David E. Gehlke of DeadRhetoric.com recently conducted an interview with vocalist Sigurd "Satyr" Wongraven of Norwegian black metallers SATYRICON. A few excerpts from the chat follow below.
DeadRhetoric.com: You made a [statement] after the cycle for "The Age Of Nero" completed that you were going to do things differently for the band going forward, that it was time for you to "re-examine" the organizational structure of SATYRICON. In what ways have things changed as a result of this leading up to the new album?
Satyr: [pauses] That change is still going on. There are many things… We've replaced almost all of our crew. And they are important people, they can really influence the outcome of a show both in a good and bad way. They can be there to save your ass, but at the same time, you can do everything you're supposed to do and if they screw up, you're the guy that's going to look like an idiot. We replaced almost all of them; we've replaced the management, we've replaced the main agent which is the guy in charge of Europe; we've replaced one of the guitar players, and we're in the midst of replacing one of the keyboard players. When it comes to the studio, when looking at this record, we sent out inquires to some of the very best mix engineers and producers in the world and not one of them did not respond. Some of them came back asking about money, some came asking about schedule, some people said they wanted to hear some stuff, blah, blah, blah. Then one guy said, "I'm well familiar with the band. I really like SATYRICON and I'm confident I can help them get a really authentic sound." And I read that email that was forwarded to me and I said, "That's the guy that should mix this record with me." And that was Adam Kasper from Seattle.
DeadRhetoric.com: While still on the topic of your organization, it's not like the last album was a failure. You've had a significant amount of success, especially in Europe. So, how much examination went into making these kinds of decisions?
Satyr: I think allowing myself that kind of distance… I guess it was around Christmas of 2009 that we finished the touring cycle for "The Age Of Nero", and we made the decision in August that we were going to do that. The reason why I wanted to do that is that I felt at that point, the smallest, not even arguments, just disagreements would turn into huge fights and everything was so overly dramatic and I've seen that kind of stuff before and I've worked with tour managers who dealt with that stuff. If it was a business and I was an executive, I would make changes. I started thinking to myself when I was in that situation that one thing is to be the guy with that extra votes and possibility to force things through and turn them down, but you also have to provide leadership in a situation like this. I just wondered what I was going to do, and I decided I was going to impulse-break. And everyone was saying, "Why would you want to do that now?"
DeadRhetoric.com: There are some bands of your ilk that you are lumped in with that can be considered commercially successful, like DIMMU BORGIR and CRADLE OF FILTH. They are lucrative entities.
Satyr: At least CRADLE are. DIMMU seems to be really lucrative to everyone surrounding them, but not necessarily the band. [laughs] That's more their fault. You have to keep an eye on what people surrounding you are doing. I think in our case, it's like everything else in life. If you want to, after having done this for so long, keep on enjoying it and remain motivated and inspired, which is absolute necessity if you want to make something that sounds good, you have to go look for that. It will not just magically appear. I've had this talk with one of my live musicians a million times. He will sit in the dressing room and complain about something, some stage technician that he doesn't get. Again and again, he will complain, and I will say, "Have you told him?" "No, I haven't." Then I ask him: "How is this situation going to improve? What are your expectations? How will things be different for tonight's show?" And he'll go, "I know, I'll tell him." And I know he won't. [laughs] With SATYRICON, I felt like the break after "The Age Of Nero" was really interesting because I had a different way of discovering the world. I began working a little bit on a wine-making project with wineries and winemakers all around the world, and I got to the see the world without my tour bus perspective. That was really interesting. For example, in France, I worked with a small underground producer in Burgundy. I did a whole wine harvest with him and stayed with his family. I didn't do a lot of grape picking — grape picking is monkey work. [laughs] We did it for vinification. That's where you actually make the wine and to be a part of an old-school traditional French family. I stayed with them. We worked 12-hour days, then they'd gather the entire family for big traditional meals with wines from previous vintages. We'd get up really early in the morning and continue work with the vinificaiton. I also went to Lebanon and there was a winery there where I got to know the people. I stayed with them and their vineyards are in terrorist-controlled areas.
Read the entire interview at DeadRhetoric.com.
eter Hodgson of IHeartGuitarBlog.com recently conducted an interview with Sigurd "Satyr" Wongraven of Norwegian black metallers SATYRICON. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.
IHeartGuitarBlog.com: What do you think would be the perfect place to listen to [SATYRICON's new, self-titled] album for the first time?
Satyr: Well… I know it's not possible for all writers and journalists to do this, because the way these things are being distributed is through computer streams, but it's analog production with an awful lot of emphasis on getting an authentic, organic sound with a great dynamic range where the performance of the musician comes across in terms of actually breathing life into the song through the lows coming down really low and quiet, and the really explosive epic parts really coming across as powerful and huge. And to me, it just means to play this record repeatedly on a good stereo without coloring the sound with your own EQ. Just leave everything in neutral so you can actually hear what the record sounds like the way that it was made. I also think that due to the fact that it has so many tiny little details here and there — whether it's the mellotron or the harmonium or the piano or the acoustic guitars or the theremin, all these little instruments that have their small features here and there that are introduced in a subtle way — to me, it's more that than where you find yourself physically. It's how you listen to it.
IHeartGuitarBlog.com: Even just listening to the stream over the headphones, there's so much depth to everything, and the sounds aren't harsh and aggressive — they're more rich and inviting and that makes you want to listen closer.
Satyr: Well, to me, that's a fantastic compliment. What you try to do as a musician is you try to make the listener hear what you're hearing and what you're trying to achieve. And that was just one of those things that I decided to do for this record. I was going to get rid of all distortion pedals. For rock music, that's pretty normal, to just crank the amplifier and go with that sound, and then maybe they use a wah pedal or something like that. But for metal, you typically have some pedal that's gonna turbo-charge your sound. And for me, I really believe in the amplifiers that I use and I like the microphones we were using for the guitar recording, and I wanted to bring out my style of playing, the sound of my amplifier, the sound of the old tube microphones that we were using, and I didn't want a modern-day pedal to kill the dynamics of my playing. So a lot of it was like that, and other things we did with the drums that typically, for a metal drummer playing like Frost does, he uses smaller-sized drums for more attack definition and in order for it to be more comfortable to play for the drummer. And I kept saying to him, "I love the drum sound on the things that we've done, but nothing sounds like our old drum kit, and the last time we used that was on the 'Volcano' record. Why are we not using that anymore?" And he just said, "Because it's old and broken and fucking hard to play." And I said, "I'm not looking for any hyper-speed solutions anyway. I'm looking for a big fat tone with great sustain, and if it's broken, we'll just get some guy to fix it and get new parts, and it shouldn't be a problem." And then we set it up again, and when we were playing the new stuff, straight off the bat, I said, "Are you not hearing what I'm hearing? This sounds so much better, so much more musical to me." So there were many little things we did here and there, even in the production process, where there would be computer versions of some compressor or something like that, which to me didn't sound that great, and the engineer would typically claim that it's the same as the real thing, and I'd say, "I don't believe you because I know that this computer thing is a $250 item and if you try and buy the physical version of this from the Seventies on eBay, it's going to cost you two grand." And he says, "Well, there is a difference, but it's a small difference," and I said, "That's the small difference I'm looking for!" So that meant we did spend a little bit more time than we had planned for, but it was necessary to make this record come across the way we wanted. We felt we had atmospheric songs, we felt that we needed our tone to come across and go into the songwriting and become a part of the musical expression, and we felt that we needed the songs to be able to breathe. And pretty much the opposite of what most records sound like today, as the majority of records are quite digital and processed-sounding, and we were pursuing something completely different. We've always had these elements in our music, but never to such an uncompromising degree as on this record. It was necessary and it gave us the outcome we now have in our hands.
Niclas Müller-Hansen of Sweden's Metalshrine recently conducted an interview with vocalist Sigurd "Satyr" Wongraven of Norwegian black metallers SATYRICON. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.
Metalshrine: The [new, self-titled] album [from SATYRICON] was recorded using analog equipment. A lot of bands seem to be doing this now. What's your thoughts about it? I get the feeling that it's kinda coming back.
Satyr: Well, I'm actually under the impression that it's not coming back. I might be wrong, but my impression is that music throughout the last three or four years is disgustingly processed. I have talked to people that have worked with some of the true superstars. There's this Norwegian production bureau called Stargate and they do a lot of stuff for Rihanna and so on and they are obviously very good at what they do, but I've talked to them as a musician and about sound and some of the things that I intensely hate about modern-day music productions and they explained to me that it's what the artists want, management wants, record company wants, radio wants. They don't want it to sound real, they want it to sound super processed and as a producer, that's what you cater to, of course. I guess that's the shocking part of it. I drove around once in a car with one of the instrument endorsers of SATYRICON and he played me some record from a very famous metal band, that was heavily processed. Everything sounded very powerful and ultra-tight, but to me, it was lifeless and dead. He was very enthusiastic and he was blasting it in the car. It was impressive, but I still hated it. I just said, "OK, fine," but I thought to myself, "How can you not hear that this sounds so fake, so manufactured?" I was hoping that this SATYRICON record, working they way that we worked, not only would it communicate the emotions within the songs, the atmosphere, but also perhaps somehow contribute to what I'm hoping will become more of a trend, because that would be one of those good trends. For bands to do things more organic. That's not something new to SATYRICON, but the difference is that it's been so much hardcore and uncompromising on this record, compared to previous records, and that's perhaps because we felt these songs needed it more than what we've done previously. But it was also because I've never felt so strongly about these things as I do now. When I had discussions about the record with A&R legend Monte Conner, and he's a music nerd like me, and I said to him, "I think a lot of the sounds you've been hearing from metal bands in the last few years are gonna be tomorrow's embarrassments, just like when people look at photos of themselves from the '80s." I think a lot of people a few years down the road, when they listen to their records from like 2012, are gonna go. "What were we thinking?" Then Monte said "I think you're right. I actually think a few years down the road, a lot of the records that are popular today, are gonna be remastered to make them sound more analog," which is the complete fuckup of some of the classic analog records that are being remastered in a way to make them sound more digital and sterile. I think the purist approach on the record helped create the record that it is. We thought that if we were gonna get this to come across the right way, and to have these songs provide that kinda authentic language, like we feel when we play them, we had to make the record, to a large degree, like it feels that you're in the room with SATYRICON when you hear the record. That's what we tried to do and I think we succeded. There's a reason why it's self-titled, because we really feel it defines the mentality and the musical philosophy of the band in terms of song writing and it shows what SATYRICON is about and it also points at the future. A part of what defines SATYRICON is a progressive attitude.
