interview by: Roberto Martinelli

Enslaved just keep getting better and better and better. Finally, it seems as if the undisputed rulers of the Viking metal genre have leveled off to a place where their output remains at a consistent state of great. After a year of searching, I managed to get guitarist Ivar Peersen on the phone to discuss his band’s latest triumph and the movements in the Enslaved camp. (Also be sure to check out Peersen’s thoughts and feelings on porn here)

Maelstrom: I’m sure the first thing on fans’ minds is Roy Kronheim and Dirge Rep leaving. There was a bit on the press release about you all getting together and Kronheim also deciding that he wanted to leave. Is there much of a story behind this?

Ivar Peersen: Yeah. After we finished Monumension, we saw that we reached into a lot of different directions at the same time. There was a strong need in the band to focus and choose a somewhat narrower path. This led to an exposure of different opinions from Kronheim, as opposed to the rest of us. We wanted to go in a darker, more negative direction, while Roy wanted to go more rock ‘n’ roll, stoner kind of direction. This simply didn’t compute.

It was obvious that we could have compromised, but it would have led to bickering and we would have eventually had to break up in a more hostile way. We managed to split and remain friends. Bergen is a little town.

Maelstrom: What about the drummer?

Ivar Peersen: That was a different story. He was more unhappy with the album and I guess what Enslaved was doing. He wanted to go back underground, so to speak. He has this other band called Orcustus that is more old school black metal. He didn’t like the part of being part of Enslaved playing live and recording stuff.

Maelstrom: I got that DVD that you put out. Have you seen it?

Ivar Peersen: Yes. Hehe.

Maelstrom: There’s a really terrible interview on there.

Ivar Peersen: Yeah.

Maelstrom: It’s really funny. They have all these jumpy, awkward camera angles. And there are quick cuts of him looking very, very annoyed.

Ivar Peersen: Maybe that’s the issue that put him over the edge.

Maelstrom: Otherwise, it’s a very nice DVD. You’ll have to tell me about your experience. It’s the third DVD that I’ve seen shot in that same club in Poland. What’s the story with the audience? Why does it seem staged? Was it just a regular show?

Ivar Peersen: It was intended to be a DVD show. I think they could have skipped all the shots of the audience. The show was good, but the audience thing was lame. There were like three other bands that day (making DVDs), making different kinds of music. If we could do the same show with the same setup and equipment, say, back here in Norway, or somewhere else where it was more announced as an Enslaved gig, the whole interaction with the audience would have been better.

Maelstrom: That’s what I thought, too. The other DVDs from I’ve seen filmed from that venue has an audience in which three people up front love it, and there’s this huge gap between the front and the back. It doesn’t seem like a metal show at all.

Ivar Peersen: It’s a bit like a car accident. A lot of people want to see it but don’t necessarily want to get involved.

Maelstrom: Hehe. I noticed you didn’t play any songs off of Eld. By the way, one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life was when you played the Double Door in Chicago in 2001 with Debris and Electric Wizard. You didn’t play any stuff off of Eld then, either. Do you not like to play any of that material?

Ivar Peersen: We do, but the live show varies with the lineup. For the DVD, we had to try and represent as much possible variety. We wanted this DVD not only to be a DVD release, but to coincide with the release of the new album. We wanted to make this experiment of recording these songs live before they were recorded in the studio. This meant we had to make the selection of other songs fit in. I guess also Dirge was not too big a fan of the Eld stuff.

Now we’re using this session drummer whose style is much more comparable to the drumming on Eld.

Maelstrom: Who’s the new drummer? Might we know him?

Ivar Peersen: His name is Kato. He used to play in Red Harvest. He’s been in the Portuguese band Sirius.

Maelstrom: I noticed there’s nothing off of Blodhemn, either. That’s your fastest, angriest record. Do you not like to play stuff off that record, either? Is it the same answer?

Ivar Peersen: It’s the same, but different. We used to do “Ansuz Astral” off that album. It’s one of the best Enslaved songs. But it wasn’t on that DVD. I don’t know why. It will surface again for sure.

Maelstrom: Let’s talk about the new record. You went from having all Norwegian lyrics with English translations, to having English lyrics; and now you have no lyrics in the booklet. The lyrics are online. Was there a conscious decision to this?

Ivar Peersen: It just happened. We learned to trust the people we work with more and more. This time we left everything up to this two man team. They made the booklet. They said the lyrics were great, but found a style for the booklet. They wanted to have a theme a lot like the front cover: a kind of silent atmosphere. They asked us if it were possible to just have key words from the lyrics in the booklet, in order to keep it quiet that way. The lyrics would make it noisy and spoil the tension. But we still wanted to have the lyrics available, so we put them on the web (at http://www.enslaved.no/belowthelights)

Maelstrom: There’s one song in particular I wanted to ask you about: The first song, “And Fire Swept Clean the Earth.” It’s quite a romantic and sad song, with the opening and closing keyboard. The lyrics, too: “...nothing left to strangle...Would the mothers be crying if they saw torches in our hands?...kisses placed upon my cheek and all color came back/ melting in solid blue tune.” What is this about? I feel a bit of a Ragnarok theme, but at the same time there’s more. What’s the bit about strangling about?

Ivar Peersen: The feeling I had when I wrote it was very positive. Very calm, so to speak. It has this Ragnarok quality to it. I was lucky enough to experience one second of not wishing or wanting anything. Just feeling like this was a good moment. It was pretty absurd. I felt that for instance, this would be a good moment for everything to end. It came out for me as a really beautiful thing.

I think the particular line you mentioned, “nothing left to strangle,” is a way to look at the world sometimes. It’s this race to find something alive and organic to strangle. Something to oppress or mechanize or automate.

Maelstrom: What does the title Below the Lights mean?

Ivar Peersen: It’s more or less a tribute to the idea of these darker places - these sub-worlds - that come along with all existences, so to speak. Our consciousness being coupled with a sub-consciousness. In mythology, you have the gods and beneath the gods, you’ll have trolls or dark creatures that lurk. It’s kind of an acknowledgement that in a lot of cases these dark places are where life or ideas spring from. To make it the most basic metaphor: where human life comes from - the womb - is not a light or nice place. It’s pretty grotesque and dark. It’s the same with the soil. Stuff dies and decomposes, and up comes something nice. It’s not a negative and positive in the tradition of light/dark. It’s more some thoughts on seeing that they’re both there.

Maelstrom: Here’s another set of words: Omnipotent eternal Pagan. Explain the choice of those words.

Ivar Peersen: That’s our little haiku. I think it describes, obviously, Paganistic philosophy. It’s something that will always be there, the acknowledgement of history, of organic life, of nature, of the universe and of uncertainty. When you embrace all of these, it’s something powerful.

Maelstrom: What do you think of all these intolerant bands that align themselves under the Pagan label?

Ivar Peersen: I think it contradicts itself. I think the whole idea of Paganism is beyond segregation. That would be like using religion to decide which kind of music is best. It’s different, that’s the whole point. As I see it, You’re free to prefer whatever you want. As Crowley said - he’s in many ways the ultimate modern Pagan - “do what thou wilt,” but in that sense allowing others to do what they want.

Of course you will find all kinds of intolerant people in any political or religious groups. Just because there are racists within the Pagan movement, it doesn’t make the movement racist. I think it’s great when you ask the question. Enslaved always does things straightforward. We never tread silent. We don’t want to whisper all this stuff: our pride and the culture. If people misunderstand, that’s sad, but in a way it’s good, too, because it’ll provoke somebody to actually confront us. And we can answer them, and we’ll have told another person what we mean. I think the real destructive thing is the apathy; that people might say, “this might be intolerant.” And they don’t do anything about it.

Maelstrom: You’re involved with Bergen Music (http://www.bergenmusic.no) Is that a new venture?

Ivar Peersen: Hehe. No, Bergen Music is a name for something that serves as a gathering point for all my various musical projects. We also book some gigs. We have some theme nights at pubs.

Maelstrom: I was wondering if that’s why you dropped your stage name (Bjornson) for this record.

Ivar Peersen: Beyond a personal thing - Bjornson would have been the way I would have been named in the Pagan tradition - using Peersen from time to time is a comment that we’re revivalitsts and at the same time want to be part of what’s going on now. I think both names are equally true. Well, to be honest, I think the whole name thing is overrated, anyway.

Maelstrom: There’s a guest musician on Below the Lights by the name of Inge Rypdal. Is he any relation to Terje Rypdal?

Ivar Peersen: Yes! Wow! I want to tell him that [you asked that]. We’ve had some comments outside the metal world, but you’re the first metal journalist to ask that. Inge’s father is Terje Rypdal’s cousin. He sounds a little bit like him, doesn’t he?

Maelstrom: Yes. I was also reading about how you love Star Trek. Are you a full geek, a half geek or a closet geek?

Ivar Peersen: I think a half geek would be right. I’m into it and totally enjoy it, but at the same time I wouldn’t say it has the answers to all questions in life, although it poses a lot of good ones. I’m not a geek in religious terms, like other people are.

Maelstrom: You have a keyboardist now. You never had a live keyboardist before, that I’m aware of. Will you have a full time player from now on?

Ivar Peersen: We’re going to have a keyboard player, but a different one. The guy you saw on the DVD is good, (laugh) but he’s so incredibly lazy that it’s impossible to have him in the band.

Maelstrom: It’s funny, because he has the smallest job in the music.

Ivar Peersen: Oh, yeah, but in terms of having to actually put the keyboard up on stage and plug in all the cords...it’s a lot of stuff to carry around. It’s too much for him, so we found another guy.

Maelstrom: What do you think of the production of Below the Lights?

Ivar Peersen: I think it’s great. I’m really happy with it. It’s got this sort of Enslaved rawness. How do you say, a live feeling? It’s not something that would win us the high fidelity award, but at the same time it’s our sound, and we’re getting closer to this Enslaved sound we’ve been trying to chase around. It’s partly because we have no idea what we’re doing technically; we’re more kind of, “give it more punch!” And the engineer will say, “what the fuck do you mean, ‘give it more punch’?”

And he’ll turn something and we’ll say, “stop, now it sounds good.” We see that we have a long way to go before we reach what we want with the sound.

Maelstrom: Is Pytten still the main guy? There’s a whole lot of credits for who produced and engineered the record.

Ivar Peersen: We split it up between the drums and guitars. Pytten did the bass, vocals and keyboards. He’s really good with this old school stuff. Especially the bass. He’s a great bass player.

Maelstrom: Ivar, that’s all I have for you. Thanks for calling.

Ivar Peersen: Thanks for the interview, man.

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