By Ryan Starr
Blut Aus Nord has been on the cutting edge of metal for 13 years. Given their unique view on music, I was eager to get their thoughts on their new album and what they think about the current scene and how metal is progressing.
Unfortunately, someone snagged the promo of your new album Odinist - The Destruction of Reason by Illumination, so I haven’t heard it yet. Can you briefly tell us what to expect?
Odinist is a real riff-based album, more powerful, more melodic, more “direct” than our previous releases. We needed to compose songs with solid structures after
MoRT and I personally needed to play some powerful metallic riffs,
MoRT was a very abstract piece of dark sound and we wanted something different this time.
Odinist represents a kind of equilibrium in our discography with elements of our first albums and elements of the last ones, this album is cold but organic, dark but melodic, dissonant sometimes but structured. It’s a solid link between past and future.
“The Destruction of Reason by Illumination” sounds like a quote. What is the origin of it and what does it signify?
The origin? Aleister Crowley! You can see those words like the perfect moment when past and future are totally obsolete. A magic second of full consciousness.
Will there be any live support for this album? Perhaps a giant avant-garde tour featuring Blut Aus Nord, Negura Bunget, and Deathspell Omega.
We don’t tour. We are not showmen, just composers. Exactly like
Deathspell Omega, we don’t want to play our music on a stage. We like to work on our sound, to explore new territories, we like to create, compose and record. I need to compose and write every day, always….
Blut Aus Nord is known for pushing black metal, and metal as a whole, to the extreme. What boundaries are left to break? Any ideas you’re focusing on?
There’s absolutely no limit! We have a lot of different ideas for the future, if you are open-minded and a good musician (technically) you can imagine a ton of different possibilities.
Is there a method or process you go through when writing? Or is it purely emotion?
We spend a lot of time to discuss, imagine, write before the composition. We need to have a very precise idea of the final result, sound, artwork, concept, etc. Finally we start to compose and we have to obtain exactly this result, if we have to modify our material, to use our instrument differently that’s not important, we have to obtain exactly this result. We work in our own studio “Earthsound”, so we can take all our time.
There are a lot of people in the black metal community who think that the genre needs to stay on the beaten path, forged by bands like Darkthrone and Mayhem. What do you think about this?
Why not, but a lot of bands use this kind of argument just because they are very limited technically and for them it’s more easy to play like
Darkthrone. They’d like to compose something else but they just can’t! So they say “Black metal needs to stay on this beaten path”, ok, ok….
And you know,
Darkthrone,
Immortal,
Bathory,
Havohej,
Blasphemy,
Mayhem,
Emperor,
Burzum,
Von, etc., were all totally different, so what is THE good beaten path? Play what you want but never forget this precious feeling, this more important than attitude. Black metal is a feeling….
What’s your opinion of the scene in general?
A few great bands,
Deathspell Omega of course,
Abigor (their last album is a pure masterpiece),
Negura Bunget,
Axis of Perdition,
Ephel Duath,
Primordial, etc., but a ton of useless releases.
Even though your style is a bit esoteric, do you see a bright future for those who want to continue in your footsteps?
They should explore their own sound, not our sound.
This is a fan question. A few months ago you had a sample track on MySpace, which sounded a lot like the material on Memoria Vetutsa. The track was taken down soon after. What happened?
Don’t worry, this track will be released on another project, in fact we have too much material and that’s not always easy to organize our work, haha.
Will we see it on an album in the future? Possibly a Memoria Vetutsa II?
Yes, but not on
Memoria Vetusta II. Just after the recording of our next EP
Lighteater (the second volume of this series of EP entitled
Thematic Emanation of Archetypal Multiplicity) we are going to start the composition of the long awaited
Memoria Vetusta - Dialogue with the Stars and this song won’t be featured on this album.
In the past you’ve done a number of solo projects. Do you have any other projects planned? Or perhaps resurrecting older projects like Children of Maani?
Probably something with
The Eye, I’d like to compose a new album for this project next year. I also have a few different musical projects but not in the metal sphere.
Any last comments?
Thank you for your support. After
Lighteater we hope to finally give you
Memoria Vetsuta II in 2008, we’ll take our time ‘cause 10 years after we have to record a real masterpiece!
I want to thank you guys for this. I always look forward to the latest Blut Aus Nord album, and I can’t wait to see what you have planned for the future.
Thanks!
Official Blut Aus Nord Website
Official Candlelight Website
