkrieg‘…where you name check Sven Hassel…you surprised me by not going full pelt down the old military drumming / orchestrations / WW2 samples route which would have been so easily to do. Was this a conscious decision on your part when setting out the recording?
Again its born outof Hassel’s books and neither the characters or the books had a military feel to them. To do a cd of music inspired by his books that played out in a military style would feel like I’d missed the point of what he was saying. Rattenkrieg’s got an emotional core to it, it’s a war you never wanted to be a part of, it’s irrational, and if you’re killing you’re killing for your own survival not the glory of the reich or a lunatic in a bunker. It’s about holding onto your soul while someone breathes their last breath in you face as you stab them in the lung.

One of my absolute favourite GD releases is ‘The Green Inferno…a tribute to Cannibal Holocaust’. I take it you’re a film fan of this once video nasty?
I like what the film’s about but not necessarily how it was executed. I’m a fan of that kind of exploitation cinema and I love the way Italian filmmakers get intellectualised even when they’re making the most OTT throwaway trash. It’s never been any more than a grindhouse movie, it’s mean spirited (to quote Robert Kerman, it’s star) and the director was, and still is, a hack. But the underlying theme of the film is still valid and the music’s the work of a genius on the same level as Ennio Morricone, in my opinion; Riz Ortolani. I think a lot more gets read into it than they ever intended but it’s going to live on for a long time because of that.

You never overuse samples in your releases. Where do you find the ones you think appropriate for each release?…bloody tech heads will be in heaven with your reply.
I’ve lifted quite a few from old movie trailers, being a movie junkie I can watch trailers for hours. The trick isn’t so much finding samples, you can go to a million sites on the internet and find samples somewhere from just about anything ever made, the trick is using them in the right context to make them work. My head’s full of nothing but music and lines from films I’ve heard over the years, I hear things all the time that if I can’t record them there and then I’ll remember what it was and track it down later on. I’ve got a lot of recordings of spoken word things I picked up from junk shops when I was DJing that are still useful now, tape recordings of things off the radio, just people talking, all sorts. I’ve started moving away from samples now and only use ones that really hit the right tone. It’s easy to overdo that kind of thing, I’ve done it myself before. I only really use them now if they add something that I can’t get from using a sound instead.

How did the Werewolf Corps vs Ghoul Detail on Funereal Disease Records come about?
Steve (WC) got in touch and asked if I fancied it. We’d been frequenting the same forum on the internet and I think I was the only person that said anything positive about his music. We struck up a friendship and did a bunch of remixes for each other for the fun of it. Once we heard the results he decided to go for a cd release through his FDR label. It was probably the most fun I’ve had doing something like that despite the fact that we never once met. No ground rules, just a case of go for it and see what happens. It was a nice release too and at that point it was the first thing I’d had released that I hadn’t put out myself so that was particularly sweet.

Werewolf Corps vs Ghoul Detail was cruelly only released in a limited run of 50 copies. Having immersed myself in this work do you not feel that this release deserves wider distribution? And the cover was absolute shite by the way. Surely not of your doing?
Where did you get a copy from? As I understood it that was sold out and deleted in about 2 weeks. It'd be nice to see it get wider distribution, it'd be nice to see everything get wider distribution, but I don't dwell on that kind of thing as I'm always focusing on whatever's current. It was some pretty good stuff on that though and Steve said at the time he'd go for a second run if the demand was there. At this kind of level it's driven a lot more by the lack of funds to do what you want to do than the lack of desire to do it. Steve (WC) did the WC vs GD cover. I quite liked it, although it was kind of difficult to tell what it was called. It fit in with the visual identity of his other releases though which was what he was aiming for.

Do you see yourself doing another release with this act like this in the future?
Steve mentioned that when we finished it, maybe doing one for Halloween last year but that never happened. I think he’s put Werewolf Corps into hibernation for a while so he can do some other things, but if he decides he’s game for it then I will be.

You also have the Ghoul Detail vs Rabbit Girls release out. Again how did this come about?
Noah (RG’s) runs Roil Noise (he’s also half of Alien Death Form) and he likes to collaborate with his boys when he can. He sent me an email saying he had half a dozen cds of stuff he’d recorded for me to play around with – digital noise, circuit bent sounds, glitchy beats, lots of weird shit that spoke volumes to me when I played it to see what he’d sent. I got hit by a flash of inspiration that kept me up for 4 days over a long weekend twisting all this weirdness into something entirely new. That was a lot of fun too and it taught me that tracks don’t have to be over 8 minutes long to be any good. I’m sure we’ll be doing things like this for a long time to come, I always learn a lot when I’m handling other peoples babies and I get a lot of pleasure from bending things to fit my way of working.

You’ve also collaborated with ANDROID IN MOTION. For those not in the know what releases are currently available from this getting together of like minded souls?
At the moment we’ve got tracks on our webpages at Roil Noise and another track; Prelude To Misery, coming out on the RINO compilation that’ll be released on Roil. I think there might be something on the AIM cd that’s coming out on RN soon if the final album ends up the same as the sneak preview I had before xmas. Andrew’s (AIM) keen to do a whole album and I feel the same, I’ve got a lot of time for him and his music, he’s got the potential to make some waves. He’s starting to push the envelope more now too, I like it when I hear other artists really being free with their music and trying new things. Hopefully we’ll be able to get something together, with him onboard I’d expect structural damage.

What I found slightly strange…although nothing should surprise me nowadays…is your involvement with local hip hop and break beat outfits. Which involvements give you the most pleasure?
These are friends that go back a long way. They have so many different projects going on I don’t know how they keep track of them; Lord Greenskull, Sqopij, The SHIT, Pig Unit… it’s all just music to me and I enjoy getting my hands dirty whatever it is. It’s educational to get in the studio with them because they follow traditional lines of music production and I pick up a lot of stuff that’s still relevant to the stripped down way I work. Anyone that says they’ve nothing more to learn really hasn’t learnt anything, I’ll take any time I can get in a studio even if it’s just as a fly on the wall. I find working in different styles of music keeps me on the edge, I’ve brought in Lord Greenskull to rap over some of my Ghoul Detail stuff (Teratogeny) and in return I’ve sung backing vocals on a couple of LG tracks, I’ve remixed Sqopij, Pig Unit and The SHIT and we’ve got a world war 1 trench warfare hip hop track in the pipeline that requires the GD touch to give a sinister feel.  They’re good friends and I love their music, they’re like me and don’t set themselves any musical boundaries, they like to play around with peoples perceptions of a style and have some fun. That’s something that I never want to lose musically, the fun. I love doing what I do, I love music and the only thing I’d like more is to have free reign to do sound design on a film and go all out to create a full environment of sound. I think, at the end of the day that’s what I’m building towards. That’s the dream. It wouldn’t sound like a film as we know them now, it’d be something else. I’ve also got an ongoing involvement in a band called PULORD www.soundclick.com/pulord where I provide noise elements for tracks but that’s very much a hands-off thing where I just throw some sounds at them and they do what they want with them.

Lastly…I think one of the biggest problems…and its one that gets me hot under the collar all the time…is the lack of interest in any form of music that the media classifies as ‘underground’. You have all these monthly publications claiming to be the pulse of the nation yet yourself and everyone else working within genres they either know little about or understand gets criminally ignored. Even the late great John Peel was guilty of this. Do you think this situation will ever change or are you happy to stay on the cult side of the fence? Personally I think you should send all these Coldplay cock sucking fuckers a copy of your latest work just to gauge their responses.
Get GD in NME? Nah, fuck that, be like Aphex Twin or NIN and rapidly disappear up my own arse when exposed to the public in a healthy dose? (harsh, but oh so true) The press never knows what the fuck's going on with music and anyone that's open to accept the kind of "underground" music people like me do will always find it for themselves. That's what I did. The mainstream media, even those that claim to know "where it's at" aren't ready to get hit in the face with the wealth of music that's out there. I'm not an elitist by any stretch, but these kinds of people will never be ready to be exposed to what GD and a host of others have to offer, they wouldn't understand it and they'd never know how to deal with it. People like the safety of neat little categories to put things into and you can't do that with so much of the good underground music that's out there. Audiences that are open to good music find good music where ever it might be without magazines or radio pointing the m to it. People like us aren't supposed to succeed, that's not what society likes, society likes its music safe and unchallenging so fuck them.

To dream the impossible dream: And with that the interview ended.  There was no need for anything more to be said. I look at all my favourite artists lining my expansive music collection and would happily trade them in for another dose of Ghoul Detail magic. For what separates Jon from the rest of the pack is his relentless pursuit to release his music his way by whatever means possible. There’s a raw intuitiveness  to his work that elevates him above all others. If he can do it then so can You. Just have the self belief and anything is possible. I once wrote that we need Ghoul Detail more than he needs us. Reflecting on his releases…this still stands firm today.

Selective discography:
 
Exhumation & Desecration – Werewolf Corps vs Ghoul Detail (Funereal Disease Records)
Strung Out In Skogar
Residual Tremors
Regale me with tales of my own demise
The smell of rejection
The transition to redemption through decay
Shell
Beyond an endless horizon
The green inferno – a tribute to cannibal holocaust
Failures of the past
Symphony of malfunction – Ghoul Detail vs Rabbit Girls
The hole of me
Chasing Dragons
Substitute for life
Rattenkrieg

Compilations:
Fossil Species 2xcd drone compilation (Roil Noise)
Pulse 4 (track “under the wire”) a local artist showcase cd www.spiralarchive.com
Whirlstream (track “assimilator”) a charity cd for the Indonesian Tsunami www.earsintl.com