Interviewing Bathory was a treat. Sure it has to do with the fact that this (practically) one-man act from Sweden is one of the three bands from the early to mid-80s that are credited with influencing the second, and most important, wave of black metal in Scandinavia. But it also has a lot to do with the enigma of Quorthon, Bathory's sole recognized member.

I had been warned that Quorthon is a walking contradiction. There may be some truth to that, as he denies things in this interview that he said in previous, reliable ones. He even contradicts himself in a couple minor ways within this very interview itself. How much is hot air? How much is this mysterious man (of whom I could only find one recent picture) trying to uphold this image that both he and his legions of fans have set up for him? Quothon goes into some detail about this very point: having to live up to what has become an institution.

And Quorthon's institution is one of mystery; awkward, gratuitous sexual references out of the blue; and a sort of martyr/ god duality. "I'm a slave to Bathory," he laments, implying that he has no control over his art and, if he could, would probably be rid of the whole bloated scene that speculates on his every move. To sum it up most bluntly, Quorthon is a big dork, but one that gives priceless quote after priceless quote, is intelligent, sharp, astute, and an excellent conversationalist. And in his supreme art of being a dorky mastermind, I respect Quorthon a great deal. - Roberto Martinelli

Maelstrom: Black Mark seems to primarily be the Bathory vehicle, and then you put out a few things here and there also.

Quorthon: It's for Bathory and for the diehards. We don't brown nose the mainstream by saying, "hey, we just put out a set of condoms, can we just put a full page in your magazine about that." We'll talk to the press when there's an album out, and some press we'll say no to. For instance there's a whole bunch of European, big, big metal magazines we will not talk to.

Maelstrom: Why is that?

Quorthon: Because they've been hanging around with first of all, very jealous Bathory clones; second of all because they felt they couldn't control us - what do you call it? Lion tamer? Ring leader? - they couldn't paint Bathory in a corner. Every time they hailed us as the original Vikings, we come out with something that's completely different, and they don't like that. And they come out in reviews sounding very personal; and it's not about music. Anyway, I'm used to it. With Nordland, we've been receiving top grades in all media over the past couple of weeks. This is a very awkward situation when people say this is the best we've ever done - you just wait for the big bang, because we're used to crap reviews, and all of a sudden people say that "this is the best you've ever done."

Maelstrom: What I think is remarkable is that Bathory had been quiet and then you put out two albums in two years.

Quorthon: I have some private videos if you…(sustained laugh) Everything from my house, people can have tons of it if they want it. With an album, you have to wait. You can't release an album every six months.

Maelstrom: Destroyer of Worlds has the hockey song ("Sudden Death"). I have to talk to you about that.

Quorthon: Oh, that's great.

Maelstrom: You must have got all sorts of horrible feedback about it.

Quorthon: …no, not horrible.

Maelstrom: Really?

Quorthon: You don't have to be a 14 year-old dork to enjoy hockey. No, that's great. People got the whole point.

Maelstrom: Ok, what's the whole point?

Quorthon: The point was for people who ask me if it's true I eat babies and drink blood and live in a cave in the north of Sweden - if they're sincerely asking me that, they don't see the humor in anything. They're feeding from the image and the legend and they believe in it. Do you really want those kind of people to listen to your album and then write you a letter saying: "Hey, you're my god"? What kind of personal relationship can you have with a person who becomes kind of a slave to the Bathory legend? I put out two solo albums full of crap that was as far away from Bathory as you could possibly get. I was trying to chase away all those nutcases, like people sending me bags of dirt from a graveyard.

Maelstrom: Did you really get a bag of dirt from a graveyard?

Quorthon: Yeah, there was a girl in Los Angeles. This was way back in '89. She'd send me a lot of letters - very strange letters, sometimes written in blood. And one day she sent me a plastic bag with earth. And I said, "what the hell is this?" So I wrote her back and she said, "one night I went to the graveyard and lay down on the grave and masturbated under the full moon. I thought the earth would be full of magic powers for your black magic ceremonies." And I said, "you've been reading the lyrics too carefully." I've had dead cats sent in the mail; people send porn pictures of their girlfriends dressed up as nuns with crucifixes up their you-know-whats; sometimes you ask yourself, how many of these people will be potential church burners, or murderers? Sometimes you have a responsibility.

Maelstrom: So your responsibility was to make a song about hockey? Is that what you're getting at? Is it sort of a joke?

Quorthon: As a joke, yes. The thing was, during the late 90s, the debate was about what the true and false sound of Bathory was. I said I didn't want to suck the cock of Odin and I didn't want to brownnose Satan all my life. Allow me to develop and evolve a little bit; the way I was allowed to during the 80s. Back then, everything was new; during the 90s, it was more a case of picking up something from the past and just doing that to please one half of your audience. And so I said, "allow me to pick some other topics." One of my friends said, "you ride a Harley, why not write a Harley song?" Yeah, I guess we could do that. We'd been singing about incest, the nuclear war, and the environment on Bathory albums. Also, I was making an interview with a Canadian magazine in those days and they said, "hey, you're a big hockey fan. When are you going to make a hockey song?" And I thought, "that's a good idea." (laugh)

Maelstrom: So when you were talking about "suck the cock of Vikings and brownnose Satan," but now you've gone back to a full-on, Viking concept album. I'm sure it's going to make a lot of people happy - I love it. But it's kind of in contrast to what you were talking about.

Quorthon: No, it's not going back. I see Bathory as a twin-headed beast doing parallel things. If I even mentioned the word Satan in one lyric, it wouldn't be a return to something; it would be just a continuation of either side of your brain. I mean, you don't have a Big Mac everyday, and all girls have three holes. So I mean there are plenty of alternatives. With Bathory, it's not about doing "Cats" every week. It's about seeing other shows; not just watching Arnold Swarzenegger movies, but maybe reading a classic book. That was what the whole identity crisis during the 1990s was all about.

Maelstrom: Are you talking about your identity crisis?

Quorthon: Well, it seemed like an identity crisis because in the 80s the whole debate regarding style and topics was in the form of fan mail, and that's very private. But with internet and all the fans growing up and becoming part of magazines and fanzines and having these internet sites, the debate was in the open - which is of course not a negative thing - but it became something completely different. And so it became an enormous item: "Is Bathory dead?" was one; two, "is Bathory recycling old crap to suck the last few bucks out of a corpse?"; three, "what's the true and genuine side of Bathory? When they do something that is not that, is it prostitution?" When you're on the receiving end of all of those opinions (and opinions are like assholes - everyone's got one), that makes you ask the question, "why the hell am I doing this?" Because no one seems to be actually appreciating what you are doing. You're in the studio recording realizing that no matter what this album sounds like, 50 percent of your audience is going to be disappointed.

Maelstrom: So why are you doing it?

Quorthon: I feel I have this sort of obligation, first and foremost. I used to be the ringleader of Bathory; now Bathory's my master. It's like an actor doing "Hamlet." Instead of Hamlet writing something, which was [Bathory's] case in the 80s, I'm just the actor or the civil servant of the monster Bathory. Whenever I write something, it has to sound like Bathory. It must be a little bit underground. It can't have that Y2K kind of sound. It's a role I play; at the same time, I'm proud of my past. When I pick up one of these so-called Nordic, Viking metal records, if people consider me to be a pioneer of that, why not [continue to] do it?

Maelstrom: So you've become an institution.

Quorthon: It has sort of become like an institution. If Santa all of a sudden would say, "so, fuck Christmas!" it would disappoint a lot of people!

Maelstrom: Hahahahaha! So, you see it as your duty?

Quorthon: It is. And it has a life of its own. There's this Nordland shit out right now. It's not necessarily what I'd like to do forever, but it's also not what Bathory's been about for the past 20 years.

Maelstrom: How is it different? How is it different from what Twilight of the Gods or Hammerheart is?

Quorthon: About 14 years, that's how different it is. People have these ideas about bundling records up in twos or threes. This is the same thing like saying we have to compare everything Slayer will ever do to Reign in Blood. Do you do that and bundle up Slayer albums? No. I mean, Slayer has a very unique sound and they've stayed true to the sound and they changed very little from one album to another, at least the stuff that I've heard. The last thing I heard was actually Reign in Blood, so…. No, I've heard one song from Slayer every three or four years.

Maelstrom: How much do you keep up with what's going on in metal today?

Quorthon: Well, I don't. you can be an active part or an inactive part of something, and I don't even think I'm an inactive part. I will sometimes come down to the office and there will be metal magazines. I'll flip through the pages and sometimes wonder if it's a kid's Halloween party or if it's a sex show. When a tree grows and you just stand there, nothing's going to happen. But if you come back one year later, a lot of things have happened. So when I do occasionally hear something - because each one of those magazines will have CDs - and it all sounds the same, but it sounds very different from six to eight months before. It used to be a lot of girl singing and violins and flutes and you go, "wow, things really have changed."

Maelstrom: The reason I brought this up was I wanted to know if you had an opinion on Enslaved, who are largely considered the best Viking metal band today.

Quorthon: I will not even be able to read a lot of those new bands' logos. I did an interview with a Swedish magazine and he asked a lot of questions about Swedish extreme metal bands; I didn't even know all of them were from Sweden.

Maelstrom: Well, you can tell from your sound: like, if you listen to Nordland I, it has a very old heavy metal sound - it's a proper heavy metal album. There are so few heavy metal albums anymore - it's like "it's a black metal album; it's a death metal album, it's a power metal album," but this really sounds like a heavy metal sound to it; this theme running through it.

Quorthon: I came down to the studio once to talk to an engineer. He was working with another band in the studio - one of these extreme metal bands. I saw the guitar player: he looked like he had an aircraft carrier in front of him - with all these boxes and things - and he was playing a guitar with two million strings on it, and it didn't even sound like a guitar. During the break I asked him, "hey, sometimes don't you want your instrument to sound like a guitar? With no effects and a plain Marshall amplifier?" And he looked at me and said, "it's the sound." Yeah, but the sound is in the guitar and how you play and write your songs, not in all those technicalities. I don't even use a distortion box in the studio. It's fashion, of course. Everybody records their guitars and drums in exactly the same way.

Maelstrom: The drums sound real on the new record. Is it a drum machine or a mix like before (like on Twilight of the Gods)?

Quorthon: Twilight… is entirely drum machine; Requiem is entirely real. For most of the 90s, except for…god, I can't even remember.

Maelstrom: That's ok, how about the new one?

Quorthon: For Nordland, there are these small, stupid microphones called condensed microphones. You kind of scotch tape them onto the drum skin. You can use any shit kit you want - you just record the impact - the signal. You feed the signal through a computer. You can use a soundbank, like with 600 different snare drum sounds. So essentially you just beat a phone book, or snap your fingers. But you need a live playing feel, so you record on a shit drum kit with these microphones.

Maelstrom: Was it you playing drums?

Quorthon: No, it was a friend of mine.

Maelstrom: I'm asking these questions because I couldn't find any credits on the album for drums. It just says, "all music and lyrics by Quorthon."

Quorthon: Even in the days when I had punk friends of mine playing on the first couple of albums, we didn't put any names in the credits.

Maelstrom: So it's just you and this guy on drums.

Quorthon: Yeah, it's the same situation as on Hammerheart.

Maelstrom: Has it always been the same guy?

Quorthon: No, he's been involved on Twilight…, Octagon, Destroyer… and Nordland.

Maelstrom: Is it someone we might know?

Quorthon: I don't think his mother even…. No, he's the kind of guy who doesn't have anything to do with metal at all. He will occasionally listen to Johnny Thunder or something like that. He doesn't even look like he's into metal; he looks like Dudley Moore. (sustained, building, kind of maniacal laugh) Don't tell him I told you that.

Maelstrom: I wouldn't even know who he was. If I saw a guy who looked like Dudley Moore, I'd have to ask him, "hey, do you know Quorthon?"

Quorthon: Yeah, exactly. Haha.

Maelstrom: Quorthon, have you ever, ever played live? Not with Bathory, but with any band?

Quorthon: Yeah, sure. I had an oi punk band prior to Bathory. If you translate the name it would be "Battle Dick."

Maelstrom: What's that in Swedish?

Quorthon: Stridskuk. The battle dick is what each batallion in the sort of ranger, marine corps here in Sweden has. If you fail a course, they will engrave your name in the battle dick. (sort of creepy, muffled, sniffing laughter)

Maelstrom: So what is it? Is it like a piece of wood, or something?

Quorthon: Yeah, it's just a wooden pole. (sniffing laughter) Yeah, it's one of those stupid things. The drummer in one of my punk bands had been in the military. I wasn't allowed to do the military service because of my long hair.

Maelstrom: Really? They wouldn't just grab you and cut your hair?

Quorthon: No, they cannot do that in Sweden.

Maelstrom: They can't?

Quorthon: No.

Maelstrom: Then why wouldn't everyone just grow their hair out, then?

Quorthon: ….uh….yeah, well, that's a good question. Is it a voluntary thing in the United States?

Maelstrom: It's still a voluntary thing, yeah.

Quorthon: In Sweden it's not. But if you're born in a certain year or belong to a certain generation or class - for example there was a very good year (wheezing, happy laughter) where there was a surplus of 25,000 kids joining up in the kids, they will have to say no to 25 percent of people. Don't ask me why we have to do military service because we don't have military power anymore. In five years we've cancelled 50 percent of the military force. I think we're just going to tax the enemy to death. (laugh)

Maelstrom: I've heard a lot about how everything is taxed in Sweden.

Quorthon: Oh, yeah. If you buy a book in Sweden, 40 percent is added to the price. If you buy a CD in the shops, it will cost you 25 bucks. On the other hand, we get very high salaries. The average Swedish salary per month is $1800-2000.

Maelstrom: That's not that high. Not for San Francisco.

Quorthon: Well, it's a very stupid system. If you buy something and you need it, you can deduct it from your declaration.

Maelstrom: But you can't deduct metal CDs, obviously.

Quorthon: If you're a journalist, or you have a fanzine, you can, because that's your job. I'm a professional musician, so whenever I buy strings or anything, I save the receipt. So I get 50 percent back. So it's a stupid situation: you pay twice as much for anything, but you get half back later on.

Maelstrom: Do you like to listen to music, Quorthon?

Quorthon: Sure. I listen to everything. I can listen to The Beatles and Glen Miller, Motorhead and Sabbath, Purple, Zeppelin…

Maelstrom: So you gravitate more to the stuff from your time, when you were growing up.

Quorthon: Yeah, that's sort of what shapes your personality. I don't think you change very much past 20. Having said that, though, the music that my older friends, who're into Blue Oyster Cult and David Bowie - I didn't listen to that - but nowadays I'm beginning to pick those records up; you know, Frank Zappa and things like that.

Maelstrom: So, this is Nordland I. How many Nordlands do you think you'll put out?

Quorthon: Now you've turned a light bulb on. No, there's just one more. What happened is that when we came down to the studio someone said we had two hours worth of material. We couldn't put that on a double album 'cause the distribution network doesn't really like double albums - they have their standard boxes: 25 CDs in a box. Also, the record stores aren't very interested in ordering double albums because 1) they think they'll have to pay more and 2) they think they'll sell less. So we decided to put them out as separate releases. But they're identical in every way except the logo being in silver and gold, and blablabla….and of course the music. (laugh).

Maelstrom: You know, black metal is so funny. It has this mystique about loving things that are old. I think that's a huge reason why you'll always be successful because as long as you're attached to black metal, people will love you - because you're "old." You're from the old days; you're largely credited with two other bands as having started the whole second wave of black metal, as they call it. On Ebay - there's this auction site called Ebay…

Quorthon: Yeah, the parasite site. They sell illegal stuff always.

Maelstrom: Yeah. There's this one band from France (Vlad Tepes) that is so cult. They have these limited edition CDRs - CDRs, right - in the world, and they sell for like, $300 if they go on. And people will lose their mind. But if it were something else, like death metal or some other kind of metal, it's not as collectible, 'cause there's not this fixation with "ancient" things. That's what black metal is all about: cult, dirty, screwed up sound.

Quorthon: But isn't it strange? You have the black metal boom right now, and you can be on the cover of People (almost, if you're in a black metal band), and you're perceived as being in something that's underground.

Maelstrom: I know, but I think that's entirely different. I understand what you're saying, like with bands like Cradle of Filth. But things like that aren't "cult."

Quorthon: One of the members emailed me and asked me if he could join Bathory. He wrote me his real name, because I didn't know the name. When I checked his email address, it turned out to be Cradle of Filth. So I logged on to their homepage, and I saw his picture there! Hahahaha.

Maelstrom: And he was all done up, I'm sure.

Quorthon: What I wrote him was, "I'm sure there are some people in your neighborhood that play and you can form a band sometime."

Maelstrom: Which guy was it?

Quorthon: I promised I wouldn't tell.

Maelstrom: So what do you think of the whole look of black metal nowadays? "Nowadays"… Shit, for the past 12 years?

Quorthon: Ultimately, the people that get the most out of a very diverse scene is the audience. You can wear any shit you want, you can play any way you want. If you are crap, you are crap, but who's to decide what's correct and what's not? You can sell shit in glass jars, a buck a jar, if your advertising is good. If you just kill people with enough heavy advertising, they will succumb sooner or later. Most of Bathory stuff was recorded on 8-track in a garage 20 years ago, and we still have to press 5,000 every three months. So I don't think it's all about advertising, or having two million spikes in your leather underwear. But things have to change. If acts would look like me or Cronos of Venom forever, it wouldn't develop. So all these young acts - I consider them my kids sometimes when I talk to them - I think they're great. It's great in the sense that they're picking up the torch, but with a different life.

Maelstrom: You mentioned you have two hours worth of material. Is Nordland II already recorded?

Quorthon: Well, everything was recorded in July. So we put one half of the material aside and figured we'd add all the extra stuff later on so we'd have more time to complete the stuff for part two.

Maelstrom: So when is the next one coming out? (Chuckle) Well, let's talk about when it's coming out in Europe because as you said before, Nordland I isn't coming out for a little while in the US.

Quorthon: The record company definitely want to have Nordland I out by late winter, 2003. However, we have the 20th anniversary to think about. We're occupied these days with putting out all the old Bathory albums on vinyl. Now, they're all remastered and everything. Since we're putting out so much stuff, we decided to put it out sometime in the spring.

Maelstrom: Black metal is the least tolerant of metal styles. You have to adhere to these strict (image and compositional) rules to be "true." The latest flavor of extremism is racism. I don't know if you were aware of this.

Quorthon: It's probably in the United States. I had never heard of it before. Metal Maniacs asked me about it a couple of days ago. They asked if I knew that my albums were a big influence on the skinhead scene in the US.

Maelstrom: It's funny. I was interviewing Barney Greenway from Napalm Death and he was saying that some skinhead bands have taken Manowar in a similar context in their true, Aryan pride. But, no, a lot of the bands are from Poland or France or Germany.

Quorthon: Well, I think that it's great that they're playing music and getting to some kind of disciplined activity rather than just hanging around kicking people in the head. But if we try to look at it in a race (negative) point of view, why not include hip hop? That's Black Panther, "I'm gonna shoot you, you White motherfucker," all over again. People are not talking about hip hop because we're white and we're guilty because of slavery and the Holocaust. If it's White racism, it's bad, but if it's racism from any other color, it's "how can we serve you?" So, I don't see the problem. I disconnected all that kind of discussion when we put out an album called Hammerheart. We had a sunwheel on the back of the album, and people - especially in Germany, 'cause they're the most paranoid people in the world, anyway - got very upset about it 'cause they thought we had serious Nazi connections.

Maelstrom: We did an interview with Skyforger, this Latvian band, and they were talking about how they play up the Pagan angle, and how on the back of their albums they have sunwheels - swatztikas. They were saying how in Latvia that symbol is a very important cultural one, so it's not banned as people understand it's not necessarily a Nazi thing.

Quorthon: Well, in Asia it's a happy symbol.

Maelstrom: Yeah, it means 10,000 years (forever in East Asian cultures).

Quorthon: The sunwheel has been carved into mountainsides for 3,000 years in Sweden. We're talking about a little historical period that was 12 years in Germany. If we should judge cultures and symbols from all over the world because of a 12-year intermission in German history, then something is wrong here. You can't chase ghosts in a white linen shop.

Maelstrom: I thought it was interesting about what you were talking about concerning selective racism. I think I may have the same views as you… I don't approve of White power groups' views, but if rappers can be racist against groups of people, then….

Quorthon: Well, it's fashion. It's White, Christian, fat society putting a lot of gangsters from the 'hood on stage and thinking, "oh, this is kid's culture." A couple years back you had Tipper Gore putting labels on metal records, getting upset about something she couldn't understand. You have all these Christian nutcases playing Madonna records backwards instead of chasing bands like Dimmu Borgir. But acts of the extreme metal scene will not attract the same kind of attention, so they will not go for those guys. The mainstream, western, Christian, fat, capitalist person wouldn't understand or know anything about Dimmu Borgir or Bathory anyways. They will go for anything that will give them a big forum for their opinions. I've seen a talk show with a Neo-Nazi and a big, fat Negro saying, "the Bible is the true book," and they refer to the same phrases in the same fucking book. So, we shouldn't look at symbols as something evil; symbols in themselves are innocent. People have different colors and cultures and languages. It's the same thing as "true" black metal and "false" black metal: a lot of people with too much spare time and too few ideas of their own.

Maelstrom: But your music is a part of this whole scene.

Quorthon: During interrogation of church burning suspects by the Norwegian national police, Bathory lyrics were mentioned several times. So the police got a hold of these lyrics and read them. When I heard that I had to read my own lyrics, which, incidentally, I couldn't remember, but I didn't mention anywhere about killing homosexuals or burning down churches.

Maelstrom: How did that make you feel when you heard about that?

Quorthon: Well, being Swedish and knowing Norway, I know that Norway is a very conservative, Christian country. If you chase a rat into a corner, it's going to bite even the biggest lion at the throat. Sweden is a very, very liberal country; if you live in a place like Norway, where they still sell porno magazines in brown paper bags, where all they have is cod and oil… and good looking girls….but, basically…

Maelstrom: I don't know…I think Swedish women are way better looking.

Quorthon: Well, looks come from inside. Look at a person like Pamela Anderson. Would you say that she's a good looking lady?

Maelstrom: Well, I think she's a good looking woman, yeah. I don't know anything about her, though: I don't buy her pictures or watch her TV show.

Quorthon: She's obviously lousy in bed, she's half plastic, she can't take care of her kids, she's doing drugs. I mean, it's superficial culture that we're looking at. I think that people also look at black metal and church burning and racism and everything in our society in a very superficial way. But going back to Norway, if you release the pressure a little bit, one of those days, one of those people is going to explode. Having lived in a sub-culture for a long time, we didn't have in Sweden like they did in Norway those sub-culture, black metal cults. If you tell people to sleep with their hands on the blanket instead of under the blanket, when they grow up, they're going to be in their own society, so to speak. You have some cultures in every generation, Teddy boys, punk rockers, hippies… People would put safety pins in their cheek or have green hair; you wouldn't make any kind of revolution or statement for having that.

Maelstrom: I think hearing you talk is most interesting in terms of coming from a Scandinavian perspective. A lot of the perception of Norway and the scene has been mythicized and made to be a semi-fantastic notion, so to have a more practical view of how it developed is nice.

Quorthon: I think people treat things they hear from exotic places like Sweden and Norway with the same kind of mythology as when sailors would come back to English ports talking about sea monsters and mermaids.

Maelstrom: Hey, I read once that you drove a cab.

Quorthon: Where did you read that?

Maelstrom: I read an interview you did with this guy (Jeff Wagner in Worm Gear #9) in '95.

Quorthon: No, and I'll tell you why I've never driven a cab: I don't have a driver's license. That's why I asked you which fucking magazine.

Maelstrom: (laugh) There was another thing about you used to box?

Quorthon: Oh, my God…

Maelstrom: That's not true, either?

Quorthon: No, it's not true. You want to know the greatest rumor I ever heard about Bathory? That I died in 1991. You know the very best part of it? A guy who wanted to know - after having spoken with me for 15 minutes - not, "so, I heard this rumor," but, "so, is it true you died in 1991?" He didn't even hear what he was saying. The rumors meant so much to him: the mysteriousness and the whole thing that was created (not by us, incidentally). It was an accident, and I played along with it when we realized, in the mid-80s, that people were drawn to the band because of the mystery. We were together for 10-12 months, but we didn't release any pictures, because they would have noticed that we were three spotty, shit kids from Stockholm. Now, Bathory has developed into this three-headed demon, Satanic, Neo-Nazi, fighting beast. Well, if a Neo-Nazi in Poland is picking up a Bathory album because of that, great. Maybe he will change his opinions and get into some serious music and understand the arrangements and listen to Beethoven, or whatever.

Maelstrom: Well, I really liked that interview. He was also talking about the rumor of Boss (the Bathory producer) being your father.

Quorthon: Yeah, I've been asked that question…

Maelstrom: I'm not going to ask you.

Quorthon: No, but it's like when people ask you the one man band thing, or all the other shit things; it doesn't matter how many times you answer the question. Sometimes you lose respect for the whole media thing and people in general. They just don't seem to actually pay attention to what you're saying. Boss is 52, I'm 37. Add that up yourself. All these stories surrounding Bathory are crazy. Terrorizer once wrote a review of my second solo album as, "it's nice that Quorthon has found a forum to discuss his former drug problems." And I didn't even smoke cigarettes.

Maelstrom: It sounds like Terrorizer could have a law suit on their hands.

Quorthon: Well, if I had been an American and Terrorizer were an American magazine, yes.

Maelstrom: You could have sued them for libel.

Quorthon: I heard that USA stands for "united suing of America."

Maelstrom: (laugh) No, libel is a really serious thing.

Quorthon: Well, I'm not gonna sue everybody each and every time that shit gets brought up. It saddens me to see how people can use so much space in a magazine discussing stuff that I killed 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.

Maelstrom: Hey, speaking of suing. Recently I read this interview with Marduk. They were talking about a Bathory tribute that they were on. There was something about this guy trying to release this album and how you tried to sue him.

Quorthon: No.

Maelstrom: That's not true?

Quorthon: The thing was, he came to us.

Maelstrom: Ok, please clear the record up, here.

Quorthon: Ok. A former member of Necrophobic (which used to be on Black Mark) is one of Sweden's biggest Bathory fans, and he wanted to put together a tribute album with Bathory. He contacted us and we said, sure, great, and if he needed help with lyrics. He would work years on that project. Each and every time he would say, "at the end of the year. There's a new band coming up with a new version…" He sent us a photocopy of the cover that had the band logo and the goat. We told him we were very sorry, but those were trademarks of Bathory and that they were copyrighted and protected. If I produced jeans in my basement, I couldn't call them Levi's. I could call them Dickhead Pants, or whatever. So we said he had to change that and asked when the album was going to come out. He said, "oh, in about a year and a half." Ok, so he had plenty of time to change that. The next idea he came out with was almost identical. It had a photo by a photographer I know. I asked him if he had gotten permission to use his picture. He said, "no, I'm gonna steal the picture, as the project is almost complete. I want to get this album out." I said, "yeah, but you have to realize you're going to step on a lot of feet. This is a commercial product." We didn't hear from him for another six months until I went downtown and I saw an advertisement on a subway, and there it was, In Conspiracy with Satan. I told Black Mark he put the album out anyway with the original cover and everything. I went to the record shop and I looked at it. They had the logo, the goat and the English photographer's picture. We called the authorities and it turned out that the tribute album hadn't been reported, royalty-wise. So it was no longer our case, it was the Swedish authorities. They said, "you're not allowed to put something on the market if it contains somebody else's work." So he had to withdraw the whole first batch. We said, "ok, now you have a golden opportunity to re-manufacture the album cover so you will not step on our feet." Six months later he puts the whole album out again, not having changed anything.

Maelstrom: Wow, that's very strange.

Quorthon: And very stupid, yes. So we said that really he wasn't giving us much of a choice. So we went to the Swedish court and asked for help. We explained it was a tribute and explained the whole thing with tributes, how it's ok to use other group's songs. It's very difficult to sit down and talk to a 55-year old gran how the whole metal scene works. When she had been assured it wasn't a theft of song material, it was just, "please help us out so we can get the album on the market without infringing on any copyright laws." So she sent him a letter to which he had to reply to in 90 days, and he didn't. So he was called to the court, where the product was deemed illegal, meaning they weren't allowed to sell or re-press it. And yet here we are 5 or 6 years later and they're still re-pressing it.

Maelstrom: Were you just really personally opposed to having the goat and the Bathory logo on it? They are your songs, even though it's not you playing them.

Quorthon: If I take a leak in a bottle and call it Coca Cola and sell it, what do you think that would do in terms of copyrights and things like that?

Maelstrom: But you don't have anything to do with Coca Cola.

Quorthon: No, but Coca Cola's attorneys do. Ok, we were talking about how the US is a suing nation; well, in Sweden we have those laws, too. I wouldn't mind if you're going to make this tribute album in an underground fashion, but these are professional acts. I would never, ever put a Marduk logo on a Bathory album, or any album and record their music and sell it and make money from it. If you look at it from a neutral point of view, all they had to do was just change the album cover. The whole point wasn't the money - Bathory's sold 1.3 million albums; I haven't had to have a job for 20 years (and I'm not driving a cab) - the whole point was an infringement of copyright laws, and those are international. There was nothing we could do about it. Once it ended up in the Swedish courts, it was not our case, it was the courts'. Because the guys who were responsible for the album fucked up. We helped them out for 18 MONTHS, and he didn't pay attention to any advice we gave him. I mean, there are tons of tributes out there: I just received one from Greece, and it's all perfect. Everything's reported, the don't use the logo, great cover versions, interesting Greek accents…(laugh) I mean, you can be an asshole and do asshole things, or you can do it the right way.

Maelstrom: Hey, Quorthon, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

Quorthon: Look out for [Nordland] Part II. The guy who died in part I is alive in part II, so don't get mixed up.

Maelstrom: Cool. I won't believe anything I hear.

interview by: Roberto Martinelli

Don't always trust what you read. If I had gone along with what reviews in zines had told me, I might still believe that Dark Tranquility was this once great band that had been signed to Century Media Records, changed their logo, and wussed out. While the first two reports are indeed facts, and while the band did go in a different direction with albums like Projector (which I think isn't half bad), the artistic demise of Dark Tranquility has been greatly exaggerated. This originator of the Gothenburg sound has made an album to rank on many metal fans best of 2002 lists in Damage Done, which I'll go on record saying is their best album ever, Gallery or no Gallery. I waylaid vocalist Mikael Stanne during the bands stop in San Francisco on the Nile/ Napalm Death/ Dark Tranquility tour.

Maelstrom: Mikael, I've known you for about 10 minutes, and already I'm struck with how humble you are. You're one of the bands that started this whole genre: people say, "Dark Tranquility, In Flames, At the Gates are the ones that started the whole thing," and you're just a really humble, nice guy.

Mikael Stanne: We're just people who play music.

Maelstrom: I'm always struck with that when I speak with people who play metal.

Mikael Stanne: We started out being friends: me, Niklas, Martin and Anders. We lived on the same street when we were kids. We went to school together. We realized we were so bored so we decided to start a metal band. So that's it. And that's what we're still doing. And now, we can travel the world and do the stuff that we love. Of course, it's great, but we can't expect anything other than having fun and doing our thing. In this, we are lucky.

Maelstrom: Something that consistently impresses me about Swedish bands is how tight you all are. Ok, there's quite a bit of homogeneity, but you're so tight. I've heard stories of how the government pays for practice spaces and that makes a big difference.

Mikael Stanne: It's kinda true, but we didn't benefit from that, ourselves. We started out in my parents' garage and then moved on to 15 different practice spaces. We really enjoy rehearsing together. To me, it's a great release to be able to go down to our rehearsal room and scream my head off for a couple hours. We were pretty nervous about not sounding good enough.

Maelstrom: When were you nervous about that?

Mikael Stanne: Always.

Maelstrom: You think that drives you?

Mikael Stanne: Of course. When you stop thinking about that, things can turn bad.

Maelstrom: So this new record…you know, I wasn't expecting it to be great because I have to admit I was swayed by things I had read: the reviews I read of the past two records, three or four of them said, "Dark Tranquility, R.I.P. They wussed out, they're lame." So I thought, "well, I haven't listened to them that much before, so I guess they're not good. Then I got this promo and thought, "this is one of the best records this year!" So I went out and got Projector (one of the ones that got panned). You sing on that album, and I think you have a singing voice. I like some of the songs on that record. Damage Done is clearly better, but… How much do you pay attention to what people say? You look at Damage Done, and you've gone back to the rough vocals only. Were you aware of all this stuff?

Mikael Stanne: Of course we were aware of it, but if we listen to what people want to hear, we'd probably do The Gallery 10 times over. One of the reasons we did Projector in the first place is that we got tired of people pigeon-holing us into Gothenburg death metal, and that's all it is. As long as we feel that whatever we do is new, fresh and interesting and can give us something right back, that's what we'll do.

Maelstrom: So, where do all these ideas for Damage Done come from? Every song on there has something to really savor. I look forward to each successive song.

Mikael Stanne: It was a long writing process. One of the things we learned over the years, I guess, is to make all the songs special. It took one and a half years to write this album; we went through many things. We do all this production work in the rehearsal room that people normally do in the studio, so when we come in, we go, "here it is," and we put it on tape.

Maelstrom: Do you think you'll sing again?

Mikael Stanne: Ah, yeah, but I don't know when.

Maelstrom: Was it a conscious decision not to sing on this record?

Mikael Stanne: There was no room for it, and we didn't need it at all. This is an angry album. It's not remorseful.

Maelstrom: One of the things I really like about Damage Done is that you have just the right amount of quiet on it. I think it's on track 7 or 8 that you've got a nice bit, and then the bonus track, "I, Deception."

Mikael Stanne: That's just something you learn over the years.

Maelstrom: Do you ever step back and take an objective look at the gruff vocals and question it? This kind of style becomes normalized by listening to it all the time, but when I play something like this for a non-metal friend and he or she says, "why do they sing like that?" and I realize, hey, it is sort of silly or absurd.

Mikael Stanne: It is. I definitely thought about it in the beginning. The first thing I heard that I was intrigued with was "Flag of Hate" by Kreator. I was blown away by it. It was so extreme. I'd never heard someone sing like that. So we wanted to do aggressive music like that, but with tons of melody that we got inspired by bands like Blind Guardian and Helloween. We also got into bands like Morbid Angel, but we wanted to keep the melody. I love screaming and getting things out there. I would never write something I couldn't go on tour with. Standing on stage with hundreds or thousands of people, if it didn't mean something, I'd just be a puppet. What I write has to work being screamed.

Maelstrom: The secong song on Damage Done, "Hours Passed in Exile," has this lyric, "what if we are all different." What are you talking about in that?

Mikael Stanne: What if everyone else is the same and we (you and me, or someone we can connect with) are the ones who are different. I feel sometimes that it's all a blur: random people getting influenced by media, etc… Traveling the world, you see all these people and they're great, but we're kind of bonded by a certain thing, a certain music, a certain passion. When you see al the stupidity on TV, you sometimes wonder, what if they're right and we're wrong?

Maelstrom: So what are these hours passed in exile?

Mikael Stanne: That's the time when you can get away from your regular life and get a different perspective. You can find someone you really relate to, your friend or lover, and when you get away from that person or your family, you get a new perspective on things: that there are only a few people that you can really, really relate to, and the perspective you gain from being away from them.

Maelstrom: Mikael, what is the best thing ever?

Mikael Stanne: The best thing is being totally, 100 percent satisfied. Pulling something off that you didn't think you could do. The satisfaction of love. I'm not afraid to admit it: I'm a material guy. I love things. When I hook things up and they work, and I love it. The realization of doing what you set out to do.

Maelstrom: How do you keep challenging yourself? Like right now, you've done this record. What's the next thing?

Mikael Stanne: I have to sing much better; make songs much better. Take it somewhere we didn't expect; something that doesn't feel old. We're restless guys. You have to renew your relationships, whether it's with your girlfriend or with your band mates. We have to reinvent what we initially set out to do, to do something that feels amazing and is challenging.

first and last photo courtesy of Volker Beushausen

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interview by: Roberto Martinelli

Stratovarius are the Spice Girls of metal: their music is silly and candy coated, and no one will admit to liking them; yet they sell a bunch of records. They're also one of my favorite bands. I don't know why; well, I do - it's because of their singer, Timo Kotipelto, and his irresistible, yelping vocals, and the bands' knack for being charming, children's metal with brilliant melodies - it's just that I don't know why this would appeal to me even though I also love bands like Anaal Nathrakh. Go figure.

Honestly speaking, Stratovarius has become one of the marquee names in today's power metal world. More and more bands sound like them (including most of the power metal bands out of Finland, it seems). And although it's not too hard to copy Stratovarius' own cookie cutter style of simple arrangements and songs, it's an altogether different matter to duplicate these songs' impact and likeability.

Episode, this group's sixth studio album, and the first with the defining lineup of Timo Tolkki (guitar), Timo Kotipelto (vocals), Jens Johansson (keyboard), Jari Kainulainen (bass), and Jörg Michael (drums), is one of the best European power metal albums ever. Since then, Stratovarius has largely been repeating that record by remaking the same three or four basic songs. Here lies Stratovarius' greatest trick, to be able to make the same record over and over again, yet make people love them and make their songs recognizable from one another. Unfortunately, the formula was getting a little thin as riff recycle was becoming more and more glaring on their last record, Infinite. Anticipating a repeat of that record, it was refreshing to see that the band had made an effort to do some different stuff on Elements Pt. I, the first of a two part series. The signature remains undeniably Stratovarius, but the recipe has gotten a strong shot in the arm.

And now it seems that Stratovarius and its European power metal compatriots aren't so uncool by American standards as they once were. More and more of these bands are coming over to play at US festivals, and the shows are selling out at high prices. Considering these developments and my blind infatuation with this group, I jumped at the chance to talk to Jens Johansson.

Maelstrom: One of the things that made me happy about getting you for an interview has to do with that Intermission CD that you put out. Everyone in the band wrote something in there, and I found what you wrote to be the most interesting and personable: the process of getting picked up by Timo Tolkki at the airport, and you record a record.

Jens Johansson: They were actually complaining a little bit about that. "Every one else's was one page, and we had to use two pages for your stuff."

Maelstrom: Since you live in NewYork, and the Finnish guys live in Finland, and the German guy lives in Germany, how much out of the year do you actually play together?

Jens Johansson: Well, it depends on what year. In the past five years, we've been together six or seven months a year.

Maelstrom: So, do you have a house in Finland?

Jens Johansson: Not really. We are on the road so much. But if you take 2002 as an example, I was in Finland for maybe three months for the new record, which was very involved. The next tour is starting on March 20th, and I'm going to go over on March 7th.

Maelstrom: Since you brought up the tour subject, I think what's really remarkable is what's happening in the United States: Euro power metal is starting to catch on. There was that Prog Power festival in Atlanta, and all these bands that had never come to the United States showed up, and it sold out.

Jens Johansson: Yeah, I know.

Maelstrom: They were bands that before were either too happy, or too "gay," or whatever, to come to the US.

Jens Johansson: It's still a difficult market. We're still sitting on the fence as to what to do about that. The Prog Power is in September of this year (2003), and the problem is [a band] would still lose a lot of money going to that thing. Even though it sold out and the tickets are 80 bucks, what remains over for the bands is very little. I think that this year it's going to be a little more complicated beyond that, as some bands may not have gotten the right immigration papers last year and gone in as tourists, and then they play a gig, in under the radar, so to speak. I don't think that's as easy any more. If a band tries to do that this year because of the September 11th stuff, they may get stopped at the border and thrown out.

Maelstrom: So how is it that you live here? Do you have citizenship or are you married to an American woman…?

Jens Johansson: I'm married to an American woman.

Maelstrom: How long have you been married?

Jens Johansson: Only for a couple of years, but I've been living here for 10 years.

Maelstrom: How were you living here before that?

Jens Johansson: I had this visa that I got as a work permit through different bands.

Maelstrom: How did you meet your wife?

Jens Johansson: She used to work at a record company.

Maelstrom: You've had some big hits. When you write a song, do you ever know that they're gonna be a big hit?

Jens Johansson: No.

Maelstrom: How does that work? Is it always like a big surprise?

Jens Johansson: Yeah, I think so. If you ask any successful band that, they say, "I had no idea. We put this one as a b-side on something." I've heard that many times. If you look up the history of a lot of The Beatles' songs, too, I think you'll find the same thing. I think you never know. You throw shit against the wall and see what sticks.

Maelstrom: One of your songs on the new record is called "Fantasia." You have a lyric in it that goes, "imagine a world with no wars and no arms; imagine a world with no religion and no god." Do you consider war and arms to be as evil as religions?

Jens Johansson: I think what [Timo Tolkki] was thinking was that there are a lot of problems with religions, like wars. I don't think he's against religions per se, I think he's against the violence that results, like people flying planes in to skyscrapers and all these idiotic acts. Sometimes, like in Northern Ireland, it's the same fucking religion and they're still fighting. I know he's not very religious, at least not in the traditional sense in terms of adhering to a certain branch or sect. In some senses, I think he's more religious than some people who proclaim themselves to be true believers of something and go to church every day. I think he has more respect for his fellow man and nature than a lot of these people.

Maelstrom: Were you near when the plane crashed?

Jens Johansson: I was here, yeah.

Maelstrom: What was your experience?

Jens Johansson: It was horrible, of course. The first plane flew over my apartment. I live in Manhattan, about six miles (nine km) away. I had just gotten back from Europe. I woke up and thought, "what the hell was that?" It was flying like, 80 meters above the apartment. "Fuck, that was loud," and I fell back asleep. Then, 30 minutes later I got a phone call, "you have to put the TV on!" That's how I found out. It was very eerie. The streets were empty and dusty people walking around, completely stunned. It smelled for weeks. It was horrible.

Maelstrom: What did it smell like?

Jens Johansson: Like…burnt plastic, or something; very hard to describe…like an old radio burning - burned electronics.

Maelstrom: Going back to "Fantasia," it seems that you've got some different things going on in the new record: different melody patterns, bass parts, different keyboard sounds. You've got some accordions going on now.

Jens Johansson: Actually, that's a real orchestra with a real accordion. For us, it was really like "whatever it takes." If we were looking for some effect, we let it cost whatever it cost and let it take whatever time it took. There were maybe 170 guys all on union scale in the orchestra. It was a very massive project to undertake.

Maelstrom: Do you think you'll play "Fantasia" live?

Jens Johansson: The only way we might do that is if we sample the stuff and trigger it while you play. All of the songs are like that. I can double the parts on a normal keyboard, but it doesn't sound as good as when a real orchestra plays it. That's the part you give up when you do something like this, you can't bring it on the road.

Maelstrom: The songs seem to be getting longer.

Jens Johansson: Yeah, longer and slower.

Maelstrom: Yeah. Is this how Stratovarius will continue to progress in the future?

Jens Johansson: I'm not sure. Well, the next record will be like this one, but after that, who knows?

Maelstrom: Actually, I'm really happy, in a sense, of what you've done because you were recycling a lot of riffs.

Jens Johansson: Yeah…There's no so much we can do in a certain tempo. It might be a different riff, but it still sounds like something else.

Maelstrom: It's sort of funny. You're one of my favorite bands and I have to tell you something. There's a song on the last record called "Phoenix." Last year, I had some horrible depression. I got through it, and this song really helped me a lot through it. So I wanted to thank you.

Jens Johansson: That's great, thanks!

Maelstrom: But, as I was saying, part of what I like about Stratovarius is that you have these three or four songs that you repeat, and I like those songs. So, as long as you repeat those songs, I'll be happy with it.

Jens Johansson: Of course, you can still listen to the old records.

Maelstrom: Yes, it's true. But, with this new record, it still sounds like Stratovarius, but you've got different things going on.

Jens Johansson: When the tempos are lower, there are more things you can do with the spaces. When the tempos are that high, you can't fill the spaces as they're so small. If you try to fit stuff in, it becomes really muddy. Rhapsody has very high tempos, and sometimes it becomes very difficult to listen to as there's so much going on. What Rhapsody is trying to do is make this Elements album, but keep the high tempos. In my opinion, that's very difficult to make work. Either you have the tempo high and you put less shit in it, or you have the tempo low with more space and expand some of the stuff. But, our core stuff will be the same. Like you said, very positive type of lyrics and also very melodic chords to every song. It's easy for the ear to listen to. There's always a clear quality to it, which I like.

Maelstrom: Is Timo Kotipelto improving as a singer? He sounds like he's getting better all the time.

Jens Johansson: I think he's still the same singer, but he's learning new tricks. I think what's different about this new record is that at the outset, we said, "no compromises whatsoever on anything."

Maelstrom: You compromised before?

Jens Johansson: Maybe subconsciously or something. I think the previous five years, we had this situation where we had sort of a bad record deal that we wanted to get out of. We put out five records in almost five years in order to escape the deal.

Maelstrom: So the deal ended when you put out Eternity?

Jens Johansson: Exactly, and Infinite was the first record on the new deal. But we needed to make that within a certain time frame, as well. But this time, we took a break. At the outset, we decided that it would take whatever time and money necessary (within reason) for every little detail. Timo K. had seen this process and he felt, "if they can take a month to do the drums, that must mean I have all the time I want as well." And literally, he did. If he felt he wasn't happy with what he did, we would have pushed the release date back a year, if needed. Maybe he felt more relaxed, which helps a lot with something as personal as singing.

Maelstrom: Jill Farthing of Nuclear Blast USA said that Timo is currently doing vocals for Elements, Pt. 2.

Jens Johansson: Yeah.

Maelstrom: So you're already working on Elements, Pt. 2?

Jens Johansson: It's already done, except for the vocals and mixing.

Maelstrom: Wow, so how many albums are there going to be?

Jens Johansson: Two. Elements. I mean, there'll be other ones after that.

Maelstrom: Does that mean it's coming out next year?

Jens Johansson: It's coming out late this year or early next year.

Maelstrom: Are you back on this frenetic pace?

Jens Johansson: Well, I consider it one huge record with 25 songs.

Maelstrom: Sounds like the new Bathory records, in terms of Nordland I, and Nordland II is probably coming out the same time Elements Pt. 2 is coming out.

Jens Johansson: Maybe, yeah. Maybe it's the same concept.

Maelstrom: (laugh) I don't think so.

Jens Johansson: Of course, it becomes a little boring. The drums will have the same feel, and a lot of the concepts will be that same, with the same orchestra. But also you save a lot of time that way. The only other option we had was t release both at the same time, like a double album.

Maelstrom: Apparently record stores don't like that so much.

Jens Johansson: No! (laugh) So I've been led to understand as well. It wasn't so much more expensive to record than one record; I would say it cost maybe one record and a half. There are some very, very nice songs on the next one. I think I might like it even better than Elements Pt. 1.

Maelstrom: You talked about triggers before. There's something I always wanted to know. There are some songs on previous albums when all the music cuts out and then you have Timo Tolkki going super fast on his guitar. In the background there's the keyboard with sort of a delay, but that matches the guitar completely.

Jens Johansson: It could be doubling. That's not so hard.

Maelstrom: The reason I'm asking is that a friend of mine seems to think that Tolkki has some sort of sample that his guitar triggers. It's really hard for people to play like that at the same time.

Jens Johansson: Well, it would be hard if we did it at the same time. The way it works is he puts the guitar first. Then, I have to listen very carefully and play to it until I get it right. It's a very laborious process. If it's really fast stuff that's in tempo, then it's possible to do that live. But if he's wanking something and I'm doing that, you can't do that live. You have to analyze and sit down and play it.

Maelstrom: How hard is that to duplicate live?

Jens Johansson: It depends. In the studio, it's easy. We used to do that type of shit in the Yngwie days. Live, sometimes it drifts more. He might get excited and play it too fast. It's not impossible.

Maelstrom: I don't know if you're sick and tired about talking about playing with Yngwie. You go back a long way, Jens!

Jens Johansson: Yeah… It was fun.

Maelstrom: Is Yngwie a common name in Sweden?

Jens Johansson: It's not very common. The average age of people named Yngwie in Sweden is like, 80 now.

Maelstrom: I like this woman that sings on the "Papillon" song. Who is that?

Jens Johansson: That's actually a boy.

Maelstrom: Ok! I like the boy, except he pronounces the name of the song wrong.

Jens Johansson: Oh, yeah. Of course, he's only nine years old. They have quite a good music education system in Finland, so you can find quite talented little kids. You pay them a lollipop. "You don't need no union scale." No, I think they get paid good. Of course, the parents have to get involved. They have very heavy child labor laws, and there's this union representative with a clock saying, "ha! This child is not allowed to work more than two hours."

Maelstrom: Why do you think that European power metal, with all of his happiness and all of its sing along choruses, is so big in Europe, but not very big in the United States?

Jens Johansson: I think that part of the problem is that it's very difficult to compete with the big companies here in the States. It seems to be that the market is more closed in the US. Especially in the early '90s, I think there was some almost orchestrated labels to have an "out with the old and in with the new" campaign. All the old stuff, like Motley Crue and stuff like that, was erased from the map. "That's poser stuff; now we're into grunge." It seemed controlled from the top. But it didn't happen like that in Europe. Things were allowed to happen the way they would. But still, I'm not quite sure why it's so impenetrable here.

Maelstrom: If you go to festivals like Metalfest and look at the roster, it's mostly death metal bands and some black metal bands.

Jens Johansson: It's very underground.

Maelstrom: Yeah, it's very shit. I don't know if you've ever been to that festival…

Jens Johansson: No.

Maelstrom: It's not very good. I don't recommend it to anybody. It sounds awful. You can't hear anything.

Jens Johansson: (does grunting impression)

Maelstrom: Yeah. It's like truck with a blastbeat.

Jens Johansson: Exactly.

Maelstrom: I have to say that Wacken 2002 was kind of disappointing. They turned the bass drums up so loud that you couldn't hear anything else. I love metal, but it's funny that I don't like the way it's presented much of the time.

Jens Johansson: Which bands played?

Maelstrom: Angra. I love that band, but I couldn't tell what was going on because it sounded like a plane was taking off all the time.

Jens Johansson: Wow.

Maelstrom: I saw you guys play live at Wacken 2000. You were great. That's when I first discovered that I liked Stratovarius.

Jens Johansson: We have a good sound guy. We have the same guy. We make sure he's happy; and if he wants more money, we pay him. If you go on the road, that's the most important thing. It's ridiculous why you would trust that to anyone. You might as well just hand the instruments over to five other guys.

Maelstrom: The time I saw you at Wacken was the time Kotipelto burned his hand. That whole Hetfield-like incident.

Jens Johansson: Oh, yeah…

Maelstrom: Man, it was the coolest show. I remember you having the best stage presence of the festival. After that I remember thinking, "I have to look into this band." I think I want to wrap up with the topic of playing keyboards in metal. I think that keyboard players are the least respected people in metal.

Jens Johansson: I think that's turning around, though.

Maelstrom: You think? 'Cause, when ever you read some review of a metal record, it's like, "they're too loud," or, "they ruin it."

Jens Johansson: I think those days are over. I think that when I started, in '83, it was a struggle. I thin that due to the heroic efforts of people like me and others - like the guy from Dream Theater, Queesryche… those Type O Negative guys - I think those stigmas are starting to erode. It went away about '95. When I started, it was horrible. I don't think it's there anymore.

Maelstrom: When you started playing piano, did you think, "I want to be in a metal band"? I imagine that most people who start laying piano don't envision going to metal.

Jens Johansson: You just start sliding into things. I used to listen to Deep Purple when I was little. They had a keyboard player…and Rainbow. After that era, around 1980, there started to be this segregation in metal: there's supposed to be guitar only, and aggressive lyrics. That's when the problems started; of course, that's when I started as well, so I had to take a lot of the shit. We toughed it out and now you have bands like Nightwish, which is run by a keyboard player. That's pretty amazing.

Maelstrom: When you look at all the bands that have so blatantly copied your sound, what do you think?

Jens Johansson: Of course, one part of you thinks it's the sincerest form of flattery. I like it because sometimes they turn it into something new. Of course, Stratovarius probably copied a lot of other bands - everyone's influenced by someone else. A couple of the bands I really like are taking parts here and there and turning it into something new. Some people may get upset, but for me it's more of a live and let live type of thing. Take Nightwish for example. They may have started taking Stratovarius as a model and trying to copy that, but they've evolved into something that's completely their own thing. I also like Sonata Arctica: they have a youthful, hopefulness that sometimes I think we are lacking.

Maelstrom: When is Stratovarius coming to the US?

Jens Johansson: Maybe in the fall. There's some talk about it. It depends how much people are downloading our songs. I'm making statistics on this. Every time you tour, you lose money, basically. It's just to promote record sales. There's a territory that we shall not name, but it starts with a "u" and ends with an "s,a," where like billions of kids in the heartland with cable modems, downloading pirate copies like crazy instead of buying records; maybe we won't burn our powder there.

band photos taken from www.stratovarius.com

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interview by: Roberto Martinelli

The term "black metal art" gets thrown about quite a bit. You know it's too much when bands like Enthroned start talking about what they do using these words. However, calling what Eikenskaden does truly fitting. First and foremeost is the sound: shattering and breaking at every note like an explosion of a geode, the unique, excruciating sound is a perfect delivery for the passionate, classical music tinged compositions.

What really makes things get weird and interesting is when you discover that there's this other band called Mystic Forest, which not only has the exact same sound, but also the same type of artwork and the same sound sample of running water and the same type of piano breakdowns. Things were getting pretty bizarre. So amongst much speculation, I tracked down the leader of Eikenskaden, a Frenchman by the name of Stéfan Kozak, to figure out what the hell was going on. Sure enough, it turned out that he was behind both bands. So the question was, why? Why do the same thing under two different names? Is Kozak an artistic genius or a one-trick pony who's found something special and is totally out of control? Read and find out as Kozak (and, to some extent, Mystic Forest bandmate Baalberith) talks about his projects, as well as the just released Mystic Forest album Waltz in the midst of Trees (reviewed in this issue) and the hot off the presses new Eikenskaden album, The Last Dance. (pour lire la version originelle en français, touchez ici.)

Maelstrom: I learned about your works by discovering Eikenskaden. When I noticed a Mystic Forest album (it was Welcome back in the Forest, review in issue #10) at a store, I was very excited as there were elements of style and presentation that were similar with the first Eikenskaden disk. The main question initially is, why do you have two bands when the sound and the sonic themes are practically the same? I do believe that Welcome back… differs in a fairly notable way from The Black Laments Symphony (review in issue #9) in terms of the actual musical compositions, but the production is the same, you've got the running water samples (as well as on Green Hell, the first Mystic Forest album)… For example, when I first heard Welcome…, I knew when to anticipate the piano solo.

Stéfan Kozak: Everything that you mentioned is true…well, was true…for with the two new CDs of my two bands, things change. Now Mystic Forest and Eikenskaden are much different from each other in terms of the image, ambiance and sound. You'll see. Eikenskaden will keep that rawer edge, while Mystic Forest will be more prog. Well, it'll remain the same at the core level. The Black Laments… is in fact a compilation of all the "waste" of my other projects! Everything that is unusable elsewhere - perhaps as it's too "strange"! Eikenskaden is a sort of forum for us to let off steam! It's the roughest of the rough; we play what we like, when we want. That's it. It's really something separate; it's desperation in its purest form. It's inexplicable. To be exact, the next Eikenskaden has strong industrial and S&M imagery. There are also gloomier sound samples. By the way, thanks for your write-ups of my bands. I'm quite proud.

Maelstrom: I find it a bit surprising that the first Eikenskaden was a sort of recycling bin… That would certainly explain why the sound is so similar between the two projects. However, I find, like you mentioned, much more passion in Eikenskaden's music. Speaking of this, does Eikenskaden mean anything?

Stéfan Kozak: It means "oaken shield."

Maelstrom: So if I understand correctly, the new Eikenskaden will be different as the project isn't something for you guys to let off steam?

Stéfan Kozak: No, it still is.

Maelstrom: I find the titles of the songs on The Black Laments… very interesting and funny (without being stupid in the least, of course). They're certainly unique, like "She's Hiding behind a Tree," "I'll take a Walk on My Grave" and "I'll Take Another Walk on My Grave." Did you foresee that these titles would have this effect?

Stéfan Kozak: Eikenskaden's titles are in fact caricatures, but in the favorable sense of the word. It's quite true! I don't place any limits on my imagination, that's all…hehe. On the next album, the song titles aren't too bad, either, and the artwork, well, that'll be the corker!

Maelstrom: So, you're three in Mystic Forest; are you three in Eikenskaden? I think that there is a woman in Welcome back… Is there currently a drummer?

Stéfan Kozak: We're six on the last Eikenskaden… I'm the drummer on the new Mystic Forest. Julie, our singer, is still in the band; she does some fantastic vocals, especially on Waltz in the Midst of Trees.

Maelstrom: Something doesn't make sense. You said there were three people in Mystic Forest, but six people in Eikenskaden. How can Eikenskaden be Mystic Forest extras if there are different amounts of people?

Stéfan Kozak: There is mainy strange things about Eikenskaden... The first thing is that I am the only Mystic Forest member in Eikenskaden. The second is that the photos show which guy plays which instrument... maybe sometimes the same man is in a different picture... maybe :) No one except me and the other Eikenskaden members know really how many we are and who we are (except for me but that's due to a label spoiler… and now it's to late to hide). The only thing I can say is that the line-up is not always the same from song to song... but I write all of them.

Maelstrom: I'd like to know more about the sound that you have achieved on your albums. It's like a microphone has been held un way too closely to a loudspeaker. The result is like a scintillating shattering of glass at every note.

Stéfan Kozak: I don't know…it's the way it is, it's my sound. It comes from my will to use this sound. Now, if you say that I'm the only one to have a sound like this, it's perhaps true, but I'm not trying to stand out from others; I'm only looking to do what I want to do. Mystic Forest has never had any restraint, nor any desire to seduce. Maybe this feeling comes directly from my equipment. At the same token, I'm not one to try to have the most extravagant guitar possible, just the one that sounds the best. I use a jazz type guitar with very thin strings. It's my style.

Maelstrom: Should we be looking for complicated themes in the samples of running water that are in all your albums? Is The Black Laments… a concept album?

Stéfan Kozak: All the samples have an important place on my recordings: they represent something. Now, it's for each person who listens to my music to make his own image. It's like when you read a book: it's your imagination that has to be working above all else!

Maelstrom: Your incorporation of classical music in Eikenskaden is a success. Abinoni's "Adagio" is one of my favorite pieces.

Stéfan Kozak: I have always done that and will continue to do so. I simply have always adored classical music, so I make it live through my music. It makes me happy to play it, so if on top of that other like it too, that's perfect!

Maelstrom: Who's the little guy on the Mystic Forest albums? Why is he leaning over at that curious angle?

Stéfan Kozak: That's my own personal logo. I try to include it in some way in the logos of all the bands I play in. That's why, incidentally, that it'll be on the next Eikenskaden record. Actually, he's not leaning; it's just his shadow that makes it look that way.

Maelstrom: Tell me a bit about yourself. "Stéfan"… that sounds rather Slavic rather than French… Tell us about your love for the forest and the duality of the serene images on your albums and the music, which is so explosive and then calm. What are your demons?

Stéfan Kozak: I have the same first name as my Ukranian grandfather. In terms of the forest imagery, it's more present on our earlier recordings. Now, it's rather an image of sadness and desperation that we're putting forth. The forest represents something really mysterious, which is the feeling we've always wanted to the band to have. There are enormous forests in the place where I was born. When one spends a lot of time in such places, the image of what the places represent remains engraved within oneself forever. In terms of the duality of my music, it's something difficult to explain, but for me it's something that's very natural. It's in my emotions, sometimes calm and sad, sometimes unleashed and desperate… sometimes both at once. My music represents the sadness that I feel at my core, and it permits me to allow it to be liberated. It's difficult to explain. My music is me, that's what I am… What are my demons? Certainly an infinite sadness at the depths of my being.

Maelstrom: I'm doing another interview with this band. We've been talking about the notion that black metal isn't for fun. What do you think of this idea?

Stéfan Kozak: For me, black metal allows me to completely evacuate my sadness, which allows me to be more normal afterwards. But like always, there are exceptions, such as certain bits of Finntroll or Nokturnal Mortem that sound a bit like a Pagan party, but which remain completely black metal in spirit!

Baalberith: I'd like to intervene on this discussion. Personally, I am entirely of the same opinion as you are, Roberto. I live my life well, but when I'm making black metal, there's a certain spirit one must respect!

Maelstrom: I noticed this thing on the new record that you, Baalberith, said that dates back to 1980 (!). "For who that is in black metal, contemplates sadness…" What importance does this musical expression have?

Baalberith: Concerning the 1980 dedication, and it is indeed one, you're not the first one to ask me about it. In fact it's a dedication to my best buddy, who's a fan of the band and especially that song ("La Terreur me contemple" from <Waltz in the midst of Trees>) So instead of putting down his name (which seems kind of lame), I tried to be more subtle by putting down his birth year instead! :)

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interview by: Roberto Martinelli

Imagine being at a lounge in hell and witnessing this set by former serial killers playing catatonically mellow music. Or, if you're familiar with the TV series "Twin Peaks," imagine hanging out in the Black Lodge and the music that would accompany such an experience.

Thankfully, you won't have to die for your sins to enjoy this, as the band in question, Bohren und der Club of Gore, exists, up here on the material plane - Germany, to be exact. This four piece's image, name and themes are about as incongruous with the group's music as you can get. Ever since I first heard this group's material, I was instantly fascinated by all the irresistibly random and aesthetic aspects of its persona, like the austere, nocturnal cityscapes devoid of human life, the impossibly slow drumming, or the clash between the image of an armory of rifles and sultry saxophone sounds. And then there's that inimitable atmosphere, one that takes you off to a world where only you really exist, as you turn the lapels of your trenchcoat up and the brim of your hat down over your eyes, before you venture out into the opium world that Bohren creates. (You can read more about this in detail in the reviews of the band's first, second and third albums in issue #4, or Bohren's fourth album, reviewed in issue #11).

It is with great pride that I present to you this interview with Morten Gass of Bohren und der Club of Gore, one of the most essential bands ever.

Maelstrom: Hello. Let's please start by discussing the name of your wonderful band. I understand that "bohren" is German for "to bore" or "to drill." (although I'm sure some people might find the irony or the other mening of "bore" too great) Then you have this club of gore thing. What's up?

Morten Gass: The band name has no real meaning in the first place. It just happens the way a lot of band names had their origin from: we were drunk!!! But besides the fact that we had a few beers too many, we managed to put some important words in this name. "Gore / Bohren" stands for horror movies (especially the Italian stuff like Fulci, Bava, Argento, where you can find some pretty nice drilling scenes as well). Gore is also a secret hidden link to a genius Dutch instrumental band called Gore. The first two Gore albums had a big influence on us. "And the Club of" just means that we wanted to be a jazz band. Playing in smoky, dirty nightclubs, just like Sade. Well, as I said, we were drunk.....

Maelstrom: So your group is wacky and so brilliant. Your first record, Gore Motel, has a picture of Bruce Lee on the cover and a zany array of random images ranging from paintings of birds to a logo with an upside down cross in it. It's got hilarious titles like "Dangerflirt mit der Schlägerbitch." Were you going for the maximum off-the-wall effect or was there method to your madness when you created this album?

Morten Gass: Gore Motel was a real quick shoot. We never thought that someone would be crazy enough to put that stuff out on CD, so we scraped everything that had some kind of a meaning to us and sent it to our record company before they could change their minds. Not very clever, but it was a debut album. Yes, and it all looked over the top. But this was not our aim, cause Bohren ain't no fun band! Beginning with Midnight Radio, we took care of all the artwork (photos, drawings, layouts etc… all by ourselves)

Maelstrom: Gore Motel's subsequent two records, Midnight Radio and Sunset Mission, were enamored with these austere, nighttime urban landscapes, charmless and devoid of all human element. As with your Gore Motel record, there's the theme of fierce contrasts arises again, this time with the urban landscapes clashing with images of rifles and katanas; loungey, sax-heavy music with titles like "On Demon Wings." What attracts you so about these elements?

Morten Gass: After the spontaneous Gore Motel we came up with a theme for every single album. We wrote the music to images that we had in mind. Call it them concept albums or whatever you like. Midnight Radio has a night driver theme. Just streets, rain and a radio... Sunset Mission has a serial killer theme. Lurking in shadows, checking out locations and preparing for war.... I don't see any contrasts. To me it is a perfect association, all these images are in our heads when we start creating the music. Besides, all the mellowness it is some kind of dark music we play. Horror, death and vengeance, our minds seem to be poisoned with that stuff.

Maelstrom: Speaking of Midnight Radio and Sunset Mission, these two albums remind me so much of the TV series "Twin Peaks," to the point where they could both be alternate soundtracks to the show. The lounge feel of Sunset Mission makes me think I'm in this place in the show called the Black Lodge. I don't mean to bore you with this if you haven't seen the show. Is the similarity in feel to this cult series at all a coincidence?

Morten Gass: We formed Bohren in '92, so I can’t deny that we had a bit of "Twins Peaks" in our heads those days. The title-theme from "Fire Walk with Me" is great. David Lynch movies always have a kind of horror feeling, so it is ok to connect them with our music.

Maelstrom: Speaking of the saxophone, the new record, Black Earth, continues to use the sax, but it's toned down a great deal. Some friends of mine felt that the sax on Sunset Mission was a bad thing, and it's just right on the new record. I for one loved the saxophone on Sunset Mission, but I'm getting the idea that you may have not…

Morten Gass: Sunset Mission is a sax-album. It was meant to be the most mainstream album in Bohren's history. We are 100% satisfied with that record. But indeed it is the most atypical Bohren album. Black Earth is the quintessence of the three previous albums.

Maelstrom: I've heard this rumor that you guys are in fact pretty big black metal fans, and in particular Immortal fans. Is there any truth to this?

Morten Gass: Actually, I didn't like the last two Immortal albums very much. But, yes, we are into any kind of heavy music (except nu and rap metal...). Nordic black metal still has an influence on us. Check out the new Khold, Shining or Taake stuff to know what I mean.

Maelstrom: How did your band develop into this catatonically mellow, loungey group? I can imagine you may have started as some sort of Melvins-influenced group and then found this voice all your own. You can kind of feel this in-between point of uncertainty on Gore Motel when you had some relative speed to your music, but your sound wasn't quite developed yet.

Morten Gass: You are right. We had exactly that kind of background. I must mention Chris Reifert and his band Autopsy (which had the coolest slow parts I've ever heard), along with Black Sabbath and Trouble, with whom we were on a real doom trip. In the end we just got bored ripping off our heroes and we started playing our own style. Gore Motel features our first demo tracks, no real worked out stuff. It is the only album that we are not really proud of.

Maelstrom: Midnight Radio is close to an hour and a half of comatose bliss. Then there's this sort of electronica track at the end with canned beats. Perhaps I should know better than to ask, but what's going on here?

Morten Gass: This last track (track #11) is just a bonus track. We ruined one track from the Midnight Radio session, so we made this electronica track as some kind of experiment. I’m still not sure about this track, but I agree that this song doesn‘t fit in with the other 10 songs. Let's call it a bonus, filler track.

Maelstrom: Let's talk about the way you play. I've never heard slower drums. Does your drummer ever fall asleep, or is it the rest of the band's job to wake him up every now and again so he can gently tap the ride cymbal?

Morten Gass: Hell, yes, "...other bands play, Bohren bore!!!!“ Thorsten has a hard job. I mean, he is a really fast drummer; he had a grindcore band in the 80s. But look at him now, what a poor fellow. He must drink a lot of beer to slow himself down. Only as an act of solidarity do we do the same...

Maelstrom: What are your shows like? Do you play all newer, saxophone stuff? Would you be satisfied if the audience fell asleep?

Morten Gass: We play in total darkness with nothing but a 10-watt spotlight above our heads. The audience must have the feeling of being in a grave. Yes, we make it pretty easy for them to have a nap. I would just recommend the audience to go to the bar and have a drink, because our show is very low-voltage. The stuff that we play live is form our last two albums.

Maelstrom: How about your compositions? How do you write your pieces? Are they sort of structured jam sessions? Do you ever feel like speeding up as a band?

Morten Gass: All the music was written on bass or piano, just like a rock song were you start with a guitar riff. Sometimes there is a bit of experimentation to get the right melody line for the saxophone or piano. But 90% is straight written on a piece of paper before we start to practice. We never waste time on jamming.

Maelstrom: Black Earth plays up the dark/evil side of things more than ever before with an all-black packaging and a skull on the front. Again, here's one of our favorite things about you guys: contrast. What's the story behind the evil elements and your mellow, mellow music?

Morten Gass: I don’t know, but to me it is just dark music (without being a Goth or metal band). It is like meeting a very cute girl who hands you a gin-arsenic tonic.

Maelstrom: How did you guys find each other? Has it pretty much been the same people in the group the whole way?

Morten Gass: We are friends form school making music together for about 15 years. Christoph Clöser is the only new member. He joined us in `97 to play the saxophone. Reiner Henseleit quit a year before because he had a very time consuming job.

Maelstrom: Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions. Bohren und der Club of Gore is without exaggeration, one of the most magical groups in the world and certainly one of my favorites ever. Please tell us about your touring plans and anything else you'd care to mention.

Morten Gass: Well, Roberto, thank you very much for those flattering words and your support. Sorry about our website (www.bohrenundderclubofgore.de), which is still written in German. We are working on it. Please excuse my short answers, but my English is too bad to bring them to a deeper level. What else? We are doing a small German tour at the end of March. Unfortunately, there are no touring plans for the US right now. Wonder, our record label, is negotiating about a licensing of our current album in the US with a cool label from San Francisco. We hope they work something out this year. Die hard legions iron and steel....

photo courtesy of Morten Gass (second from left).

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interview by: Roberto Martinelli

The Postman Syndrome is part of the exciting new breed of underground, extreme bands that take bits of hardcore, death metal, alternative rock and pop music and make it into something unique and refreshing. This New Jersey, USA, band's M.O. is a very technical mix that doesn't put flipping on the kill switch as the end all objective. Be sure that this band will get bigger and bigger over the years, and will no doubt inspire younger bands to take up the musician's mantle. The following discussion is with Chris Alfano, Postman's guitarist and co-screamer, who discusses how pessimism drives him to succeed, the not so progressive nature of most prog, and his fascination with video game music. Just like on The Postman Syndrome's debut album, Terraforming, there's a lot in here, and it's not what you might expect.

Maelstrom: It's pretty fascinating what you guys have done. It's sort of like you came out of nowhere and put out this brilliant album with fascinating lyrics and concepts. It seems that Terraforming is a story.

Chris Alfano: It's partially just us being pretentious and wanting to set some mood. There's no conceptual narrative going on. We do try to approach our writing as trying to get from the beginning to the end in a cohesive line.

Maelstrom: There's this song called "Hedgehog's Dilemma." I think that's a really funny title.

Chris Alfano: We have two "Evangelion" references. We really didn't want to have two…

Maelstrom: Haha! In know what that is. I haven't seen "Evangelion" (it's a Japanese animated series) much. What are the two references?

Chris Alfano: "Hedgehog's Dilemma" is one episode title, and "Unfamiliar Ceiling" is another. Some of these songs were written over the course of a long time. Three years ago Matt, the other guitarist/vocalist, and I wrote "Unfamiliar Ceiling." At the time we were into the series. The lyrics aren't about [the series], but we used it. A year later, Jim went to college with us, and we watch the whole series with him. He gets into it and he names a song he wrote the lyrics for after another episode.

Maelstrom: Something about the lyrics you wrote make me think of Alice in Wonderland; weird but captivating. They have a fantastic quality to them.

Chris Alfano: Personally, I try to write my lyrics so that you can grasp them. I don't always succeed in that. Me, more than Jim or Matt - especially for the next album - I want you to get my lyrics, as opposed to Jim who writes for himself. We generally write our own lyrics for our own vocal parts. There have been songs where we've misinterpreted each other's lyrics. I would want the reader coming away with some sort of meaning. Me, Matt and Jim are all English majors. Coming from that, I think it's really cool when a writer can be really far out but really use writing as an art to convey message instead of just running around randomly without control.

Maelstrom: I almost never read lyrics, because mostly I find that to be the case. I listen to the music or the sound, but the content is not as important.

Chris Alfano: I've never been the biggest lyric fan.

Maelstrom: Especially the genre that you're in (or others). It's generally incoherent vocally. If you're going to write lyrics and do them in an incoherent style, for me that means that it’s not really important for me to know what you're saying.

Chris Alfano: That might be it for me too. I honestly can't think of a lot of bands off the top of my head that I really get the meaning of their lyrics. My favorite lyricists might be the guys from They Might Be Giants. Sometimes it doesn't even matter to me how trite a song is, as long as it says something in a creative way. Hell, there's a NOFX song that is really straightforward and blunt about the stupidest stuff, but it's well written. Lyrics aren't essential to a song - we don't even write vocals when we write a song originally. We write instrumentally first. You could say that's a fault of ours at times. We try to avoid the vocals being an afterthought; sometimes they're a little underdeveloped. Like a song like "Amputees…" we slacked a little bit on the vocals. Sometimes it's because it's hard to play our songs! A lot of the harmonies were written in the studio. It's really hard to play guitar and sing.

Maelstrom: Yeah. I play drums and I know how hard it is to play drums and even speak.

Chris Alfano: Yeah, drums are different in that you don't get the urge to sing while you're playing.

Maelstrom: Yeah, you don't.

Chris Alfano: When you play guitar, you get into the mood to yell into a microphone. We're trying to get away from writing the music first and the vocals afterward, but we have four new songs and none of them have vocals yet.

Maelstrom: You know how Rush does it?

Chris Alfano: I don't even know. Everyone always compares us to Rush…

Maelstrom: Well, I'm not comparing you to Rush… but the drummer writes all the lyrics, gives them to the other two guys, who write the music, who then gives that back to the drummer, who writes the drum parts. But I'm not comparing you to Rush at all.

Chris Alfano: Good. I give them a lot of respect: they're amazing musicians and very influential, but I just don't like them. There were different prog rock school in the 70s (not that I'm claiming to be an expert). King Crimson is my favorite of that period. Rush seems to have influenced the Dream Theater school - more progressive than experimental. King Crimson seems more experimental than progressive. We're not virtuoso musicians. A lot of the stuff we play is at the limits of our talents.

Maelstrom: You're billed in the press as how technically difficult your music is and how you have these difficult changes.

Chris Alfano: I don't know if difficult is something to brag about. A lot of our biggest influences aren't master musicians. Skill at your instrument is definitely a virtue. Our bassist and drummer are amazing musicians, and Jim and Matt are better guitarists than me. But there are so many bands that can outplay us. Even in straight up rock music there are musicians that are unbelievable. Have you heard Dysrhythmia? Check them out, they're amazing. But we're not trying to impress people. If our next album ends up being simpler, but we like it more, that's all that matters. We have been influenced by technical bands and simple bands.

Maelstrom: Speaking of influences, there's this trend lately of hardcore bands - I interviewed Hopesfall, who represent this - that blend hardcore with melody and singing and cool choruses. I see these elements in your music. I hear a lot of Smashing Pumpkins influence in there with the guitar tones. I know with Hopesfall, the Pumpkins is one of their favorite bands ever. I wondering that if it's starting to become that time when people who when they were 12-14, were listening to the Smashing Pumpkins and have now formed original bands of their own.

Chris Alfano: Mike, our drummer, used to love the Smashing Pumpkins. The rest of us despise them. The music, Billy Corgan's voice, everything.

Maelstrom: (laugh)

Chris Alfano: I'd take them over Everclear, but that's not saying much. I can say that they were better and more creative than the bands in that era.

Maelstrom: Talk to me about "The Postman Syndrome." Whenever I hear that, I think about "going postal."

Chris Alfano: We thought it sounded cool. We've been around for a long time, keep in mind.

Maelstrom: I didn't know that. This is your first record, right?

Chris Alfano: We've been around for six years. When we formed the band, Jim was 14; I was 17. We were a high school band. We're all good friends and never broke up and never formed the next band.

Maelstrom: You never made demos?

Chris Alfano: We have three demos. The first one, hopefully, you will never find anywhere. It has the worst guitar you will ever hear, hands down.

Maelstrom: I dunno. I listen to black metal.

Chris Alfano: It was about there. We were experimenting a lot when we first formed. I think the reason we ended up like this is because we were unlike other bands, who form in their early 20s. They already have an idea of what they want to do. Generally, if you form in your early 20s, you're already good at your instrument and experienced in being in a band. You don't develop as much because you already know what you're doing. We didn't know what we were doing. We did know that we didn't want to be limited by anything. When we formed, I was into Fear Factory to punk stuff to melodic stuff to death metal, and Jim was into Soundgarden and Stevie Ray Vaughan. We knew we wanted to do a lot with music and didn't want a name that would pigeonhole us, like Flaming Corpse, or something - which was actually the name of my first band ever.

Maelstrom: Hahahaha!

Chris Alfano: "What sounds serious and funny?" We wanted to be taken either way. There was this kid I jammed with, and his sister's boyfriend came up with the name. We just thought it sounded cool.

Maelstrom: Remember that movie "The Postman"?

Chris Alfano: …with Kevin Costner?

Maelstrom: Yeah, the worst movie ever?

Chris Alfano: I dunno, man, have you ever seen "Batman and Robin"?

Maelstrom: No, but there's a distinction. Everyone was making fun of that movie when it first came out, so of course my friends and I went to see it, as a goof. We figured we'd have a good time laughing at it. Sure enough, we were the only ones in the theater. It was amazing. I don't know if you like to rip on stuff.

Chris Alfano: Yeah, I like to rip on everything.

Maelstrom: Yeah, my best friend and I have this odd thing where we'll go down to Blockbuster and laugh at video covers for an hour but not rent anything and go home thoroughly happy.

Chris Alfano: My friends and I like to laugh at movie tag lines. My favorite one is from that Keanu Reeves movie, "The Replacements," about the football players. It had the least creative tag line I've ever seen. "Pros on strike; regular guys get to play."

Maelstrom: "The Postman" is the most amazingly stupid movie. First, that anyone would write a book about this, but then say, "ooh, let's adapt a movie." Have you seen it?

Chris Alfano: No. I've seen "Waterworld."

Maelstrom: I think that's second in line. In "The Postman," society crumbles and everyone's in disarray. There's this pseudo-militaristic guy who's like an overlord. This guy finds a postman uniform and decides to use that to get free stuff by making people think that he's from the government, which people believe has gotten back together. This causes the people to have hope and they rally against the overlord and defeat him and then start their own government because the mail is the symbol of unity. It's three hours long. And Tom Petty is in it. And he plays himself.

Chris Alfano: (laugh) He won't even back down against the overlord.

Maelstrom: (laugh) Ok, moving along…so, you came out of nowhere and made this amazing album, one that'll make a bunch of people's top album lists. Where do you see yourselves in two years?

Chris Alfano: Poor, flea bitten and in a beat up van.

Maelstrom: How about in five years?

Chris Alfano: Maybe less flea bitten, and in a halfway decent van.

Maelstrom: One of my writers thinks you sound like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tool mixed together.

Chris Alfano: Umm…cool.

Maelstrom: And if MTV gets wind of you, you'll be huge. I agree. You have this mainstream appeal sound to you, but you also have the technicality going that would appeal to more underground fans.

Chris Alfano: Here's the thing: it's a very rigid format. On MTV or mainstream radio, there's a list of requirements you have to meet. We just don't meet them. You can get Hatebreed on MTV2, but even they have a verse/chorus structure. We're not against that. We've had pop songs before, but they didn't make it onto the album. You might see one or two on the next album. We're trying not to limit ourselves. We're hoping that half the people who buy the next album will not get something that they expected.

Maelstrom: I dunno. I think of bands like System of a Down…

Chris Alfano: Yeah, but they have very catchy choruses. "Chop Suey" especially is a very poppy, melodic structure. If we end up writing a song with a verse/chorus structure, it's probably not going to be a song that people go nuts over. Any song that's really gonna turn heads is probably not going to be able to be played on [mainstream radio].

Maelstrom: I think of you existing in the hardcore genre. What do you think?

Chris Alfano: People label us as that because we have fairly short hair.

Maelstrom: Who do you play with?

Chris Alfano: We play with whoever we can play with. That’s kind of our problem. We're not generally accepted by any scene.

Maelstrom: That's what I was gonna say: if I have to put you in one thing, I'd say hardcore; but it's a lot softer in terms of the energy that comes out of it.

Chris Alfano: Hardcore isn't really the biggest influence for all of us. If I had to define hardcore, we're talking about hardcore punk; it has to have a punk mentality. Most of our abrasive mentality comes from metal: Meshuggah, Neurosis, Isis. If you wanna consider hardcore Botch and Kiss it Goodbye, then yeah, but I've always considered them metal. Especially Kiss it Goodbye. The type of kids that would like Poison the Well would like us; but maybe they won't. We figured we can grab 10 percent of every crowd in every scene that we play for.

Maelstrom: Well, you're doing something completely different. You can listen to it and think, "wow, I'm surprised that's never been done before." It takes a certain amount of courage to do what you're doing. I'm not saying you're conscious of doing that, but it could easily "suck." At the same time, if you continue making records, I think that down the line you'll have bands who'll start copying you.

Chris Alfano: All we're doing is copying other bands.

Maelstrom: Yeah, but you're in the middle of it. As a fan and a listener, I think you're doing something a lot different. No one's really embraced this yet, because there's this fear of not being hard or aggressive enough.

Chris Alfano: I've never really thought of it. There are plenty of bands that have hard parts and melodic parts. I remember when first started writing songs, the thing was to get more aggressive on the chorus - that was the big part. But when (Fear Factory's) Demanufacture came along, I noticed that the opposite was true.

Maelstrom: I think it's interesting (mostly for a fan) to think about, "where is this band going?" What albums are gonna come out, and where will they be in terms of popularity and the public eye? Does that matter to you? Have you ever had fantasies like, "we're gonna be big"?

Chris Alfano: Well, I have been eating more. Honestly, I'm sure you ask that to a lot of bands.

Maelstrom: Honestly, I don't. A lot of bands I interview are never going to be big. I know it; they know it. I love the music, but no one else ever will.

Chris Alfano: We're not happy people. We're very miserable, depressing, cynical people. We're very self-depreciating. It sort of pisses of the guys on our label: "come on, guys! Don't you believe in your album?" It's being cynical that keeps me motivated. If we formed this band and said, "we're gonna be the next Tool or Soundgarden," then we would have quit a long time ago. We have no problems with being able to have health care and not sleep on top of each other when we're on tour. We're all for being comfortable, but I'm planning for the worst. If you don't plan for the worst, then you're gonna get bit in the ass when things don't go right. It keeps me motivated to be negative. Most of us are graduating from college at the end of this year. After May, we're planning on going on tour for a long time. We're going to throw everything we have into it and be negative about it, so we can work our asses off. Because of the way we sound, there are a lot of obstacles in front of us in terms of people liking us.

Maelstrom: Well, you just have to play for the right people. I mean, look at Meshuggah. They've all of a sudden gotten HUGE. Why? They played Ozzfest, they played with Tool. Now everyone realizes how good they are. Lars Ulrich is saying, "I don't get a lot of that extreme stuff, but Meshuggah's amazing." It's like, "Lars, if you listened to other bands, you'd realize that there are many of amazing bands like Meshuggah out there."

Chris Alfano: Well, it was also that they finally toured America. I was at the second Meshuggah show in America, the Coney Island High. I heard afterward that Meshuggah was kind of afraid 'cause they were headlining a show in America, where they had only played once, the night before in Milwaukee. The show sold out so quickly. The place was packed and everyone was chanting "ME-SHU-GGAH!" It's all luck. I've seen so many amazing bands and no one likes 'em…Thought Industry, I thought were one of the best bands ever. I don't think they've sold a lot of albums, and it's a major shame. (They're from Kalamazoo, Michigan and are on Metal Blade.) Their earlier stuff is probably a bigger influence on me. They were an artsy prog band, but in a way that I like; not like Dream Theater prog.

Maelstrom: Isn't that funny about prog? "Prog metal": Everyone's like Dream Theater.

Chris Alfano: Yeah. I have nothing against Dream Theater, but there's so much other prog.

Maelstrom: It's so funny that "progressive" is hardly progressive at all. Everybody is doing the Dream Theater thing. Where's the progression?

Chris Alfano: I think it eventually just became a sound. You have to use labels to explain to people who haven't heard the music, but labels are annoying.

Maelstrom: And it's to the point that bands will use the same keyboard and guitar tones as Dream Theater.

Chris Alfano: People like Zelda, man!

Maelstrom: "People like Zelda"… are you talking about the game?

Chris Alfano: Yeah (laugh). It's the Zelda keyboard.

Maelstrom: HAHAHAHAHA!

Chris Alfano: That's the only explanation I have.

Maelstrom: Do I have permission from you to start using that term?

Chris Alfano: Yeah, definitely. When I think of prog, the ideal I'd like to play is video game music. Me and Matt have planned out some video game music covers. There's some amazing stuff out there. Yoshinori Matsuda - he does some Squaresoft games: Chronotrigger, Chronocross, Xenogears - the guy's friggin' amazing. There's a Matsuda album, an arranged CD for Xenogears called Creid. It's all the music for the game, but arranged for this fusion/Celtic group. It's a four-piece Japanese rock band, and 12 Celtic musicians. It's probably me and Matt's favorite CD ever. Of course a lot of game music is really cheesy, but some of it for me walks a nice line between pop and classical.

Maelstrom: What about Anime CD soundtracks?

Chris Alfano: Yeah, just about any soundtrack, I've been into. Well, not the "Big Daddy" soundtrack. Matt has the Evangelion and Escaflowne CD.

Maelstrom: One of my friend's favorite composers is the woman who wrote the "Escaflowne" music. Her name is Yoko Kanno. My friend is really into it and wants to make movie soundtracks.

Chris Alfano: What's funny about it is that in a way it's not all that removed from pop music. There's generally a unifying melody. It's made to be rhythmic, melodic and catchy. I'm not saying that that's what we're trying to do, but it's one of the things.

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interview by: Roberto Martinelli

Structure of Lies for me represents the new wave of underground, extreme music. It's an exciting development. Instead of trying to be more fast or brutal than the bands that came before, groups such as this Arizona-based one (whose members used to be in the established bands like death/grindsters Unruh and sludge doomsters Wellington) are piecing together bits from a diverse source of influences to make something palatable while remaining true to the essence of being challenging. Structure of Lies is young in terms of its life as a band, and have only released an MCD called Abacus and a split CD with Iranach, both on Deep Six Records. The band has recorded another split with angry Dying Fetus castoff band Misery Index, and will be out soon. While parts of Structure of Lies' music clearly show which bands they love, I can only see good things for this group as they mature and find their unique identity as a unit. The following interview is with guitarist Ryan Butler.

Maelstrom: When I got the Abacus CD, it came with a little note saying that it was not at all the way it's supposed to look; the email is wrong…

Ryan Butler: On the back of it?

Maelstrom: Yeah.

Ryan Butler: Yeah…

Maelstrom: Did it come out kind of shitty? The inside looks great. I like some of these drawings.

Ryan Butler: If you read the poem on the back (which we took from the book that inspired the band name), there are like seven misspellings. The kid fucked it up totally and didn't use a spell check. The front cover is supposed to be a huge picture of witches on horses…

Maelstrom: Yeah, it looks terrible.

Ryan Butler: Yeah. All you can see is their heads and it's all grainy. Basically, once the first 2,000 sell, we'll redo it. But we're fucked until we sell that many records.

Maelstrom: How are you doing so far?

Ryan Butler: I think the first 1,000 are just about gone.

Maelstrom: It was really cool when I saw you play at Gilman Street in Berkeley in the fall of 2002, with Hirax, Phobia and Walken. Speaking of Walken, although you don't sound the same, I think it's exciting what's happening in metal: you're starting to see technical metal stuff that has all these cool and varied parts that aren't so aggro and are melodic.

Ryan Butler: Right.

Maelstrom: You guys do it, and it's really fantastic. I hope it's going to continue to go in that direction for other bands, too.

Ryan Butler: Basically, our drummer and I have both been inspired by not just death metal, but hardcore and doom metal… I listen to emo, and so does everyone else in the band. We just grab and steal from all those different influences. We're way into shit like power metal, and we're not afraid to stray from the Cannibal Corspe, New York death metal sound. It does make a really eclectic mix, and I think that's something that death metal needs right now, a good kick in the ass.

Maelstrom: It sure does. I'm getting really, really tired of Hate Eternal and Krisiun. You hear that stuff for five minutes and you've had enough.

Ryan Butler: Yeah! That stuff's great, but in small doses, and not all the time. You can't listen to Immolation every day, or you'd slit your own wrists. I'm listening to Jimmy Eat World and Sunny Day Real Estate all the time, and it makes for a more eclectic band. I think that's the way a lot of bands are, but then so many won't stray from the…

Maelstrom: Yeah, it's really funny. Certain genres have more of this than others. I think the black metal genre is the most so. "If you don't do it this way, you're false." There are all these stringent rules you have to follow if you want to be considered serious.

Ryan Butler: We have a lot of problems. We play a lot of hardcore shows, too, which we think is cool, to play to different audiences. Plus most of us grew up in a hardcore and metal scene. But a lot of times we'll get labeled, "oh, they have high-pitched vocals. They're not a metal band, they're a hardcore band."

Maelstrom: But you have blast beats.

Ryan Butler: Ninety percent of our influence comes from metal in one form or another, be it doom metal or power metal or death metal or grindcore. I guess we do have pretty political lyrics and high pitched vocals, but so did At the Gates and Death and Carcass…

Maelstrom: I think it's pretty exciting what's happening in the hardcore scene. I mean, I'm not exactly an expert, but I've been getting into it more and more lately. There are bands like Hopesfall and The Postman Syndrome that have a lot of the hardcore elements but are going more for dynamics and melody that make each song really special.

Ryan Butler: Totally. I know exactly what you're talking about.

Maelstrom: For me, hardcore was like Earth Crisis.

Ryan Butler: For us, hardcore was something different. When we were in Unruh, it was considered a hardcore band. And we were deathy grind.

Maelstrom: Yeah, that's what I think of Unruh as.

Ryan Butler: I'm telling you right now that 90 percent of the shows that band played were hardcore shows, and we did splits with bands that were considered hardcore. Ten years ago, hardcore was a totally different monster than it is now. It's not just Victory Records [anymore]… Bands like Misery Index, they almost consider themselves hardcore.

Maelstrom: Oh, that's funny. They're like poor man's Dying Fetus.

Ryan Butler: I think they're amazing. They're stripped down, but that's what they're going for. Ten years ago, everything from Assück to Earth Crisis was considered hardcore. Now they're all these classifications.

Maelstrom: Yeah, I think of Converge; all this technical stuff; stuff that I like.

Ryan Butler: We get compared to them every once on a while because of our vocals, but I think we sound nothing like that band.

Maelstrom: You don't. Even comparing you with Unruh, Structure of Lies is a lot more interesting. Unruh had fewer dimensions.

Ryan Butler: Well, we just had me as a guitar player, so it had to be stripped down.

Maelstrom: The second song on the Abacus record is called "A Virtue of Silence." That song is one of the best songs I've heard this year. It's got so many cool parts and the way it builds and comes together.

Ryan Butler: Our bass player counted it once, and there are 23 different riffs, and that doesn't even count the changes. We were like, "what?" We couldn't believe it.

Maelstrom: Yeah, it seems like it would be a total disaster to try to do that. But it doesn't. Unruh wasn't trying to do this stuff.

Ryan Butler: Yeah, Unruh was out to pummel. There was no melody. This band is out to pummel with a melody. We just wrote a song that's straight off a My Dying Bride album for the first minute. The Unruh stuff was written 5-8 years ago, so I've grown as a songwriter and Bill's grown as a drummer.

Maelstrom: Let's talk about the name Unruh. I'm studying to be a real estate agent and there's this thing called the Unruh law. It's something so boring, I can't even remember what it is. (It's the state law prohibiting discrimination by businesses on the base of race, creed or national origin) I was like, "that's like that band Unruh!…. That…sucks…" So what is the name all about?

Ryan Butler: (laugh) Well, there's a bunch of different meanings. There was a mass murderer in New Jersey named Howard Unruh. He did a mass murder spree in 12 minutes and killed 13 people. We took it from that, but it has a double meaning. In German, it means rioting or unrest. We thought it was a cool word.

Maelstrom: On the back of the Abacus CD there's the pyramid with the eye from the one dollar bill with the words "annuit coeptus" and "new world order" (in Latin). Why did you put that there?

Ryan Butler: We took the name Structure of Lies from the book Behold a Pale Horse by William Cooper. He's a man out of Arizona who was just basically murdered by the FBI. He used to be secret naval intelligence. He wrote this book and gave seminars exposing things like UFOs and the Freemasons. He was run off the road by a black limousine at one point and lost both his legs. They came to his hospital room and tried to suffocate him. Then the FBI broke into his house in Northern Arizona about six months ago and shot him to death. He took at least one of them out.

Maelstrom: How do you know it was the FBI?

Ryan Butler: It was on the news. They did a short blurb about it.

Maelstrom: Why did the FBI go to his house? What was he suspected of doing?

Ryan Butler: They said he was housing firearms. He really wasn't. They were looking for an excuse. It's exactly the type of stuff he talks about in his book is what they did to him. He knew it was coming someday. It was pretty crazy when we saw that on the news. We took the name straight out of the poem on the CD. Unfortunately…it's misspelled. It kind of loses a little meaning. But that's what we get for not paying for layout.

Maelstrom: You mentioned the Freemasons. I learned something very interesting years ago about the whole symbolism on the dollar bill, and how a lot of the founding fathers of the country were freemasons, and how the eye on the pyramid is the eye of god, but it's not the Christian god, it's the Freemason god.

Ryan Butler: It's Lucifer.

Maelstrom: Yeah?

Ryan Butler: It's called the Star of Light, which is named Lucifer. Anytime you see an eye in a pyramid, it's the symbol of Lucifer.

Maelstrom: So what's Lucifer doing with light? I don't get it. (for some in-depth explanations on Freemasonry, the Star of Light and Lucifer, please visit http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/Writings/LuciferandSatan.html, which explains that Lucifer "is the Latin term originally used by the Romans to refer to the planet Venus when that planet was west of the sun and hence rose before the sun in the morning, thereby being the morning star." - Roberto Martinelli)

Ryan Butler: I probably couldn't explain it off the top of my head. If you ever look at the Bolt Thrower logo…

Maelstrom: The Eye of Chaos?

Ryan Butler: That's what that is. But, Behold a Pale Horse is a really great book. It goes in depth about what the Freemasons are all about, the FBI, and UFO technology.

Maelstrom: It sounds like some sort of conspiracy theory, whacko book.

Ryan Butler: Yeah, it's been labeled as that. It's probably the scariest book I've ever read in my life, and supposedly non-fiction. There are a lot of William Cooper sites online (check out www.williamcooper.com - Roberto Martinelli). He explains all the symbolism of the Freemasons. When I read it I was working at a car lot at the time. Seeing all the high ups at the lot with Freemason symbols on their cars, I was like, "oh, man, don't fuck with those guys."

Maelstrom: What are Freemason symbols?

Ryan Butler: There are several. There's one that's an upside down pentagram. Sometimes it has a goat's head in it, even, and the eye of god thing. It's blue and white, and looks all nice. You see it on $50,000-60,000 Cadillacs and you think, "there's a fucking pentagram on the back of that Cadillac!" (for more info on the pentagram in Freemasonry, please visit http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/pentagram.html - Roberto Martinelli) Being into metal and seeing that on some rich dude's Cadillac, you kind of go, "whoa!"

Maelstrom: It was so funny at the Phobia show, because your band was clearly the best one there. Phobia was good for like six songs, but then it was like, "yeah…they're doing the same song again."

Ryan Butler: They love to play a long time. When you're around 12-13 years, you get so many damn songs. They're awesome guys, and I like their early stuff more because it's more deathy, but it can get pretty redundant. But I enjoy seeing them 'cause the kids go nuts.

Maelstrom: I didn't see Hirax 'cause my date was tired.

Ryan Butler: Haha. They were pretty rad, too.

Maelstrom: I'd like to see them mostly because of this interview the singer gave for Terrorizer. It was the coolest quote ever. He said, "people think that because I'm Black I like hip hop and rap. Well, fuck that shit. That shit sucks. Bands like Limp Bizkit sold their soul and are going straight to hell."

Ryan Butler: (laugh) They're coming out here in May. I can't wait. He's real funny; he's like posi-core metal, like, "keep at it guys, you're doing great!"

Maelstrom: What kind of power metal do you like?

Ryan Butler: All kinds.

Maelstrom: Like, the real happy, European stuff?

Ryan Butler: Oh, yeah.

Maelstrom: I love that stuff. For a while I was like, "it's not cool to like that stuff," but then I realized, "what are you talking about? That stuff rules!"

Ryan Butler: Everything from Maiden and Helloween to Hammerfall and Iced Earth.

Maelstrom: Have you heard of Dark Moor?

Ryan Butler: No.

Maelstrom: They're one of the best power metal bands out there but they're not that well known. They're on Arise Records.

Ryan Butler: I'm really into bands like Arch Enemy that sound power metal but have death vocals.

Maelstrom: Have you seen them play? Fucking great.

Ryan Butler: Awesome. See, I got into Maiden reeeal young. It's my bread and butter.

Maelstrom: What's the record that got you into them?

Ryan Butler: Maiden Japan.

Maelstrom: Huh….

Ryan Butler: I traded something for it. I was in first or second grade. It was '83 or so. I was like, "oh, my god. This is crazy!" Ever since then, it's been non-stop metal.

Maelstrom: The big thing for me was when it was '86 and I was 11 and Somewhere in Time came out. That's still maybe my favorite record ever.

Ryan Butler: That's a great record.

Maelstrom: For me, that's what heavy metal is. It's Maiden Somewhere in Time or Powerslave.

Ryan Butler: They are the epitome of heavy metal.

Maelstrom: It's funny what answers people will give to that question. For one friend of mine, it's Yngwie Malmsteen. Others say Celtic Frost, or Manowar. I think Manowar's terrible.

Ryan Butler: I like 'em just 'cause they're funny. (laugh)

Maelstrom: I mean, I liked 'em when I was nine. "Whoa, 'Dark Avenger'! That's the coolest song ever!"

Ryan Butler: I think if had to pick any one band to call heavy metal, I think it should be Iron Maiden. Number one, they're British. You have to sing power metal with a British accent no matter if you're from Kansas or Sweden. It's because of Iron Maiden. Hammerfall's not singing with a British accent because Helloween did it. Think of that next time you're listening to Nevermore. They're from Seattle, but [Warrell Dane] sounds like he's [British].

Maelstrom: Have you ever heard Sanctuary?

Ryan Butler: Oh, yeah.

Maelstrom: That first one (Refuge Denied, From the Vault, issue #5) is one of my favorites.

Ryan Butler: I have that record. It's great.

Maelstrom: You got into playing guitar 'cause you liked Maiden?

Ryan Butler: Actually, I got into playing guitar 'cause I liked punk and hardcore.

Maelstrom: So what's the band that is hardcore for you?

Ryan Butler: That's a good question. My favorite hardcore band is called Rorschach, who was around in the early 90s. They're very metal. They eventually formed Kiss it Goodbye and the drummer is in a band called Playing Enemy. Early Black Flag and Negative Approach is what hardcore punk is to me.

Maelstrom: I'm getting' into this band called Driller Killer.

Ryan Butler: Oh, yeah, they're awesome.

Maelstrom: I'm getting more and more into punk stuff in terms of it being in black metal. Like, there's this band Carpathian Forest. Have you heard them?

Ryan Butler: Yeah.

Maelstrom: It's punk black metal, and I think they're fucking bad!

Ryan Butler: (laugh) That's why I always dug Celtic Frost: it sounded real punk, and I thought that was cool.

Maelstrom: There's something undeniable about the kind of energy that good punk music can bring. You can just rage around to it.

Ryan Butler: That's one thing that I think makes us stand out in the stereotypical death bands, is that we put more of a hardcore stage presence, but playing technical death metal. We're up there jumping around like idiots and looking like jackasses instead of just standing there, banging our heads.

Maelstrom: So I hear your second guitarist left the band.

Ryan Butler: Yes.

Maelstrom: When you have a band that plays real well and plays together so well, when somebody leaves, how hard is it to replace these people?

Ryan Butler: Usually, it's impossible. (sigh)

Maelstrom: I would think so. This music is never going to be popular.

Ryan Butler: To tell you the truth, the drummer and I are the only original members of this band right now. We're on our third second guitarist. This was the easiest switch, though. He got in the band in the beginning of November, and we played with him on the Immolation/Vader tour when they came to Arizona on November 29th.

Maelstrom: I saw that tour, and I have to say how totally disappointed I was. Vader is one of my favorite bands, and I know all their songs by heart. But the show had this terrible sound guy, and they have these sound checks that take half an hour, but there's no difference between the beginning of the sound check and the end. The set ends up sounding like blurting double bass, and you can't hear anything else.

Ryan Butler: We got lucky here; they sounded real good. Our first show was with Vader, so it was cool to play with them again. I think they're great. They're the Slayer of death metal.

Maelstrom: Yeah, exactly. They play Slayer better than Slayer does, sometimes. Back to the topic of switching members and how hard it is, I tried to be in a power metal band more than a year ago.

Ryan Butler: Oh, that's so hard. To find someone in this scene that can actually sing…

Maelstrom: Do you think that Structure of Lies could actually have singing vocals in it?

Ryan Butler: I'm not a big fan of bands that go both ways. It kind of annoys me when Shadows Fall go from brutal vocals to singing vocals that aren't even that good. Some bands can get away with it, like Strapping Young Lad, but they're not singing power metal. I don't see us doing that in the future. We'll probably have some more low vocals in the future.

Maelstrom: How long did you have to practice to be able to play as well as you play now?

Ryan Butler: Uhhh…(laugh) Well, I've been playing string instruments since fourth grade. I played viola and cello in an orchestra and took some guitar. I didn't keep with it because I didn't know what a distortion pedal was. I was taking lessons and sounding like John Lennon and not Dave Murray. So I was kinda bummed. Around 7th or 8th grade, I got a bass. I found out I could play stuff by ear with no problem. I could play along with Danzig records without even thinking about it. I'm 26 now, but I didn't really become dedicated to practicing until I was about 19 or so. I still need to practice a lot more. I see a lot of areas that need improvement.

Maelstrom: So how do you identify what needs improvement and how do you go about improving it?

Ryan Butler: This is the first band I've ever done leads for. I don't think I'm very good at it and I worry that my stuff sounds the same. I really try to make that stuff diverse. I can't just bust out with solos; I have to write 'em. It really has to be set in stone. I'm not like Kerry King, where I play a different lead every time.

Maelstrom: What do you think of Slayer leads?

Ryan Butler: They're pretty messy.

Maelstrom: I think they kinda suck. I don't know if it's so hard to play a different lead every time if you just play chaos every time. The guy in Vader does that to the extreme.

Ryan Butler: But if you do notice, it's always in key. Those guys know how to play their guitars. They're all about the chaos solos, which are actually harder for me to do than the melodic ones. To stay in key and to make it sound real crazy is pretty hard. On the upcoming split we did with Misery Index, I do a chaos solo. I wish I could go back and re-do it. I'm totally unhappy with it.

Maelstrom: Misery Index had Kevin Talley in the band, but they don't anymore?

Ryan Butler: They have a new guy, Matt. He is a Kevin Talley worshipper. This guy is Kevin Talley the second. If I sent you this recording right now and told you Kevin Talley played on it, you wouldn't blink.

Maelstrom: Dying Fetus Destroy the Opposition is one of my favorite death metal records. I love Dying Fetus, but at the same time I hate Dying Fetus because of how stupid that band has gotten.

Ryan Butler: Yeah, it's out of control, now.

Maelstrom: They had an awesome lineup and then the main guy got rid of everybody.

Ryan Butler: I thought it was weird seeing them without Jason, when Kevin and Sparky were still in the band, but I can't imagine what it's gonna be like seeing them this month without all those guys.

Maelstrom: The new drummer is good - he has to be - but he's no way as good as Kevin Talley. I heard that Kevin Talley is out of music.

Ryan Butler: Yeah, I heard he's in a Third Eye Blind type band.

Maelstrom: That SUCKS. Third Eye Blind SUCKS.

Ryan Butler: He really wants to make money. He was second in line for the Slayer job. They showed us the rehearsal tapes; he played the shit perfect. They said that he was not mature enough for them. Man, that guy could drum circles around those assholes. It's a real bummer to see someone that talented go and just play 4/4 (with his new band). Whatever, you gotta do what you gotta do. It's too bad that this sub-genre holds some of the best musicians in the world and none of 'em can make a living at it.

Maelstrom: Let's talk about the split you did with Iranach. I hate that band.

Ryan Butler: Hahaha! Everybody does.

Maelstrom: It's really funny to see how that band was on a split with you.

Ryan Butler: I really dig on them. I have some demos of theirs whose recordings kick ass compared to the stuff on the split. [For the split] they went to some shitty studio, gave 'em $500 and said, "record this."

Maelstrom: I can't believe that. I'm just starting to get into a band; you put all this time and practice working at it, and you figure that I'd be all nervous going into the studio, thinking, "oh, my god, this has to be the best thing possible because this is like our chance."

Ryan Butler: Most people hate that guy's vocals.

Maelstrom: It sounds like Swamp Thing; like he's taking hits off a water bong while doing vocals.

Ryan Butler: (laugh) I'm into Devourment and stuff.

Maelstrom: Well, Devourment's different. I mean, they have that ridiculous snare thing that I like. (laugh)

Ryan Butler: (laugh) I think Iranach's vocals are great. I think it's totally extreme.

Maelstrom: But it's always the same. The thing I always ask myself is, "why even bother writing vocals?"

Ryan Butler: I've hung out with him and he says he's saying stuff, but how could he be saying anything? I think they're real talented, but they're not together anymore.

Maelstrom: If you have a young band that wants to record what tips do you have?

Ryan Butler: You're talking to the right guy, because I'm about to start a studio. For death metal stuff, do some research on microphones. For the drums, the Sennheiser mics are the clearest and punchiest. The Shure Beta 57-A are real good for guitars. It's a cheaper mic, but it sounds better than more expensive ones. For vocals, it's not that much of an issue; the Neumann is the best for that. It's a pretty big condenser mic. A lot of it’s opinion. I'm a big fan of digital recordings. It's clearer and tighter, and the editing process is so much cleaner. But some people like the warmth of tape. I'm a Pro Tools fan, but a lot of people are into big, Studer tape machines. For guitars, pan the guitars left and right and double the tracks. Make sure you use the same amp for both guitars. Unless you're Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, you need that tight sound for death metal. I've found that we always do four rhythm tracks, two of each guitar player's stuff. I record all the guitars. It sounds 100 times tighter than doing it with two different players.

Maelstrom: So, you have a second guitarist credited, but he doesn't play on the record?

Ryan Butler: Yeah, but that's how a lot of metal bands are.

Maelstrom: Thanks for taking the time, Ryan.

Ryan Butler: No problem.

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interview by: Roberto Martinelli

From the very first seconds of "Through Deep Snow, Darkness Stalks the Hunters," track #1 on All is Suffering's album The Past: Vindictive Sadisms of Petty Bureaucrats, you'll know that this is a special disk. This American group takes all the best elements of all extreme genres in the metal world and fuses them all together: frrezing walls of black metal riffing, jarring, water-tight grind blasts, mad vocals, bits of crushing, classical choir, melodic death riffs, all delivered with fierce punk 'tude. I'd never heard of this band. I hope that you'll discover them through this interview with guitarist Lenny Likas.

Maelstrom: I casually put the CD in my walkman and was like, "what IS this?" From the first two minutes of The Past: Vindictive Sadisms of Petty Bureaucrats, I was enthralled. You've got this sinister, wall of noise guitar intro that's like black metal. In fact, it reminds me a lot of this super obscure BM band called Weakling, who are one of the best ever, but no one knows about them. I sort of think about you guys as Weakling if they were a bunch of punks. What are you influenced by to write such parts and then mix in grind and punk 'tude?

Lenny Likas: We write music the way we want to hear it. I have never heard Weakling, but we all like good black metal and metal of all other kinds. We mix everything up because we're tired of bands that seem to have such a limited scope and are entrenched in a one dimensional sound--in respect to ourselves and our music, we would be bored without growth. Building up our sophistication and proficiency is inspiration for us. But sophistication and proficiency doesn't necessarily equate to musical technicality. Understanding the power of the simple musical statement is most important to me--be it a power part or meaningful melody. We all like to hear music that really gets us going. Some of my favorite bands are really straightforward, like Sodom, Bolt Thrower, Repulsion, Discharge, Bestial Warlust and Motorhead. But I also like more experimental bands like Celtic Frost, Amebix, Crass, Neurosis, Satyricon and especially Voivod. We like to blend what we consider as the best sensibilities of many earlier bands. Our music reflects our own extremely jaded tastes and builds from the past. As for being punks, we're punks in that we want to destroy institutions and instruments of mental slavery.

Maelstrom: You talked about the past. That makes me think of the curious title of your album, The Past: Vindictive Sadisms of Petty Bureaucrats. I'm mostly curious about the inclusion of the "past" part.

Lenny Likas: The title is simply meant to convey vastness - A historical perspective, but a vague one. The past is important to some. We are forced to resort to it in protest of the future.

Maelstrom: Cool you like Bolt Thrower. They're one of my favorites, although I think they went sharply downhill after Whale left and then pretty much in the toilet when Willetts left.

Lenny Likas: I agree wholeheartedly on that one. The early shit up to …For Victory. Realm of Chaos was my favorite because of the production. The faster shit was better.

Maelstrom: Have you heard that live album of theirs (Live War) that was in the limited edition …For Vitory?

Lenny Likas: I have that. I like Karl's voice alot. He has character."Dying Creed" is fucking awesome on that disc.

Maelstrom: It was pretty funny to talk to Gavin Ward about that and how he said there were only like 15 people at that show (read more in the interview in issue #8). It's true, you can hear it.

Lenny Likas: Yeah, it does kind of sound like it, like when Karl says "this one goes out to all the guys who were here last time..." You can hear like ten dudes and one chick yelling in the background. Over the years, I've come to appreciate some vocalists that I used to despise, but I've also come to despise some vocalists that I used to think were cool. The first really really heavy death metal album I bought was Harmony Corruption. It blew my fucking face off.

Maelstrom: Me too! That's still my fave ND album. I'd like to hear more about vocalists that you used to hate and now love, and vice versa. I know I never used to like M. DiSalvo of Cryptopsy until I interviewed the drummer of that band (talk about amazing drums). He gave me a new take on the guy and now I totally love what he does. Too bad he's gone. The new guy is pretty run-of-the-mill. Do you like Marduk? What do you think of Legion's vox?

Lenny Likas: I'm not really into Cryptopsy too much. Just not a big fan of their style, that's all. I really enjoy Marduk. Legion is a cool frontman and his dedication is obvious. His vocals are seriously strained and choked in an awesome, evil, raspy way. Good black metal vocals, but they do get on my nerves after an albums worth of listening.

Maelstrom: In the booklet, you've all got silly nicknames. Then, it says that all songs were performed by a bunch of famous metal guys. What's that all about?

Lenny Likas: We've all been friends for a long time and we like silly nicknames and having fun. We all have a sense of humor, but that doesn't come in contact with the recorded music, we save it for band practice. Musically and vocally we are exclusively negative, hateful and crushing. We are completely serious about this.

Maelstrom: That's cool. It's a nice fuck off to the standard of black metal that it can't be "fun."

Lenny Likas: I think anyone who is a good band must be having fun. If you're uninspired and not into it for the right reasons, your inadequecy is written plainly in your music.

Maelstrom: I'm totally floored each time I hear that male choir on the album. It's another wonderful dimension to all the parts of your album, parts that contrast but don't clash - they seem totally in place with one another. Where did you find that stuff?

Lenny Likas: Good classical music is cool. I enjoy it more than a lot of other shit out there. Creating interesting sound dimensions is what we're all about. It's like getting a glimpse of another place, somewhere strange and unknown.

Maelstrom: I wonder if you're familiar with the choir compositions of Henryck Gorekci. Miserere is absolutely crushing stuff.

Lenny Likas: No, I haven't heard of him. Beethoven, Wagner, Holst, Anton Wieburn, the guy who wrote "Pierrot Lunaire" - the name escapes me - folk music; these are some of my favorites. I also enjoy soundtracks like "Conan the Barbarian." Godspeed You Black Emperor! are one of my favorites. They bring me a lot of bittersweet joy and sorrow.

Maelstrom: I like the new Godspeed a lot, greatly because there aren't any of those sound clips. Those bother me. I mean, they're ok once. My friend likes 'em, but most people i know don't. What do you think? If you like that band, there are others that kick ass like Set Fire to Flames (a Godspeed side project) and this band Magyar Posse. One of the coolest shows ever was seeing Godspeed in Chicago. Speaking of Godspeed and their old label, Kranky, do you like Stars of the Lid?

Lenny Likas: I think the best Godpeed album is F#A#. I think the new one is incredible also. Their past use of sound clips was appealing to me because of the ideas they evoked in my head. The numbing, alienating stretch of concrete and death that the world is swiftly becoming encapsulated in the sound of an impersonal gas station announcement with racist overtones, or the delirious rants of panicked homeless man, or the sonically manipulated voice of a Christian blabbering on and on pathetically, sounding like complete lunacy set against the soft, tragic instrumental music. I thought they were great when I saw them in Baltimore. They played in a partially gutted church, the lights and the stained glass and the projections made it surreal. That show actually made my girlfriend nauseous it was so intense. I haven't heard any of those other bands you mentioned.

Maelstrom: Do you ever meet women through your musical endeavors? I mean, like, women that you find appealing?

Lenny Likas: Not really. I'll see some hot babes at clubs every now and again, but I don't really talk to a lot of people anyway, be they male or female.

Maelstrom: If there's anything I can say even remotely negative about your album, it's how songs that go over more than one track are cut when the track changes. What happened there?

Lenny Likas: Poor editing and mastering. Shoestring budget.

Maelstrom: How many other recordings have you made?

Lenny Likas: We've been recording since about '95 or so. To date, six professionally recorded sessions, all at Mike Bossier's Oblivion Studio in Upper Marlboro, MD. Our latest session, from July 2002, has been made into a MCD, which we designed, manufactured and released ourselves. It's called Execution by Flamethrower and it has some of our best new songs.

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interview by: Laurent Martini foreword by: Roberto Martinelli

Steven Smith main musical pursuit is being the guitarist for the ethno-ambient group Thuja. Lately, Smith has released an excellent solo album called Kohl (review here). Now, we are treated to a new solo project of his by the name of Hala Strana (reviewed in this issue.) Laurent got this info out of him.

Maelstrom: How do you go about writing songs for Thuja?

Steven R. Smith: The music Thuja makes is completely improvised. So it that sense, the songs aren’t written at all. We just get together and bring a variety of instruments, objects, and artifacts to be played and then we just start. It’s a very natural process and we don’t discuss what we’ll be doing at all. At times it gets to be a racket but most of the time it really comes together. Surprisingly, when we all got together to play for the very first time, it pretty much just sounded like this, we have fine tuned the process a little bit over time, but really it’s just always sounded like this. It's very nice, organic method of creating sound in a room. We listen a lot when we play, and that’s really the most important part of it-- listening to what the others are doing.

Maelstrom: Your sounds with Thuja are vastly different than the ones on Kohl, how do you explain the difference?

Steven R. Smith: I’d guess the sounds are different on account of the solo stuff just being me. Thuja is a group collaboration and we all contribute. So you have the sound of people playing together in a room, and each of the Thuja members have their unique voice and style which I could never duplicate or copy on my own stuff. On the whole, I’d say Thuja is more concerned with a more abstract way of playing, whereas my solo stuff is definitely more melody driven and dealing with harmonies and layers of sound and so on. I enjoy both.

Maelstrom: Who/what are some of the influences that you have musically? And how have they affected Kohl?

Steven R. Smith: Well, the whole idea of Kohl was that the fellow who runs 3 Acre Floor records, Jason Honea, asked me at a party to record a record for his label of just solo piano pieces. I drunkenly agreed, but when I later (much later) got around to actually trying to do it, I discovered that I’m just not that great of a piano player. I don’t even own a piano and so it was hard to really get going on it at all, so I decided to do a record of just one-take guitar songs. This is in great contrast to my other solo records which have been very heavily layered with lots of instruments and so on. I really liked the idea of trying to make an interesting record with just one instrument and without it sounding like I was trying to be a virtuoso or a show off or something. Just nice songs which are hopefully spontaneous enough to stay interesting to a listener. Funny thing is Jason later moved to Germany and his record label is temporarily on hold so he didn‘t release Kohl anyway.

As far as influences, I don’t know what I was trying to do for Kohl aside from just struggling with the limitations of my own guitar playing. I like a lot of different stuff. Folk music, traditional musics, late 60’s jazz, soundtracks, the usual post-punk stuff. Some favorites: Leonard Cohen, the Birthday Party/Crime and the City Solution, Pharoah Sanders (particularly his work with Sonny Sharrock), early Einsturzende Neubauten, the Band, Richard Thompson, Zoviet France, Brian Eno, Scott Walker (especially his Tilt LP), the Fall, Popol Vuh, the list just goes on and on.

Maelstrom: Is this you first solo album? Do you wish to do more? And if so what different styles do you see yourself experimenting with?

Steven R. Smith: I’ve actually released quite a few solo records, probably around 5 or 6 others since 1996. Some of those came out in very limited editions on small labels and a few have been on bigger labels like Emperor Jones who I have continued to work with. Kohl may be the last solo release for awhile. There will be a limited vinyl edition of Kohl on Emperor Jones in July which will come with the book and also a large hand printed woodcut print. After that I’m going to focus on another project I’ve started called Hala Strana which is based a lot on the old traditional folk music from Central and Eastern Europe (Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Czech Repub., etc.). That first CD will be out in April on Emperor Jones as well and I’ve even started recording for the next one to boot. I’m really excited about this stuff and have been doing a lot of research on it from old field recordings from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. I’m doing kind of abstract interpretations of a few traditional songs but have also just written a lot of my own songs based on the modes and scales and instrumentation from the music from this region.

Maelstrom: Everything about Kohl is so unique, from the sound to the song titles to the packaging, how long did this project take?

Steven R. Smith: The recording for the music was really quick, like a couple weeks, and those were very lazy days. Typically I’d do one song a night and just go in with a couple beers, sit down and pick which guitar I was going to use and set the levels and then just maybe record 2 or 3 attempts at a song and keep the best one. There was no overdubbing except for the little outros that pop up at the end of each song. Almost all of it was improvised right there (aside from a few little themes that I had worked out which I would keep returning to within some of the songs). It was a very loose and immediate way to make a record. There was no bullshitting around doing a million overdubs and creating some dense monstrosity. You immediately knew if the take was good or shit and that was the end of it. I usually have a tendency to just pile crap on and see what comes of it but I forbid myself to do that this time and it sure made things less complicated.

Now the book, on the other hand, seemed to take forever to make because I did them all by hand. I had to fill all the baggies with seeds, I did the woodcut images, and then had to layout and Xerox and staple all the books together, draw each book cover, etc….I worked on those off and on for a couple of months. Just a little bit here and there. The outside covers were also drawn by hand and the woodcut print that will come with the vinyl version (they were too big for the CD envelopes) I had printed a year or so ago for a different vinyl release which ended up coming out on CD instead, but they fit real well with Kohl as well. I really like doing stuff like that and plan to do more. It’s hard though with the mass produced CDs labels usually run off because usually the minimum run is 1000 copies and that’s an awful lot of packaging to do by hand. But when it’s possible, I’ll do more of this kind of stuff.

Maelstrom: How did you go about writing songs for Kohl? Did you try to create different moods according to the songs?

Steven R. Smith: Mostly, I just tried to make each one different from the others (i.e. using an acoustic guitar vs. an electric guitar, playing more sparse and abstract vs. more folk oriented, playing with a metal stick vs. fingerpicking, etc). By allowing myself to use only a guitar, it was hard to not make them all sound alike and I hope I succeeded in getting at least a little variety in there. I also had some of the woodcut images in the book finished at that point and some of those pertained to a specific song idea so I would keep those images in mind while playing.

Maelstrom: Working by yourself on Kohl and working with other band members in Thuja, how is the experience different?

Steven R. Smith: The solo stuff is really based around my whims and ideas, whatever I feel like pursuing at the time. Thuja is most definitely a group experience and a situation where you leave your ego at home and just try to contribute to the greater whole. They are actually almost polar opposites in method. But are both very enjoyable ways to make music.

Maelstrom: One last question. Rob told me that you are studying (or have studied) rare and antique books. Could you please tell me more about this? Is this a hobby or something that you enjoy doing as a career? Has this influenced your work in any way?

Steven R. Smith: I worked as a cataloguer in a rare book auction house up in San Francisco for about four years, and have since gone on to grad school focusing on archives and special collections. It was (and still is) more of a job than a hobby. I don’t collect rare books or anything as I can’t afford that kind of hobby, but I find it sort of interesting. I am not an expert by any means and have gotten a bit rusty with it since I went back to school. It did have an influence on my music in some ways-- many song titles and some of the artwork which have been used on some of my records came out of various rare books that I was working with at the time which caught my eye and found their way into whatever music I was dealing with. Also, I guess I have an affinity for items which have some age to them, some visible history and, in a way, I would be happy if some of that came through in the music that I make.

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interview by: Roberto Martinelli

The increasingly diverse and interesting Jester Records label, headed by the chameleon-like Kris Rygg (aka Garm, aka dozens of other names), has put out yet another remarkable album. Star of Ash is a project whose control has been totally give to Heidi Tveitan, wife of Vegard Tveitan, whom we all know as Ihriel and Isahn, respectively, from the bands Peccatum and Emperor. With a sound that is reminiscent of Dead Can Dance and Portishead, but ironically is inspired by neither, Mrs. Tveitan has made a fine album. I chatted with the very soft spoken, English accented woman on the phone to discuss her family's projects.

Maelstrom: Excuse me if I don't have this completely straight - it's kind of hard to keep the real names of people straight, like from Emperor, who don't use their real names in their music. I'm looking at the lineup for Star of Ash, whose press release says it has "members of Emperor." Is it just your husband?

Heidi Tveitan: Yes, that's right. Vegard.

Maelstrom: How long has this project been in production?

Heidi Tveitan: I think it was around New Year's, last year. But it was more a question of being asked, really, to do this solo project.

Maelstrom: Who asked you?

Heidi Tveitan: Jester Records. I didn't really consider it up to that request. But after being asked I found it to be a challenging project.

Maelstrom: So Kris Rygg basically asked if you wanted a band of whatever kind of music you wanted?

Heidi Tveitan: He asked if I wanted to do a record based on the more quiet parts in Peccatum, and we went from there, and it changed form during the process.

Maelstrom: Yeah, it's nothing like Peccatum at all.

Heidi Tveitan: No, he didn't really get what he requested. I think he was happy, though. (laugh)

Maelstrom: What does "iter.viator" mean?

Heidi Tveitan: That means "the journey, the traveler."

Maelstrom: I'm more and more interested by Jester. The record label has become a great label and has put out some very cool stuff. What is Kris Rygg like? He's always changing personas and names, and he's always doing different things. He's on every record that comes out on Jester, it seems. What's this man like?

Heidi Tveitan: I think he appears in the media in a fairly nice way. He's a really nice guy. But he knows what he wants and he kind of runs his label very idealistically. I think he's a very fine musician and a very fine guy to work with.

Maelstrom: How did you originally meet your husband? I want to hear some stories.

Heidi Tveitan: That was quite a few years back, through some friends, I think.

Maelstrom: Was this when he was 16 or 17 and starting in Emperor.

Heidi Tveitan: No, probably '93, '94.

Maelstrom: Was it all new to you, when you met him and he introduced you to the music he was involved in?

Heidi Tveitan: The black metal oriented thing I've been listening to more on and off for the same period of time.

Maelstrom: So you already knew about him before you met him.

Heidi Tveitan: No, not as a musician. I didn't really have that much interest in black metal. I guess I never have.

Maelstrom: But he got you to do Peccatum, which isn't really black metal, but it has quite a few elements of that in it.

Heidi Tveitan: Yes, I've been into heavy metal since I was a teenager: Judas Priest, Dio, Accept.

Maelstrom: It's kind of funny to look at Jester as being promoted in the metal world despite it not being a metal label and Star of Ash not being a metal record. I wonder how people will receive it.

Heidi Tveitan: It's difficult to say, but obviously he's had a market for Ulver in the past and also Arcturus, and therefore it's natural to push [this in the metal market]. The metal market is starting to open up quite a bit, too, to other genres. You have a lot of mixtures. Even though metal as I see it is rather nostalgic, but the metal audience in general listens to a lot of music. That's probably why he's also pushing it through the metal market.

Maelstrom: Is there a very strong focus in Norway for children to learn how to play music? Considering how few people live in your country, how many groups (both metal and non-metal) are coming out of Norway.

Heidi Tveitan: No, not really. We have the music schools. That started up about 16-20 years ago, and that pushed the music community quite well ahead. Apart from that we don't really have much musical skills. The way I see it, the eastern Europeans are much better with that in the general schooling system, where people learn to read notation just as well as they learn to read the alphabet. But I think Norwegians are into listening to music in general.

Maelstrom: How did you get into learning about music and playing?

Heidi Tveitan: I've been playing the piano since I was rather young, and also got into singing rather early because I come from a family of quite a few musicians. I haven't always been interested in it.

Maelstrom: The press release compares Star of Ash to Dead Can Dance, amongst others. It seems that Dead Can Dance is a really big part of your Norwegian generation's listening.

Heidi Tveitan: It might be, but to be perfectly honest, I've never heard them, which is probably quite embarrassing. Haha.

Maelstrom: The thing that I think about when I listen to your music is Portishead. What do you think about that?

Heidi Tveitan: Yes, well, Portishead is another band that I'm not all that acquainted with.

Maelstrom: How funny! Well, actually I think that's pretty interesting. So, when you wanted to do this kind of project, (I guess looking at it in retrospect), what do you think you were influenced by?

Heidi Tveitan: My main influence in everything I do, I think, is Arvo Pårt. That's my absolutely #1 favorite musician.

Maelstrom: My German friend was telling me how there's a group of musicians in Germany that have begun to play this thing that Pårt wrote that would take 700 years to complete. Or something like that. I have some of his stuff. I like it. Does he use vocals in his music, too?

Heidi Tveitan: He does, but more like instruments. He also uses a big contrast. But the vocal stuff I do isn't really influenced by his way of doing things. But I think it's important to see that a musician can be influenced by a very different type of composer who can draw out aspects that wouldn't really resemble the original product. It's more a state of mind and the kind of feelings I detain from listening to his music.

Maelstrom: So, what is Star of Ash about?

Heidi Tveitan: When I write music, it's an open process where I don't lay much emphasis on genre and style. With each record, there are obviously some boundaries, but the main idea is to create music that I like myself.

Maelstrom: Would you consider Star of Ash as your main group?

Heidi Tveitan: No, I don't have any main group. It doesn't matter what kind of forum I put it through. It's all as important or non-important. It doesn't really matter.

Maelstrom: So the world is dying to know what Vegard is going to do next.

Heidi Tveitan: We're currently working on the next Peccatum record, and he's also discussing various other projects aside from that. I don't think he's even sure, himself. Time will tell.

Maelstrom: How much of the new Peccatum is done?

Heidi Tveitan: At the moment, we're mostly working with themes, and we'll continue with that process for a while and try to make more linear forms. At the moment we'd like to keep the process rather open.

Maelstrom: I would guess that it would be the least metal thing he's ever done, only because of how much he put into the last Emperor.

Heidi Tveitan: I doubt it will be non-metal. Themes are one thing, but arrangements and instrumentation is basically what divides the genres.

Maelstrom: Would you have any insight to give us about Emperor breaking up? Was there anything bad going on inside the band? You look at the Emperor credits and there's this "additional guitars by Samoth." That's such a big shock for people to see.

Heidi Tveitan: Well, that's actually out of my league, but I think the guys are good friends. I don't think it has anything to do with any friction. I think that as they said themselves, they wanted to chase down different musical paths. I think it was as simple as that.

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interview by: Roberto Martinelli

I don't seem to get a lot of what some people seem to rave about concerning so much dark ambient. It seems to me that there are far too many keyboard-wielding doofs out there who get signed and put out truly weedy albums. So for Karjalan Sissit's self-titled album to make my best of 2002 list means that it's something special. Indeed it is: brooding and militaristic, Karjalan Sissit wins big points with its fuzzy, fog horn-like qualities that communicate militaristic images, which are broken up by quaint, laid back songs and polkas from the period off of old gramophones. Indeed, this project is all about a Finn paying homage to his ancestors who fought in the war between Finland and Russia during the same years as World War II. This interview is with Markus Pesonen, the Finn in question.

Maelstrom: Hi, Markus. I was instantly grabbed by your self-titled record. In particular I like the heavy, fuzzy, foghorn-like sounds and melodies. Before you recorded the album, what was your plan to go into the process to achieve this result?

Markus Pesonen: I was searching for a historical feel and so I recorded some songs I felt strong about at that time period of my life.

Maelstrom: Another thing that works exceedingly well on the album is the contrast between the massive, sometimes scary walls of sound and the unthreatening polka pieces and other bits that sound like they're being played off an old gramophone, something else that's always a winner. Please tell us the history behind these recordings?

Markus Pesonen: "Säkkijärven Polkka" is a Finnish oldie; Very well known in Finland and loved of many. Composed already in 1939 and performed by Viljo Vesterinen. "Suomi Marssi" (das england lied), 1942 by Georg Malmsteen. My grandfather Uuno Kettunen used to sing these songs back in his days. This is my way to salute him. He's gone but not forgotten.

Maelstrom: This brings us to the next question (which you may have answered in the previous one). Karjalan Sissit is a war-themed record. I would imagine that many would incorrectly assume that it's a pro-fascist/ Nazi record due to the imagery in the layout and sound of the compositions. However, Justin from Cold Spring says it's not, and the soldiers in the album are related to you. Perhaps you could tell us what the ideas behind this recording are, and about the people in the photos of the album. (could you please also send me graphic files of these photos, and a Karjalan Sissit logo?)

Markus Pesonen: Unfortunately, some narrow minded people seem to think Karjalan Sissit is a right wing project with fascist sympathies due to its photos and music that have got a historical feel. Karjalan Sissit, as mentioned so many times before, is about Finnish history and my inner thoughts and feelings. My grandfather was in the Finnish Sissi elite and Karjala is our home. Sissi battalions had quite a lot of differences when compared to an ordinary infantry battalion: They were intended to fight in a large area, possibly in the enemy rear area, as a more or less independent unit. Making small attacks against the enemy supply columns, securing open flanks in the wilderness, mining roads in the enemy rear and securing cable lines. These actions were usually made with small detachments but larger units were also used. But even while this type of warfare proved successful, the shortage of troops forced the Finns to use some Sissi battalions also in regular front-line duty. A Sissi battalion had 3 rifle companies. My grandfather Uuno Kettunen was involved in both winter war 1939-1940 and the following continuation war 1941-1944. The photos from the booklet are taken from these time periods.

Maelstrom: Justin also mentioned that something in the album is based on some writing that was found in the pocket of a soldier in the war between Finland and Russia?

Markus Pesonen: Finnish Sissi battalions found some notes for a song in the pocket of a dead Russian. This song was later performed by A.Aimo, Viljo Vesterinen and Sointu Orchestra, originally written by G. Dubriansky. The Finnish version was titled "Elämä Juoksuhaudoissa."

Maelstrom: There's a track with some militaristic sounding speech. What was that taken from? What is the man saying? How about the other, sparse male vocals?

Markus Pesonen: Mannerheim speaking to the Finnish people.

Maelstrom: What were the emotions that led you to undertake this project? Was it as a result of some anger or resentment? Did you feel a personal need to pay homage to your ancestors? Or, did you just think it was cool?

Markus Pesonen: I spent the last summer with my grandfather Uuno Kettunen. When he died I collected my thoughts around Karjalan Sissit.

Maelstrom: What do the words in the booklet, "Pontikkoo, konnarii, haitarii, ja Viel Perkeleesti kuolemoo!" mean? What does "Säkkijärven" mean?

Markus Pesonen: These lines are Karelian and would not work out correctly if translated.

Maelstrom: If you haven't already, please tell us more about the history of this period of your country. Please feel free to make it as long or as short as you'd like?

Markus Pesonen: From a historical perspective I found winter war 1939-1940 and the continuation war 1941-1944 really interesting. A diplomatic conflict lead to war between Finland and Russia. Without going into longer history lessons I suggest to those interested to read 105 days of Honour.

Maelstrom: How do you think of Finnish society today? I briefly visited once, and it felt slightly more Slavic than Scandinavian. How do you think Finland fits in amongst the countries of the region?

Markus Pesonen: Nice country and great people. I found many things kinda similar to Sweden except the language.

Maelstrom: What other groups or people that you listened to made you think, "hey, I can record something, too!"?

Markus Pesonen: Well, I never thought in such a terms but anyways: Cold Meat Industries has had a major impact on me since I discovered them back in ´89. There are so many other things that inspire me: Everyday life and its difficulties, compulsions from society, etc...

Maelstrom: Please tell us about you, Markus. What kind of person are you? If we met you in a pub or on the street, but had no idea about Karjalan Sissit or its connection to you, what impression would we have of you? What do you look like?

Markus Pesonen: Kinda antisocial man. I rather prefer sitting in an apartment with my friends, enjoying classical music together with a good cigar and whisky than go out in a local pub.

Maelstrom: I understand there are other Karjalan Sissit recordings either out there or on the way. Please tell us about those and how we can get them. Are they similar in nature to the self-titled album?

Markus Pesonen: 2001: debut CD released by Cold Spring Records. Limited Lp-version( 300 made ) released via Svartvintras Production. 2002 : The second full-lenght cd titled Miserere was released in September 2002. Released via Cold Meat Industry. 2003 : New 7" out in March. Published by Eternal Soul Records. Strightly limited to 300copys. A third full-length CD, titled Kapitulieren? Nein was recently recorded at Erebus Odora and awaits its release in the fall of 2003. It's got an obscure red line and all harsher parts are even harsher than before. Again it differs a little bit from earlier works. About the recordings: All Karjalan Sissit records shall stand for themselves. I don't want to repeat myself. For me it's important to present something new all the time otherwise I would get bored. Not a radical change in thought as the whole idea with Karjalan Sissit would then be lost. Ideas change as life inspires you. All items in stock via www.karjalansissit.com. or following labels : www.coldmeat.se / www.svartvintras.com / www.eternal-soul.de /www.coldspring.co.uk

Maelstrom: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Markus. This album is wonderful. We hope to hear more from you soon.

Markus Pesonen: Thank you all for incredible support. For latest news from the KS bunker, visit www.karjalansissit.com. In order to contact Karjalan Sissit, please write to : karjalansissit@hotmail.com Label: www.coldmeat.se

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Maelstrom: J'ai fait connaissance avec tes oeuvres en decouvrant Eikenskaden. Quand j'ai remarqué un album Mystic Forest (Welcome Back in the Forest, revue en Maelstrom #10) dans un magasin, j'ai été très excité car il y avait des elements de style dans la presentation qui etaient similaire avec Eikenskaden. La question la plus grande initiellement est: pourquoi as-tu deux groupes quand le son et les themes sonores sont pratiquement les mêmes? Je pense que Welcome back... diffère d'une façon assez importante du The Black Laments Symphony (revue en #9) d'Eikenskaden au niveau musical, mais la production est la même et il y a ces samples d'eau coulant, etc (aussi présents sur Green Hell, the premier album Mystic Forest) Quand j'ai ecouté Welcome… pour la première fois, j'ai su quand anticiper le piano solo, par exemple.

Stéfan Kozak: Tout ce que tu dis est très vrai... Enfin, était vrai... car avec les deux nouveaux CDs de mes deux groupes tout change. Maintenant Mystic Forest et Eikenskaden sont beaucoup plus differents dans l'image, l'ambiance et le son. Enfin tu t'en rendra compte. Eikenskaden garde de coté "raw" et Mystic Forest est plus "prog." Enfin ça reste toujours pareil The Black Laments... est en fait le rassemblement de tout les "déchêts" de tous mes projets! Tout ce qui est inutilisable ailleurs, car trop "étrange" peut être! Eikenskaden est un défouloir! C'est du brut de brut; on joue ce qui nous plait comme on en a envie, c'est tout. C'est vraiment quelque chose à part, c'est du désespoir à l'état pur, c'est tout... c'est inexplicable! En precision, le prochain Eikenskaden a une image très SM et industriel. On retrouve des samples plus glauque aussi, enfin tu verras. Sinon merci pour tes chroniques, j'en suis tres fier :)

Maelstrom: Je trouve ça un peu surprenant que le premier Eikenskaden était une sorte de poubelle de recyclage... Cela expliquerait certainement pourquoi le son est si similaire... Mais je trouve, comme tu dis, beaucoup plus de passion dans la musique d'Eikenskaden. En parlant de ce nom, est-ce qu'il a un sens?

Stéfan Kozak: Eikenskaden veut dire "bouclier de chêne."

Maelstrom: Si je comprends bien, le nouveau Eikenskaden sera different car ce projet n'est plus un defouloir?

Stéfan Kozak: Si, le nouveau Eikenskaden est toujours un defouloir.

Maelstrom: Je trouve les titres des chansons de Black Laments… très interessantes et amusantes (sans être du moindre con, bien entendu). Ils sont certainement uniques, comme "She's Hiding behind a Tree," "I'll Take a Walk on My Grave" et puis "I'll Take Another Walk on My Grave." Est-ce que tu as conçu que ces titres auraient cet effet?

Stéfan Kozak: Les titres d'Eikenskaden sont en effet des caricatures, mais dans le bon sens du terme, c'est tres "true"! Je ne me fixe pas de limite à mon imagination, c'est tout... hehe. Sur le prochain il y aura aussi des titres pas trop mal, et l'artwork faudra le détour!

Maelstrom: Alors, vous etes trois dans Mystic Forest; Est-ce que vous etes trois dans Eikenskaden? Je crois qu'il y a une femme dans Welcome back... Est-ce qu'il a un vrai batteur actuellement?

Stéfan Kozak: On est six sur le dernier Eikenskaden... C'est le moi le batteur sur le nouveau Mystic Forest et Julie, notre chanteuse, est toujours dans le groupe et elle nous fait des voix fantastiques, surtout dans Waltz in the Midst of Trees.

Maelstrom: Attends...tu as dit que vous etiez trois dans Mystic Forest, mais vous êtes pourtant six dans Eikenskaden? Comment est-ce que la musique d'Eikenskaden peut-elle être de Mystic Forest si les membres des groupes
sont differents?

Stéfan Kozak: Il y a tant de choses étranges avec Eikenskaden... La première est que je suis le seul member de Mystic Forest dans Eikenskaden. La seconde est que la photo du groupe Eikenskaden montre qui joue quelle instrument… peut-être que c'est parfois la même personne dans plusieurs photos… peut-être :) Personne sauf moi ne sait exactment combien de personnes nous sommes et qui nous sommes (à part moi, mais ça, c'est à cause d'une erreur du label qui a diffusé l'information… et c'est trop tard pour le cacher). La seule chose que je peux réveler est que le line-up n'est pas toujours le même de chanson à chanson… mais je les écrits toutes.

Maelstrom: J'aimerais que tu parles un peu plus du son que tu as reussi sur tes albums. C'est comme si un microphone a été tenu bien trop près d'un haut parleur. Le resultat est come un brisement scintillant de verre avec chaque note. Personne d'autre a un son comme ceci.

Stéfan Kozak: Je ne sais pas... c'est comme ca, c'est mon son. Cela vient de ma volonté à utiliser un son comme celui de toute façon. Maintenant si tu dis que je suis le seul à avoir un son comme celui-ci, c'est peut être vrai, mais je ne cherche pas à me démarquer des autres; je cherche juste à faire ce que je veux. Depuis toujours Mystic Forest n'a aucune contrainte, aucun désir de seduire... Sinon, cela vient peut être de mon materiel. De la même façon, je ne vais pas chercher à avoir une guitare la plus extravagante possible... juste celle qui sonne le mieux. J'utilise une guitare look jazz mais avec des cordes tres fines, c'est mon style, c'est tout !

Maelstrom: Devons-nous chercher un thème compliqué avec tes samples d'eau qui apparaissent dans tes albums? Est-ce que Black Laments… est un concept album?

Stéfan Kozak: Tous les samples ont une place importante sur mes enregistrements: ils représentent quelque chose... Maintenant c'est à chaque personne qui écoute ma musique de se faire sa propre image... C'est comme quand tu lis un livre, c'est ton imagination qui doit travailler avant tout!

Maelstrom: Ton incorporation de musique classique dans Eikenskaden est réussi. "Adagio" d'Albinoni est une de mes pièces favories.

Stéfan Kozak: Je fais ça depuis toujours et je le ferai encore. J'adore la Musique classique tout simplement depuis toujours. Alors, je la fais vivre au travers de ma musique. Je me fais plaisir en la jouant, alors si en plus ça plait aux autres c'est parfait!

Maelstrom: C'est qui le petit bonhomme qui se trouve sur les albums de Mystic Forest? Pourquoi est-il penché à cet angle curieux?

Stéfan Kozak: C'est mon logo personnel. D'une certaine façon, j'essaie de l'inclure dans le logo de tout les groupes où je joue. C'est d'ailleurs pour cela qu'il sera aussi sur le logo du prochain Eikenskaden. En fait il ne penche pas, c'est juste son ombre qu'on voit en dessous...

Maelstrom: Parle-moi un peu de toi. "Stefan"....ça fait plutôt slave au lieu de français... Parle-moi aussi de ton affection pour la forêt et la dualité des images sérenes de tes albums et la musique qui est si explosive et puis calme. Quels sont tes demons?

Stéfan Kozak: J'ai le meme prénom que mon grand père qui etait ukrainien... Pour ce qui est de l'imagerie de la forêt, elle était plus presente sur nos premiers enregistrements. Maintenant c'est plutôt une image de tristesse et de desespoir que l'on mets en avant... La forêt représente vraiment quelques choses de mysterieux - c'est l'image que l'on a voulu renvoyer du groupe depuis toujours. La où je suis né, il y a enormement de forêt. Quand on y a passé beaucoup de temps, l'image quelle represente reste gravée pour toujours en soi... Pour ce qui est de la dualité de ma musique, c'est quelque chose de difficile à expliquer, pour moi c'est quelque chose de très naturel. C'est dans mes emotions, parfois calme et triste, parfois dechainé et desperé... parfois les deux en meme temps. Ma musique represente la tristesse que je ressent au fond de moi, elle me permet de la faire ressortir pour en être libéré. Grace à cela je reussi à être quelqu'un d'équilibré en dehors de ma musique. C'est difficile à expliquer. Ma musique c'est moi, c'est ce que je suis...
Quels sont mes demons ? Surement une infinie tristesse au fond de moi, tout simplement.

Maelstrom: Je suis en train aussi de faire une entrevue avec un autre groupe actuellement. On a parlé un peu de la notion que le black n'est pas pour s'amuser. Qu'en penses-tu de cette idée?

Stéfan Kozak: C'est une évidence en éffet... Pour moi, le black me permet de completement évacuer ma tristesse, ce qui me permet d'être plus normal ensuite. Mais comme toujours il y a des éxeptions, ainsi certains morceaux de Finntroll ou de Nokturnal Mortem sonne un peu comme une fête païenne, mais restent completement black dans l'esprit !

Baalberith: Je me permets d'intervenir sur ce débat. Personellement je suis entièrement ok avec toi, Roberto. je suis un bon vivant, mais quand je suis dans le black, il y a un esprit à respecter!

Maelstrom: J'ai remarqué dans le nouveau album un truc que tu as dit qui date de 1980 (!). "A celui qui dans le metal noir, contemple la tristesse..." Quel importance est-ce que cette expression de musique a-t'elle?

Baalberith: Pour la dédidace 1980, car c'en est une, t'es pas le premier à me le demander. En fait il s'agit d'une dédicace à mon meilleur pote, fan du groupe et surtout de ce morceau ("La Terreur me contemple" de l'album Waltz in the midst of Trees). Donc, plutôt que de mettre son nom (ça fait un peu con), j'ai voulu être plus subtil en mettant sa date de naissance! :)

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