Brescia, Italy, right before Bixia Obscura Festival.
TRANSCRIPTION
Welcome to Pagan Storm and thank you for your time. Let's start from the future of the band... You've always worked silently to your albums: how is it with the writing process and the preparings going? Are you pretty satisfied yet, or not?
Mitja: Yes, we've been working on it for a long time actually, and we even almost composed the whole album, and then we deleted it completely and started again. Right now we're again pretty much on the final run of the songs, 30% of the album is still unfinished, but other than that it's going great.
Can you tell us a period in which you think will the new album came out?
Ville: Not yet, but it's probably gonna be out a year from now.
A year from now?
Ville: Along those lines.
In the next fall, something like that?
Ville: Fall... or winter.
Mitja: The timelines are so long. If we go to the studio in summer, it means it's gonna come out late that year, or even next year.
During the years, you actually have forged your very own trademarks: what do we have to expect from the new album? Maybe something new from this point of view?
Mitja: I would say, we never try to find an album and repeat it sound-wise again. It's gonna be very different from the last one, and again, it's going to be a very different mix of elements completely. That's something we always do, and the time we find out we cannot do it any more, that we cannot find a new approach or a new aspect to the music any more, then it will mean that we have come to the end of... But so far so good, it sounds great.
Ville: I'd say the new album sound-wise is gonna be more black metal than doom metal.
In the latest stuff of your career, starting from Verisäkeet, one of your trademarks are long timing and structured songs. How will the new songs be under this point of view?
Mitja: It's not gonna be that long songs this time. They are long for sure, it's very hard to get out of the 15-minute format that we found on Verisäkeet, but it's not going to be 30-minute songs or anything. We really didn't want to repeat ourselves in that aspect either.
Ville: Definitely, on our scale there are gonna be radio hits. [Something something] is gonna be a real radio hit then, compared to our previous works it's gonna be more accessible.
Good for us, because we are a radio and it's very difficult to share your songs, we have to cut them. How do you work in creating new stuff, usually? From what do you begin? Do you work all together or each on his own?
Mitja: We don't.
Ville: The magic just happens. Nah, it's Henri who does most of the work, and he does it at home.
Mitja: Everybody can contribute to that process and give riffs and songs and ideas, and usually we either just send him the material or we go to his place and we have sessions with him, or we start arranging the songs. It might be that the next day everything that we did is gone already. He's very fast when he's working, when he starts building up a song he can write five or six minutes in no time, with all the orchestrations and instruments, but if he feels "nah, this isn't good enough," he just presses delete or puts it in some folder that's hidden somewhere. It's amazing what kind of stuff you can find there over the years.
Ville: Years of folders.
Mitja: Yeah, if you find them.
Ville: Legendary riffs that will never be released. For the good of everyone.
I think from the deleted part of Moonsorrow maybe seven or eight good bands can grow and publish a lot of good albums.
Ville: Maybe seven or eight bands, but I don't know about the "good" part.
One year ago, your "Heritage: 1995-2008 - The Collected Works" came out in only 100 copies. Why did you choose to press them on such limited quantity?
Mitja: Actually it was 450 copies, there's just 100 of each edition, because there are different ones: plain black vinyl, white, splatter, and then the diehard one that was 150 copies. The whole point was: if you make such a deluxe item, it's very costly to produce anyway, there's no point in pressing two thousand units or something, because if even 100 of them don't get sold, the company would go bankrupt completely. It was done based on the demand and assumptions of how many people would buy it. And it was very carefully planned in every stage of it.
But it sold all copies, I think.
Mitja: Yes, it sold out pretty fast. I would say, if we had 50 more it would be still be sold out, but I think it was very cleverly calculated how many would move.
It would be interesting to know your favourite bands, and then the ones that in your opinion have influenced Moonsorrow's music the most.
Ville: Venom. (laughs) No. I don't even like them.
At all?
Ville: No, I really don't. Bathory I do, they copied Venom a bit in the beginning and then they copied Manowar. It made it so much better! One fo my favourites definitely, and you can probably hear it in Moonsorrow's music as well.
Mitja: When you hear Manowar in Moonsorrow's music it means we've been copying Bathory. There are lots of bands, like Enslaved, that influence us all actually, very much. Also the language thing, that you don't have to sing in English. It was one of the first bands we came across that actually made us think: wait a minute, you don't need to sing in English, you can do this in your own language or... Well, it wasn't their own language, it was Icelandic or whatever they were using, but...
Ville: Their ancestors' language.
Mitja: But it's much more interesting to do it in different ways than the other bands. Of course we all have our personal preferences, like Slayer and so on, which doesn't have anything to do with Moonsorrow, and then King Crimson has been very influential for many of us, you can also hear it in the music, we have this progressive rock element and that's definitely from there. But I would say Scandinavian black metal is the key, like many bands.
Ville: And Satan.
Mitja: Of course.
It is not a band, so...
Mitja: It IS a band! From the UK!
Ville: Very true.
Are there any bands born after the year 2000 that you enjoy or usually listen to, or even non-metal bands?
Ville: There's so very few of them, because I don't follow music any more. I just listen to what I used to listen to when I was a kid. I don't find that many new bands. There are a lot of interesting bands, of course, music is constantly evolving, it's not like all the music after 2000 has to be crap, there's a lot of good bands, but I'm just too lazy to check them out. I know a few, but...
Mitja: For me it's the same thing, unfortunately. For example, in 98 or 99 I grew tired of the black metal explosion, because there were so many bands coming up that I couldn't follow it any more, and then I realized most of those were crappy anyway. Then, after a few years I started to listen to the new bands again and I think black metal is still doing very well right now, for a few years already. That's interesting. But it's very hard when you've lived the years where you find your favourite bands and all these things to follow all the time some new forms of metal, for example. I do listen to a lot of other stuff also, but it's very hard to find new metal bands that would really catch me.
In the end of the 90s there was a blast of new bands coming out from Scandinavia, something similar to what happened in the 60s in Great Britain for the Rock Music. Why, in your opinion, this situations occur?
Mitja: There are many reasons, but one thing... Well, I can only speak for Finnish bands, and I know that we didn't have a national identity in what comes to music or metal or rock music really, we had some really good local bands singing in Finnish but we didn't have any breakthrough internationally until some bands started to do what they really wanted to do in their on way, and not trying to copy Swedish or American bands or something, and they started really gaining attention, and other young upcoming bands realized they could do that in their own way, they could do this a bit similarly or something and take influence, and suddenly they're just growing and growing en masse and you get this huge scene that's lifting up. In Finland it caught on during the early 2000s.
Are there not economical reasons, in your opinion, or political ones, social...? Only musical?
Ville: I would say that Finland has always been a very safe and boring country when it comes to economy and politics, there are no big uproars anywhere in our history
Mitja: And if you have a band and want to make money with it, you're already going on the wrong track, because none of the bands who formed and became successful and influential started it for the money. It would be the worst business move to form a band. (laughs) Anything is better than that.
You can just go to pop.
Mitja: Even that is difficult. You have to be really talented to make it in pop music.
Ville: My advice would be to work for bands.
Not for money?
Ville: Not work in a band, but work for bands. Like the technician or whatever, outside the band, so that the band pays you, and you get money. The band doesn't get money.
Thnk you, this interview is Finnished, thank you very much.
Transcribed on March 15th 2021. Thanks for appreciating the phonetic license I took at the end, glad you noticed what I did there. Aren't I hilarious?
No comments:
Post a Comment