ENSLAVED : SAFETY IN BONDAGE

-Here’s your new Lp, ‘Below the lights’ : could present it to us ? Does it continue the same vein than ‘Monumension’ ?

- It certainly continues down the road from ‘Monumension’, some of those directions, but also it’s a little bit more focused on this one : as I sit now after having some time to listen to ‘Below the lights’ and compare it to ‘Monumension’ I think that for us, at this point ‘Monumension’ maybe reached the maximum level of spreading the concentration that we thought that we needed to be able to keep the energy in the music, and we needed to be a little bit more focused again, so we took the darker parts of ‘Monumension’ and explored them for ‘below the lights’

-After the recording, your guitar and drums players left the band : we you afraid that the band stops for that reason or were you decided to go on with Grutle ?

-There were two very different situations : first with R. Kronheim, who was very close to the link of this focus that we talked about, because he was pulling in one direction, more hard rock, more stoner like while me and Dirge were tending to make it a lot darker, harder kind of music a little bit in between. So the thing is when we wanted to make it more focused for ‘Below the lights’, it became evident that we would disagree on almost everything. We took a discussion at a very early point and we agreed that it was more important to stay friends on a personal level and maybe don’t play in the same band and do a void, because I’ve seen it so many times that if you continue too long, you have very different interests and you just end up in a long series of compromises, where nobody’s really satisfied, nobody has his own ambitions fulfilled. One day, we thought there was too much friction and Ivar and myself didn’t want to let the band down and told him that it might be better for the band if he left, which he did, and then the speed really became faster again. So he’s got inspired a lot, made a lot of demos with his own project which is pure cultivated stoner and psychedelic music and it was something positive for us. For Dirge, we were a little bit more surprised, to be honest, it was immediately after finishing recording ‘Below the lights’, he announced he wanted to leave the band and when we asked why, he said he was very satisfied. He said this was the reason for choosing this time, that he finally felt that he achieved something really high with Enslaved, but he’s been thinking for many years that he wanted to work on more obscure stuff, more underground, pure really noisy black metal kind of things, and he started his own band to do this. But then we thought that there’s nothing we can do about it, there’s nothing we can change to keep him in the band, so we had just keep on going. We already had a session guitarist, which then became a permanent member at the same time because we thought being two people would be too little to keep on rehearsing. We haven’t found a steady new drummer but we’re close to many people in other bands, so drummers help us out when they have time for the live shows, and in the rest of the process we worked a lot to make new stuff in the studio, so there was no stopping at any point.

-Now you’re three, with Arve on guitar : will you look for new members in the future ?

-Yes, we have to find a member number 4, but who’ll be this time really convinced because of that. It’s easier to think that R. and Dirge were members of the band for a short time because it sounds like that, this band is from 91/ 92 and they joined in 97, but when you look from 97 until the end of 2002, it is old time members of the band, almost half time which has a really heavy impact on this. It’s not just to find somebody who can play the stuff, they also need to go on the road, to be part of it. We also have this theory, the same as with Arve, as he joined, it’s a guy we were becoming good friends with and then we thought maybe we could ask him because he’s a good guitarist and he’s already a good friend and the same thing happened with the drummer. It should be somebody who finds Enslaved rather than Enslaved searching for someone.

-So we can say that this record represent a new start for the band ?

-The continuation is very important on that one because we want to prove that the core of Enslaved remains intact ; it’s a pretty absurd situation, when you see a fifty per cent reduction of the band in a very short period of time. It’s kind of like when the results for ‘Below the lights’ show that it’s actually one of the most successful albums we have, it proves not only that of course because me and Ivar has been there from the beginning, so we have the advantage of this but also Enslaved has a sort of life of its own, that’s the idea, this kind of way of making music that started to work a little bit on his own, and sometimes it’s like you’re wondering if you keep the band going or if it’s the band which keeps us going ! I think it’s just a pool of strength but of course it’s gonna be a new direction because of the new people coming.

-Is it special themes or sources of inspiration for this album ?

-It’s different considering the music and the lyrics, it’s got a darker texture and darker content and I think it could be linked to a lot of stuff as I said both to wish to do something more direct and darker after ‘Monumension’ but also I think we should consider the situation of the band with members leaving and this triggers a lot of negative energy and instead to try to stop it, we’d rather let it happen, continue this and try to release a lot of darker feelings into this album.

-Are you still very inspired by Northern Mythology ? What gods in particular ?

-I suppose we’re looking into lots of other weird stuff too, but for Enslaved it’s still basically around the Northern mythology. But it’s getting more and more up to date anyway, because we put in it more and more of our own, it comes having more and more courage each time to give our own interpretation of it. Especially for this album, I think you can see connection, as ‘Monumension’ had this parallel to the nine steps to the Ragnarok, the Armaggedon ; this album, on some level, is depicting the feeling of death but I feel there’s a very different way of regarding that thing, this mythological concept in contrast with how we see things and the society today with the Christians, perception of death is something fine, something you try to avoid or when you think about it, you try to imagine that something nice will happen in afterlife, you’ll play the harp so don’t be afraid, but while in this Pagan tradition or Buddhism, there’s something pushing you to get more out of life. I think this death/life cycle is very present in reality.

-Could you tell some records which changed your life ?

-I listened to a lot of music when I was a kid, first on the radio and then I got into heavy metal but the first with a huge meaning was Pink Floyd and especially ‘Dark side of the moon’ which I got when I was eleven for my birthday, a gift from my father and, when he came to work, I could stay up all night listening to this album again and again, not only for the nice songs and the nice guitars into it but for the whole atmosphere ; then ,‘A blaze in the northern Sky’ and ‘De Mysteriis...’ by Mayhem, we were very young and listen to death metal but when we heard these records, so much fell into place and I see now of course that it made us to start Enslaved, which gave us possibilities of doing a lot of fun stuff. And then later, King Crimson with ‘In the court of the crimson king’ which really managed to shock me. I think that the discovering of these moods for music, from Pink Floyd to extreme metal and then to this discovering of the progressive stuff of the seventies would be the three major musical influences.

-What do you listen to today ?

-It’s not very new, but the Tool’s records are really going on my stereo for a couple of times every weeks since it came up. The new Darkthrone, and that’s been really kind of re-discovering a lot of stuff with that, the new Pale Forest, and a new very exciting Swedish band called Cult Of Luna, which appeal very much to me because of their energy, like Neurosis and Godspeed black emperor.

-Website of the band : important tool ?

-It’s been very important but also very frustrating : it can be that way for many bands because of the way maybe the company couldn’t afford to have somebody to run the webpage, we’re always dependent and we’ve been lucky to have friends which know how to do those thing and put it up, especially last year which has been enormously difficult to update and to keep it fresh and it’s a little bit frustrating to see that out there and nothing happens, and of course you cannot push the people, they already work as volunteers, they go to school or work, so now we’re in a process of trying to find a new solution to get away, because we don’t want to push people who already do favors, and we don’t have a lot of time ourselves. But now we’re rebuilding it, so we can directly access very easily and put up news and stuff like this, whereas now, we have to send the e-Mails to the guy, when he has the time to put it into code. This is definitely important, when you see the forum, it’s cool to see people from different countries that have different questions and sometimes pretty good ideas for the band, or before a gig, people put the songs they want to hear, this part of the Internet is good.

-Internet : big user yourself ?

-Yes, I have a middle university degree in information science so I work a lot with computers, but I have to admit that I have always had problems with computers, because I like the information bit, I like the post bit of E-mails but beside that I have a lot of aversion to it because of the level of how much we depend on computers, if you look at the amount of errors, it’s just incompleteness built upon incompleteness all the time, because that’s an industry which is so driven by demands for efficiency or productivity that stuff is always been released way ahead before it’s finished and being tested, and there’s so many examples of it : there’s a paradox because when you studied it, you don’t get so technologically optimistic, for example, ambulances get sent to the wrong parts of the city because wrong parameters are entered into databases. I think we need computers, but it also needs to be limited on some level. Also as far as communications are concerned, for my young siblings and their friends, everything is based around the Internet, E-mails and I feel a little bit pulled between being interested in technology and at the same time, I feel, as a pagan, that we need to keep a little bit of human and real focus. Like in music, I think Enslaved is a good counter reaction to going to school with computers or go to work with synthesizers because you know how they’re gonna work, it’s gonna be sometimes a little bit out of tune, but at least you know every point in it, and if it fucks up you know what’s wrong with it, like for the guitars : there’s no sound, there’s a string broken, so you can change it : I like that ! I’m working on a side project right now, more based on machines and guitars, and we’ll put out an unofficial demo sometime in the winter, a mixture of ambient in the 70’s mode like Klaus Schulze or Brian Eno, but I want it organic, I like the idea of the sequencers, that everything is preprogrammed and that the songs are made by simply turning on and off the different matrixes and sequencers and connecting them, and stuff like that, I like the physicality of the sequencers, and it will be mixed with heavy doom metal.

-If Enslaved were a movie ?

-That would be a dark David Lynch movie, something in the vein of ‘Lost Highway’, ‘Mulholland drive’ and ‘Twin peaks’, those really dirty fucked up movies, full of chaos and panic : the Bob character is one of the most scary thing, especially when you start to realize that he can change his form from person to person, and his aspect with his psyche ; I would like to compose something for a movie, but we have no project in this sense. There’s a very active movie fan scene in Norway, especially in Bergen and we stay in touch a little bit, and sometimes, when you go out and get drunk, you talk to one of these guys who makes movies, and I talked to one, saying that if it was for something different and he wanted to try somebody else, he could contact us because we’ve done strange stuff before, and we would like to try something like that.

-Many black metal bands gave up make up and corpse paint, and musically tended toward heavy or progressive rock : was it, at your sense, an inevitable evolution ?

-As I’ve said, I think it’s very natural and happen to a lot of bands when they do this, but at the same time, I think it’s possible, Immortal is a good example of how to change just a little bit and become something new, so after ‘At the heart of winter’, suddenly they put this little touch of more hard rock approach attitude in some ways and you have a new band which is totally successful. I know that from experience too myself, these moves are often genius ones : just change one little thing a little bit instead of thinking you have to change everything. And you have some bands which change a lot and then seem to be go back again, because it’s really strange, if you play in a band for ten years, you gave a certain image being a typical black metal and the next moment you’re supposed to be on stage and be gothic or whatever, I think it fuck with your attitude, it’s not often so successful, I know, that especially the ancients think that’s easy to make popular music and poppy songs, but most of them fall flat on the face because it’s more difficult to play something simple with success.

-After more than ten years with Enslaved, how do you consider the road of the band ? Are you satisfied with how things evolved ?

-I guess it’s a very good position to be where we are right now, because if of course we could have had more success etc and maybe some external factors, if this and this may had happen, maybe this and this would have happen, but on our own responsibility we could have worked harder or done things quicker or better or whatever, but the bottom line is at least we have only produced albums we’re proud of and one of the most healthy signs about the band is if you put up there every album released, there’s something special about all of them which I’m really proud of, it’s not like we want to hide away the beginning of our career or anything, it’s very different, it’s a red line, and one of the greatest compliment for me is when people tell me : you put on the new one or old ones, they can sound totally different styles but you can hear who’s playing, even if it’s different studios, instruments or amps, there’s a way of doing it, we feel that we have pride in what we do.

-Next projects ? Touring Europe ?

-I don’t know : it will not be before the winter, as we work to put up both an American and European tour, Europe first obviously : this will happen sometime I guess in the winter, the dates should be ready around August or September and posted on the website, because the album has been postponed a couple of times, so it’s been a little difficult to start, but now the response seems really good. If we go to Europe, we always go to France, not only because of the food and women, but we love people at the gigs, they’re cool !

Interview made in Paris on May 20th 2003 by Jean Paul Coillard.