recording : aof

the world is : free

Free-Creator Jason M Norwood, of Angel on Fire, code OOO, Cadmic, and Memoria Absentia, releases the end of an influential trilogy.

:: interwebview by Laine ::

Angel on Fire is the alter-ego project of Jason M Norwood.

Norwood’s musical history is coloured with recording loops, shortwave radio frequencies, punk & folk bands, disc jockey gigs, collaborations and solo work of tape looped mixed material, instrumental segues, and power noise.

The Angel on Fire Trilogy of panic is: love, lay yourself down in a river of wine, and the self-titled, angel on fire, is finally complete after it’s long journey.

Influences such as Shoegazer, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, His Name is Alive, Sigur Ros, The Cocteau Twins; have given flavor to the works Jason has been creating for over a decade.

“you get home at 4AM after a night out... you're intoxicated… and you slowly move around your home with the feeling you've never been there before… confused, hoping to talk to someone...”

The alternating & provoking styles Jason has applied over the course of many projects has come from an artistic, sincere and creative perspective that few develop.

Recording and mastering all of his own work, Norwood has put forth a quality to all of his titles, a keen ear to static feedback, samples, looping, and applying a powerful sense of heart and play to Angel on Fire.


Recorded in self-studios such as The Historic Woodfield 1840 and the more recent Hope Mansion, the Trilogy ends nearly a decade of work and an alter-ego; now many Angel on Fire enthusiasts have the complete story.

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Laine: you've had several albums and multiple recording projects.... what do you consider your best recording moments?

Norwood: I think in general the best recording moments I have are when I’ve burned a rough copy of an entire album. I take it with me to listen to, find mistakes, stuff like that, but there's that feeling that it's all threading together. you get that chill when you realize you've created a cohesive work.

L: was there a low point where you nearly gave up on recording?

N: several times. working completely by myself all the time can get frustrating--after a while you're looking for collaborations, you want to bring people into it. I think most of those feelings came during periods of writer's block--when I couldn't see the next step.

L: is there something that motivates a particular style out of you?

N: for anything I've ever done outside of angel on fire, I usually had a specific palette in mind--like "the black mirror", where I wanted everything acoustic. angel on fire got separated from that because I kept going back to the same palette to work from, to expand on. odd thoughts, confusing ideas....there's bits and pieces of my experience in some of the songs, some of them simply happened the way they happened.

L: when you're reaching completion, is there a struggle to bring it all together?

N: actually, the struggle happens kind of in the middle of it. you've got a ton of rough ideas kicking around, and sometimes it's hard to see where it's all going--what makes a cohesive album instead of a bunch of songs. once I find a small number of songs that fit together, most of the rest get discarded, new stuff gets recorded and at that point it starts to fall together really fast.

L: did you have a favorite instrument that you added on to a track or album that made a huge difference in your later work?

N: actually, it was two things--the tape machine and the radio, in a kind of musique concrete way. when I was 12 or 13 I was heavily into making tape collages, loops, stuff like that. it wasn't until a lot later that people pointed out stuff like "revolution 9" by the Beatles or godspeed you black emperor's found sounds and stuff like that. the radio came into play when I discovered shortwave radio--there's some really odd, neat stuff being talked about on shortwave. out of that I got a fascination for recording broadcasts, chopping them up, using them in strange ways. it seems secondary because I use your usual instruments--guitars, basses, drums. but those voices kind of drifting out of the music in segues kind of tie the various elements together.

L: as your Angle on Fire work is manly a 'solo' project.. were there moments that you felt collaborating gave you an advantage or disadvantage, like someone more skilled, affected the creative process?

N: a lot of the collaborations in angel on fire came sort of after the fact. I had recorded the music for "the perfect present" entirely when I saw some of the writings on her livejournal blog and asked her if she could come up with some spoken word stuff over it. Andrew Kilpatrick’s violin on "chest rises chest falls" was actually him testing effects--I pitch-shifted it, put it in the middle of "chest rises" and it worked so perfectly that I asked him if I could keep it. fortunately he agreed. but I mean, in terms of normal songs, I don't consider myself particularly skilled as a player--I’ve learned more and more over the years, but there's obviously people out there who are better players, and if they add something to what I do, it's definitely an advantage.

L: about your final album.. why go self titled?

N: I had working titles for the album, but once the album was done nothing really surfaced that spoke of the album as a whole, so I dropped having a title for it.

L: was there a narrative you wanted to tell?

N: I don't think so, at least not consciously. with angel on fire it's a much more direct process. I think the lyrics on this album are certainly a shade more personal than the other two albums--probably another reason why the album was untitled. I think the three albums sort of form a trilogy--"panic is : love" is very much out of confusion, "lay yourself down in a river of wine" maintains that but things are getting figured out, and the self-titled album sort of finishes that, as if to say "hey, I’ve reached this point, things aren't confusing, it's time to move on". it all works well that way as a trilogy.

L: what was the toughest sell on production, something that you wanted to work but no matter which way you cut it, you couldn't be convinced it would take and dumped the idea altogether?

N: it feels a lot more like a "natural selection" process as I’m recording. I’ve got reams and reams of tape where there are half-baked ideas, and when I go back and listen to them, I stumble on something that I don't even remember starting. weaker ideas just simply disappear, and the ones that resonate with me more just cause a feedback loops of "work on it....work on it....work on it...." on the new album, there's one song where I attempted to use piano, organ, stuff like that. I love the music, but it just started resisting the process, and it was never finished. it's now in the hands of a couple friends who might be able to do something with it outside of angel on fire.

L: I found so many tracks like signals and let the damage slide much more 'positive', implying there is and would be a 'future'. was that a place you thought you would ever go with AoF?

N: there was never really a definition of angel on fire as a dark sounding project or a hopeful sounding project… I think that as the songs work through their stories there is always a note of "this might be a really bad feeling, but it's possible to resolve it". even back with "panic is : love" there's some moments I found uplifting.

L: Noticed the reuse of phrases like 'songs of ritual' from chest rises, chest falls and signals.. do you find you recycle a theme over a long period on purpose?

N: not on purpose....I kind of cringe when I’m listening to a bunch of angel on fire songs and I realize something I just finished borrows a visual idea from a song I wrote five years ago....but I think there's a lot of personal archetypes that do recur in my songs, and so I’m bound to repeat myself metaphorically. then again, sometimes it threads through the albums, kind of like you're revisiting that spot and thinking about it from a different angle.

L: when writing motivational lines like "we know where we are now / we know we have nothing left to prove" or "tomorrow will be a new day when old emotions don't apply" and then sorting out lyrics, did you find the words came because you were in that place or trying to get to that place?

N: depends on the song story, really. with that line from "let the damage slide"....it goes back to hopefulness. the person in that song pretty much lost out in the end. sometimes hope doesn't work out, but there was still hope.

L: where do you see your work leading you in the next few years?

N: well, I decided to end angel on fire more out of a sense of completion for a certain period in my life. right now there's a couple collaborative projects, possibly a new band. I think what's liberating about ending angel on fire is that while I’m not going to suddenly make a left turn in my own style, the possibility of working with other people and kind of letting that melt into other people's concepts is what's jazzing me the most. I’ll probably still do stuff on my own, but more sporadically. but like Andrew once told me, "just keep making music. doesn't matter what kind, just keep making music." ;)
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More information?
Jason M Norwood : Hope Mansion Recordings
angel on fire story: aof bio
Laine (Bryan McLean) : http://lyinghere.com

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