Impaled Nazarene: The man that they fear…

-So, what’s up, Mika?

-M: As you probably know, we have a ten weeks European tour coming up, including a string of dates in Germany. What happen yesterday, around four o’clock, I had a phone call from our touring agency, that the Anti-Fa movement, the German anti fascistic movement, very strong there, had started sending threatening letters to all the clubs, informing them that they will put bombs to those places if you played there, they had been sending threatening letters to the agents, to all the places that were selling tickets for the show, they did contact all the city councils, as there was some reactions already from the city councils that we cannot play, so yesterday, the whole tour was in jeopardy, so you can imagine how I was. I had to give phone calls to Finland my band members who are in rehearsals and them that it was a possibility that we’re not going to tour at all. So we had some emergency phone calls to Osmose, and Hervé, thankfully, could take care of the situation: we contacted lawyers, and we have thankfully too very good lawyers, because the clubs says that they will refuse to that us because of the bomb threats or the city councils are against it or whatever, but, under the German law, they cannot ban us, that what has been said on a couple of E-mails. So, this morning, around twelve, I finally got a phone call from the lawyers saying the tour is going through, and yes we’ll play in Germany, but there’s only one show now, instead of twelve. Many clubs have banned us, but we can sue them, because they have already signed a contract. So that’s the reason why I’ve going through emotions to fucking end all that crap. And yesterday, I went to see on our website, our guest book, and you couldn’t believe what kind of messages were there, like

‘When you come to Germany, German people will kill you’: there were thousands of these bullshits. There’s an American band, Grand Belial’s Key, they did a tour in January in Europe, and the anti-Fa managed to ban them everywhere except Finland and UK, so they had like twenty dates cancelled because of this, so the anti-Fa has really started to attack metal bands.

-And aren’t you not afraid of the trouble in you goes to Germany anyway?

-M: We will go there and of course will check all that’s going on. Thankfully, we are not taking plane this time, because this album is our biggest production to date, so we’re taking all our material from Finland, so the tour starts in Finland, we’ll do a couple of Finish shows first and then go to Sweden, so we have our road crew from Finland for the first time on the road with us, so we’re surrounded by very good people and as we don’t have to go by the aeroplane, we can take some interesting weapons with us in case that something goes wrong.

Can you imagine, it’s year 2OO6! I think that the whole thing came to the fact that, if you think about it, what happened in Denmark, and I think that the whole Europe is in this state of paranoia at the moment, so you can say that we choose the worst title album ever, considering what’s going on at the moment!

-Don’t you think that this title could be taken as a provocation?

-M: It’s absolutely not provocation, and I’m gonna tell you the story how we came up with the name: I just wanted to have a Latin title for the album, so I bought a Latin Finnish dictionary, and I found ‘pro patria’: I said ok, if I had pro patria and Finland there, I should have vodka. So it was too long and at the end we only kept ‘prop patria’ and cut the fucking vodka out of the title, but people failed to see it completely, and people has been asking what that cover symbolize. It has been done by the same guy that did the cover for ‘All that you fear’ and the live albums covers. I just sent him the title, saying to him to do whatever he wanted, and he came up with this cover, which is basically how it looked in 1940s, when Finland was invaded by German army, and its in fact dead Finnish soldiers buried under a Finnish flag, nothing more, nothing less. So, if someone sees fascistic ideas on this, he must be really blind to see swastikas and shit!

-And do you think that Impaled has become a very easy target for a certain kind of people, each time you’re touring or issuing an album?

-M: It’s a clear thing that this is really well planned because they started it one week before the tour only, you know, the lawyers has been investigating from where it’s coming from.

One of our friends’ bands who’s supporting us, Zuul FX, have a new guitar player who’s a black guy: do you think that this guy would tour with a nazi band or something, or a nazi band would accept to a black guy in a band? So I don’t know where the Anti-Fa has taking the idea, but it’s just a bunch of bullshit. At the moment, the best word to describe the world is paranoia, I mean, In Finland, no newspaper published caricatures, because they didn’t want trouble, but a private person did it on his website: can you imagine that our prime minister flew to Kuwait to apologize for the Islamic world because one Finnish private person has put the fucking thing on his website, and even our leading Finnish newspaper said in their editorial that we have a complete fool as a prime minister, this is going to far. And then, three days later, our president makes another apology, being sorry for this guy in Finland. That really matters because that’s going scary. After that, the Finnish secret police actually started investigations that are illegal: now they think that they shall prosecute the guy for putting a fucking caricature on his website. If this happens, as it will be illegally sentenced, then, in my opinion, the next logical step would be the Christians or the Catholics coming, saying that, if Muslims can do that, you are also blasphemous against Jesus, and it will be the domino effect.

And it will be the downfall of Europe…

-That was one my question: last time we met, you said you were very preoccupied by your new government, and you had to wait four years to maybe change it

-A: The election will take place next year. I don’t understand why, as we had a bad president before, the same president, this ultra socialist, she was elected again. We have this fucked up government, and all the parties are like kind of the same. You should abolish the whole government and, in my opinion, that people who are running the countries in the world, bad economists and this kind of people who could understand how to make money and how to keep the country rich. All that is wasting, it’s all completely useless bullshit. But that’s enough of politics!

-Well, so tell me about this new record: what’s in there, so, considering the lyrics?

-M: I can tell you that I watched a lot of TV, because I’m very interested in what happens around the world. Each day, I open the TV and see the stupidity of humanity when I watch the news. So ‘One dead nation under dead God’ is about the flood in New Orleans, and it’s kind of very ironical lyrics, saying that now you can collect the corpses and the funeral fees, it’s a complete paradox that the USA has the money to pump middle east each day but they cannot even help their own citizens on their own soil. This song is evidently very nazi oriented! Then, of course, you have ‘Goat sodomy’: I was already thinking if we should finally stop doing the ‘goat song’ or not, so I put out the question on our forum: ‘dear fans, do you want to see a goat song or not? It’s up to you!’ And everybody, except one guy, said to continue with the goat song. So ok, goat song you want, goat song you’ll get! And, with this title, you know that you won’t have a social commentary coming in it: is just needs a goat, bleeding rectum and cement! ‘Psykosis’ is basically kind of like a continuation lyrically of ‘Tribulation Hell’ on the ‘All that you fear’ album, it deals with being insane, stuff like that. Things have detonated and there’s no turning back anymore.

-And this title, ‘Kut’?

-M: That’s actually Flemish, and that means cunt, and it’s about a woman who I think is a total cunt. It’s a very personal hate song, and this other song, ‘Contempt’, happens to be also on another woman. ‘Cancer’ is about one guy that everyone want to see absolutely dead, he’s a cancer to the society, so you lots of different things: ‘Neighbourcide’ , for example, happen when our bass player called me one day, asking if a fucking beast like me could do a song about killing your neighbour, ‘cause I want to murder my main neighbour! It was really a very interesting idea, I’ve never tried to do lyrics that something gave to me just like that. So I wrote it and sent an e-mail, asking if it was what he was after. He read the lyrics and said it was fantastic, exactly how he felt!

-About the production, is it still Ansi Kippo and Mikko Karmila who took care of it?

-M: No, this is completely different this time: our live album was mixed by our own sound engineer, Tapio Pennanen, so we asked him to do this job and we also change the studio, we recorded at the Sonic Pump. The live album was mixed there, but at the old Sonic Pump. Their old studio was in a cellar, and not very good. They built a completely new studio where they have top of the art equipment now, so we decided to record there and use our own soundman, which is basically the best decision ever for the production wise, because of course he knows us, mixing for us for three years now, so it’s very easy to work with him, and we did a completely different kind of thing than we usually did before.

(Then, the interview is interrupted by the guitarist of the band, in honeymoon in Italy, and who didn’t know at all the story of the ‘German affair’.)

Previously, when we’ve been in the studio, the whole band has always been there, and it was one guy playing, when the others were listening and then listen to all takes and stuff. This time, because we were recording in Helsinki, all of us basically stayed at home, so there was only one guy in the studio with the song. Then, I just went one day there to check out that everything is ok, and listening to the guitar solos, because I think that has been our biggest problem in all our previous albums, the guitar sound has always been way to thin, and, when I listen to the new record, I’m wondering how the fuck did he do about this, it’s absolutely magnificent! Things went so smooth with that record that we were basically four days ahead of the schedule: the drummer did his drums in one day, I couldn’t fucking believe it when he phoned me and said it was done, the drums were ready, all the drums, I was very impressed. It was a very easy album to make, we had booked two or three weeks, and we spent seven or eight days: we are fast!

-Talking about that, this album seems much more concentrated this time: was songs like ‘Never Forgive’ just an experience or do you think you’ll do some more in the future

-M: This new album is much more brutal, much more faster, but, when we wrote it, we actually had a couple of slower tracks. And last September, when I talked to our bass player, I said to him let’s us just drop the slow songs and let’s do an album that’s just straight to the point album, no bullshit. But who knows, maybe the next album will have some slower tracks. But if that kind of shit like what happen with the Anti-Fa coming up, so the next album will be even more brutal, because, when you’re pissed off, you don’t write exactly songs like ‘Never forgive’, I don’t think so!

-You’ve been touring several times in South America: how are you received there and why is the audience there so wild, when it comes to extreme music?

-M: I think that they are hot-blooded people, maybe that’s why they like extreme metal, I don’t really know why. We’ve only been in Latin America in fact, we’ve done three Mexican tours, we were there this January: it’s like a crazy place to play: this year, in Mexico, I’ve never seen such a huge moshpit in my life, apart from Slayer concerts, I was watching it from the stage, the whole hall was like one big ring that was running around, there was so much stage divers during that concert that I you couldn’t sing, that you just tried to protect yourself, because someone was fly right to you, another one left to you, and you were in the middle! They were all bleeding on the faces, there was a really wild crowd.

-You’ve always been fan of Motorhead, and I guess you still are, but, about Black Metal, what bands or what ideas or else drove you toward that in the first place?

-M: It was Venom, because the very first metal album I bought was Venom’s ‘Welcome to Hell’ and that’s where the interested for that started. We’re in fact gonna play with Venom, at the Tuska festival, the biggest metal festival in Finland, this year, Sodom, Venom and Celtic Frost. We are playing this year too, so, when I heard this, you couldn’t believe the smile on my face! But I haven’t heard the new Venom, I don’t know how it’s going to be, but of course that it will be, like Celtic Frost as good as they used to be, but you never know: maybe they will surprise us!

-Did Slayer have a big influence on you?

-M: It started with Venom, but basically the trash metal scene started to develop and German speed metal started to develop at that time and it seemed like each band started to become more brutal and brutal. I think there’s two poles in the whole metal music scene, and one of them is of course Slayer’s ‘Reign in Blood’, because, when that album came out, all the other bands sounded like they played doom metal, it was so bloody fast and aggressive. I remember, it feels like yesterday, when I put this album first and ‘Angel of Death’ started, I was wondering what the hell it was! I guess that the second thing that has really make a huge impact is ‘Scum’, the Napalm Death album, because, the first time I hear it, I was wondering how can we play that fast, it is fucking impossible. I think that those two, with the Venom album, are really the cornerstone of the extreme metal music. I was attracted to them because they were fast and aggressive, and of course dealing with the dark side, having sex with women, things when you’re young, you’re always interested in: some plays ice hockey, some others want to have sex with Satan or something

Interview made by Jean-Paul Coillard, on March 24th in Paris.

Thanks to Nicolas for his help.