Epica
Fast Spinning Pieces Of Energy

28.03.2015

Too many musicians proclaim every now and again that the purpose of their art is to make listeners think. Unfortunately just a few turn out really capable of doing so, without being too science- or philosophy-intensive or resorting to flat-out preaching. Holland’s Epica belong to this “selected few” – even though their output is highly entertaining, with lots of energy and melody and a beautiful frontwoman who is really a great singer, too, to top it all off, they also have a lot to offer to the thinking audience. To begin with, how about taking your Latin dictionary and translating the segments of the lyrics which are not available in English anywhere? Further on, Epica are not strangers to covering topics that are politically-charged or rich in philosophy, and they always try to present more than one point of view on the problem. You can find nearly all of the above on their latest album, “The Quantum Enigma”, which Nuclear Blast Records issued in 2014, and you can also experience many of the above live, when the band returns to Russia in late April. In the run-up to these shows guitarist and singer Mark Jansen called us to share some insights on his worldview and his music (yes, the right sequence)…

First of all, let me wish you a happy belated birthday…

Thanks!

You know, some people really hate their birthdays, they turn off the phones on this day and so on. Others love this day and try to make the most of it. Which one is your type?

I think I’m right in between. It’s not my favorite day of the year but it’s also not that I hate it. For me it’s just a normal day. I try to make the best possible from every day, I live day by day so I try to approach it like any other day and to just get happiness from it. I was at home and there was a party. My girlfriend organized it, many people came, and so we had a good time. But it’s not that I’m looking forward to this specific day.

What would be the best present for you?

The best present? Huh… I’m not a materialist, so materialistic things can’t make me happy. I have everything I need and all that I don’t have I don’t need. So when I get presents that I don’t need it doesn’t really make me happy. A good present for me is something like bringing me somewhere where I have never been or just a nice walk outside. That makes me really happy.

You know, it can be a difficult task to find a place where you’ve never been.

Oh, there are so many places where I’ve never been. I think I’ve been only to a very small fraction of the places in the world. All the rest I’ve never seen yet.

The second part of your world tour is starting soon and we are waiting for you in Moscow in April. But in light of the current political situation our fans are worried if the show in Moscow will take place at all. So can you assure them you’re coming to Russia as scheduled?

If it’s up to us we’ll come for sure, but I can’t guarantee anything that’s beyond our control, of course. If for example the political situation gets worse and we don’t get our visas then we’ll be not able to come obviously. That’s something that we have no control of. The only thing I can say is that if it’s up to us, we’ll come for sure. There’s nothing that takes us away from coming to Russia. We are not people that are scared of anything. We’ve been to many countries with worse political situations going on and we always go. So whatever happens we’ll come. I hope nothing will happen to force us to stay home.

So in your opinion politics shouldn’t interfere with heavy metal?

No, absolutely not. On the contrary, I think whatever happens the metal fans are one big family and they don’t want to have anything to do with fights on the political level. There is propaganda going on everywhere. Here, in the West there’s propaganda about Russia, that Russians cannot be trusted. And in Russia there’s propaganda about the West, that the West cannot be trusted. It’s a game that goes on forever. It has always been there in the past and it will always be there in the future. We make metal music, we wanna make people happy and we don’t wanna have anything to do with all that economic bullshit because the only thing left in the end is that every country wants the best for themselves. And that’s logical because everybody wants the best for their own people. That’s why there are all these political fights going on, that’s why there are wars in the world. There are always two reasons, religious reasons or political and economical reasons. Both are not good reasons for us to skip a country because, like I said, we make music, we make art, we wanna make people happy. We wanna have a party when we play a live show, we wanna make people forget about the problems, not to remind people about the problems.

Thank you and let’s hope nothing will stop you from playing that show. Meanwhile, it’s been half a year since your latest album was released (“The Quantum Enigma”, 2014). Very often musicians say they need some time to make an opinion about their own album, they need to step aside from it. It looks like you had that time, so did you opinion change somehow?

No, not at all. Actually it’s still exactly the same. Though I understand why musicians say that they want to step aside. Well, sometimes it changes over the years, for example. But I still… First of all, it’s been only one year or a little bit less even. So it’s still quite a short period. I was very proud of the album when it was released and I’m still very proud of it. I was very happy with all the songs that we put on the album, I’m still very happy. We were curious which songs would actually work live in the way we expected and they were pretty much all working very well live. So, all the things we were confident about really happened. I’m still happy with the album as I was one year ago.

Talking about live shows. You tried different songs during the tour. Are you going to change your setlist somehow for the second part of the tour?

Yeah, we changed some songs on the first leg of the European tour and we’re always experimenting and seeing which songs work the best. So the basic setlist will stay the same but we will keep changing the setlist here and there to make it more interesting for ourselves and also for the people who come to several shows. These are the main two reasons why we keep changing.

Some songs you tried only once and then dropped them. Why? Didn’t they go down as well as you thought?

There are two different reasons. “Reverence” is the favorite song for some guys in the band. So I said, we’d put it in the setlist once to make the band happy. But for the fans we don’t have to play the song because it’s their least favorite one on the album. Instead we can play songs that people are really asking for. That’s the reason why we played “Reverence” only once. As for “Canvas of Life”… We were thinking about playing it more often but then we asked our light engineer for the opinion and he said he liked the heavier set list more. When you play a ballad there is always a different atmosphere coming and it takes away a little bit of the continuity of the show. It has its advantages as well as disadvantages. Usually we play a ballad but this time we thought, “Well, maybe, let’s just skip the ballad”. We tried it once during the tour but we didn’t feel like we should play it more often. Maybe it will be back in the setlist sooner or later, we don’t know yet. It’s not about the song, it’s more about the continuity of the setlist. We like to keep on playing heavier songs instead of letting the energy doing a bit away with a soft song.

It looks like you are really interested in physics, aren’t you?

Yes, yes. I’m very much interested in it and I think we can use science as a tool to prove things if they are true or not. There are many people shouting a lot of things, some of them sound more ridiculous then others but some of those ridiculous things are actually true. And that’s the funny thing about it. Every new idea starts with a ridiculous thought. In the beginning people are laughing at it, later on it gets proven and then people accept it. That’s what I like so much. There also were many ideas in quantum physics and in the beginning people were laughing at it, but now it appears to be true. For example, these little particles, they can go through walls and they can disappear and they can exist in different points at the same time. These are things that we just can’t imagine with our minds because we can’t think of things that can be at different positions at the same time. It’s such a marvelous magical world of quantum physics. On one side it’s very complex but it’s also very comprehensible, it’s very fascinating and that’s why it keeps coming back in our songs. It’s so interesting and we hope that because of our songs people start getting fascinated about it and start reading about it.

What other topics can we expect from you? Maybe gravitation, black holes or something like that?

Ahh. (laughs) Yeah, black holes, it also started with a very ridiculous thought that later was proven to be true. I really believe that whatever comes to your mind, whatever you can imagine must be happening somewhere in the universe. You can’t get a wild enough idea that cannot be true and that’s the funny thing about the universe that also makes you wonder what the universe is made of. Personally, I came to a conclusion that the whole universe exists only in our imagination, we project it in a way around us and then we see it with our eyes without understanding what is actually happening. That’s kind of a new development in science and a lot of scientists believe that’s actually true. It’s called the holographic universe and personally I believe that it must be the direction that we have to think in. Because matter doesn’t really exist in the universe. So everything that we see and experience as matter is actually, no matter at all. It’s just… yeah, energy. Fast spinning little pieces of energy.

Do you think there is anything real in the world?

Yes. What is real is the consciousness that we have. And the interactions that we have with other people are also real. I think we share the same environment, the same vision; we all see the same thing and the interaction that we have, that is real. I also think the goal in life is to develop with the experience that we have in this world and everything we learn from it. Also there are these near-death experiences. People are dead in a way but return to life and they always report that there was a lot of information coming down when they were actually dead. They experience a lot of information, a lot of consciousness and a lot of love. So I think these things are real. The lesson I learned is that nothing around us is like it seems to be. Everything you see, you have to question it and think what is really important in life. In the end all these material things – cars and everything – are not important at all. I came to that conclusion and I hope many other people will come to the same conclusion because I think that’s the way to make the world better for all of us. Everything is connected anyway, so you cannot try to get yourself a great life without caring about others because if the others don’t have a good life, your life will not be good either. So the only thing that matters is to get the best possible outcome for all of us.

Talking about these philosophic topics, I came across a line in your song “Reverence (Living In The Heart)” that really made me stop and think. It is “To really know yourself ignore your mind”. What do you mean by that?

It is actually about our thoughts. There are thoughts coming into your mind all the time. You get born in this world, you get experience from the things happening around you and thoughts come automatically from all the things you experience, from relations you have, talks you have with other people, things you see on television, learn from movies, from books… And these thoughts, they come almost all the time. There is a constant flow of thoughts. And a lot of people identify themselves with these thoughts; they think that what they think is what they are. But that’s not true. These thoughts are not the core of yourself. Sometimes there come really cruel thoughts to your mind. That you want to kill your own mother, something like that, for example. Every person has some cruel thoughts coming in. But these thoughts are not what you really want or what you are. I don’t know where they actually come from, but they are there all the time. And with meditation for example you can make these thoughts stop. At least for a certain amount of time. And then, when these thoughts stop, you can discover what you truly are yourself. That’s what I mean with this sentence.

It’s a kind of very deep meaning.

Yeah, a deep meaning in one short sentence.

That’s true. There are a lot of deep meanings in you songs and I really love it.

Thanks, but I also get inspired myself by the books that I read, videos that I watch, so it doesn’t all come from myself. The knowledge is spread by people who have already been investigating these topics for many years. It’s like, literally, standing on the shoulders of giants. All this knowledge is there, we only have to see it.

And then you come and put all this knowledge into one sentence…

(laughs) Yeah, I think that’s the task that we as musicians have. We have the music as a tool and the lyrics as an extra tool to make people think. We put a summary of what we know into lyrics in order to make people start thinking about it and start looking themselves for the sources of all this wisdom. I literally see our goal in spreading information that came to me and see that it gets to other people.

Who is writing Latin lyrics for your songs? Do you do it yourself?

We do it partly ourselves, but as our knowledge of Latin is quite limited, there is a guy helping us out. He’s a teacher of Latin, actually he is a brother of Arjen Lucassen, it’s the guy from Ayreon, another big project from Netherlands. Since the beginning he helps us with Latin lyrics. He really loves doing that, so it’s really nice to work with him. The reason why we put Latin into our songs is that it sounds way better when the choir sings Latin. It sounds really massive. And it also makes the lyrics a bit more mystical because those who really wants to know everything about the lyrics can also translate Latin and find out more about the lyrics. It’s like a puzzle that a person that really wants to know everything can solve. It’s a challenge.

Probably, you’ve answered this question before, but I didn’t find it anywhere. Please, tell me who is the Fifth Guardian (that’s the title of an interlude on “The Quantum Enigma” – ed.)?

Oh, I don’t know. (everybody laughs) That’s a title that Simone (Simons, vocals) and Isaac (Delahaye, guitars) came up with. Personally I have no idea of who this Fifth Guardian is. Actually I’ve never asked them. So maybe, I’ll ask them next time. (laughs)

Ok, then tell me a little bit about the album cover. It reminds me about an iceberg somehow.

Yes, it can be an iceberg in a way. But in this case it’s like, a stone mountain. The idea behind it is that we see the top of the mountain, while under the surface there is a lot more. Something that we cannot see but that we can find out in different ways. You see, there is also this little boat on the cover shining with little lights into the water trying to find out something but those lights are very limited… And do you see this big Buddhistic image in the middle? It represents all the different ways of finding out this knowledge that cannot be seen but is still there.

We all know about your love for Mayan culture, but for this album you chose this Buddhistic symbol. Why is that?

Well, it was not a conscious thought. It just happened. We sent our lyrics to a designer (Stefan Heileman), he started reading the lyrics and with a little bit of extra description he came up with this booklet. And when I saw this cover I instantly knew what he was referring to. But that’s the good thing. We didn’t give him any information about what to do; he just came up with it by himself. He didn’t find any Mayan references in the lyrics, so he didn’t put them on the cover and he was right because we didn’t write this time about anything Maya-related.

Has your passion for Maya changed somehow after the End of the World didn’t happen?

No, it has nothing to do with that, because I’m fascinated by the knowledge that the ancient Mayan culture had already. And that didn’t change. In the old Mayan culture you can’t find anything about the end of the world in 2012, that’s just the end of a cycle and the start of a new one. So I never understood why it would be suddenly the End of the World. It was just an invention of modern people looking for a sensation. They also said 2000 was the End of the World, and that Nostradamus said something about when would be the End of the World... It just happens that you read books about a certain topic and you write about it, but later on you read books about other topics and you write about that. It’s a natural evolvement, but it has nothing to do with 2012 that now I’m reading books about different topics.

You’ve been to Mexico recently. Did you visit any ancient cities?

When we’re on tour, there is basically to time to visit anything. It happens really rarely that you can visit some place on a day off. Usually there is no time at all. Every day that seems to be like a day off, is actually a day when you have to catch a plane. So you have to leave the hotel early and go to the airport where you wait for two hours, then you take a flight, you arrive to another country and before you know it’s already evening and you have to go to bed, and the next day is already a show again. But two years ago I was in Mexico on a holiday for one month. Then I had enough time to visit a lot of Mayan ruins and to see all these great places with my own eyes. I really had to take one month off. I couldn’t do anything else; I just focused on making my dream come true.

On your previous albums there have always been songs dedicated to politics or some kind of social issues, but not on this album. Is that because you took all the politics to your second band, Mayan?

Yes, in a way, it’s like that. The things that I see happening around and that I want to write about fit really well with Mayan’s music. I also noticed that some people can get really mad about things that we write about; and it is better that people get mad about Mayan than about Epica. That’s maybe an egoistic thought but with Epica we have to make our living off it. So we want the fans that come to our concerts to be happy and to forget their worries. But with Mayan it’s another story. If people get so pissed off that they don’t want to buy Mayan CDs it’s no problem because Mayan is something we just do for fun. (laughs)

So you want people to have fun, but in the beginning you said you wanted people to think. Can’t you see a contradiction here?

No, because we really want people to have fun during the concerts. But when people listen to our music at home and read lyrics, then we want people to think. I think, when you are at a concert you don’t really listen to all the lyrics and don’t think about philosophical things. When at a concert you want to have a beer and enjoy the party.

Ok, but you said that heavy metal should stay away from the politics and everything. And still you have a lot of songs dedicated to those topics…

Well, I didn’t say that heavy metal should stay away from the politics. I said that it is important that people realize that there are a lot of sides. So when you look at a situation from the western point of view you have different news, different propaganda and different ideas then when you look from the opposite side. So it’s never right. What I always try to do is to show all the perspectives. There is always this contradiction going on in the lyrics. That’s why it is sometimes confusing for people. They don’t understand and they ask me what my opinion is. I say, “My opinion is not important. I just write about the situation. And what’s your opinion you have to decide yourself”. At least we also show the opposite opinion. Because for example, when the Americans went to war in Iraq, in Afghanistan, on the television you could only see the good things that were happening. But you never saw that one big reason for doing this was the oil. Nobody would want to go there if they knew the true reason. So we wrote about that also, and also about the things that were not going well. We also showed it in our video “War on Terror”, for example. A lot of people got pissed off because that was not what they wanted to see. But that’s what is really going on. (laughs) So I learned not to burn my fingers anymore with Epica touching this kind of topics, because you can’t change that some people are just more narrow-minded than others. And narrow-minded people can get pissed off so much that sooner or later they can even get a gun and shoot you down. Because they don’t respect other opinions, rather then what they have in their own mind.

Talking about Mayan, do you feel comfortable on stage without a guitar?

Yes. In the beginning of course I had to get used to it, but now I really feel comfortable. With Epica I feel very comfortable playing the guitar and singing, but for a change sometimes it’s really nice to have no guitar and move your hands freely and get the crowd going. I like both ways. I wouldn’t like to do only this one or the other.

What do you think now about the frontman’s job? Is it harder than the one of a guitarist?

No, it’s not harder, it’s just different. When you play guitar you know that the most of the looks are aimed towards the lead singer. So it’s a nice and comfortable position, you can step in these spotlights whenever you want, but you can also step back and disappear in a way. When you are a frontman you know that everybody is looking at you and that gives you a different role and a different responsibility as well. I must say I really like to be in the shadow because it fits best to my personality. But when I have to play the role of a frontman then I do it as well as I can, of course.

Do you have any plans for Mayan for the future?

At the moment we’re so busy with Epica that we hardly have any time for Mayan. That’s a pity of course because we got so many good reviews for the last album and there was really something going on, but we could not tour because Epica was taking all the time. I don’t regret that because I’m really happy it’s going so well with Epica. But I sometimes feel a bit sorry for Jack (Driessen, keys) and Frank (Schiphorst, guitar), because they have no other band. Making such a great album and not having time to tour, it’s a pity of course. Personally, I’m focusing on writing new songs for Epica, but I’m pretty sure that sooner or later there will be a new Mayan album. But the main priority at the moment is Epica and Mayan will happen whenever there is time.

I know you released a new video recently for the song “Victims of Contingency”. Though making videos is not your favorite job, can you tell me a bit about the idea behind the song and the video?

First of all, the idea behind the lyrics themselves is something different from the story of the video. The lyrics are about taking responsibility for the things that are happening to you. They are happening because of yourself. Maybe not everything, but quite a lot. If you spread negativity there will be a lot of negative things coming to you. But there are many people who spread negativity and when bad things happen to them, they blame all the others for that. That’s exactly what the song is about. Whatever you spread you will get it back. If you are spreading positive energy, you’ll get a lot of positivity back. As for the video, the people who made it, they wrote their own storyline. In a way they used this concept but with their own interpretation. So they say, you have to face the consequences of your acts. That’s what happens in the video. The guy who is a hunter is in the end the one who is been hunted. It’s a bit different from what I meant with the lyrics but we always give the people who work with us the freedom to come up with their own ideas and their own creativity. That’s very important to us and people can also surprise us with their ideas.

I know you do a lot of promotional work, like your Facebook page and backstage videos and everything. Is it important for you to keep in touch with the fans?

Yes, for me it has always been important to stay in touch with the fans. When I started my first band, After Forever, I was already always talking to the fans after concerts and seeing what they liked about the concert and what they didn’t like in order to learn from them and to do things better in the future. Even though many of fans want to tell you nice things, but when you ask deeper questions they tell you the truth about how they experienced the concert. This experience you can use in your performance. Of course you always have to do what you feel comfortable for yourself. But within that comfort zone there is still a lot of things you can do and you can integrate suggestions that you hear over and over again. Besides it’s always very nice that people who have ideas and who want to let you know how important your music is for them could reach you. I wouldn’t say that I read all the messages that I get because there are simply too many of them, but I always select some of them that I read. I read many inspiring and beautiful stories about how important our music is for people, and that really gives you energy to go on.

Do you run your Facebook page yourself?

Yes. I have two pages, the official one and my personal one and both I do myself.

I’ve seen a lot of beautiful pictures on your Facebook page. Have you ever thought of doing it professionally?

No, I never thought about that but sometimes people even ask me what type of camera I use, and actually I take all the pictures with the phone. (laughs) The thing is I just capture beauty. I see something in the nature that I think is really beautiful and I take a picture of that from a nice angle. That’s basically all I do, that’s it. With these pictures I want to make people do the same, because they often say they want to do it, too. Once someone said to me, “I’m so jealous, you go to all these beautiful places”. Yeah, but there are beautiful places everywhere! You have to go out from your house and explore the nature around you. Another funny thing is once I made a lot of pictures from my own village in the Netherlands. And there were some people from my village who commented on those pictures and said, “Wow, we didn’t notice there were so many beautiful places in our village!” (everybody laughs) They just never explored and never went to see the area. But if you stay at home you don’t see these things.

Yeah, maybe, it’s a kind of a gift to be able to see the beauty in ordinary things.

Yes, maybe it’s a gift. Or it’s just a button that you have to put on in yourself. It sounds so easy, but it is actually that easy. It’s just a mind-switch you have to make. From one day to the other you can start seeing all these things.

I know fans usually give you a lot of presents. What do you do with them?

I always keep them and that’s also my problem, especially when we are flying. Sometimes my suitcase is way too heavy. (laughs) Then I have to pay extra money. But I just don’t want to throw away what I get because people gave it to me with the best intentions and even if I cannot close my suitcase I still try to bring it home with me. I’m always very thankful for all the presents we get and everything I get I take care of the best way I can.

And what about the drawings the fans send to you? Have you ever thought of publishing them?

The fans’ art on Epica Facebook page is also something that I take care of. Everybody in the band has their responsibilities and that’s something that I really like doing, to collect the art that people make and publish it on the website. And it would be really cool to have one day maybe an Earbook or something with all these beautiful pieces of art combined. Yes, it’s a cool idea. I don’t know if it will ever happen and I don’t know if the quality of the small Facebook pictures is high enough to put it in a real book, but it’s definitely an idea.

You are often called the mastermind behind the band, but I know that not everybody likes this word. What is mastermind to you?

Well, I’m always happy when people express their feelings about the band or me personally, when they tell me compliments. But I also always say that I’m not a mastermind, we do it all together. The thing that I’m really good at is putting right people at right places, building a really great team. That’s what I’m really good at. So if I was alone and wrote music all alone it would be by far not as good as it is now. I think the collective work of everybody, that’s the mastermind behind Epica. We do it all together and everybody is very important for this process.

I have only one question left. I found a saying on your website, belonging to Simone. It says, “Epica is the place in the Universe where you can find answers to the questions of life”. So did you find those answers?

Our previous drummer was actually the first one who said... At the time I didn’t know what to think about it but now I agree with him. He said that this place in the Universe is in yourself. I started thinking about it and while the time passed I thought, yes, he was right. So Epica is actually in yourself. You can find answers to all the questions that you have within yourself. That’s a really interesting thought and after all the things that I learned I came to that conclusion as well. So yeah, I think this place can be found within yourself.

Thank you. Do you have any last words for the fans?

Yeah. Even though it’s still a couple of months before we come I really can’t wait and I hope nobody is worried that we don’t come because like I said in the beginning is it’s up to us we do. The last time in Russia it was really cool and I hope this time it will be even better. The tour we did so far, the first leg in France, Spain and Italy, was really a blast and it will be cool if the Russian dates turn out as great as the rest of the tour. Maybe even better. Together we can do it!

Epica on the Internet: http://www.epica.nl

Special thanks to Maxim Bylkin (Soyuz Music) for arranging this interview

Ekaterina Akopova
December 17, 2014
© HeadBanger.ru