InterviewSlumber

10.12.2004

SLUMBER : interview with Ehsan Kalantarpour

e-mail interview by Salvo Russo ___ 03.12.2004

organized by Karmageddon Media and gryphonmetal.ch

official website: www.slumber.nu

6 STRINGS ARE ENOUGH

Salvo: Congratulations for this first album...one of the my favourite in this 2004...what is the secret of your music? a new dimension for death....in my opinion your songs get elements from many bands...but you're very original....may you explain the secret?
Ehsan: Thanks man, glad you enjoyed it. If I would explain the secret, it wouldn't be a secret anymore, so let us keep the answer untold. I wouldn't wanna kill the mystery oooohhh. It's up to us to create, and for you to find out. I'm not going to make it unnecessarily easy.

Can you explain to our readers the story of Slumber? How Slumber was formed?
Me, Jari and Siavosh met one night in early 2002, just to jam some with each other. We discovered we had very good connection and understood each others ideas really well. That jam session led to our first song labyrinth. We were totally in love in the song at that time, so we decided to meet again the week after. One thing lead to another, we decided to make a band out of it. We recorded our first demo Dreamscape a couple of months later. At this time we recruited more members so we could perform live. We didn't do much with our first demo, since it didn't represent how we could sound. One year later we recorded the second demo, Seclusion, which hooked us a contract. In the beginning of 2004, we went to Skara, a little shitty town here in Sweden, so record the album, that was our two demos re-recorded including one new song, the title track Fallout.

As I can see the Slumber line up gets 6 elements ,for live shows...7! How is a live Slumber show?What can we expect into a Slumber live performance?
That aint exactly right. We recently parted from Daniel Beckman, who was the live keyboarder, because we brought him in the band because I couldn't handle all the keyboards by myself live, but in time I learned to do that, so his role became unnecessary.
Slumber is extremely powerful music live. On stage we live our music to it's peak, and express our true passion for our tunes. It's an experience, that I guarantee.

Is there another album scheduled?
We are working on the songs for the upcoming album all the free time we have. If nothing goes wrong, we will spend two months, instead of two pressured weeks, in the studio summer 2005, recording the new album.

Nowadays...are you completely satisfied of the work made concerning songs, production, arrangements? What would you change (if you could)?
Of course not, what kind of artists would we be if we were completely satisfied with what we made ? In my opinion, in order to evolve, one must learn to despise that which has been done and can't be changed, and love what is being created. There are many things that could of been better, in all factors. But we try not to hook ourselves up on things we could of done much better, instead we are 100% focused on the next album, not making the same mistakes.

There are also some good passages that remind me of prog-metal...do you appreciate this style?
I don't know which bands that fall into that category, so it's kind of hard to tell whether I like the style or not.

Now a technical questions about the guitars... What do you think about 7strings guitars ..or 8 strings guitar (Meshuggah)?
Doesn't interest me. I think 6 strings are enough, all musical spectrum is filled.

What do you think about the actual death-doom metal scene? In your opinion what are the most valid bands?

I don't care what other bands do in this genre. I don't listen to it. For me, Death is often emotionenless, just technical musicians fistfucking their instruments, and Doom is too un-dramatique. Too extreme music in my opinion, tends to get boring.. I need a more colourful type of music, with varietys of emotions involved, like Pink Floyd.
There's only one death-metal record I have in my collection that I still listen to and dig as hell Testament - the Gatering

Is there a style different from metal that you like to listen to?
Style doesn't mean anything to me. I like music that's sad/dark/melancholy.. now it could be anything, death, doom, pop, rock whatever. As long as it has a atmospheric and dark sound, and I can sense the passion in the musicians. It's very important to me that I can feel that those who made the music really had great passion for it, in order for me to give in to the music completely, passionately listening.

Give to our readers a good reason to buy your album!!!
I can't come up with a good reason not to buy the album.

Ok...As my last question I propose our usual and typical Gryphonmetal last question for the bands we interview for the firs time... The game of the Tower' : there is a very high tower and on this tower three bands are waiting for you and you have to push down two of them to let them fall saving the third one. For you there are: KATATONIA, OPETH, TIAMAT!!!!
I would give all members of Katatonia and Tiamat a parachute and then push them down, and then I would sit down, smoke some weed and ask Opeth to play for me all night.

Thank you!!!

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