Ambiences of Imprisonment: An Interview with The Ruins of Beverast
The Ruins of Beverast is Alexander von Meilenwald’s solo project, formed in Aachen, Germany in 2003. Seven full-lengths in, he named the latest after enkoimesis, the ancient Greek practice of sleeping inside a temple to receive oracular dreams that a priest then had to translate. The parallel is the key to everything his music does. Von Meilenwald answered our questions about the record, the ritual, and twenty-three years of making music that answers only to itself.
Tempelschlaf, temple sleep, is the seventh record from Alexander von Meilenwald‘s solo project The Ruins of Beverast, released in early 2026 through Ván Records. The title comes from enkoimesis, the ancient Greek practice of sleeping inside a temple precinct sacred to Asclepius, the god of medicine, in order to receive oracular dreams. Those dreams required a priest to interpret them; the god communicated obliquely, in images. Von Meilenwald has been recording on the same terms since 2003, working alone in Aachen, Germany, building each album around a specific piece of historical or mythological darkness. On Tempelschlaf, for the first time, that condition becomes the subject of the record itself.
Six albums in, he gave the seventh a title that names what all of them have been doing. That consistency across the years, through subjects as different as Dominican inquisition and Greek ritual incubation, and compositional approaches ranging from the stripped brutality of the debut to the orchestral density of the middle records, points to something more durable than a stylistic choice.
Doomnation Radio: That resistance to direct meaning has been a constant in The Ruins of Beverast across more than twenty years. Is that resistance a creative principle you consciously protect, or does it arrive on its own as a consequence of how you work?
Alexander von Meilenwald: It is inherent in my way of expression, although I don’t consciously protect it. It’s more that I cannot really control it. I seem to have a natural antipathy against too obvious transportation of thought; I assume it seems somehow cheap and profane to me, although TROB’s lyrical world is not exactly a deeply philosophical or sophisticated one. I have been wondering about that phenomenon quite a few times, but I was never really able to answer that question to myself. You know, I am a huge admirer of surrealistic, psychedelic and abstract music and cinema. I feel both challenged and caressed by art that indulges in the luxury of leaving questions unanswered, confusion unsolved, and paths lost. And to some not too transparent extent, I seem to capture this idea for what I’m doing. That might be a possible explanation. But even if I tried, I know that I couldn’t come up with lyrics that only collect catchphrases, or that tell an obvious story everyone understands. It would seem like a betrayal of my music; opening vast plains of sonic meditation and then filling them with small words of human randomness. Apparently, that’s not what I consider to be a proper treatment of TROB. You are certainly right by also detecting this in the interpretation of the divine messages during the Enkoimesis, although that wasn’t the first and foremost reason to choose it as the title motive. Ancient motives and habits have always been serving as sceneries in TROB’s world, and I felt that the Tempelschlaf idea and the questions that I keep asking myself made a perfect plot.
What von Meilenwald describes is an architecture of open space: music that creates room, and the recognition that a lyric with too much to say would shrink that room to the dimensions of its argument. The betrayal is structural. Fill the plains with direct statement and the listener no longer needs the priest. Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher of the late sixth century BCE, described Apollo’s oracle at Delphi as communicating through signs, in the space between speaking plainly and saying nothing. The oracular tradition held that the divine communicated through image and sign because direct statement would diminish what it was conveying. Von Meilenwald describes the same condition from the inside. He cannot write lyrics that collect catchphrases.
The Involuntary Resort
The questions von Meilenwald keeps asking himself are as old as the project.
Your first album in 2004 was called Unlock the Shrine. The new one is Tempelschlaf, temple sleep. Both titles are built around sacred spaces. Is there a connection you see between those two records, or between those two spaces?
In a way, yes. They are ambiences of imprisonment, albeit being different types of prisons. The shrine was a place I wanted to escape, although being terrified when escaping. The temple is an involuntary resort, a place I must consult, although being terrified because of having to. Like I said quite a few times, TROB songs do never happen in a vacuum, they always have a place, scenery, plot, coulisse. And these places already tell a lot about the story they’re supposed to transmit. “Unlock The Shrine” was as much as “Tempelschlaf” an album about anxiety, rising lunacy and descending into world-weariness. Instrumentally speaking, I already said that “Tempelschlaf” echoes the primordial savageness of the debut in terms of reduced layers and tighter structures. On “Unlock The Shrine” though, this was an automatism, while on “Tempelschlaf”, it is a conception.
Unlock the Shrine arrived in 2004 with a rawness and creative instinct that twenty-plus years of accumulated craft have not made irrelevant. Between it and Tempelschlaf lies a discography that expanded in almost every direction: longer songs, denser arrangements, broader historical and mythological territory. The Thule Grimoires was the furthest point of that expansion. Whether pulling back from it was a decision or something closer to an inevitability is worth asking.
That was a conscious decision. “The Thule Grimoires” had reached the top end of compositional and layer-related escalation, it was the ultimate saturation in song-building for my and TROB’s measures, and I couldn’t have driven it any further. “The Tundra Shines” and “Polar Hiss Hysteria” are the most challenging and complex compositions I ever created, and I seriously asked myself the question: what is there to come? So, I started contemplating how to strip off the possible bodyfat that was about to threaten my future compositions, and how to avoid any inadequate “Progressive” labels that wouldn’t fit The Ruins Of Beverast at all. I developed the idea of imagining a live situation for the new songs and measure them by their virtual live feasibility; not with regard to a real live situation, but to keep their bodies slender and agile. However, since I’m not able to compose music with any restrictions of whatever nature, it didn’t work out as extensively and effectively as planned. But still it turned out to be a proper technique to reach my goal. Because I think “Tempelschlaf” probably features the most basic and “purified” material since “Unlock The Shrine”, indeed.
The constraint was fictional and functional simultaneously: not an actual live performance to be planned for, but the idea of one, used to test whether each new piece could survive physical space and an audience’s patience. The fiction did the work the reality would have done.
Von Meilenwald’s own term for his framework is “TROB cinema,” a term that implies a systematic directorial vision, a body of work with a consistent method for finding its material. The range across the discography makes you wonder how intentional any of it really is. Blood Vaults: The Blazing Gospel of Heinrich Kramer (2013) centered on the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, published in 1486 by Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, whose prosecution of accused witches exceeded what many church authorities considered acceptable. The text became the procedural manual for identifying and executing accused witches across Europe for two centuries. Tempelschlaf drew from ancient Greek ritual incubation. Is there a system for finding these subjects, or does the system find him?
To be honest, I mostly leave it up to chance. At some point, I’ll stumble across the central idea for an album; it usually comes to me and doesn’t need to be looked for. This has been easier while I was still studying at the university, because I was virtually bombarded with spiritual, historical, geographical, psychological or philosophical motives, matters and constructs that were worth diving into and would build a perfect set for the TROB cinema. The Malleus Maleficarum was only one of them. I still have a few of them in stock that may or may not be consulted in the future. Others, like the current sleep incubation motive, resulted from research I actually did on a different topic, I can’t exactly remember what it was, it is a good couple of years ago already. In any case, I suddenly found myself pushed to the field of ancient dream interpretation and its rites, origins and impact, and I was grateful for that. It has always been like that in TROB’s history, and to a certain extent, I’m relying on that. But if that fails to work one day, so be it. I’ll find another way.
“TROB cinema” also has a literal image on Tempelschlaf. Jordan Barlow, a New Orleans-based painter working in a classical figurative style, was given the lyrics and a full written interpretation of the title track. What he produced locks onto the album’s central scene: a prostrate figure on a temple floor, a hooded presence at the altar with its back turned, a void where the wall should be. The sleeper is already inside. The dream has already begun. But, how much of that was directed?
I sent him the lyrics and a full interpretation of the title track, a rough idea of the main color and the basic elements that I wanted to be depicted in the artwork. He took it from there. We have been working a lot with Jordan in the past. Almost entirely for merch designs, but we love his art and also the way he works. I didn’t want to restrain him too much, but he wouldn’t let me anyway. As for the merch designs, we actually don’t do any briefings for him, he just comes up with his own vision, and that’s always flawless. There are quite a few elements in the artwork now that I hadn’t thought of, and that’s exactly what I was hoping for. It is always a good thing for me to let go of these things and not stress myself and anyone else with some morbid control freak behavior. Jordan is super creative, reliable and has a great intuition, there is no need to mark out an area of any kind for him.
Poisonous Thorns
Roadburn Festival, held annually in Tilburg, Netherlands, occupies a specific position in heavy music: a curatorial project as much as a festival, built around atmospheric and experimental forms at the heavier end of the spectrum. The Ruins of Beverast made its live debut there in 2013, having spent a decade as a studio-only entity. The Ruins of Beverast has since played Hellfest, Inferno, and Party.San Open Air, among others. What any of that did to the music, and to the person making it, is genuinely unclear from the outside.
Well, the good thing about the live turn was that it forced me to leave my cave and give up my musical isolation. Because I started meeting legions of fellow musicians to interact with, and as much as I like working alone, it was a super fertile process after all. It widened my view upon music in general, but also made me review my own work again. In fact, it even intensified my passion for music a lot, because the long years of stewing in my own juice made me a conservative and narrow-minded grump. They made me miss and ignore so much magic. I’m a bit surprised myself that the live situation didn’t really seem to have a greater impact on my songwriting though. “Thule” and “Tempelschlaf” feature songs that – leaving the studio sound aside – could have been in the tracklists of earlier TROB albums as well. This is the part where I preserved my weird approach to music, apparently. But throughout the 14 years into the live era now I have re-learnt how to arrange with a band situation, and I gained plethora of knowledge about the wizardry of songwriting, arranging and producing, and I guess I made something like 20 new favorite bands, mostly outside the Black Metal – or even the Metal genre. I still think that TROB don’t sound like your random metal band, I still sense a lot of “anti-industry energy” in myself, and I still have no ambition to align with all the little habits and customs of the modern Heavy Metal business, neither in terms of artistry nor in communication. But I learnt to channel my excessive quirkiness into something that TROB can benefit from, instead of getting stuck. That is all to the band’s credit.
Fourteen years of performing and touring changed what von Meilenwald listens to and who he knows. The studio, apparently, remained exactly as he’d left it. Which raises the question of who, if anyone, the music is actually being made for.
I guess it is just impossible for me to write songs from someone else’s point of view. Songwriting is my ultimate passion, and I always vanish into a lightless tunnel when doing so. I have a lucid vision of what I’m about and willing to create, and this is the ultimate aspect of my life where I cannot be stopped or manipulated or distracted. I think every musician who trusts his vision feels that way though. I’m rarely impressed by music that is obviously tailored to a certain target group. If you keep composing for people and ignore any artistic vision of whatever kind, you’re doing commission work for the outside world, but your creative inner self withers away. Since I am not reliant on sales figures and measurable success with TROB, I enjoy adorning my music with poisonous thorns, and allow myself not to wonder if anyone doesn’t approve of that.
Music made in a lightless tunnel, with no audience in mind, still produces images. The specificity of those images, detailed enough to place in a film genre, precise enough to describe a time of day, is what the tunnel makes possible: undistorted vision, unmediated by the question of whether it will be understood.
A Narrow Cone of Light
Asked what Tempelschlaf would look like as a scene in a film, von Meilenwald answers song by song. That precision comes from the same place the music does: a room with no audience in it, where an image has nowhere to go but further in.
The Ruins of Beverast generates images rather than simply accompany them, music that behaves like cinema without needing a screen. If Tempelschlaf were a scene in a film, what would that scene look like? Where are we, what time of day is it, what is happening?
Phew, well, you see… “Tempelschlaf” is not a concept album, neither do the songs interconnect in any way, like they did on “The Thule Grimoires”. So, it’s almost impossible to wrap one passe-partout mood around all the songs. The title track doesn’t even emulate a film, I’d say, it’s not exactly cinematic by nature, it is more of a nightmare. Some weird vision, extremely dark, just a narrow cone of light, and the whole scene is very far away in time, though disturbingly close in distance. Unreal. While “Day Of The Poacher” seems more like a modern zombie film to me, a fast, aggressive, deadly hunt where the undead are bound to triumph in the end. “The Carrion Cocoon” is that weird mixture of David Lynch and Lars von Trier and the likes, weird dialogues, against all manners of drama, viscous in parts, and almost solemnly hopeless. TROB have quite a bunch of this kind of songs, and they’re often placed at the end of an album; “Arcane Pharmakon Messiah”, “Monument”, “Deserts To Bind And Defeat”, “The Carrion Cocoon”, they’re somehow related in their psychedelic, monumental darkness. I love to see them coming alive, here it almost feels like directing a film that comes alive in music.
From Arcane Pharmakon Messiah at the close of Foulest Semen of a Sheltered Elite (2009), through Monument ending Blood Vaults (2013), to Deserts To Bind And Defeat closing The Thule Grimoires (2021): all sit at the end of their records, long, internally displaced, and moving deeper.
New songs, made in isolation, will go out into the world: Tempelschlaf heads to mid-year festivals and a November headliner tour alongside Birmingham funeral doom band Esoteric.
What a temple dream means stays with the dreamer past the moment of waking. The priest is still required. In 2006, on “Soil of the Incestuous,” von Meilenwald opened a sixteen-minute track with a sample from The Attic Expeditions, a film about a man who wakes in an asylum with no memory of what he did, unable to separate what happened from what he dreamed: “…there are eyes within our eyes. Only these inner eyes see the truth of the matter: that there are dreams within our dreams.” Von Meilenwald has been building music on that logic since the beginning. Then as now, you go in, and the dream does what it wants.
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