KERRANG! 53“D
eath is our ultimate destiny,” smiles
Bartłomiej ‘Bart’ Krysiuk. “We all
march towards it – every day and
every hour, regardless of what we
do. It is the great mystery. Nobody
knows with certainty if there is anything beyond
death – yet everybody, at some point, asks
themselves the question. It is our only certainty,
and sooner or later its terrible truth strikes you.
You must face it, contemplate it, and somehow
reconcile with it.”
Ironically, there is much of the everyday
clergyman about the reluctant figurehead for
Polish occult black metallers Batushka. He speaks
with a calm, thoughtful warmth, exuding kindness
and prone to elongated pauses for thought. A
pair of wide blue eyes brim with intelligence and
wonder. Even sermonising on latest LP Hospodi’s
underlying themes of mortality, bereavement
and the possibility of the hereafter, he does
so without a hint of the ghoulish pantomime
of his contemporaries. Instead, he radiates a
benevolence that is both immediately engaging
and all the more unsettling when contrasted
with the subverted splendour of his music and
the death’s-head-emblazoned vestments of his
mysterious onstage persona.
Not, he insists, that Batushka’s compositions
shouldn’t be allowed to speak for themselves.“Introduce the band?” he smiles. “I think the
important thing is to not introduce the band.
That would represent a coming out from our
safe place. That’s something we’re not ready for.”
He isn’t even truly comfortable, he tells us,
engaging in face-to-face audiences like ours today.
“I have no interest in being a star. Interviews are
not my world. To be enigmatic is better...”
To truly understand that figure onstage and
the music he has begotten, we must understand
from whence he’s come. Born and brought up in
the village of Simuny in Poland’s far East, a rustic,
rural culture was ingrained. Later, he attended
the secondary school in Supraśl, attached to
the famous Eastern Orthodox monastery. It was
there that his musical interest flourished – as a
touring orchestra trombonist of real renown, and
as a fascinated observer of the celebrated ‘Lavra’
chants which would drone through the monastery
grounds from dawn.
“This was the culture and imagery with which
I grew up,” he reflects. “It is what I absorbed. For
me, these things are nothing [out of the ordinary].”
Evolving through the Polish black metal
underground (Bart counts Behemoth frontman
Nergal as a friend of over 25 years) his
indoctrination into a far darker church led to
creative and stylistic liberation. It was only with
the release of Batushka’s 2015 debut Litourgiya,Batushka: Arm-y
of darkness...