|
| |
| |
1. Could you give us a brief description of your evolution through
life?
I am not sure if you mean like a short autobiography, the evolution of the
band or how I have changed as a person through the years. I guess, in either
way, the answer would be too long to fit in any context other than a book.
In any sense, I feel very much the same as who I was at the age of 11 –
the biggest difference is that people take me more seriously now that I
am a so called “grown-up”.
2. What message
do you wish to express with your music?
It depends very much on what album I am writing, but I always revolve around
humanistic values and the way every action will make a difference on a surprisingly
large scale. I wish to focus on the fact that it is important who you are
and what you do, and that the quest for finding out how to deal with those
two topics is something that will follow us throughout our lives. Mankind
may be the stupidest creature ever to have walked the surface of this earth
(people may argue that we have survived this long and prospered so we must
be very successful – well, then I say that every other species alive
today has survived just as long, and furthermore, all other species ever
to be extinct survived up to a certain point when they, for some reason,
became too stupid to survive and fit the system – so maybe we were
“smart” up until about 8,000 years ago and NOW we are too stupid
to survive in that we simply grab too much?), but I still haven’t
given up on us.
3. What are some of the goals of Pain of
Salvation, musically, professionally, etc.?
To drive the unworthy hordes of filthy human creatures in front of us and
punish them relentlessly for their ignorance with our rightful swords of
blazing steel and leather whips carved out of live cattle, in order to prevent
them from breeding and thus, with their detestable inbred descendants reeking
of sloth and stupidity, soil this earth that justly belongs to us!
Sorry, I’m just having this fling with power metal… Did I forget
to mention the dark pits of angst and fire? [laughs]
4.
When did your love for music come to fruition?
Well, I grew up in a home where music was very present – my parents
were listening to music and had a lot of records. I found my favourites
in some Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, ELO and so on. But usually I was
stuck on particular songs rather than specific artists or albums, and I
am exactly the same still. So I would, carefully, play those specific songs
from those specific albums. Some songs that I remember falling for very
early were “The Boxer” and “Sound of Silence” with
Simon & Garfunkel, “Jolene” with Olivia Newton John, “Fernando”
(the verses), “Winner Takes it All”, “Eagle” and
“Happy New Year” with ABBA, “Norwegian Wood”, “Let
it be” and of course the second half of “Abbey Road” by
The Beatles (I loved the movie “Help” as well and really liked
the song “Hide Your Love Away”). There was this song about a
grocer named Jack who died and I remember being really moved by that song
as a kid – I have later found out that it was “Excerpt from
a Teenage Opera” by Keith West. I also remember “Mission”
by ELO, “Suicide is Painless” from M*A*S*H and “Mother’s
Little Helper” by Rolling Stones – all of which could be found
if you ventured through my parents’ record and tape collection. All
this was before school so I would have been younger than 7. I later on found
Jesus Christ Superstar, before getting into Kiss at the age of 8 –
in the school library they had this one cool album called “Love Gun”
by a band called Kiss. Now, they had two audio systems and four chairs with
headphone jacks, which meant you could be two guys listening to the same
album, but only two albums could be played. So, during every lesson you
would (through whispers) pair up with a class mate to aim to get one of
those systems and listen to Kiss during the coming break, then you would
double your chances to get to listen to the album. A few times you would
come running into the library out of breath just to find both audio systems
taken. That would signify a bad day. [laughs] Anyway, I think it was Kiss
that made me obsessed with the idea of writing music and playing the guitar.
They were the trigger, even though I’d been enjoying trying mom’s
guitar or the piano even before that.
5. Is selling a large
abundance of records important at all, perhaps, to communicate a message
to many people?
Well, yes and no. First of all, of course it helps you to get your point
through if it is digested, or at least received, by a lot of people. But
there is more to it. I mean, it would be just as sufficient if all people
got your music for free, through downloading it or copying it, for instance.
However, if you look at it from a long term perspective you will find it
necessary to sell at least a fair deal of albums, since your ability to
devote yourself to your music and worlds of creation derives from your financial
situation and, uttermost, how well your creations are received and how much
that generates. If nobody bought an album I would probably have to give
up after two or three attempts as an artist, no matter how big my communicative
or artistic urge would be. In short, if I had to work 8 hours a day with
plumbing to be able to pay rent and food and have that as my sole income,
I would never be able to invest so much time and effort in the music and
concepts that I create.
6. What types of curriculum interested
in you, during the educational process?
Well, there is always the difference between being good at, and being interested
in I guess. I was reading and writing very early and language has always
come easy for me, but in school that meant I had to skip two grades in Swedish
and I always hated attending those classes. A wiseass is never appreciated
so the fourth graders would of course be quite irritated when this second
grader would sit in on their lessons. I always loved drawing and music,
but again, I detested music lessons in those early years. Our teacher actually
bribed me in second grade, giving me a small coin every time I joined the
others in singing a song. I think this is quite natural (although maybe
not what we would call “normal”) and caused by under stimulation;
I was very easily bored. I loved to write short stories to which I drew
images, creating characters and names for the characters. I drove many teachers
nuts by contradicting them in their lines of reasoning. In retrospective
I was probably quite odd. In second grade I refused to be called Daniel
and would only listen to the name Christian (which is rather amusing considering
the meaning of the name in English). I was a very fast runner but I always
hated gymnastics and sports and of course happily shared that information
with all teachers in those subjects. And I always had to prove things. Once
our teacher decided to punish me during a soccer game by letting me run
one time around the whole soccer field (those are huge). I ran 28 times
around the field, until the lesson ended. The only one suffering from that
was me of course. Stupid boy. [smiles] Anyway, I later on learned to appreciate
language again, when I finally found an intelligent and creative teacher.
I sometimes wish I had been growing up in another time, when physics and
mathematics were considered exciting and a lot of creative people were into
that – with enthusiastic teachers I think I could have been brilliant
in those subjects. Instead, I have had to find them at a much later age
by myself. To sum it up – I love knowledge and learning, but the educational
process has constantly and repeatedly only turned me off. I wish more creative
and charismatic people would choose to become teachers.
7.
Did you ever take vocal lessons?
I did, during Music College – but I must say that it only confused
me in my quest to find my own voice. At first my teacher could only confirm
that I did things right from the start, then she proceeded by trying to
force me into a template on how to sing. It took me like two years to get
back on track after those lessons. [laughs]
8. What is
your knowledge concerning musical theory? Did you ever receive guitar lessons,
or are you self-taught?
To me, learning music theory was like studying a language you already speak.
You basically knew all the words and how they would relate to each other
and have different values in different situations, but then you learn that
this specific word class is called a non-transitive verb for instance, or
that this particular form of the word is called future tense, see? It is
very helpful in communicating your ideas to other musicians, or understanding
why this or that passage is so attractive to you. Music itself, however,
is a completely different thing. We all know physics by heart, every time
we make the immense calculations needed to keep our balance when we walk,
or in the way we can calculate gravitation and mass at the blink of an eye
when someone throws us a ball. To know the set of rules and notions is a
different thing altogether, but may still be as useful to you. To answer
your question then; I took guitar lessons from the age of nine – our
teacher was an old drunk who had never heard of the term “pedagogy”
– and what he taught me more than anything else, even though he didn’t
know this, was the importance of not giving up. We were six or seven kids
at first, I was the only one left after one year. One by one they would
start to cry and leave, never to return to his lessons. I had my times when
I wanted to quit too, but my mother would always say “hang in there,
things will brighten up”. She was right of course. My conclusion when
it comes to learning from teachers is this: “Listen carefully to what
they say, then the hell with it”…
9. Would
you consider yourself autonomous in nature?
Yes, I have a wonderful talent when it comes to ignoring common knowledge,
this has always led me down the path of originality, with lines of people
on both sides of the path, shaking their heads. It is of course my mission
in life always to prove them wrong. [smiles]
10. What or
whom, would you say inspires you?
My wife Johanna inspires me of course. There have been so many sources of
inspiration in my life, it’s just impossible to mention even a fraction.
But what it all boils down to, is the fact that who we are as persons affect
all we do, so the inspirational forces that have changed me as a person
are simply more influential on my music than any musical references. That’s
my opinion anyway. And then I can mention some of my all time heroes: Astrid
Lindgren and Tage Danielsson, two Swedish writers who have been of great
importance to me in retrospective. They always had humanistic values at
the heart of everything they did.
11. Have films had any
influence on your you or your writing?
I have always loved movies, an interest that has only increased with every
passing year. I couldn’t say any movies in particular, but musically
I would have to mention Jesus Christ Superstar and The Wall of course.
12. What are your thoughts on religious belief systems?
Difficult topic to deal with in this limited context. My whole point in
“BE” is that religion is our small way of repeating a pattern
from a higher fractal level. Another piece of the puzzle is the fact that
fractal relations tend to shift. The tools we create becomes our masters,
just like the “masters” that, according to the religious belief
systems you mention, create us becomes our tools, allowing us to kill in
the name of pacifism or burn to save from eternal flames. To me, human religion
can be displayed by a hypothetic scene where two one dimensional people
look at a cylinder from two angles and them kill each other in a fight concerning
whether it is round or square. They can simply never grasp the concept of
the three dimensions. This does not mean that the cylinder is supernatural
or fantastic in any way; it is merely on a fractal above their comprehension.
They are both right, and they are both wrong – the question “is
there a god?” in our world, is like for them to ask “is the
shape round?” – altogether just a concept that cannot be applied
to our sense of reality, our fractal. Thus, as I see it, every/any human
conclusion on this must ultimately and without exception be faulty and fractioned
(it may seem as I myself am making a conclusion or definition right here,
but I only conclude that we cannot know, which is to decide to avoid making
a definition rather than defining something). No point killing each other
over that; we have so many other reasons anyway, as it seems.
13.
What are your views on drugs ? (Not in reference to prescription)
If you have a small mind they seem to help you get access to the parts you
have shut down. It’s like a shortcut to a visionary state that you
can reach anyway if you just let go of your mental limitations put there
after years and years in this world. If your mind is already large they
will just help you shut down other parts of it. Let’s say they are
a shortcut to a place to which you will never find a proper way if you use
them. Usually, when a mediocre artist starts doing drugs, they will in fact
produce one or two interesting albums, more open minded than their previous
work, then they will just turn sour and never do anything as good again.
At least, that’s my impression. I don’t go near them. I have
struggled through dense vegetation to find that place anyway, and that journey
has done me good.
14. What are your feelings about live
performances?
I love to perform live; it gives music another dimension. I just wish that
our contemporary society was more appreciative when it comes to seeing live
music. But, then again, I hardly ever go and see other bands live so who
am I to say anything, really. On the other hand, I think it would be different
if I weren’t playing music myself – I have to focus on the creational
process and sometimes that means cutting down on the incoming channels.
On stage, sometimes you get to that state of magic when you are 100% into
the song and you are just in this flow – being in touch with something
larger than life (just a matter of speaking, life transcends most things
if we can just see the grand scale of it).
15. What does
the future hold for Pain of Salvation?
I have no idea, we usually surprise ourselves just as much as we surprise
our fans and the press. There will be the “BE” DVD of course,
and we should start thinking about touring. And then, somewhere down the
line, the second part of The Perfect Element is bound to come to life of
course.
16. How do you feel about having such a devoted
and exclusive amount of admirers of Pain of Salvation?
I feel just fine about that. There will always be the occasional e-mail
from people thinking I am their god or the new messiah and things like that,
but most people are just very nice and care very much for our music and
the concepts that we deal with on our albums. Maybe I would say that I am
fonder of devotion than exclusiveness.
17. What is it
about “One Hour By the Concrete Lake,” that bothers you?
Nothing. I love all our albums. If I am asked to place them in a sort of
personal order of liking (which I prefer not to but am sometimes forced
to) it just happens to be the one I would place at the bottom (one of the
albums is bound to be there). That does not mean that there is any big difference,
they follow each other very closely for me. I simply see that as the least
original and unique one. It is still more original than most albums out
there though, so I am not worried. [laughs]
18. As in regards
to the continuation of “The Perfect Element” story, when do
you plan on writing it?
Parts of it are written already and I was just planning to continue it when
we decided to do “BE” instead. Right now it is just sitting
on my mental shelf waiting for me to return to it. I can only say that it
will not be our next album, that’s all I know right now.
19. In the inside of the “Remedy Lane” booklet, the
dates next to the song titles, what is the significance of these dates?
Are they the dates the songs were written?
They are the dates when the content of the songs takes place – much
like a chronological grid that has been taken apart, just like when we recall
parts of our lives and we make associations between different periods and
events without caring about chronology.
20. Finally, about
your latest opus “Be,” what was the recording ambiance and experience
like for this album? What was it like to work with so many other musician’s
in the studio?
The most different thing was that this was the first album I recorded and
mixed at home, which was a very interesting experience on every level. The
strings, unfortunately, had to be recorded live, so there was a lot of work
with filtering and synchronisation. For the church organ, I had to take
parts of my equipment to a big church to record it on location, so actually,
apart from us, only Cecilia (the female vocals on Dea Pecuniae) and the
Morgan family (reading the Animae narration) were in the studio with me.
21. What do you hope for in the future?
A better world where mankind finally realises what the real dangers of our
time are and actually changes. Adapt BEFORE we are forced to. We simply
need to be much, much better than we are today – the abuse of nature
and the poor must end, there is no going around it in the long run.
22. Congratulations with the release and magnificence of “Be.”
Furthermore, I’d like to thank all those involved with Pain of Salvation
from the beginning to present, for all their contributions to such an important
musical unit.
Thanks, and you are welcome. Wow, that turned out to be a rather funny bipolar
exchange of appreciation… [laughs]
23. Do you wish
add anything not mentioned or whatever’s on your mind?
Nope, I feel absolutely content and satisfied. [smiles] |
| |
| |
- First
of all, I must congratulate you on this delicious album you granted us this
fall. I will not pretend to be a die-hard fan of PoS, but having a chance
to enjoy "BE" I immediately longed for listening to the previous
albums of yours. And even though I found them also extremely interesting,
I still claim "BE" is an album on totally different level - higher
level. What is your opinion?
Thanks for all those nice words. And yes, I am
of the firm opinion that "BE" is in a way our Magnum Opus, both musically,
lyrically and, maybe most of all, conceptually. It is thus also the album most
difficult to grasp and get into I'd say, at least for many of the average fans.
On the other hand, once you let go of your expectations and predictions you
will find this album to be the most rewarding and a friend for life.
- On
the other hand, I met some opinions of people very impatiently looking forward
to promised continuation of "The Perfect Element" album. And I have
a feeling some of them may not be really satisfied with "BE", as
your latest album presents PoS from quite different perspective. In my opinion,
the extended concept together with variety of vocal lines dominated the music
that has somehow been pushed to the background. Was it your intention this
time or maybe you rather disagree with my opinion?
Of course there will always be the ones who want
us to make another Remedy Lane or The Perfect Element or even Entropia. Pain
of Salvation has always been about changing, about finding new ways and, when
it comes down to it, not listening one bit to what people think we should and
should not do. We respect people's opinion but they must realize that this reluctance
of conformity and unwillingness to repeat ourselves is exactly what gave them
those albums in the first place. I always make the music I want to hear myself
and that I feel is lacking out there - over and over again I create my own favourite
music. That's the only possible way to create good music. I do not agree that
the concept has been allowed to dominate the music any more than the other way
around. They are both dependent on one another as usual and they have both been
born out of the other.
- As
I mentioned before, the essence of "BE" lay in its concept that
dominates over the music. Could you in few words describe its basics in order
to intrigue the fans to fall deeper in the lyrics and everything concerned
with the concept?
It's impossible to explain the concept briefly.
I have done some phone interviews where I have briefly touched upon the most
important aspects such as my theories on Fractals and the impossibility of seeing
more than a fixed number of fractals in and out of your own system; Depriving
myths of creation of their semantic and linguistic connotations as a means of
seeing the larger fractals and combining them in a unified theory with our contemporary
society's bodies of knowledge and hypotheses (such as Science, Religion, Philosophy,
Socio-Politics etc); Life as a binary state etc. It takes me about 2 hours of
very rapid and controlled talking to cover that ground just briefly and then
we have not even mentioned the conceptual ideas on The Fractured Creator as
the unifying glue between seemingly contradictory religions and ideas; Tardigrades
as a possible key to life and death; Game theory and how it supports the idea
that we are programmed for kindness as opposed to Locke's idea of "Tabula Rasa"
or Christianity's "Original Sin"; The causes and examples of Overshooting the
Carrying Capacity in a given Biosphere; ideas about how the soul and body connects
and are allowed to disconnect in certain situations; the occurrence and reoccurrence
of Fractals, Cycles and Waves in all creation; the possible existence of a Grid
of time, possibly shown in energy quanta; the loss of something 8,000 BC, possibly
connected to the human malfunction of the Vomaronasal Organ etc. I could write
a book on any of the above ideas without covering all ground. It is simply too
huge. My hope is that "BE" will just keep on growing beyond the ether of the
album or the DVD shape in the future. Internet can play a big part here.
- I
must admit I have listened to the album while following the texts simultaneously
(which does not happen too often in case of mine). The track that affects
the listener mostly is undoubtedly "Latericius Valete" - do you
really think there is no more than half of a century left for most of us and
our descendants?
In this specific fictional story it is. In real
life it is all up to us, right now we are showing every sign of overshooting
the carrying capacity and straining the system far beyond what it can possibly
endure for any longer period of time. Mankind is indeed very good at adapting.
Unfortunately, we are often to blame for the need to do so, and we seldom seem
to adapt any sooner than we are forced to do so. We don't have a good record
so to speak. In this, I must conclude that we are the dumbest species ever to
have walked this earth, in that we have apparently forgotten how to stay alive
in the system to which we belong.
- Another
impressing track is "Vocari Dei" - I wonder what was the genesis
of the idea to ask fans to record their so highly personal confessions of
answering machine in order to create a song based on them. The song sounds
therefore very authentic and makes the listener to focus on his own thoughts
(what could be my Message to God?). How many Messages have you completed?
What was the most strange/impressing/intriguing one?
I first thought of writing a number of lyrical
passages and let people record them, but then I though it would be very interesting
to let people talk directly from their own hearts, and with a large fan base
we had the possibility of doing so. So we offered this possibility to our fans
on our news letter (The Letters of Loss) and we had a great feedback. Hundreds
of messages were recorded and I had a breathtaking ride listening through all
of these messages. I could not pick out one more intriguing than the rest. They
were all so different, yet at the same time they were all the same in their
perfect rendition of humanity and mankind.
- Continuing
- "Dea Pecuniae" is another one I have to mention. The odd dialogue
of two individuals, continued in further part of the album. In the beginning
it sounds strange, maybe even irritating - later on it becomes an essential
part of the album. Please, reveal to the fans, what sorts of people are described
by successively appearing characters.
Well, the dialogue is between Mr: Money (representing
today's trend that I like to call Hyper Individualism, going hand in hand
with a Capitalism in a raging stampede) and one of his many female acquaintances
(this man sees anything as property or propery-to-be). This character will
later on come to symbolize mankind's fear of annihilation, both on an individual
level and in the context of humanity as a species (and, in this, the fractals
of Life and Creation) and undergo Cryobiosis to reach immortality. In other
words, the though of losing is unbearable to him, and he fails to see that
a total winning can only be achieved through the complete and utter elimination
of all competition (the only ultimate way of controlling a forest is to cut
it down). The dialogue before Dea Pecuniae serves five purposes:
- We
are presenting the character of Mr. Money, showing what kind of person he
is and how he looks at persons as property. A successful man of our contemporary
society, yet showing disturbing signs of a total lack of social skills and
understanding of humanity.
- It
is based on humour; it's funny in a childish sort of way.
- This
humour will get the listener in a mood more appropriate to understand the
cynic and humoristic touch of the following song, a humour that is much
more subtle than that of the intro and could otherwise be lost on the listener.
- It
contains some typical male word games in its bluntness and jests with today's
gender roles. This also depicts their weaknesses and how, in a way, we have
failed to reach equality on even the smallest levels of everyday life.
- The
most important aspect, however, lies in the interview with Mr. Money taking
place on the car radio in the background - this is where the concept is
still alive an moving, so I advice you to put on your head phones and start
delving deeper into the concept, not only here but everywhere on the album.
The other characters are Animae (the creational
force in the beginning of the concept - the force that religion calls devine),
Imago (the image of Animae - what we call life or, more specifically, mankind),
Dea Pecuniae (the godess of money - Capitalism and/or The Market), Miss Mediocrity
(basically any female that is prey to Mr. Money), Nauticus (traveller
of the seas - refers to both humanity and the probe built by mankind at the
end of the concept, but is also implying that Animae is lost at sea just as
the above mentioned, underlining the fractal patterns of creation).
- What
is characteristic for your concepts, you attempt as strongly as possible to
encourage the fans not only to listen to the music, but also to pay attention
to your ideas, to start thinking on the problems you describe, to start thinking
on their own in general. How do you think, what percentage of the listeners
enjoy the PoS albums fully in this manner? Remembering the "Message to
God" concept, I have a feeling PoS has a group of really involved fans...
I have no idea how many fans try to take in the
whole aspect of every album. I can only create what my urge leads me to create
and give that to others. If they wish only to listen to it in the same manner
that they listen to Backstreet Boys or even exclusively have it on in the background
when they vacuum clean their living room, it is their choice. And possibly their
loss. Even if all our fans would do this, it would not affect my way of writing
music and concepts. Luckily, we seem to have a lot of fans who delve deeper
into our albums than only the surface structure of music, indeed, I guess, a
lot of our fans are fans to a large extent because of the way Pain of Salvation
differs from many other bands when it comes to the devotion to meaningfulness,
emotion and communication. In a way, it is simply similar to the difference
between writing short stories and writing novels. A collection of disconnected
songs and lyrics is a collection of non-related short stories, Pain of Salvation
writes novels, usually with a lot of research at the foundation and with the
stress on the emotional values. Then there are those who seem to write Dadaistic
poems of course... [laughs]
- Each
of your albums have been built on a concept so far, but neither of the earlier
ones involves such a diversified musical content while being so unified in
lyrical layer. If we compared "BE" to "The Wall" (which
in opinion of many people is the most basic pattern of a concept album in
history of rock), I would risk a statement you limited the distance to this
pattern very significantly this time. But maybe you have another target point?
The biggest difference between "BE" and the previous
albums, is the fact that the previous ones have all had a point of departure,
time wise. That is, every concept has had a "now" from which the rest of the
concept is viewed. It is like the difference between living a life or remembering
a life. When you look back on your life, every one of those memories will be
filtered, tinted, by your present state; coloured or stained by the one you
are at the time of remembering. This means that all those different memories
will have the same shade or nuance regardless of how different content they
carry. "BE", on the other hand, is too large to have a tidal point of departure
since it spans beyond the grid of our specific fractal. Thus, we have to travel
through "BE" in a sequence of "nows" where every single experience or snapshot
is the top layer of time (even though "BE" does not support the idea of linear
time, or time as a movement of any sort really). It naturally follows from this
that the concept will change much more musically, and then, after hearing it
countless time, the feeling of conformity is up to us to create as listeners
when we remember and recall the music and the concept.
- Have
you ever thought about recording a mere album, including 10 or 12 songs -
each one having nothing in common with the preceding or following one? With
an interesting music, but unnecessarily deep lyrics? :-)
Yes. I have thought about it in the lines of "why
do that?" [laughs] Jokes aside, I don't know what the future holds; I don't
have a plan. We surprise ourselves just as much as we surprise our fans every
time. It would simplify my interviews a lot, that's for sure. [laughs]
- Is
there any chance to combine the music of "BE" with a visual layer?
I know you planned some sort of performance based on this material. Will other
fans from outside Eskilstuna have a chance to enjoy these performances? There
are some rumours concerning DVD...
There will be a DVD coming out pretty soon actually.
It is a recording of the original live production of "BE" as it was when performed
in the fall of 2003 with a live orchestra and a specially built stage. The show
itself was very visual. When it comes to performing it live in other parts of
the world in the future we will simply have to see what to do about it and discuss
possible solutions.
- What
about the orchestral parts - did you have a chance to develop your music fully
on stage? What about performing "BE" live in future - how are you
going to cope with the choirs, outstanding female vocals, spoken parts, Messages,
etc. Or maybe it simply does not make any sense to perform these songs in
every single venue?
When writing and arranging this album, I was planning
the stage performance so it was performed as intended. Actually, the orchestra
on the album was recorded live during one of those shows. As I mentioned above,
we are not sure how to do with future "BE" shows - maybe we will just let the
Swedish shows be the tour in itself and not try to recreate the show again.
We'll simply have to see.
- I
checked the dates on your website and I noticed the stage activity of PoS
has become very limited over the recent two years. What is the reason?
"BE". It has taken up most of our time the last
two years with research, writing, live production, studio recording, live recording,
DVD production etc. As I said, this is our biggest effort and achievement by
far.
- On
the other hand, you spend a lot of time in other bands/projects, etc. Does
it not collide with your obligations towards PoS - after all, when you do
not work, neither music, nor concept of a new album has a chance to appear...
I have done a lot of other things but I have not
spent a lot of time doing it, to be painfully honest. And in the long run, I
think Pain of Salvation benefits a lot from this since it gives me other channels
of both input and output, allowing me to focus on Pain of Salvation in another
way. My biggest problem so far has been to shield me from a constant flow of
ideas that does not have a channel or outlet. When it comes to concepts, they
are being formed in my head as we speak, since they are a product of experience
and a constant learning process called Life. The more I see, the quicker the
concepts come together. I simply stumble across a lot of ideas every day, and
all these pieces are stored in the back of my head and eventually start to interact
and interconnect until, one day, they tell me that they are ready for the assembly
line.
- One
of my first considerations when I listened to "BE" concerned the
status of PoS on a music scene. In my opinion a band with such a huge potential
deserves much more attention than PoS currently attracts. Unfortunately many
people will not have a chance to notice that such a wonderful music passes
them in favour of another artificial blondie from MTV. How do you feel about it?
When I was a kid I somehow thought that if you
are just really good at what you are doing you cannot fail. However, every aspect
of life seems determined to prove me wrong. Drinking your head off in the right
company will much likely take you further than any talent or skill would ever
do. I don't complain about the fact that our music might not attract everyone,
but I would wish that everyone would have the chance of deciding for themselves
what they think of our music. For that to happen, the whole entertainment industry
must become less narrow minded and product oriented. Looking at every other
industry before this one, however, I must assume that it is bound to go the
other way.
- On
the very end - could you explain the meaning of the album's subtitle "Chinassiah"?
It is a word puzzle, as so many other titles and
phrases on the album. It derives from a combination of China (for fragility
and beauty, but also manmade) and Messiah (for saviour but also the notion of
something in which we, humanity, put our faith for salvation). Other puzzles
on the same theme is Machinassiah (as above but with the adding of Machine symbolizing
industry, artificial and a moving system), Machinageddon (as above but replacing
Messiah with Armageddon for destruction and a negative spiral) and Machinauticus
(as above but replacing Armageddon with Nauticus for searching, quest, lost
and the creation of the probe).
- Thank
you for the interview.
Likewise, and I really hope to be able to come
to Poland with Pain of Salvation in the near future - I was very welcomed
as a spokesman of Pain of Salvation when I came with the Flower Kings some
while back.
Vampire Magazine interview |
| |
Since the Pain Of Salvation phoner was scheduled at 10 pm, I was watching
the remake of Tarkovsky’s “Solaris”. However, 45 minutes into
the movie (9:13 pm to be exact) my phone rang. Since I didn’t expect Daniel
to call this early I picked up answering in Dutch.
Yet it turned out that the journalist who was scheduled at 9 pm couldn’t
be reached and Daniel asked me if I fill in on this spot. What followed was
a conversation which easily exceeded the quest to find the answers to human
life in “Solaris” in terms of length, philosophy and intellect…
Hi Daniel, you must feel relieved to finally get this album and its
concept out of your system, right?
-Haha, yes in a way. It’s always a struggle to come up with something
new and interesting. To find the next level of progression. We sort of, tried
to figure that out but I feel I’m really close now.
Aha.
-So, that’s really nice.
How many journalists have told you they were completely overwhelmed
by the concept and the music on the new album “BE”?
-Uhm, basically all of them.
Haha.
-I’m doing a lot of interviews. But all of them found a way to grasp
the album, and that is more than I dared to hope for because I’m really
aware that it’s a difficult and dangerous album in many ways. Both musically
and commercially.
We really took a risk doing this album but we really loved it so we had no choice.
Haha. Okay. When I listen to this new album and compare it to the
previous albums it seems like the previous outputs contained more real songs
sort to speak, lyrics on those albums also dealt with emotions and feelings
which are easier to relate to than to the scientific concept of the new album.
-Ah, well I think that this is probably all to a way of perceiving things.
I would refer to songs like for instance “Nauticus” which is one
of my favourite songs on the album. And one of my closest friends who listened
to the album, he was like, how do you see that as a song. And I was very surprised
and was like, what about this thing is not a song? And I guess it all depends
on what you expect from Pain Of Salvation. The more you expect, the more surprised
you’ll be. And the more surprised you will be, the bigger the risk that
you will actually not find what you were looking for in a way. But the best
way for this album is trying not to expect anything but just let the music flow
through you. And then experience “BE” as something completely unique,
such as it is.
Hmmhmm.
The quest for the concept of “BE”.
I’ve tried to find out what the whole concept was about and since
I’m a psychologist my own starting point is a bit limited compared to
all the disciplines of science that were used.
But I do have a few remarks.
-Yeah, come on.
Hehe, well you’re probably better prepared than I am but let’s
see. First of all, the exclusion of language. You say we must put it aside but
you use the good old rhetoric to explain your theory or concept.
-Exactly. And that was one of the biggest problems of all this. As I mentioned,
one of the main points is that you have to take the language away really, in
order to see the patterns like the fractals and the connections between all
these different theories and hypotheses. And doing that was like doing something
almost magical. It was like seeing patterns which are stunning in a way. And
the thing is that when making a concept out of this, you had to address these
very words once again. It was very frustrating. It’s in a way that you
have your language, it’s like being human and then for just a few seconds
you’re allowed to see something that goes beyond human. But then to be
able to kind of communicate this, you will have to get down on that level again
and see the whole thing being kind of destroyed. So it was definitely very frustrating.
A very frustrating process.
And it still is, in these interviews I’m constantly being faced with the
situation where I am supposed to explain the concept and in every of those situations
and also in the situation of creating the concept, you’re constantly feeling
at loss to describe what you mean. You just constantly feel like you’re
making a very dry, limited, narrow version of that whole thing. It’s like
you’re having a wonderful dream or something, and then you try to explain
that to someone and as you hear your words, you just realise that although this
is what I dreamt of, but it’s still not close to that dream anyway because
it’s impossible to put into words and make the whole thing shine through.
So you can only make a limited selection of what you’re thinking and how
the theories have formed. And then in a way you have to rely on the listeners’
urge or mood or will to proceed and try to find a way into this concept. Which
I completely understand if people do not feel that they have the time or will
to do this.
Hmmhmm.
Uhm, let me gather my thoughts on this.
-Oh yeah sure.
I think actually, when you get this concept and theory in your own
mind then, although you use your inner voice as well, it’s much easier
to explain it to yourself and when you have to use the rhetoric to explain it
to someone else.
That brings me to my second remark. Which is to what extent you think you will
be able to make someone else to understand your theory. I mean we all perceive
things differently and our interpretation phase makes different things of those
perceptions as well.
-Yeah, I don’t think that… I think this is the same thing with
books, the old statement that there are as many versions of a book as there
are readers. I think it’s the same thing. I will probably never be able
to explain to myself even, all these connections and all those interrelated
flow of fractals of every one of us, different theories and everything. It’s
more like seeing a pattern which you can’t really explain. And it’s
really hard to try and put into words on how that works.
When you’ve been seeing a lot of different theories, you’ve read
a lot of different knowledge from different territories, in a way it’s
like the whole humanity is displayed in a lot of different territories. Where
you have for instance, religion as one territory, and science as another one,
social politics may be a third one. And in a way, all these different territories
have different theories and different beliefs so to speak, a different library
of words, of thought. And pretty often, these different territories and theories
are seemingly contradictory. I think that probably started with the myth of
creation. That is like one of the first stepping stones into this concept, and
that was in 1996. We were having this course in cultural history and in that
process we were reading a lot of myths of creation. I mean this kind of myth
you can find in almost every nationality or part of the world. It is part of
usually the indigenous people and it’s transcended through many generations
and years and so on. And the thing is that these myths were often very different,
dealing with different things but if you took away the words and took away the
biased feelings that we have and the connections.
I had the question in a previous interview the other day, wondering why I used
a girl and a man as the voices of god in the beginning of the album.
Hmmhmm.
-And first of all, I said that was not a woman actually, it’s a boy.
And that is a good example what I mean with those limitations. I mean because
it is part of the human structure to try to understand and often when we do
that, we’re actually limiting ourselves. That is what knowledge is really
about. To narrow your topic down, you take away information rather than finding
information in many cases.
So for instance, as soon as you hear the voice, you will have to identity the
language, you will have to identify whether it is a man or a woman, what age
is he or she. And if it’s not a man or woman but a computerised voice
then you would think of a computer. There’s really no way in doing this,
I mean you can be as creative as possible and mix a lot of different voices,
but the fact still remains that you will interpret all of those words. And every
one of those words, if we go down to that level, is the same thing. As soon
as you hear it, you interpret it and limit it down to what it means. And that’s
the reason why I’ve used Latin for all of the song titles. Because like
“Animae partus” in the beginning where you have ‘animae’
which can be god, it can be a wind, it can be a breath, it can be a spirit.
We’re not as biased when it comes to those words because we don’t
face them in everyday life. While most of the words that we say and learn will
have a lot of different connotations attached to it. And we can’t get
rid of those, no matter how hard we would try.
And listing up those myths of creation, what I saw was a story too large for
words really. Or a story beyond comprehension for those who were part of it
or watched it. And this was like having a very odd or weird dream. You try to
get that… I mean, have you seen that movie, I think it’s “Mask”.
I mean the one with Cher.
With the boy with a deformed face.
-Yeah exactly. What it was is that he tried to describe the color red to someone
who can’t see and he hands her a hot potato. And it’s kind of clever
but still that feeling of red is only for the people who have eyesight. Because
so many things that are hot, are red, that’s why we make that connection.
Hmmhmm.
-And so, the thing is actually just as limited and narrowed down as he is.
But he is not aware of that actually. He thinks he’s incredibly smart
to hand her a hot potato, and the guy who wrote the script probably also thought
that. But the thing is that it’s only hot for someone that knows red.
It’s only hot to a person who has seen red. Because we connect it to hot
since we see so many things that are red. And it doesn’t really explain
the color red at all. It’s the same problem with trying to explain something
that goes beyond words, and that’s what I can see in those myths of creation.
The same kind of frustration in only using language and context that we can
relate to. Even though what they’re trying to explain is larger or bigger.
And there can be a lot of different ideas to why this would be.
A simple idea would just be that it’s been the same story initially and
then it’s changed because people have moved around and find a new context,
new surroundings to use, to loan and borrow themes from to use in the story.
But I’m using more of a kind of fabulous and fascinating theory for this
album. Where I see… kind of like “The matrix”. That there
is a pattern in everything, there is pattern buried deep in all we know. Like
a code for everything, and we cannot see or read it. But we’re part of
it and feel it, yet can’t really explain it. And through this we’re
trying to solve the puzzle of what life is about. What humanity is about. And
in doing that we’re using the limitations that we have. We’re using
the hot potato because that’s the only thing we have. We don’t have
the tool of describing the color red in any other way. And especially when we
differences are even larger than between a seeing person and a blind person.
Because they still share a lot of different things, they’re practically
the same, they have one input of interpreting the world that separates them.
And when it comes to these narrative structures which differ in the one telling
the story and one listening to it, the distance is even larger. It’s like
the universe, it’s the story teller and we are the listeners. And we just
don’t have a clue really haha.
So like I said it’s been a very frustrating journey trying to put all
of this together. I started with the myths of creation depriving them of words
and all of a sudden these contradictory stories started to make sense. If you
exchange the father for a something like representing the father like putting
an X in that position, like a place holder. And then do the same thing for whatever,
a crow in the other story. While the moon is being used in the third story.
Or whatever the story is about and just narrow it down to just a sense of trying
to pick the feelings, trying to pick the most basic pattern of how you interpret
a father in a lot of different contexts. And then all of a sudden, it all starts
to… it’s like having all these rhythms and the more you deprive
and the more you narrow them down, the more you try to exclude human fabrications,
the more you will hear all those beats and drums. Things start to go in line
with each other, start to share the same rhythms. And it is truly a fascinating
process. What I’ve been doing after that is just trying to apply the same
thing to the rest of the 3 areas that I’ve been studying for the concept
really. Which is really interesting when you see so many different theories
and it’s like: but this is the same thing really. It’s exactly the
same thing, but they basically were prose.
What is quite interesting is that you said you narrow things down to
some more basic patterns and I think most people are biased and by using such
biases they also narrow things down to be able to understand the world and be
able to deal with it.
-Yeah exactly. I mean, it’s what you’re doing in both ends of it
really. So you’re narrowing yourself down to communicate and you’re
narrowing yourself sometimes, you know, not to have to communicate. So it’s
a well tried path both ways for human beings definitely. I mean it’s been
a really interesting journey through all these different worlds really. Because
the magic happens when you start seeing those theories and different territories
start to connect, to relate to each other and interact. And you start seeing
things in the other territories as well. And that is when the concept starts
to take shape.
It’s a way it’s unifying all these theories, using those patterns
and those ways of interconnectivity, all of a sudden reincarnation suddenly
makes sense. And not believing in it at all makes sense, and it doesn’t
oppose reincarnation. Having heaven and hell without the reincarnation all of
a sudden does not oppose reincarnation either. Simply because none of those
words are the correct things, if you get my point.
Hmmhmm. (Ron: He means that language and the words we
use are made up by us to narrow the world down to a comprehensible level. Yet
none of those words are the correct terms of description for all these concepts.)
-So, for instance, having this idea of the creation of force in the beginning.
The mind that shatters itself in order to understand itself and become the human
being in many ways. Using that as a kind of pattern, which is purely fictional
of course, is still interesting because it make the puzzle work. Even though
it’s not the right way of making it work, it’s still one way of
making it work. Because all of a sudden it all makes sense. Doing that, god
is everywhere, and doing that there is no god. Doing that, there is a god. Depending
on how you see that. And in a way, we all reincarnated if we travel into that
system of being like those bits of information in a hard drive or something
like that. While still there is a heaven and hell which is basically what is
left. It’s like a bipolar or binary way that life is kind of consistent
to two states: being and non-being. Let me give you an example, I mean this
is really… we always compare humanity and ourselves to the thing that
is most prominent in the technical development. So today it’s the most
natural thing in the world to compare humanity to a computer system. And it’s
a factual thing, people always do that. But it’s just an example.
I’ve been reading books about transcending and near-death experiences
and stuff like that. I’ve also been reading books on out of body experiences.
I’ve met people who have had such experiences. I’ve heard scientists
who in very convincing ways argue why it is impossible. And I think they’re
all right and they’re all wrong in a way.
If we just imagine that the universe as we know it is a hard drive in a computer.
And we would be small bits of information in that hard drive. You would have
scientists in this hard drive creating that when a bit of information is lost,
it’s not lost forever because it’s lost in the hard drive. But then
they should never the whole computer system. They could never understand how
the bits of information have, like magic to them, travelled through the core
to a monitor and being transmitted to my eyes when I sit at the computer and
being stored in my brain. A storage that remains there after I delete certain
bit of information. So, to the bits of information in the hard drive this is
incomprehensible, this is beyond every possible way of understanding life to
them. Because the whole hard drive is their universe. And it doesn’t matter
how much they would try to figure out what is beyond the hard drive because
it’s not their world really. It’s a completely different dimension
and still in that sense, you can say the guy sitting at the computer is an all
powerful god. Because he can just by touching a key on his keyboard basically
destroy a world and create a new world inside that hard drive. By just erasing
this letter ‘a’ and writing ‘b’ instead in his Word
document or whatever. So in a way, he’s the perfect god but on another
level it’s just a completely natural process which does not include the
urge or need to create. Because when I type that little key, I have no intention
of certain bit of information. It’s just necessary for what I’m
doing at that moment. And the connection between these two worlds can never
be understood from the other side of the circuit. The bit of information of
being a scientist, if being in this world, that claims that this bit of information
would be like another human being, that bit of information is lost when it is
destroyed. This is completely correct since this bit of information is lost
in the computer. And the ones who say that the information, like the souls of
information will transcend onto another level are also right. Both of them are
right. But they just have a limited view on what is right and what is wrong.
So they would say they have contradictory theories about this. But they don’t,
they just don’t see how they’re right.
(Ron: How are the bits of information who are reading this, doing right
now? I can assure you I’ve destroyed and created millions of worlds typing
this interview!)
Grab your towels!
Your notion of the universe as a computer reminds me of Douglas Adams’
“Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy”, in which the earth is
actually a computer designed to come up with the answer to the question…
no wait, it’s the question to the answer of 42.
-Haha yeah exactly. Indeed it is actually the question to the answer 42. The
answer is 42 but nobody knows what the questions was haha.
Yes, I think just the earth exploded by the doing of the Vogons, its
last calculation of the question was something like 9 x 6. But this doesn’t
equal 42 so it’s still remains unsolved hehe.
-I mean, that’s what is not really realistic but that book, even though
it is also a theory completely fictional, and I don’t think for one second
he believed that that was a correct theory of the constitution of the world,
but still also a way of laying the puzzle. And it is valid for a lot of questions
that will arise, it’s a wonderful example of how twisted and turned things
can be when seeing them from different angles, to see what comes out. Regarding
the sources of literature I really love reading both sorts of books. You know,
by side by side on equal terms, there usually are some books which make you
find things out and then there is the more entertaining literature. And I really
think you can gain just as much from all of these different variants of literature.
If it’s good, it’s good, regardless of categories.
Yes, and I feel the same about music. There’s only good music
and bad music.
If it doesn’t move me or make me think then it is ‘bad’ music
in my opinion. And indeed regardless what music style or genre it is.
-Exactly.
Easter eggs in the songs.
I have some questions about the songs, not all of them, but some of
them hehe.
-Oh yeah, bring it on.
The fourth song (“Pluvius aestivus”), I did have Latin
in high school, so I’ll just use the Roman numbers of the songs if you
don’t mind.
This song includes a piano part which has a certain Philip Glass feel to it.
Would you agree?
-Well, the thing is I’ve heard a few different alternatives already haha.
I’ve never listened to Philip Glass so I guess I can’t say if there’s
a Glass influence in it. And if it is, it’s definitely not intentional
because it’s nothing that I really know. But another interview is like,
well this is extremely influenced by Archive X. (Ron: I think he means the
X files)
And I was like, yeah maybe it is. Because I never really watched that show either
even though I liked since I kinda have a feeling that it is good. I have heard
the soundtrack even though I haven’t really listened to it.
(Daniel starts singing the X files theme song.)
I have heard it, it’s somewhere in the back of my head but it is kind
of interesting since this is repeating itself with the album. And people are
like, well this must be influenced by this or that. And every time I’m
embarrassed to say, uhm… haven’t heard that haha.
Well, I’m not saying that it’s influenced but the piano
part I’m talking about is fast, melodic and repetitive.
-Yeah.
And that is something which is one of Philip Glass’ trademarks.
These constantly repetitive, beautiful piano parts that keep going on, there’s
no beginning or an end really. He made some excellent soundtracks as well, like
for instance for “The hours”.
-Alright! That is a great movie.
Yeah, and the soundtrack is also fabulous.
-Yes sounds interesting. I have the movie so I can watch it again and listen
more to the soundtrack.
There’s this interlude prior to song six (“Nauticus”)
in which a man and a woman who are quarrelling in a car.
-The so-called "Car Scene".
Yeah.
You’ve probably had lots of questions about it before.
-Hmm, just a few actually, not as much as I thought it would provoke.
'Cause I don’t have the lyrics, would have preferred to have
them, but this section just somehow falls out of place, it doesn’t fit
very well with the rest of the album or so it seems.
-Haha. Yeah, it serves 3 purposes really. First of all, it serves the purpose
of being funny. And kind of funny at the expense of the male gender. It’s
like the downside of the male gender in a way. So that’s the first and
simple purpose.
Second purpose is that being on the funny side of things, being cynical and
all that, it kind of gets you in the right mood so that you will take the song
that follows in a more correct way. Because that song is cynical in itself and
has a lot of ironical sublevels of information. And I think this song will be
much easier approached by these feelings in the right way because you’re
in a certain mood from that introduction.
And finally the third and maybe most important reason; that actually the story
you’re listening to, is actually taking place on the radio. On the car
radio. So the car radio is where the actual story is taking place. Because there
is an interview with Mr. Money going on, on the radio about technical development
and cryobiology which he’ll come to later on in the concept. So, that’s
the car scene laid out for you hehe.
Okay, well I sure as hell would never have figured out the third one!
-Haha, so that’s like a little, almost like a little Easter egg. It’s
just like many songs on the album that have many sublevels but one of the more
easy sublevel to point out.
Yes, there are so many layers to be found I really pity the journalists,
I pity myself! To try to find all these layers in this huge musical creation.
There’s so much of it…
-Haha.
Song number 8 (“Vocari dei”) includes these voice mail
messages from the fans. They are very moving but what I don’t get is that
the messages are addressed to god.
-The thing we did was… are you still there? Hello?
Yeah, I’m still here hehe.
-I accidentally hit my telephone with my elbow and I thought it had disconnected
the line.
Nono, I’m still here.
-That’s good haha. Yeah, I wanted to depict… because when moving
through the concept we started off with how this creation of force in the beginning
is forming the world in order to understand itself. So it’s like a quest
to understand himself or herself or itself. And then mankind is formed in that
same you know, as an image, as this lower commonly crow. And they would follow
mankind’s progression really into the acres where we are at today. Where
we turn religion into our own tools, and we’re turning the former god
into more of a slave, who will help us solve of our own purpose. And here we
can see a lot of switching in scenes where you have god displayed as one caller
states: once again the humans messed things up.
Because speaking of god, you will instantly have a lot of connotations to that
word and the same thing goes for slave. So, those were the two most interesting
words I could find that would fit into the concept. I’m really still not
satisfied with those two words. I would rather have the relation between them
at a more pattern scale sort of speak. A more fractal scale.
In that little section we are really looking at humanity, once again man, which
is a very biased word as for as gender is concerned. But mankind or humanity,
which also contain man, so it doesn’t really help. Anyway, the relation
to deity, divinity and god and themselves, I wanted to depict that in a good
way.
And I was first of all thinking to have people when you record the messages
and maybe record the messages ourselves. But then I figured it might be a very
good idea having people call and just leave their messages by themselves. We
have a lot of subscribers to this newsletter we send out, so we send out an
offer to participate in “BE”, simply by calling a number and you
would have the possibility of leaving a message to god. And the rules were really
very simple, you can do whatever you want. You can hate, you can love, you can
cry, you can laugh, you can joke, you can be dead-serious, whatever you want.
Everything is completely up to you. The only thing we wish is that you make
it full-heartedly. I mean, I was going to say seriously but that also implies
that you have to be serious. And heartedly also implies a certain amount of
seriousness. So once again the words are really a problem here haha. But do
it honestly you know. Although honest also is a bad word because it implies
that you have to be honest with your message but you don’t have to be
honest either. It was like a breathtaking ride listening to all those messages.
A lot of people were funny when they called and left their messages. And it
was really difficult to pick out just a handful because I really wanted to use
all of them.
I can imagine.
-Yeah. So uhm, but it was definitely a thrilling ride. I remember one point
when I was listening to this extremely serious message and I thought, oh shit
this guy is going to kill himself. And maybe it’s our fault since now
he feels like he left his message and it’s okay now, now he can end it.
And we were like, oh man what have we done, you know? What have we created here?
And then, after stopping in the end there was a silence for a while and he went
like (puts on happy voice): "okay guys, that was it, hope you
enjoyed it. Really looking forward to the next album. You absolutely rule guys!"
Haha!
Hahahaha!
-It was like you’re closed between these emotions and you start to go
like: oh man… It was really a thrilling ride as I said. But I think it
really contributed a lot to the feelings of that song and of the whole album
actually.
Obviously the songs sort of breathe different moods, like for example
song number 12 which sounds like a dirge. Like a funeral song.
-Uhm… 12, which one is that?
Uhm…………… I would have to go and check
the CD back cover.
-Is it the last one, or the church organ one?
Could be. I’ll go and check the song title.
-Okay, that would help hehe.
It’s called “Omni”.
-Yeah, it’s the church organ one. Yeah, that is kind of like the turning
point where you have Nauticus which is like an intelligent probe. Because I
always loved the idea of these probes that mankind sends out and they have like
this gold vinyl album with Mozart on there. And you have a man and a woman raising
their right hand because that’s like the universal symbol of peace you
know. It’s so crappy. I really would wanna be on one of those meetings
when they’re deciding what they would send to represent mankind. It’s
just hilarious in a way. And in this concept mankind is sending away this really
intelligent probe with the buildings of social life and he’s going to
learn as it moves along. At this point it’s like, because usually when
we have people in this concept thing, it’s kind of a symbol of mankind.
This man send probe is like mankind in a symbol. Depending on this probe to
be able to find the answer of the meaning of life in time. Because we really
messed things up here on earth. So that’s basically the feeling. It is
kind of a funeral march. The harmonies of that song are really… you go
from this one end and the whole very long passage actually reaches like a final
chord. Exactly at the end when you resolute the chords. I really love the chord
structure of that song. I think it underlines the message really well.
Okay.
The necessity of skipping questions…
-I just want to say that I have to quit kind of soon because I’m supposed
to call another interviewer at 10 o’clock now. But just take the most
important ones of the ones you have left.
Haha, okay.
Hmm... haha.
Let’s skip that one…
-Hahaha.
Yeah, I hate to skip questions.
A very short one then. The end of the album with the kid’s voice singing
“We have room for all god’s creatures, right next to the mashed
potatoes”, you mentioned the progression of mankind, it reminds me a bit
of the end of the movie “2001: A space odyssey” with its cosmic
rebirth.
-Oh yeah? Uhm… yeah actually it might, it might. I haven’t really
thought about that but I’m thinking about these circles in a way. So actually
in the end, this probe kind of gains awareness of itself and just like in the
beginning, just like you are never really aware of the exact moment when you
fall asleep. I think that no being can be aware of this exact thought, just
like we can go down to the creation of the universe like the first millisecond
or probably even shorter, but never reach the exact point of zero. You can never
do that. And it’s the same thing with being created, you can never go
back to the exact moment of creation. You can never remember your own creation.
Just like you can never attain light speed but you can get very, very close.
So this probe wakes up and being unable to go back its own creation it doesn’t
know where it comes from. And it has got all the knowledge of mankind really,
and all the knowledge of life (Ron: hmm, sounds like Marvin to me!), so it has
the potential of creating a universe, a new world. And with that final exclamation
“I am” we can even imagine that a new circle, a new cycle it starts
at that point. And it is the exact same origin and god or creation of force
that we have in the beginning of the album creating it.
So it’s full circle once again.
-Yeah.
"BE" live?
Okay, one more question then. I really do hate skipping all the rest
of the questions…
How are you going to play this album live? I mean, how are you going to pull
this one off?
-We are not sure if we will actually. Because we did the live production of
it like a year ago. And when we actually played this whole thing in a very nice
production live for three weeks. And we’ve been discussing it from every
possible angle and we can’t really figure out how it could be possible
to do this live. Because you really can’t do it with only our instruments
since this is so far from Metallica as you can get. Uhm, the orchestra is really
part of the musical structure. So if you take that away it doesn’t make
sense anymore.
So that’s probably also one of the reasons why you’ll be
released the DVD version of “BE”.
-Yeah exactly. This is a good thing to see how it was actually performed in
the original version.
Okay. And do you have any touring plans coming up?
-Well right now we’re still talking about it. I mean because we’ve
been so busy making “12:5” and then making the live production of
“BE”, making the album production of “BE”, and now making
the DVD production of “BE”. It’s just so difficult foreseeing
this schedule so we have actually skipped touring as much as possible. We’ve
done a few shows here and there but it’s basically only when we’re
forced to do that hehe. You know, either the album is very good or it’s
a good place and we have to play there. So we’ll have to see until after
the DVD is getting done we can start talking about the future when it comes
to touring and playing all of that.
Because I still haven’t seen you guys live!
-Really? Oh!
Yes exactly, so I’m really anxious to see you in a club or on
a festival.
-Yeah. We’re always getting back to the Netherlands so you have better
chances than most people on this world to have the possibility of seeing us
in the future. Because we always play in Holland and we practically did a Holland
tour a couple of years ago. It was called the Benelux tour but we never played
in Luxembourg so I call it the Bene-tour. But we will get there. If not with
“BE” we will play other material. But we will get there.
Good, looking forward to it.
So I’ll let you off the hook now haha, so you can call that other guy.
But it was very nice talking to you.
-Yeah, it was a very nice and pleasant interview. So it was my pleasure.
I’ll send you an e-mail when it’s online so you can check
it if you have the time.
-Alright, cool.
Bye bye.
-Okay bye.
| |
| |
1. I've seen a PoS show for the first time at ProgPower V festival
in Atlanta. I enjoyed the show very much and felt that 1.5 hours were very short.
How did you feel about the show?
Great that you saw the show, I wonder if you had to land in the outskirts
of Ivan the storm as we had to, but you were probably there already. Well, those
90 minutes seem much longer when you are the singer, believe me, especially
with the set list we had for the evening. :) Johan Hallgren caught a really
bad cold the same day as the gig so we were all a bit anxious about his health
on stage, but he pulled through. I wouldn't say it was one of our best shows
but the audience seemed to appreciate it, a lot of people came to see us alone,
which is very flattering. There were a bunch of people from Costa Rica there
and they pressed their own Pain of Salvation shirts for the event ("Costa
Rica is getting used to pain!" they read - we were given a shirt each in
the band too).
2. Please tell us the set list at ProgPower V.
Wow, I don't know if I remember it. I remember starting with Undertow - I think
that made a great impact as opposed to all the power metal bands there starting
off with their most powerful and speedy songs; the lights went out and before
the curtains opened you would hear that single guitar growing - silence spread
across the audience like magic. We decided the order of the songs simply by
writing every song on a piece of paper and draw them one by one from a cowbell,
haha. It turned out surprisingly well I'd say. I remember playing Rope Ends,
Idioglossia, Trace of Blood, Inside, People Passing By, Used, In the Flesh,
Ashes, ! and Beyond the Pale. I might be forgetting something though...
3. The set list was said to be based on the votes by fans. Was it difficult
to decide the number of songs to ten something? Why didn't you play any tune
from the new album, "BE"? Is there any album tune that cannot be played
live?
All songs are written and produced in order to be possible to perform live,
to answer your last part of the question. The list was decided by the fans through
voting and we simply picked the top songs until we covered all 90 minutes. "BE"
was not out at that point so there were no votes for that album. It was a special
thing for this festival since we were special guests.
4. When did you start to write songs for "BE"? Did you write
all the tunes by yourself?
I started to work on the concept and music in March 2003, and we performed
it for the first time later that same year. I wrote all songs except for Iter
Impius, which was written by Fredrik and I wrote the lyrics.
5. Though a live album, 12:5 was released in between, "BE"
is the first studio album in two years since Remedy Lane. Does it mean you spent
a lot of time on production and recording? How was the band's situation in the
meantime?
Well, first off, I would like to say that 12:5 is much more than a live album
or an unplugged album. It is in many aspects a complete make-over of many of
the previous Pain of Salvation songs, making a whole new concept about the relation
of two people, that can also symbolize the relational patterns of mankind or
the interactions of nationalities in contemporary society. Furthermore, the
last two years have probably been the most productive both for the band and
myself. First there was the whole writing process of "BE" after a
few months of discussing ideas and actually working a little on The Perfect
Element part II, then there was a lot of work with the conceptual ideas and
the click tracks, back tracks and projections for the live production of "BE"
that took place in the fall of 2003 for three weeks. During those weeks we did
a live recording of the whole show. Then there was the work on the DVD recording
of "BE" before creating and recording 12:5 and releasing that after
making the artwork. After that I finished building my own studio and we started
recording the studio version of "BE". The last two months (prior to
the release of "BE") we have been working on the live version and
the DVD productions as well. To clarify the level of work I can mention that
me and my wife Johanna have had two weeks of real vacation together in almost
12 years together. Apart from the above mentioned, I have personally also been
involved in three tours with the Flower Kings, one album recording and one DVD
recording with the same band, the Hammer of the Gods project together with Mike
Portnoy, Paul Gilbert and Dave LaRue, the second part of Genius, a Spastik Inc
album and a number of Pain of Salvation shows every now and then.
6. You once said that music and concept were moving at the same time.
Was this true with BE?
Yes and no. The framework for the concept of "BE" was beginning to
take shape as early as back in 1996, but the concept is bigger than ever on
this album and the ideas and theories needed a lot of time to mature and create
interconnections. When the song writing process started for real, that's when
the concept creation moved up to a higher level and started to develop more
in sync with the music, so from that point it developed hand in hand as usual.
7. Tell us about the concept of "BE". Are all the song titles
Latin? If possible, please explain the scenes represented by the individual
tunes. Is the subtitle Chinassiah a coined word of yours?
The concept is too complex to be explained - if I talk really fast I can make
a brief description in about two hours. Believe me, I have actually tried. Let's
say that it is a modern tale of creation, a unifying hypothesis attempting to
explain all the different thoughts and ideas of seemingly contradictory theories
presented by different territories of contemporary society such as Science,
Religion, Sociopolitics, Philosophy, Psychiatry etc. Some key notions would
be fractals (seeing the same patterns' repetition on several levels) and the
deprivation of linguistic values and semantic connotations applied to the above
mentioned theories and beliefs. The use of latin is a way of avoiding too much
tinting and filtering of the bigger patterns as they are again pushed into the
realms of human language. For instance, I bet they have translated the English
into Japanese, but not the Latin, right? Latin is a dead language even though
it is kept alive in some ways, thus you are free to take poetic freedom to a
larger extent without people reacting too sharply. As an example I can mention
Nihil Morari, just to give you a clue as how to work on the titles. Nihil is
a latin word meaning "nothing" or "emptiness" or what is
left when you deprive something of everything, so to speak. Brick number one.
Then you have the word Morari, meaning "leftovers" or "remains"
of something - "corps" in a way. Brick number two. Then you put them
together and translate them into English: Nothing Remains (this is the magical
process where the homonym (right? When two words sound and sometimes even look
exactly the same, but mean different things depending on the context) "remains"
transcends from the plural noun to the progressive form of the verb. Brickwork.
See the magic yet? It's also a language with very wide semantics, in that the
word Animae can mean god, spirit, wind, breath etc, making it possible to focus
on the larger patterns. Chinassiah is a homemade construction consisting of
China (symbol of beauty and fragility) and Messiah (symbolizing both the saviour
and the hope/belief of salvation - a hope we can place in different "fractals"
such as political movements, persons, gods, inventions. In other words, all
of the above mentioned contemporary social territories or mind worlds have saviors
of their own - deceivingly contradictory. Furthermore we have in the other constructions
Machine, Armageddon, Nauticus to indicate the evolution of Imago (mankind).
8. The booklet of the album has many pictures like those from movies.
Does this mean that BE was also completed as a visual work? Does this have something
to do with a DVD release?
Most images comes from the projections that we used at the back of the stage
when we performed it live in 2003, and parts of those projections will be visible
in the DVD that we are working on right now.
9. Comparing BE with the past works, what do you think is different
and how you have made progress musically?
"BE" is a much more complex and intellectually challenging piece
of work, where we have allowed the songs to have a much more developed personality
and integrity. All the previous albums are created like a view from a particular
point of departure, like remembering your life will always tint and filter the
situations you remember depending on what point you are actually viewing them
from, right? Then it's natural that they all breathe the same air and are colored
in different shades of the same color. On "BE" however, we are truly
moving through the concept since there is no possible fixed viewing angle to
a story with a span that exceeds the Universe as we know it. Thus, the songs
will a more unique personality as you move through the matrix of the whole story
bit by bit.
10. Vocari Dei has a Japanese phrase 'Kamisama-san, Naze senso...Sayonara'.
Who said the phrase? What does this stand for?
I truly do not know. We gave our fans the possibility of participating in "BE"
by calling a phone number and leave a message to God, they could say whatever
they felt and wanted to express to God. It gave the song an extra dimension
and really adds to the concept and the relation between the Gods and Slaves
used in it. So I was hoping you could tell me... :)
11. I think your fans now assume that PoS albums mean conceptual albums.
Don't you feel it a heavy burden to create concept albums?
No. To me it is like asking a writer why he writes novels instead of short
stories. I don't feel like I have to, I'll simply do it as long as I want to.
12. How about Part 2 of The Perfect Element? Is it still put in cold
storage? Do you plan to produce Part 2 in the near future?
The second part will come, don't worry. But the time needs to be right. People
have waited for what? twenty, thirty years? for the third episode of Star Wars,
so I figure around 2025...? No, just kidding.
13. Please tell us about your plans in the near future. Is it tough
to work as the member of PoS and that of THE FLOWER KINGS? Is there any possibility
that PoS's coming to Japan to play live?
Well, first of all we will lay our last hands on the coming "BE"
DVD, then we might start to think about where to go next. I have some great
song ideas and conceptual ideas but I will just let them decide for me as usual,
I'll go with the flow and gently steer rather than push the music away from
its genuine form and spirit. I think that all of the side projects I've been
involved in rather makes it easier to focus on Pain of Salvation since it produces
an outlet for a lot of the other musical rivers that flow through my head and
sometimes just distract me. Pain of Salvation is my brainchild, my love and
my first priority. My favorite band with my favorite musicians making my favorite
music of all times. It is music transcending man, transcending the stained and
torn little constitution we call civilization. It is Music. And "BE"
is our latest world, the new and most developed chapter in the Pain of Salvation
Book Of All That Matters.
We would love to come to Japan - we are just waiting for an invitation. I was
there myself back in 1997 and it was a great and very memorable week in my life.
I tell everyone all the time how much I enjoyed Japan (or, I should say, Tokyo
- but the next time I hope to see even more of Japan!).
Love.
Thank you very much.
|
|
|
|
| | |