Order from Chaos/Ares Kingdom Chat

CK: It’s not a box set, but a faithful re-release of ‘Stillbirth Machine,’ Dawn Bringer,’ and ‘An Ending in Fire’ LPs and CDs. I’d say yeah, the old releases are out of print because I’m not aware of them being available anywhere, but that all changes this winter. All will have their original art and layouts, etc. The only new things will be posters and stickers.

CK: I was a decent kid, I guess. Never really got into trouble, I was just into my own things. I got interested in astronomy when my parents gave me a small telescope and book on the stars on my sixth birthday, and that interest has been ongoing ever since.

CK: I grew up in mostly a classical and old jazz household. Popular music was not on my parents’ radar at all, so I went from Bach and Tchaikovsky to Iron Maiden and Judas Priest almost overnight.

CK: I was intrigued by The Number of the Beast, Run to the Hills, You’ve Got Another Thing Coming, Holy Diver, Trashed videos on MTV. I was lucky enough to have a friend down the street who already had those albums (and more) and he sort of pulled back the curtain for me, and I was off and running into the METAL. Almost completely skipped regular rock and roll. Sure, I was exposed to it on local rock music stations, but I listened only to catch the fleeting presence of metal on the stations. I spent all my lawn-mowing money on records, heh. Funny enough, it wasn’t until almost the ’90s that I would begin going back to regular/AOR rock and roll to check it out.

CK: That was a more gradual thing. Of course, I saw adverts in the major mags for Slayer and Venom here and there, but it wasn’t until I got my driver’s license in ’84 that I was able to hit the indie record stores  in my area more freely and expand my base. In 1986, I landed a job curating underground metal and punk at one of those indie record stores, which led me down crazy musical paths that were totally unexpected – but expanded my horizons significantly.

CK: I had dabbled with my Mom’s acoustic guitar here and there, trying to rationalize the instrument with piano and trumpet, which I had formal training on. In my earliest metal days, I was content to be a fan. But once I heard Yngwie in early 1985, it was all over. I thought, ‘I’ve gotta do that!’ He was a perfect blend of the music I grew up with and my metal obsession. I had a crappy little cover band with a couple of friends that never really did anything, which was fine because I was horrible. But I kept practicing, learning Thin Lizzy’s Cold Sweat, basic Maiden stuff, Priest, you know, obvious stuff.

I always loved the bands that had huge guitar tones the most. Martin Birch and Tom Allom’s production styles blew my young mind, and of course Chris Tsangrides, those guys just had the magic. Then, I heard Metallica and a direction for myself began to crystalize. Here was a band that played heavier than fuck, with a wall of guitar, and aggressive riffs. I mean, we all were looking for the next more aggressive thing, right? Right on their heels came Slayer, Frost, Venom, Exodus, Mercyful Fate.

CK: Not much of a scene here. What bands did exist were generally only interested in imitating national music trends. And we didn’t know anyone else who was into extreme underground metal. Over time, we discovered a few others who became good friends, but OFC was always just the three of us.

CK: I went to high school with a kid who worked at a Dairy Queen in my old neighborhood. He told me about a coworker, Eric, who was a Metallica freak and who had a rare picture disc I needed for my collection. I got his number and called him one night in Sept 86. He didn’t want to sell it but we got to talking about bands and found we liked the same stuff. He asked if I played guitar, and when I said yeah, he asked if I wanted to join his band. Dude had never heard me play before but didn’t give a shit because I liked the right stuff and the two guitarists they had at the time were hopelessly locked in traditional HM. Turns out Pete was the bassist, and they had a not-very-confident singer, Dave. Well, they froze out the old two guitarists and Eric, Pete, Dave and I went on, shifting the band to doing Slayer, Exodus, Nuclear Assault, Frost, Metallica, Maiden, Priest, and even Beastie Boys. We were very broad-minded, heh.

We were pretty good and easily the heaviest thing we knew of from KC. It lasted almost a year altogether, but by about six months, Pete and I started writing originals. We couldn’t get Eric and Dave onboard, so after a disastrous party gig in July ’87, we left the unnamed cover band and started what would eventually become known as Order From Chaos. I think Pete just said he’d do vocals until we found someone else, if we ever did. But his vox were so good and unique that we never bothered to look for anyone else, ha!

We had no drummer, but I had been kicking around with Mike Miller, who I’d known since first grade, and another buddy of ours, Bobby, who was a killer guitarist – way better than me at the time. I had some rehearsal stuff of just Mike and I doing Metallica songs in his basement. Pete thought he sounded great, so we rang him up and asked him to come over and listen to a demo Pete and I had recorded of embryonic versions of ‘Of Death and Dying’ and ‘Quietus’ with just guitar, bass and vocals. Mike listened once, emphatically said yes, and that was it. We started rehearsing in my parents’ garage days later. Theoretically, Bobby could have been in the band, and would have been fantastic, except he was shipping out with the army by the time OFC got together.

CK: The name came by accident. Pete was having a conversation with a late friend of ours who used the phrase. It stuck with Pete and he came back to me with it. I wasn’t wild about it at first but thought we could use it temporarily until one of us came up with something better. But we never did. We wanted to set ourselves apart from what was going on nationally, and it definitely served that purpose.

CK: Because of the record store I already mentioned, I was able to use its behemoth printer and scrap paper to run off what was probably thousands of quarter and half page ads. In those days, I did all the mail, and I would stuff envelopes and packages FULL of ads because, as you remember, we all sent around one another’s ads in any correspondence. The effect was pretty immediate considering those days. I think our first review appeared in Level Six zine from Phoenix, a killer little rag which would eventually give rise to Eternal Darkness Mag from there. PLEASE SEND BACK MY STAMPS

CK: I tried once or twice but it was usually easier to ask for an IRC and go that route. Never had a rubber stamp, as unprofessional as that sounds, heh.

CK: I was a big Marillion freak in the ’80s. Don’t know exactly why they clicked with me, but they did. My ancient love for Kate Bush is pretty well known, too, but stuff I came to later in life was stuff like early Genesis.

On the other hand, I never came around to what I know most regard as THE classics like Beatles, Elvis or Rolling Stones. Just never did anything for me. (me neither-chris)

In all honestly, I’ve probably listened to as much Vangelis as I have any other band or artist…

CK: I really can’t remember how the Putrefaction deal came about. I may have talked about it in old interviews, but all that has faded now. Sure, it was really cool to have a record out, even if we never really liked the recording. I just did a quick check on eBay, a couple have sold for $38 and $69 over the last 30 days.

CK: Eh, looking back, Wild Rags was fine and the only things Richard failed to do was put out SM in a timely fashion…and on vinyl. We were young and impatient back then and waiting over a year for him to release SM was too much for us. In reality, though, Wild Rags was fine. Yeah, we did play Milwaukee Metalfest V in 1991. That was ridiculous. But Richard gave us great support and drove all the out from LA to bring OFC shirts, stickers and the Wild Rags versions of the Crushed Infamy demo, if memory serves. It was cool.

CK: OFC was never a super popular band in our time – few understood what we were doing – so getting gigs was pretty hard. We did at least one mini-tour in 1993 on the east coast, with one show having been put on by our buddy King Fowley from Deceased. Otherwise, it was a bunch of one-offs around the midwest, plus Deathstock in NY in ’94. That was a cool gig.

CK: Yeah, I think we sent material to pretty much everyone except Metal Blade. Never bothered with them. OFC was just too much for bigger record company folks, and we would have been really difficult to market in those days. What do you call what we did? Thrash was the least fashionable thing in the underground by the early 90s, and we were more death metal anyway. But not Morbid Angel death metal but like if Sodom, Bathory and Voivod hadn’t progressed. Then by 92 the panda bear black metal trend got going. Not that we weren’t fans of some of that stuff, but we never wanted to do that kind of thing musically…and we could never see ourselves doing the makeup thing. Of course, Quorthon and I talked about us signing to Black Mark but they were more focused on Euro bands in the early ’90s, and we never pushed it.

CK: I can’t remember how we connected with Shivadarshana but I always liked the label name and meaning. Plus, Michel seemed to ‘get us’ when a lot of other labels didn’t. As for the cover tracks, we just wanted to pay tribute to a couple of our biggest influences. I think we were doing Voivod’s ‘War and Pain’ around that time, too. Everyone was Norsk black metal crazy, but we were still living in the past…and it’s funny because most of those Norwegian bands were, too. It’s just that they didn’t sound like it nearly as much as we did.

CK: For sure. We were very confident in ourselves, our approach, and our execution. We knew it was all distilling into something monstrous, but even we didn’t know how monstrous it would end up.

CK: I don’t remember much about our Shiva budgets, probably bare bones for studio time because we were using the basement studio of the parents of our friends in Nepenthe. It basically cost us nothing beyond buying tape to do the recordings, and gas to get there across town. No big deal. In fact, OFC always used basement studios. The closest we got to a real professional studio was a session for mastering, and I think that only happened for An Ending in Fire and And I Saw Eternity.

We weren’t in every Musicland, Camelot, BestBuy, Circuit City stores, but I think our stuff did find its way into specialty and indie record shops in bigger cities.

CK: The owner was also a promoter in the Omaha area, and we played in Omaha pretty often. Certainly more than we ever did in Kansas City. Matt was a good friend, still is, and we were happy to work with him on it.

CK: Oh, I don’t know about perfect label. The release came about because Pete had gotten his fledgling Angelcorpse signed to Osmose and they agreed to do the OFC as well. It felt like afterthought from their side, honestly. When the album did eventually come, there was almost no press about it and the CDs were just OK. OFC never really meant anything to them. (that sucks I thought they would be happy to have band like you on their label. I guess not-chris)

CK: Nah, we finished “An Ending in Fire: just as the band was ending in mid 1995, but the CDs didn’t come out for another few years, ’98 I think. There was no budget and we only got some copies once it came out. Certainly there was no touring, but we were playing all the songs at rehearsal and probably the last live gig we did which I think was Wichita in February 1995.

CK: It was cool to have them on CD but again, OFC was an afterthought to Osmose so the release was pretty ropey. Nah, nothing extra on it.

CK: The band was long gone by that point and it was in a period where we were completely disconnected, at least Mike and I were disconnected from Pete. Pete helped pull together a Dawn Bringer rerelease in Canada with the ‘Inhumanities’ demo if memory serves. I found out about this much later but the CD looked good, so it was cool. ‘Imperium’ was basically a project I did with Merciless records that pulled together demo stuff and the soundtrack of a live rehearsal we did in December 1988 that sounded really good. There was some live stuff on there as well. It came out pretty good overall. There was no budget for that, either, haha.

CK: The split happened through the first half of 1995. It wasn’t very amicable at the time but all is well between us now, happily.

Back to 1995: We had played a final rehearsal party in our basement in mid April, then worked over the next couple months finishing up a mix of ‘An Ending in Fire,’ which I think wrapped up in June. I seem to remember Gene moving down from Minnesota around that time and he, Pete and Mike started kicking around in a project that eventually became Angelcorpse.

At the same time, I recruited Nepenthe’s drummer into Vulpecula, in addition to his duties with Nepenthe/Ligeia, and I went that direction. Mike left Pete and Gene late that summer and started working with some other Bastard Squad friends of ours in a band called Serapis, which was fucking great but unfortunately they never released anything. Mike and I started Ares Kingdom in late 1996. By 1999, Chris and I had decided to bring Mike into Vulpecula but the band concluded not long after that and Mike and I turned our attention to AK. It was another 15 years before OFC played together again…the first reunion show was early January 2010.

CK: That came out in 2014. The idea hatched in 2010 during the run of five reunion shows. Those shows ended at the NWN Fest in Berlin that November, and by then we had figured out the scope of the release. It had to be everything – a final statement. It certainly took longer to pull together than we expected, plus we had to write the definitive history/bio of the band for the book that came with the LP versions. All three of us dug into our personal archives and contributed rarities and weird stuff we collected through the years and compared our memories to give an accurate picture of what really happened in that chaotic eight year window. I didn’t drink back then, so my memory might have been clearest, haha. It was great, too, because it ended up we all had kept bits of our past the others had thought lost and would have loved to see again…and we did. The book ended up being basically a glimpse into our personal archives.

CK: The seed was planted in 2008 when Ares Kingdom played shows with Angelcorpse and Gospel of the Horns on the west coast. We decided it would be fun if Pete jumped up and played ‘Webs of Perdition’ with us at the end of AK’s set. It went amazingly and opened the door for more.

There were five reunion shows in 2010, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Berlin, a full 15 years after the band split. I’m glad we did it back then while we were still younger. The culmination was in Berlin and was really something special.

CK: I kind of doubt it. It feels like it had proper closure with the 2010 reunion shows, the ‘Frozen in Steel’ box in 2014, and the 2023 reissues of our three albums by NWN.

CK: Vulpecula was really different from OFC musically. While the subject matter and lyrics took off from where I left off in OFC with the ‘Somnium Helios’ suite, I was exploring more atmospheric melody as opposed to OFC’s Slaughter Lord inspired riffs of absolute armageddon. It was a restart of sorts, and one that eventually led to Ares Kingdom.

The demo, ‘Phoenix of the Creation’ was also released on cassette and 7″ by Eternal Darkness Creations in 1996. Then we recorded three tracks that was combined on the ‘Fons Immortalis’ EP released by Merciless Records. In 1998, we recorded four more songs which went unreleased until 2006 when they were combined with an old Peter Schilling cover of ‘Major Tom’ on the ‘In Dusk Apparition’ LP which was released on CD by Invictus Productions in 2006, and some years ago on vinyl by Bird of Ill Omen Records.

In 2020, NWN and Bird of Ill Omen rereleased everything on a single LP, plus an old unreleased studio rehearsal version of ‘The First Point of Aries.’

CK: No, there were no live shows. It really was just Chris and I as a studio project until the very end, and even as we were going to bring Mike in, it felt like it was winding down. We have a few of the NWN LPs from a couple years ago, but our webstore is being revamped and I’m not sure how many.

CK: Vulpecula started with the goal to be obscure. By the late ’90s, I was writing increasingly complex songs which I began to think might not fit Vulpecula’s original intent very well. Part of it was that I was also working with Mike again on Ares Kingdom and writing for that band. It felt like Vulpecula had already run its course, so Chris and I decided to let it go. It was a very amicable split. I often wish we had had the foresight to pull Chris into Ares Kingdom for his sound effects and atmospheric keyboard compositions. The guy was a genius.

CK: We started in late 1996 when I was recording some Vulpecula material with Chris from Nepenthe at his parents’ home studio. Mike had been in a band that had recently quit – but not before he had recorded drum parts for a demo. He asked if I could run off a tape of his drum parts just so he could have them for posterity. As I did that for him, I couldn’t help but think about writing my own music for those drum parts. I asked if he’d mind if I threw some riffs together and see what happened, and he was totally for it. I wasn’t very familiar with his old band’s music, so that wasn’t going to influence me at all and the outcome ended up being our three song demo that sounded very much like…us. In the studio, I added bass, my vocals and some FX and BAM, it was done. It came out in 1997 and was very well received.

CK: Hell yeah it is. Especially as I get older and have written as much as I have, it’s a struggle coming up with new material that doesn’t just mimic what we’ve already done. It’s a struggle not being derivative of yourself. And also coming up with new topics to write about, and doing it all artfully without sacrificing spirit…it’s all tough.

CK: When I take a step back, I can hear both OFC and Vulpecula in Ares Kingdom. OFC makes sense because Mike and I were 2/3 of the band, so AK was always going to have that sound and feeling. Vulpecula figures in because that’s just part of my writing style and AK ended up using some Vulpecula ideas. The song ‘Ashen Glory’ was written for Vulpecula but never done since we felt the style was too old school to fit the Vulpecula spirit.

CK: The name was a sort of outcropping of Vulpecula. That band’s focus was basically the science and history of astronomy. Obviously, the Greeks had a strong influence on the foundation and history of the discipline through names of objects, the alphabet used to identify stars by brightness, mythological underpinnings, important early astronomers, etc, so I was very immersed in that. I also kept thinking about the idea that the world is governed by the aggressive use of force – whether we like it or not, and Ares Kingdom presented itself as a clever acknowledgment of the fact. We just dropped the possessive apostrophe from Ares for stylistic reasons, like Judas Priest did with Judas, and went with it.

The logo came from a book of fonts. Capitals were from one font, lower case from another. Can’t remember what the book called them, but I had made photocopies of the pages, then cut and pasted it all together, a little like Quorthon’s approach with the Bathory logo from rub-on letters, heh.

CK: Yeah, we’ve done quite a few tours across North America and Europe, and played with a lot of great bands over the years. We’ve toured with Bulldozer, Pentacle, Destroyer 666, Watain, Angelcorpse, Gospel of the Horns, Deceased, Demiser, Pathetic, etc. We’ve also played MANY festivals in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. Obviously we’ve played many NWN fests, starting with the very first in 2009, plus Noctis in Canada. So many one-off shows with killer bands, too, like Sabbat, Varathron, Midnight, The Gates of Slumber, Cianide, Destructor, Nifelheim, Exciter, Sathanas, Superchrist, shit, I lose track…but you get the picture. We’ve had a pretty good time so far.

CK: We were in Oakland in 2015 to play a benefit gig for NWN’s warehouse. YK knew the guys at the indie station and arranged for all bands to play a set live in the studio the night after the gig. Part of KFJC’s thing was having bands play in the studio for live broadcast. Their engineer recorded each band’s set and gave us CDs. It was a super cool experience. It just took ages to get any kind of release going for it.

CK: OFC was just one of those bands that got lost in its own time but after enough time went by, people went back to see what they missed and found this really unique, powerful, confident, self-contained entity that embodied a metal spirit 100% free of trendy bullshit. It resonated with a lot of people, plus it had the appeal of being a cult thing, so while OFC and its sound will never appeal to the masses, those who know are glad they know.

CK: I miss some things about the old days, but not everything. The thrill and anticipation of waiting and waiting for a package to arrive so you could hear a new band or album is gone, and that sucks. What’s better is that now you don’t have to wait to find out that album or band sucks, so things are more efficient in that respect, ha.

I’m still in contact with several from the old days, mostly through social media though I talked with Keith Dempe over the phone last night. It’s nice keeping up with everyone as we all go along…

CK: The feeling of the fresh start stands out. It was great working with Chris, and at our own pace, not trying to outdo OFC or anyone else, just focusing on what Vulpecula was supposed to be. It certainly wasn’t a wild time like OFC was or AK became, but it was an important period that has its own special place.

CK: AK doesn’t have an expiration date like OFC did. The band will keep going as long as I keep writing new material and there are gigs to play, I guess. Even after 4 decades playing together in bands, we have fun like we’re still 20 years old…although our bodies are quick to remind us otherwise. I guess if one of us croaked or had to step away, that might be an end, but who knows?

CK: No. Can’t say I had any such thoughts when I started writing music in 1985 and formed/joined bands in 1986. I remember in the mid-90s thinking more about life outside of music, and the studio project approach to Vulpecula allowed space to create a stable life and eventually start a family, etc. But it will always be 1986 in my heart. (me as well-chris)

CK: We’re trying to rebuild AK’s official website and webstore, so for now, our Facebook and

Instagram pages have to suffice! Vulpecula has a FB page as well.

CK: Thanks for the killer support after all these years. DIE HARD!