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Marco - Hi Christofer, this is Marco from GryphonMetal. First, I thank you for your kindness and give my compliments for the wonderful new album. I would like to start this interview with a question that has particular importance for all of your Italian fans: will you tour in Italy? And if yes, will you have more than one date?
Christofer - We always played in Italy in every European Tour, so even if we haven't scheduled yet the European tour, it is likely that we will play in Italy. More than one date, I don't think so. Of course we would like to play more dates, but it's a matter of interest among the promoters. If there would be a lot of promoters booking shows with us, I won't mind making a 20-dates tour in Italy, but it has to do with interest, of course. Naturally also with many, because we are not a cheap band to book, because we have a lot of people with us and need a lot of extra equipment, we are so many people that we cannot go on a regular tour bus, we have a double decker, and all these things. That means that if there's an interst, there are enough fans we may tell to a promoter if he wants to... I mean, personally I'd like to go to the South of Italy as well. We played in a lot of places in the North, like Torino, Milano, Rimini and so on. I'd personally like to see Rome and places south as well, even Naples, but it's up to Italian promoters.
Your music has changed a lot since the first albums. Starting from Lepaca Kliffoth you are giving a more symphonic aspect to your music. Can you tell us what brought this change?
Well, actually I don't think there was attention to a specific record, because if you listen to the third album of "Symphonic Masses" you'll hear also keyboards there and symphonic stuff like in "The eye of the eclipse", "Princess Namaah", and even on the second album "Beyond Sanctorum" we used keyboards, and we used some female vocal and clean male vocals and a symphonic approach in songs like "Paths" and "Symphony of the Dead"... I think it's a natural process, I mean already with the second album we took the steps towards what we are today, and they were just different steps taken with each record... especially in the use of classical singers, but there has been a natural step with each record, I think we would have never been what we are today if it wasn't for each and every album that we did in the past. A path even from the beginning... I mean even with the first records... today you can say they were all death metal, but when we wrote the songs for the first album they were actually very original, those songs were written in the Eighties, it was recorded in 1990 and it was released in 1991. And even in 1991 when it was released we were considered to be a kind of "avant-garde" death metal band, from different mags, if you compared us with other bands; so we've always had the intention of being something different, being original.
You have recorded Lemuria / Sirius B with more than 170 musicians. How hard will it be to reproduce such sonorities live?
Actually there's only 164 musicians, and there's 172 peoples involved into the record, these excluding engineers, producers... but only 164 musicians to be precise. It doesn't make a difference if there's 164 or if there's 80 or 50 people playing on the record, because we cannot bring that with us live anyway, so it pretty doesn't make a difference. What you do with the orchestra is that we take the raw information, that means the sounds recorded, the way they sound that and that's what we bring with us on a digital multitrack tape machine, so we can actually bring real orchestral sound with us, sound information that sounds like a difference from the record, but it would be a little difference, so with a multitrack we can always make it different from day to day. So really if there's an orchestra with 100 people or an orchestra with 40 people playing it won't really make a difference... we're not bringing so many people with us anyway.
"Secret of the Runes" was a splendid concept on the Nordic Mythology, for the first time without the "fantasy" embellishment and imprecision that characterises the "usual" metal songs about the Norse Pantheon. But what are the ideas behind Lemuria? And what behind Sirius B? Can you tell us about the songs and their lyrics?
Well, there's quite a lot of songs, and you don't want me to comment all of them! (laughs) I will comment a few of them! Well... Lemuria - the title track... ah, first of all they are not a concept album - the lyrics are very different individually. Well Lemuria is a sunken continent similar to Atlantis, but according to mythology it was much bigger and it was much longer ago... in some mythology we have that Atlantis, Sumeria, and Ancient Egypt were actually former colonies of Lemuria; archaeologically there was this "Land of Mu" but Lemuria is something more mythological. Other songs deal with Classic Greek Mythology, like
"An Arrow from the Sun", "Prometheus Entfesselt", "Typhon".
Then you have more Nordic Mythology in "Uthark Runa"... Egyptian history like
"Son of the Sun" about Akhnaten, the heretic pharaoh that invented monotheism... ancient Babylonian mythology in
"Blood of Kingu"; there's one about a Russian Mystic, the one about Rasputin, "Khlysti
Evangelist" - he was a member of a sect called Khlysty; and one about Gurdjief, a guy which invented a new philosophy called The Fourth Way, and it's called
"The Voyage of Gurdjief"; one from the Hindu traditions called
"Kali Yuga"; and one song about Punt that is a kingdom that was disappearing into the Sahara desert, which is quite interesting.
All the tracks of your new albums are perfectly attuned to the lyrics. For instance, Call of Dagon is about a Water God and sounds like flowing water; Kali Yuga really gives the anxious feeling of living in a dark age, and so on. How do you write your songs? Does music come first? Or do you first write down lyrics? Or what other method of composition do you use?
We always write music first. And then I sit down and bring all together with Karlsson to write the lyrics... sometimes I already have the feelings that this song should be about this or that, sometimes Thomas (Karlsson) he has other ideas, sometimes we just get ideas from the title of the album, or topics we are discussing.. actually when it comes to decide to
what song we're writing lyrics, Thomas has quite a lot of freedom, he "feels" the music and chooses the lyrics. Usually all the melodies are already written when he gets the stuff, I usually write a kind of mould to the lyrics, and I put some words into the melody so that he has the "colour" of the words and then he replaces them with the lyrics.
There is a sort of difference between the styles of the new albums, at least in my own impression: where Lemuria is more progressive, Sirius B seems more symphonic, to the point of classical music. Has this been done with a purpose or is it just my impression?
Actually we wrote 55 songs, and we realized we had over thirty songs that we wanted to put on the record, so we decided we should make three albums and actually that is the reason we released two at the same time instead of recording them one by one and promoting them in the proper form, that would have been too time consuming. This is why we decided to record and release them now for they are actually part one and two out of a trilogy.
However, when we have all the material overviewed it felt natural to place all the material to make it a bit more progressive, and that's actually the album which is coming up later; and one record would feel a bit more symphonic, a bit more melodic and also had a bit more heavy metal influences, and that's Sirius B; and Lemuria is actually the one collecting the rest of the songs that we wanted to put on a record, and that would make Lemuria the most... diverse of all three, the most varied. And it would become more clear when we'll have the third one mixed up.
A question about artwork: your covers have always been characterised by symbols or undefined images, except for notable exceptions like Theli or Live in Midgard. In this new work you have again opted for definite images on the covers. On the other hand, the booklets are always more illustrated. Who comes up with the artwork and packaging ideas?
This time I worked very close together with Thomas Ewerhard, the guy that did all the graphics. Normally I give them pretty much free hand, I'm just telling them the context and they can make ideas and just say if I like it or not, and if there's something I like we use them. But this time we worked pretty close together, and also with the management - because our manager here has a very good eye for graphic stuff. The idea for the front sleeve of Lemuria was mine, actually. As for Sirius B, I just told him the concept, and he gave me an image, and I just thought that maybe a symbol or something looking... you know... kind of "spacey" but not really referring to astronomy, that it would be something... well, it's hard to describe; it shouldn't look science fiction but at the same time should be clearly some sort of "universal" image; and it has been hard because is a delicate line between what is good for this and what is not.
He came up with this symbol first, and it was in the right direction but not pretty much what we had in mind, so we made changes, came up with additional ideas, and I would say that the difference between the first idea and the finished artwork is equally big as if you compare the music between the first album "...Of Darkness" and this one, is a very long journey with the graphics we did.
As to the pictures in the booklet, he had very much free hand; but he went deeply into the lyrics, made a lot of research about the topics, and tried to illustrate them.
You have clearly estabilished a true and magnificent style of metal, that is really complex and somehow I feel a very "learned" kind of music. But what influenced you in this style? Do you have favourite bands - or songs - not necessarily from metal that influenced your symphonic style?
When it comes to metal, you can hear that even once in a while, we are influenced by Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and other big metal bands; also, I am influenced by several of the 70s symphonic and progressive rock band... I don't think we sound anything like those bands, sometimes I'd say we have the "feeling" of these bands lives on in our songs. E.L.O. is another band we are influenced by, and you can see it in Lemuria with all those mellotrons; but even with the E.L.O. feeling you cannot find a song that sounds like them.
Now there is a sort of "social" question: do you really feel we are living in Kali Yuga, I mean, in a dark age of iron and suffering?
Yes, certainly. You just look out of your window and you'll see...
And one more "social" question: what do you think about the connection between music and Internet? Do you think that free exchange does help or hinder the true music?
I think for metal bands it helps...because in some countries there is no real distribution channels of this kind of music. Think of those countries that recently came out of the communism, or like China or India... I think that it helps if you can check out how something sounds in the Internet, and pretty cool if you can get it. I think that metal fans are very "quality-aware": they really don't find any real alternative for CD-quality sound. Burning CD on home computer, that may be, but not MP3s, they don't give that quality, and metal fans are aware of this. Also in metal there are limited edition CDs, and people actually like to own the original. It means something to have the original release with the booklet and artwork.
I think it's much worse for the pop industry of disco and stuff like Britney Spears. Among of Britney Spears you find people that say "oh, I don't care about the difference between MP3 and CD... they're all the same". This kind of people is always behind that kind of crap pop music.
Maybe it's a threat to music industry itself, but I don't think it's a big threat for the metal industry. I think the burning of CDs at home has definitely made the sales a bit harder, but this is, I think, mainly making new fans. People who already has bought a couple of burned CDs, they won't have the originals. You don't mix up original CDs and burned ones, they look wrong on your record shelf.
I think that maybe the problem would be for the new band. There is no loyalty among the "fans" of new band. And actually I think that there are a lot of new bands producing CDs that are not worth recording. I think the next generation of metal fans will be much less loyal, and there's a lot of new band recording cheaply, a lot of new bands that should be in their garage for at least a couple of years more. And there is also a lot of people who can't buy everything and will resort to CD burning and stuff like that.
You can notice this fact with Nuclear Blast. I remember that when we signed with Nuclear Blast, if you'd sold 10000 copies of your first album you were guaranteed that you would make another record. If you sold less than that there was a chance that you were off because the sales were less than enough. And then later this became fair stuff, but now with other labels when they sign new bands they think that for example 3000 copies are OK. And this clearly show how much harder is become to introduce new bands, which is partly due to CD burnings and partly because the market is getting "saturated". And unfortunately it's so cheap now to make a good looking promo; everybody can make their promo on a PC stuff and all can have really cool covers and the band names standing really cool on front, and people are been buying them, and they don't realize they are buying crap, so they should be more careful about new bands.
The last question will be the most complex one, of course: I now propose our typical Game of the Tower (for the bands we interview for the very first time): you are on a crumbling, dangerous tower with 3
bands, and you can push down 2 of them, saving only one... but I will be very naughty this time and I will propose some famous metal exponents for you to "kill". Let's see... Korn, Metallica, and Man
o'War... think carefully! You can rid the world of some of them, who would you choose to save?
If I'd to save one of these bands... Man o'War, certainly. Korn... I don't give a shit about them. Metallica... well, I like Metallica, but their latest album is a bit of crap... I 've been liking Metallica, but I
think they took too much cocaine and drunk too much... so from a couple of years now I would be very surprised if they could be able of making a good album again.
While Mano'War is a band... well, they can be lost about the lyrics but I think they've really contributing with something, their first record was out in 1981... and they were a bit ahead of their time. I think they're very very underestimated for the music and the impact and influence on
Metal. I really admire a band that can play this kind of "eghties" Metal in the '90s... I think they're really cool.
Very Well Christofer, thanks for your time... I hope to hear you again - live!
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29/07/2004
THERION : interview with Christofer Johnsson
Niederrohrdorf
- Switzerland