Satyricon 2 eng

-Last time, ‘Volcano’ was distributed by Emi, badly distributed in fact, and today you have signed with Roadrunner: how and why did it happen? Did Joe Jordison have something to do with it? (Joe toured with Satyricon for their last American tour, ndlr)

-S : Well, maybe he had something to do with it, because the guy at Roadrunner who took the initiative of the signing was Monte Conner, who is the senior A&R, in New York, and Joe Jordison did introduce Satyricon to Monte Conner. But that has been many people working at Roadrunner in Europe, who came to me, saying that I should sign to Roadrunner, many years before that actually. The reason why we signed there is that we really felt we were wanted by Roadrunner. They have offices in Amsterdam, London, Paris, Milan, New York, and, talking to all those different people, it was very apparent to us that they really wanted to have Satyricon on their label. That’s very important for a band, when they want very hard to have you and to work hard with him. With Emi, we knew the worst of the situations, concerning promo, touring etc. It’s not the same landscape there, definitely!

-I suppose this change of label is the reason for this hiatus between ‘Volcano’ and ‘New Diabolical’?

-S: I think that a lot to do about it the time we need to tour one album, because it takes time, we did two European tours, one of the north of Europe and one on the whole continent, plus two American tours and then we had a bunch of festivals, and then we had this year and a half just composing this new record and one month for the recording. People always seem to think that Satyricon releases a new record and then have a long break, but we’re just working all the time!

-‘Now Diabolical’ seems a bit shorter than ‘Volcano’, after only one hearing: -was it your point to make it that way, more dense?

-S: He’s 45 minutes long and, if he’s like that, it’s not a coincidence, it’s very deliberate: I wanted songs with solid framework, very direct, and I wanted it chorus oriented, I wanted to built songs for the chorus and I wanted a pretty simple songs structure: to set up every song so that the powerful elements would be even more powerful instead of clouding them.

Instead of putting some bits and pieces all over, I wanted to make the hitting fist even harder and more direct. That was the technique and what was in my mind during the writing. What’s good about the length of the songs is that what has happens so far is that we had so many friends saying the songs were pretty short : they thought it was 3 ½ minutes long but I said it was actually five minutes and forty seconds. I think that’s a good sign when people think that a song is shorter than it is. They are not bored!

-This new record has been produced, as usual, by Frost and yourself: but are you the unique composers in Satyricon, or do you have extra hands sometimes?

-S: No, I write everything myself. The only thing I do with someone else is with Snoder, from the band Thorns: we worked together on his music, and on this record, we worked a little bit together on his music on the arrangements parts. I write all the music, but sometimes, we’ve been exchanging ideas and doing brainstorming for song arrangements, and sometimes also for the drumbeat. But that’s just pretty much the way that all has been since the beginning. Frost is more a performance musician more than a creative one, and I’m more a creative than a performer…

-S: Satyricon is a band that has always tried to push the boundaries and limits of the black metal, and we don’t really like to walk the path that other people has already walked on and. I personally know Peter Tagtgren, he’s very nice and very good, but not for us, we want to do something different, and Mike Frazier have worked on a lot of music, not only AC/DC and stuff like that, but a lot of classic stuff like Jimmy Page or country music, many varied stuff.

We’re always trying to say on ourselves that we’re very good at black metal, but this guy is very good at this, this one at that, so let’s join forces, and this is very much like the philosophy of this band since day one. I think that works, and I think also that music should be fun, and, for me, working with different people, with different backgrounds is also part of that fun. Sometimes it’s very difficult and frustrating because people don’t understand what you mean, but at least, if you know what you want, it can be successful. The problem is, when you start working with other people and you’re not so sure yourself. But if you know exactly what you want and you don’t want, and you’re not afraid to say it, then I think you’re ok.

-Is it a general inspiration for this new lp, or only separate songs, with their own identity?

-S: Everything is very much inspired by the occult, and occultism itself can be so many things. In ancient days, people read the divine astrology and read the stars with occultists, as some people consider tarot cards to be occultism. I think that, within occultism, you have something very interesting which is the use of symbolisms to develop you inner self, your spirits, and basically yourself as a human being and it’s very interesting: for me, when I write lyrics for this record, it’s not like I sit down and describe occult rituals and ancient gods, but more like the ideas and the thought patterns of ancient occultists, especially for the eastern world, the whole areas where occultism came from. It’s not only about the ideas, but also the language to describe it. All that has clearly been a source of inspiration. But lyrics will always be just a reflection of what’s going on inside of the mind and the heart of people who write them.

-Do you feel an evolution of that inspiration, from the days you started till now?

-S: Well, I have probably to split our career in two, the part one being the ‘dark and evil’ times, part two including ‘rebel Extravaganza’, ‘Volcano’ and ‘Now Diabolical’. I feel more comfortable in doing what we do today now, but what I did back then

sounded right at the time. We’ll never be an ordinary band. We were very inspired by the middle ages, a lot of folklore and stuff like that, in our lyric and in our music, and with ‘Rebel Extravaganza’, we became a colder and darker band. I started applying songwriting techniques that were not so progressive but had a more simple structure, almost like all black metal in the eighties: if you listen to bands like Celtic Frost, Venom or Bathory, the song structure is not very complicated. Some songs excepted, it’s very straightforward. I don’t try to do what other people have done before, but the songwriting technique that they used is what you can almost call like rock’n’roll writing technique, and what I try to do is blend new answers, new details and a new approach to it, that’s kind of make it more dynamical, more energetic and more extreme in the way that when it’s aggressive, it’s very aggressive and when it’s dark, it’s pitch black, or when it’s melancholic, it’s very melancholic. That’s just the nature of the black metal music: a little bit more everything than anyone else!

-S: I think that they’re very good at doing what they do, but it’s not for me. If it was, I would do stuff like that myself!

-S-I think Slayer is a very good band, but amongst all the trash metal bands, there are some that I would probably recommend to the fans, just as much if not more, if they want to listen to evil sounding trash metal, my first and number one choice would be Their Infernal Majesties album called ‘None shall Defy’. I guess it was on Roadrunner records, back in the days. It’s a band from Vancouver, Canada. Another thing is ‘Beyond the Gates’, by Possessed, a classic. I like Slayer and Metallica, all that stuff, but, to me, there are probably some more obscure bands, not because they’re obscure, but maybe because they were doing stuff more unusual and just as good.

-After the ‘Roadkill’ DVD, do you intend to issue a new one, with new stuff, videos, etc?

-S: We have some recording from the Wacken show in 2OO4 and we have the thing we did with Nocturno Culto from Darkthrone, which is something that we are looking to do something with, at some point in corporation with him. Also, we will be shooting some stuff this year, so it will probably be a new Satyricon DVD out next year, but we still have to work a little bit on, exactly how we want it to be.

-S: We stopped making both of these in the recent years, and the reason why is because we could easily sell them and make money, but the Satyricon thing is like when we feel that something is not relevant anymore, we want to move on, and it’s a little bit different with albums, but with videos, t.shirts and stuff like that, when I think it has been done and it doesn’t feel relevant anymore, I just want move on.

-It was that censored video for ‘Full of Hatred’: no way to see it somewhere?

-S: It is on the Satyricon website, you can download it, it’s probably the best way, but that could be on a future DVD too.

-S: We did record four or five songs, they were extremely good, but we didn’t finish them because of all the Phil Anselmo’s personal problems. But he called me for the first time for a long time three weeks ago, saying he wants to continue and I said I would love to do that, even if I don’t have time right now. So now it’s up to him.

-S: Yes, and I think the ones we made after were even better. You can find one more song on the Moonfog website.

-S: It’s fine. The only thing that people ask all the time is why nothing new is going on, and the reason why is because we have fired some bands, maybe we will fire more, and we’re looking to build a new artist roster in order to renew the label. We need new blood injection in the label: Moonfog is supposed to be fun and it has come to the point that is not fun anymore for me and my partner. So we want to sort of rebuild the label, and in the meantime we’re going to re-release and remaster some records with new artwork, plus some reissue of the vinyl stuff.

-Do you have a new keyboard player, Jonna Nikula: is she a permanent member of the band now?

-S: yes, she’s half Swedish, half Finish, and she’s a permanent live member.

-What is your greatest pride in all you have accomplished already with Satyricon?

-S: I think that the greatest thing to be in Satyricon is that I had the chance to express myself, and our biggest achievement is the records that we made: they are documents for eternity, of what we’ve done.

-S: We’ll do the Hellfest, and then several club shows in France, in the fall.

Satyricon : The Brothers of the Flame