Hunting Lodge

There are two bands called Hunting Lodge.

1. Hunting Lodge are a band from Southampton / Bristol, UK, who split up in November 2007. www.myspace.com/huntinglodge

2. Taking cues from other artists such as Arab on Radar, the Pop Group, the Birthday Party, Jesus Lizard, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, they have deconstructed the traditional notion of ‘the song’ reassembling it as a giant killer robot that’s going to crush your puny human head in its rusty metal claws. OUCH!

A bassist who pummels, pounds and slaps the fretboard like it had just jumped ahead of him at the taxi-rank, a bare-topped drummer solemnly thumping his skins like he was beating time on a Turkish slave-galley, the freeform guitar lines of an inept crack-addled Robert Fripp dragged mercilessly through a wasp farm and a vocalist whose squawks and screeches smack of the sugar-fix tantrums of a retarded 6-year old. All this combines to produce the effect of being yelled at by an alcoholic in a disco.

Hunting Lodge make music at the point where the boredom has long since abated, the point where a kind of manic joy sets in, the dull chorus of 700 computer fans and phone operatives becomes giddily thrilling, and your every gesture becomes exaggerated and hilarious. In their ecstatic celebration of Nothing, Hunting Lodge salvage the pawnshop gold of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Boredoms, and King Crimson, infuse it in vats of piss and come away with base metal. Repetitive churning dirges framed by drunken skiffle, giddy house rhythms and inept free-form freakouts are clamped around lyrics about Whitby, a wizard and seagulls trapped in bins.


2. Hunting Lodge from USA. Akin to Big Black, Hunting Lodge uses compressed noise and electronic drums. "Carnivora!" rocks a lot in overloading melodious chanting with laborious grunts for discomfort. [PDCD booklet]

# Releases:
# Carnivora! CDEP (Permis de Construiere Deutschland)
# Necropolis CD (Dark Vinyl)
# Nomad Souls LP (S/M Operations 1984)
# The Harvest C (S/M Operations 1985)
# 8-Ball LP (S/M Operations 1987)
# This Is Truth 12" (Normal 1987)
# Will CD (Dark Vinyl 1992)

I N T E R V I E W

This interview was originally published in “The Other Sound” issue #7 way back in 1986.
It had a print run of 2500 copies and we are happy to reprint it here.

IN THE PAST 5 YEARS,
HUNTING LODGE
HAS BECOME ONE OF THE MOST
WELL-KNOWN AND RESPECTED
GROUPS IN THE AMERICAN AND
INTERNATIONAL UNDERGROUND.
WHAT FOLLOWS ARE EXCERPTS
FROM A LENGTHY CONVERSATION
BETWEEN COUP DE GRACE AND
THE MAN BEHIND HUNTING
LODGE, LON C DIEHL.
THE CONVER-
SATION TOOK
PLACE IN
OCTOBER
1985. ALL THE
WORDS THAT FOLLOW ARE THOSE OF LON C DIEHL………………..


: C H I L D H O O D :

It was very normal. A very normal, somewhat suburban childhood. I lived on a lake in New Baltimore, Michigan with my mum and dad and a bunch of older brothers and sisters—very much older—thirteen years was the youngest to me. I was never extremely sociable…at least that’s what I believe…perhaps it was just that nobody liked me. I ended up spending a lot of time alone; drawing…that was my favorite pastime. There was nothing extremely traumatic or different from anybody else’s childhood. When I was 15 we moved to a small farming community up north. My father retired and I ended up spending a lot of time, about 3 years, in the woods by myself. To this day I still like my privacy a great deal, and need a minimum of 3 hours a night or else I start losing my sanity. Also when I was 15 another slight personality quirk of mine probably came into existence when I was told that I had been adopted, after living 15 years without a clue. That tends to make you not jump to conclusions as quick as other people would—not take things at face value as much. My first gig was in 1974 at the First Congregational Church in New Baltimore, Michigan where I played organ on Good Friday.


: P A R E N T S :

Yes, they certainly do know. I don’t think they totally comprehend it, but I never really bothered to try to convince them of its validity. My father is an engineer, so he enjoys looking at my equipment and talking about the technical side of it. The rest of my family are pretty much oblivious to it, although one holiday I came up to my parent’s house and played “WILL” for my family (it was right after that album had been released)… after the entire album was over nobody said anything for a little while and then my sister finally said “So, do people actually pay money for this?”…


: F O R M A T I O N S :

Directly before starting Hunting Lodge & S/M Operations with Skott, I had been doing a magazine for a number of years called “Smarm”…and then the last issue was called “S/M Operations” when Skott joined me. I was in a number of bands… when I was in college up in Central Michigan University I was lucky enough to get hooked up with a number of creative people. We were doing mostly improvisational shows of funky/jazzy/noisy kinds of things. At the end it was called “All Night Movies”, but we changed the name every time we played up until then. That ended in 1980, and then when I came to Port Huron I started playing with some ex-members of a fantastic band that used to be in the area called “Problem”, who unfortunately never released anything. But I got together with some of those people and we called ourselves “Hate/Grey”…we played one show and it just kind of fell apart after that. The formation of S/M Operations came about when I met Skott. I got a job at a record store and I met him through that. We found out we had a lot of similar interests. The first day we got together and did something musically (it’s on “WILL”—it’s called “S/M Operations”)…we just plugged in and did it. Then we listened to it back and we obviously felt we had something worth pursuing. So we solicited the help of another person, Karl Nordstrom, who was on the initial live tape and he also had bits and pieces on “WILL” and “Exhumed”.


: L I V E 1 9 8 4 T O U R :

I guess you could say they were successful. Back then our shows were more of an excuse to get together and play. I would give Skott a tape of the things we would be playing over that night, and we’d each hear what the other person was doing at the show. I would say the most all-around successful show in my opinion (I was never fond of playing live) was the very first one, where Karl Nordstrom (who did the visuals on “WILL”) presented a slide show—black and white slides of material very similar to what was on the album cover. It really came together quite well that night. I suppose it went fairly well on the tour…once again it’s not something I love to do: play live and drive, and drive, and drive. But we did have a few good times on the tour. The New York show was the worst…it was the first show. We hadn’t practiced any of the material yet (but I don’t think that was a big problem), it was mostly because the P.A. was turned down to the volume level at which you’d expect someone to listen to Windham Hill or Brian Eno “ambient” records…quite a shame since that was the best P.A. I saw on the whole tour. Danceteria has a really gorgeous P.A. but we unfortunately utilized about one eighth of its potential that night…so we got hecklers over the noise and every time I’d try to turn it up the P.A. man would turn it down, farther…people heckled until “Tribal Warning Shot”, then they danced for 5 minutes, and then started heckling again. The best show all around was Denver—the P.A. was in good shape (it was extremely loud and I believe in stereo) and people waltzed. I really enjoyed that quite a bit. Also the final show in San Francisco was interesting; it was the last show with Skott. I tripped over the power cord very soon into the show which negated the memory in a couple of pieces of my equipment…but by the end of the show we did a live version of “God Loves The Rock Stars” where I was just making up words and Skott was playing some screaming heavy metal guitar.


: A N D R E A S M Ü L L E R / N O R M A L :

He re-released one cassette, “Live At The Harrington Ballroom”, and he himself released “Exhumed”. He sent us a magazine in late 1982 called “Datenverarbeitung”…this was just about the time we did the Harrington show and we sent him a tape of that, and he liked it a lot…he wanted to put it out on his label because he didn’t want to have to pay postage for having them shipped over. Then we had some extra stuff lying around after “WILL”, and we didn’t have any money to release it, so we sent him the material on “Exhumed” and he put that out.


: S I D E E F F E K T S :

I met Graeme Revell in May of 1982 in Chicago when SPK toured…when he went to Germany the following year Andreas mentioned that he was putting things out by Hunting Lodge and Graeme recognized the name and expressed some interest in what we were doing. I sent him a tape of “Jenny Burton”…and the rest is musical history.


: N E W M A T E R I A L :

The new material I’ve been doing is much different than previous things…for one it’s much more accessible…it doesn’t have that ungodly density and most importantly I would like to clean up the sound a great deal. I’ve recorded on very poor equipment up till now—never more than a four-track cassette machine—and would like to actually go into a proper studio and do it right. I haven’t played live since the tour…I plan to but I just have to get things together. I sold a lot of my equipment to put out the album (“Nomad Souls”) and the 12”, but I never recouped that money and ended up finally getting new equipment just a couple of months ago. I’m still trying to get used to it. When I do then I’ll finally do something live. I’m also going to have to dig up some players, which is not easy in a town this size, or even a town like Detroit. Presently I’m working on material which I’d hope to be on an album someday, although S/M Operations has been rather financially decimated… I’ve been struggling just to pay back debts built up by the last two products and I can’t imagine ever having the guts to release anything by any other bands. I had planned to start releasing things by other bands on vinyl this year, but the money is just not there.


: S O U N D :

I had listened to music for a number of years, but it wasn’t until I heard SPK and TG, and read the propaganda associated with the two bands that I really felt someone was doing something very unique with music…there was a lot of bands I was listening to at the time who were probably almost as influential such as Pop Group, Pere Ubu, Residents, 23 Skidoo, “No New York” compilation, Dome, and a bunch of horror soundtracks—“The Shining”, parts of “Alien”, etcetera. I really don’t feel an alliance with anyone…perhaps SPK for realistic reasons…Motorhead I quite like, this Foetus album “Hole”, the Swans a bit, SPK, I like Yello…not so much the most recent album, but the one that came out in 1983. It really changed the way I think about pop music. And since that album I’ve listened to a lot of hip-hop music although it’s kind of getting stale by now. I listen to a lot of soundtracks, the Stooges, some of the more recent Laibach things, various rhythmic and ethnic musics, and of course Herb Alpert before he sold out.


: B O O K S :

I used to read a lot more than I do nowadays because I don’t have as much time as I used to. I like a book called “God’s Bullies” quite a bit, “The Face That Must Die” by Ramsey Cable, most Ballard books especially “High Rise” and “Crash”, a lot of things by Nietzsche, “Will To Power”, “The Diceman”, “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill, “Maldorer”, “The Death Dealer’s Manual”…a lot of the books that I read I do because they bring me out of my “nothing is worth doing” attitude which I slip into now and again…I need some motivation in these times…Colin Wilson (especially “Introduction”) is very good for that, some Crowley, “Think and Grow Rich” is good for motivation.


: F I L M S :

“Wiseblood”, “Apocalypse Now”, “The Tin Drum”, “The Evil Dead”, “King of Comedy”, “Taxi Driver”, “The Bad Seed”, “Last House on the Left”, “Clockwork Orange”, “Repulsion”, “Eraserhead”, “Mondo Cane”, among others.


: A R T :

I really have no favorites artists. I like bits and pieces of what I see. I like the people I work with; Tim Caldwell and J.K. Potter. Visually I like medical books and blueprints more than any particular artist.


: P O R N O G R A P H Y :

No I don’t collect pornography…I worked at a porno-complex here in Port Huron for a short time when I first got into town…I do still enjoy indulging my baser side. I wouldn’t really consider any of the older Hunting Lodge things to be very sexual, though I’d say “Tribal Warning Shot” comes about as close to being sexual as anything since it has that sort of disco crotch beat.


: V I D E O :

No I don’t do any film or video material although I do drink a lot and sleep.


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