Although they've been together for about two years, the four members of Culted have never actually been in the same room. Michael Klassen (guitar/bass/percussion/noise), Matthew Friesen (guitar/bass/percussion/noise) and Kevin Stevenson (drums) all grew up in a small town in the middle of the Canadian prairies, while Daniel Jansson (vocals/ambience) makes his home in Gothenburg, Sweden.

After hearing Jansson’s Deadwood project, Klassen contacted him through his MySpace page to see if he’d be interested in collaborating on his and Friesen’s other band, Of Human Bondage. While emailing back and forth, the guys discovered they had mutual interests in groups like Khanate, Sunn O))) and Electric Wizard and Jansson suggested they put together a whole new project of slow, blackened metal.

Because Friesen and Klassen work out of a home studio in Winnipeg, Manitoba, they were able to write and record the guitar/bass/drum files and send them to Jansson. “I remember when I heard the first riffs I thought, fucking awesome! I really wanted to get back into metal again after only doing Industrial music for about two years, and the initial guitar tracks just blew me away. I really heard a will to experiment and create some really dark oppressive tunes,” Jansson said. Inspired by what he heard, he wrote and recorded the vocals at his studio and sent them back to his Canadian collaborators. “When Daniel sent us the vocals I was floored, the tracks we’d recorded were now songs. What remained was to flesh them out and do justice to his performance,” Klassen said. And over the next several months, the guys continued tweaking their sound, and the files flew back and forth as more percussion, guitars, keyboards and noise were added.

Although the four members of the band still have never spoken to each other in real time, they got to know each other through the music, making Culted a truly collaborative effort across international lines.