Interview by Alex S. Johnson
When I welcomed Valor Kand onto The Kandy Fontaine Show, I introduced him as the composer, multi‑instrumentalist, and frontman of Christian Death, one of the most influential deathrock bands in history. But the moment he began speaking, it was clear that his artistic lineage stretches far beyond genre.
He begins not with music, but with prophecy. “As a child,” he tells me, “I had a cousin of mine, an older cousin, telling me about Nostradamus… I was probably like 12–13 but it profoundly influenced me.” He remembers reading the quatrains and feeling the uncanny pull of the prophetic imagination: “Some of the things that were mentioned in the 15, 1600s… were quite uncanny, as far as I saw it at that time.”
Later, after decades of study, he realized “it can be all up to conjecture of how you perceive things,” but the spark remained. “It put me on my quest to understand… the nature of humanity.”
That quest collided early with religious authority. Forced into Catholic school at seven, he remembers a nun telling him that God created everything. His instinctive question — “Well, who created God?” — earned him a blow. “She actually hit me,” he says. “That moment… I realized… the hypocrisy of it all.”
He tried praying, asking “God or the gods” for answers, but “the answers never arrived,” and so he decided, “the only way I’m going to get the answers is to find them myself.”
When I ask what figures guided him, he answers immediately: “My number one influence… would have to be Akhenaten, our heretic King.” He describes becoming “obsessed with learning about him,” especially the way history tried to erase him: “They tried to scrub him… probably the first person to be shadow banned in a big way.” He recounts how monuments were defaced, how Akhenaten’s monotheism threatened the priestly class who “needed the various gods so that they could make money.”
He draws a direct parallel to Christ: “The correlations between that and Jesus turning the tables over for the money… very significant.”
Akhenaten’s epiphany was simple and radical: “He thought… the sun has to be God, because without it, we don’t exist… all life stops without the sun.” Crucially, “He didn’t use his belief in the sun as a means of control, like the previous dynasties.”
Valor notes that Akhenaten “freed the slaves and he paid them a wage,” making him “probably the only one out of any of the pharaohs that even did such a thing.” After his death, “they brought back the old ways… everything that he wiped out.”
From ancient Egypt, Valor moves into the long history of slavery and hierarchy. “People even up to this day don’t realize that slavery… has always been the way it was. For the entire planet of history, in every culture.” Even today, “it still exists… in smaller pockets.”
He notes that one of his nationalities is British: “The word subject means that I’m subject to the powers of the king… therefore I could be made to do anything by the king under the old rules.” Modern states don’t use those rules explicitly, but “England seems to be going back to medieval times… that seems to be where they want to go.” He extends this to global elites: “My opinion is… the wealthy class of the planet… people like Bill Gates… they would prefer to eliminate most of us, and the ones that they don’t eliminate would be their slaves.”
We talk about conspiracy theories, the CIA’s weaponization of the term after Kennedy, and the far‑right myth of “global elites” as an antisemitic dog whistle. Valor’s critique is not about fantastical cabals; it’s about observable structures of control. “
There’s a lot of egotists… whose goal is ultimate control,” he says. “Nothing’s changed.” He sees the internet as “basically the second iteration of the Gutenberg Press,” but also as a tool of surveillance: “You’re being tracked… by every commercial entity on the planet.” He describes “generational planning… going back to the times of the kings and queens,” and insists that modern oligarchs share the same megalomaniacal impulses.
Yet he insists that ordinary people are fundamentally decent. “Most people are really good people,” he says. “If people weren’t at nature generally good, we’d be slaughtering each other on a daily basis.” The powerful exploit that goodness because “they know the vulnerabilities of most people… that most people have a conscience when they don’t.”
He describes the psychology of cruelty: “The satisfaction of hurting people… like a rapist… it’s the sexual satisfaction of hurting somebody.” Scale that up, and you get systems built on domination.
When I ask how people can resist manipulation, his advice is simple and hard: “Have an open mind… but doubt, doubt and doubt again.”
He tells listeners, “Don’t believe me… go out and use your best judgment.” His fantasy punishment for oligarchs is stark but non‑lethal: “Solitary confinement… where they can’t tell anybody what to do… throw food at them.”
From there, we move into animals, and his tone shifts. He talks about his chickens, dogs, and a fox he once rescued, and how animals endure hardship without complaint. “What they do is right,” he says. “What we do is the deviation.” He uses the “native Wild Kingdom” as his moral reference point: “How they live and what they do is right, because it’s been working for billions of years, and what we do is the deviation of humanity.” He sees deep parallels between human and animal love: “Little chihuahua wants to protect its human being… same love, same compassion.”
This leads us into mythic territory: Nephilim, ancient gods, extraterrestrial or interdimensional beings. He references the opening track of The Root of All Evolution, describing “the antediluvian concept… beings coming down from the sky… going into the ocean… having a culture.” He connects this to Shambhala, Antarctica lore, and other esoteric traditions, suggesting that “the gods of old” may have been entities from other dimensions.
When I ask about the through‑line of his work, he explains that his new album, Mentor de los Perdidos (“Mentor of the Lost”), is meant as inspiration: “Designed to be an inspiration for people to seek out the same things we’re talking about.”
His records always contain “positive and negative elements,” because confronting darkness is necessary: “You can’t really clean house if you sweep the dirt into a pile and put a carpet over it.” He encourages listeners to “do a spring cleaning of your soul,” to acknowledge that “evil exists,” and to pursue happiness without denial: “You can be happy… and accept that we live in a binary world… good and bad… dark and light.”
When I ask about his songwriting process, he splits it into two parts: lyrics and music. “The music is… like I’m watching a movie,” he says. He dreams of scoring films: “Which is something I would like to do… I haven’t been given the opportunity yet.” He’s a “movie buff,” jaded but still moved by how film uses music “to emphasize people’s emotions.”
That cinematic language shapes his compositions: “The darkness of music, when you’re talking about something that’s dark… if it’s a horror movie… the music turns very dark.” He wants music to make “your hairs rise on the back of your neck… whether it’s good or bad.” He compares this to the “lizard brain… still functioning down your spine,” like a cat’s fur standing up. When that instinct kicks in, “then I know that music is right.”
He describes hearing music in his head, like Beethoven: “I do nothing to do with being as talented as Beethoven, but… when he was deaf… he was hearing the music and just playing it because he could hear it in his head. I do that… I can write pieces… just in my head and put it all together.”
Sometimes the story isn’t fully expressed, so he “embellish[es] it with other sounds… other structures… even different instruments.” He’ll pick up another instrument, play one note, and know: “Yeah, this is going to work… and usually [it] blossoms from that.” His objective is clear: “I want people to feel that feeling… and the only way that I can do it is to make that music… bring it out.”
We talk about Christian Death’s videos — “Illuminazi,” Church of No Return — and the way they fuse horror imagery, symbolism, and ritual. I mention Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, that Eastern European vampire film, and how his visual language echoes its dreamlike, allegorical horror. He laughs, and the connection feels right: a shared cinematic grammar of shadows, masks, and forbidden rites.
Then we move directly into Bauhaus.
Valor locates Bauhaus in a precise lineage: “Bauhaus goes back to the ’20s of art in Germany,” he says, referencing the original Bauhaus movement and its influence on painters, musicians, and multitudes of artists.
For him, their work is “very theatrical as far as the mood setting.” He thinks they were “probably influenced by the early film genre… the early horror movies… the Bela Lugosi things… the lighting and the dark shading,” noting how their promo photos “featured that kind of vibe.” It was “very different,” a visual and sonic language of chiaroscuro and dread.
For Christian Death, the path was parallel but distinct. “We weren’t really into that direction of drawing influence,” he says. “We were just basically trying to be as dramatic as artists, without actually a direction in that time.” In the beginning, he wanted to make people feel free: “We wanted people to let go.” The performances were charged with “sexual hormones racing through your body,” and “a lot of things were inspired with sexual connotation.” It was “all about freedom,” about “sexual liberation,” and he points out that punk, for all its complaints about hippies, shared the same desire: “As much as the punks complained that they hated hippies, they had the same desire to liberate… it was all about liberation… to be able to create art and do whatever you wanted. There were no rules.”
He says, “You should be able to walk naked… I don’t understand why people have to wear clothes. Why is it illegal to walk down the street naked? I thought that’s unnatural.”
This is where Bauhaus and Christian Death intersect: in the refusal of imposed norms, the insistence on liberation — sexual, artistic, spiritual. Bauhaus brought German Expressionism, early horror cinema, and Burroughs‑inflected cut‑up sensibilities into post‑punk.
Christian Death brought Catholic trauma, Akhenaten, Nostradamus, and a feral, animal‑kingdom ethic into deathrock. Both created spaces where the dispossessed could gather and say, “This is ours.”
We talk about the Cruel World festival in Pasadena, 2022, where Bauhaus and Christian Death shared the bill with Blondie, the B‑52s, and others.
Valor tells me the original plan was even more intimate: “We were supposed to play at the Queen Mary… with Bauhaus and us… it was awesome.” The show was booked, but “Peter Murphy had his heart attack… right before.” The event was rescheduled, expanded, and eventually became the full festival. Bauhaus and Christian Death were no longer the sole axis, but the resonance remained: two bands whose names alone conjure entire worlds.
By the end of our conversation, we’ve moved from Nostradamus to Akhenaten, from Catholic nuns to Bauhaus, from slavery to the internet, from Nephilim to chickens. Valor talks about upcoming tours — East Coast “east of the Rockies” in June, West Coast in November — and a new album, Mentor de los Perdidos, due around December or January, “just in the mixing stage right now.”
He closes with simple gratitude: “Thank you very much for your interest.” I echo it, because what he’s doing — what Bauhaus did, what deathrock did — is more than music. It’s architecture for the lost, a set of rooms where those of us who never found our tribe can finally recognize each other in the dark.
Horror Sleaze Trash 