Beast In Black

Beast In Black
From The Artistic Perspective

13.12.2021

Архив интервью | Русская версия

While Russian “puritans” keep on jiving about the damage that manga and anime allegedly do to fragile souls of our youth, in neighboring Finland, there’s a great example to the contrary. Beast In Black are heavily inspired by the Japanese anime culture, yet, they are totally upbeat, energetic and positive. Ironically enough, they get a lot of negativity from the other side of the spectrum where “trve” metal fans accuse them of being overproduced, too keyboard-driven and not angry enough. Regardless of all that, the band founded by guitarist and songwriter Anton Kabanen after his forced departure from Battle Beast, keeps going from strength to strength, and “Dark Connection”, their third and latest full-length album, once again went straight to number one in the Finnish charts. We talked to Anton via Skype shortly before the album release to find out more about his sources of inspiration and the way he approaches music and art, as well as to catch up with him on some less recent events, as our previous interview happened as long as 10 years ago…

Beast In Black is an international band with members from not only Finland, but also Hungary and Greece. Was it difficult for Beast In Black to work on the record during the pandemic? Did everyone record remotely, or did you manage to bring everybody together in the studio?


Actually only one member lives outside Finland, our bass player (Mate Molnar), so it wasn’t that difficult. Actually it’s because of the pandemic that we were able to make this album in the first place. We planned a lot of gigs and tours for 2020 and 2021, and with that amount of gigs we wouldn’t have had the time to make the album. The making of the album, making the band members to record and all that, wasn’t that big of a challenge. The biggest challenge for me personally was to be the producer, technically record, mix, and edit. Apart from that, it was a good time for us. It’s a double-edged sword, this pandemic, because many bands suffer from this, they don’t get on tours and on gigs, and they seem to lose motivation or some kind of spirit, but for me personally, it didn’t affect my motivation at all. OK, there’s no gigs. What does an artist do when there’s no gigs? You have to be creative, create content, there’s always something to do, pandemic or no pandemic. If you’re hungry and ambitious, you’ll always find uses for your time wisely.

Speaking about the international nature of the band - in 2015, after your break-up with Battle Beast you went to Hungary and played with the band Wisdom for a while. How did it happen? Hungary has a great rock and metal scene, but very few people outside the country know anything about it…

Actually me and Mate, the bass player, got to know each other in 2013. It was a tour when his band Wisdom and my previous band Battle Beast were supporting Powerwolf. We got along really well, we talked, and a couple years later when I had to find a bass player for the band, I remembered, “Hey, there was this guy from Hungary, from Wisdom”. I really liked the way how he was, we really shared the way of thinking already back then, so it happened quite easily. I don’t know about the metal scene in Hungary that much, Mate himself says that of course it’s not that big as pop music or whatever the most popular genre nowadays maybe, but Wisdom were doing quite OK in their home country. It was a pleasure to play with them for some time when I was in the band – I still am, but as Wisdom we’re not active anymore.

Did you move to Hungary for the period while you played there? How do you like the country anyway?

I didn’t move there, but I flew a lot. I love the country, it’s really great, it became quite familiar, I mean the city, Budapest. Whenever I fly there nowadays, I have kind of nostalgic memories of the past, nostalgic warmth, so these are good memories, and the traveling wasn’t hard. Mate always booked me the flight, and I just went to the airport. Two hours from Helsinki to Budapest, and that’s it, not a big deal.

As far as we understand, in the beginning of Beast In Black there were you and Mate. How did you get the rest of the guys onboard? You seem to be a very diverse group of individuals – is this a correct impression?


The first drummer, Sami Hanninen, wrote me a message that if I needed a drummer for my new band or project, then he’s interested, and that was about it. He was the first drummer who asked, and I had a meeting with him, and that’s how he ended up in the band. With Kasperi (Heikkinen) we talked every now and then, we hang out in Helsinki, and he was also the first guitar player that I asked to join the band. The singer, Yannis (Papadopoulos), I found him actually already before 2015, I think it was 2014 when I found him on YouTube, and then I asked him in 2015, I think it was the last day of January when I asked him to join my new project that still didn’t have a name. That was my last Battle Beast tour when we were supporting Sabaton in Europe. He was interested, and everything went quite smoothly. I think it’s because when you know what you want, you do preparations quite well, you look around, and you can filter through the options, which you need, and which you don’t. I have always been pretty clear with what kind of future I plan artistically, what I wanna achieve as an artist, and what kind of people I need to join this kind of journey with me. It helps when you’re very clear with that. Well, there’s always luck, a little bit, but I believe that it’s mostly being clear with your own visions and knowing what you want.

Coming back to the new album – we know that it is inspired by cyberpunk anime, but is there a general concept or a narrative that ties the songs together, or does each song stand on its own?

Each song stands on its own. There are a couple of songs which are connected more. “Highway to Mars” is based on “Armitage III”, it’s a cyberpunk anime from 1995, and the first single, “Moonlight Rendezvous”, is mainly based on the same anime, but “Moonlight Rendezvous” is also based on “Blade Runner” and “Battle Angel Alita”. There’s some kind of connection, because one song is entirely based on “Armitage III”, and the other song is mostly based on “Armitage III”. It’s not actually a concept album that follows one grand story, it’s more like individual stories, but there’s also “Berserk” anime and manga which played a role on this album, like it has always played on every Beast In Black album. There are three songs about “Berserk”, but they are also not in any chronological order, they are just inspired by certain elements from the series and certain characters. For example, the song “Broken Survivors” is a song about Guts and Casca falling in love. There are like three main characters in “Berserk”, or really two, Guts and Griffith, but Casca is kind of female lead in that story, and that song is about Guts and Casca falling in love. Then there’s a song called “Dark New World”, which is about how Guts sees the post-Eclipse world, it’s the view from inside his mind, how he feels, how he sees things, what his mission is in this post-Eclipse world. When I’m talking about Eclipse, it’s an event in the “Berserk” series, a kind of dramatic and bad event after which things in the whole world become worse. Then there’s “To The Last Drop Of Blood”, it’s a song about Skull Knight, also one of the important characters of the series. But those three songs, as I said, are not in any chronological order. They are just taken from here and there of the series. But I wanted to have a clear overall view of the album, even though there are “Berserk”-related songs which have nothing to do with cyberpunk or science fiction or anything like that. You gotta have a strong profile for the album, how you’re gonna present the piece of art that you’ve made. You gotta market it, and you gotta make it feel like it’s solid. And of course, cyberpunk was the main influence on the album, there are more songs that were inspired by cyberpunk than songs about “Berserk”, so of course, in that sense, we wanted to build that wholeness, so the promo pictures, cover art, songs themselves and the music videos, everything is connected to this cyberpunk feeling. That’s how you can have a strong profile for the album: when people look at the cover art, pictures, or videos, they instantly feel, “OK, we understand what has been the influence, what kind of world we’re dealing with”.

A lot of people have seen the new video for “Midnight Rendezvous”, it already has more than a million views. What surprised us that usually metal bands are portrayed in their videos as good guys, and they always win, but you are portrayed as bad guys, and you lose, it’s the main character that wins. Who came up with this concept?


Well, I told our director and writer Katri Ilona Koppanen, “Hey, I definitely want us to be bad guys”. First of all, I’m also tired of always seeing these same videos where the band guys are the biggest heroes and they kind of boost their own egos. I told Katri, “Hey, make us bad guys!” I don’t want us to be the lead guys in our own video, because everyone always does that. We have to do something differently, but not only for the sake of doing if differently. It always comes with the story first, you have to serve the story, you have to serve the art. That song, “Moonlight Rendezvous”, seemed like the best song choice to present this cyberpunk theme. It does have Beast In Black trademarks when it comes to music – a catchy chorus, nice melodies, twin guitar solos, but there’s a long intro, extraordinary long, it takes almost two minutes till the vocals start. It’s very important that it’s there, because musically it already feels, “OK, this is something else”, there’s something retro-futuristic in this intro, you hear it, and it fits the cyberpunk theme. The lyrics themselves already tell a story, and I wanted the script of the video to correlate as perfectly as possible with the lyrics. Katri and I wrote the script, she was the main writer, but I was constantly telling her what I would like to have in the video, what kind of things are important, what kind of lead characters I want in the story, what the role of the band guys will be, and so forth. The story was the main thing, and then we just had to come up with an idea how to fit the band guys into the story. That song, “Moonlight Rendezvous”, doesn’t seem to be about the band members, it’s about two persons. Imagine there’s a song about these two characters, and in the video if the band members become kind of lead actors – then the story characters would become less important, and that would contradict the lyrics and the story. You have to always listen to the story and serve the story, not let yourself be more important than the story.

We were also very surprised to find out that for Katri Ilona Koppanen, it was her first directorial work. How did you decide to entrust the making of this video to her?

She has worked for every music video of Beast In Black, every official music video. She’s been taking care of the production, and she’s been involved in the story-making; she’s been one of the key personnel in these video productions since 2017. And she has also done lots of works behind the scenes, we know her really well, we know how talented she is, and it was our bass player, Mate, who told me, “What if we asked Katri to make this video for us?” She’s already been doing so much work, and we saw how much she understands from the technical point of view and from the artistic point of view, she’s a multi-talent really. She was, of course, surprised, when we asked this from her, but she was so enthusiastic and brave, she took the challenge, and in the end we couldn’t be more proud of her and happier that we already are, because that’s a great thing that she did for us. Without her this would have never happened.

As far as we understand, the whole band regenerates in the last scene of the video. Does it mean that the storyline will continue in the next video?

We’ll have to see about that. That’s an interesting perspective. It definitely leaves you an opening to the story when you watch the video until the end. If we ever decide to continue, there’s a chance for that, and we can kind of tie it together with this video. But at the moment there are no plans, or concrete scripts, or any songs that are like sequels to “Moonlight Rendezvous”. It has been on my mind, to be honest. Time will tell.

Once again on “Dark Connection” you are doing a couple of cover versions, and the originals once again very diverse – Manowar (“Battle Hymn”) and Michael Jackson (“They Don’t Care About Us”). Back in the 80s if somebody was listening to them both at the same time everybody would call such person “crazy, mad, insane”, as they are worlds apart from each other. What made you pick up these two songs?

First of all, when you say they are worlds apart from each other, I understand what you mean by it, but on the other hand, I always think purely from the artistic perspective. I always say that we are servants of music and art or whatever, it can be literature or paintings or movies. You have to be objective and not let the genres or other views limit you in seeing the art itself. What we saw in those songs when Yannis and I talked about those - we immediately thought, “Wow, great songs!” That’s the thing! When a song is a great song, it’s usually more than just a genre where it is presented. For example, if you think of the “Titanic” movie, it’s a drama, you can quickly say, but it’s much more than a drama, it becomes a huge action film halfway through the film. It takes its time to develop the story, there’s the drama part, and then there’s the huge action part and everything. The same thing is with songs: a good song can work for any audience, at least I believe that those two songs are something like that. First of all, they have stood the test of time, they both are old enough, and we can still say to this day that they are definitely classics and people still listen to those a lot. You can go to YouTube and look how much views they have. It’s never about slicing the cake in half, like, “OK, there’s this part that belongs to heavy metal, and this other part doesn’t, so we can’t do it”. We forget about that when we listen to that stuff, it has to give us the authentic feel that we enjoy it no matter what the genre is, and we got that, me and Yannis, it clicked right away. He was the first one who told me backstage on a tour in 2019, “Hey, we should cover this Manowar song”, and I immediately thought, “Yes”, because we both heard inside our minds the Beast In Black version, how it could turn out, we knew that it has the elements that fit our style, our trademarks, and the trademarks are exactly good melodies, good song structure, there is dynamics, there are soft parts, loud parts, and, of course, this screaming heavy metal power. You gotta have that in a Beast In Black song, and that Manowar song has that as well. And if we look at the Michael Jackson song, it’s got a great chorus, great lyrics, and a great melody. It also has so much room to fill in, like what else you could have there without destroying the original song structure, or the melodies, or nuances. Luckily that was really fun to make, and that’s why there’s so much keyboards and other stuff in the Michael Jackson song that we made compared to the original. But still we included all the nuances and the song structure and the melodies and everything, we tried to do it how he did it the best we could, but then we added more on top of that, because there was room for that. If there had been no room, we wouldn’t have done it, but the song doesn’t even have massive instrumentation, the original Michael Jackson song, and that is exactly the reason why you could add more instruments in our version.

Speaking about the trademarks, all the Beast In Black cover artworks were done by Roman Ismailov. As far as we understand, he has only drawn covers for Beast In Black, early Battle Beast, and Kasperi’s band, Merging Flare. What else does he do? Could you tell us a bit about this guy?


I became friends with him in the army back in 2007, so our friendship goes back a long way. He was making many many Battle Beast demo covers and graphics back in the day, and then the first Battle Beast album cover was done by him. After that he didn’t do any more covers with me, and then in 2017, when Beast In Black’s debut album was in the making, I asked him, “Hey, what if we start doing something together again?” There was an old draft that he drew in 2010, I remembered that, and I told him, “Hey, what if you make this seven-year-old picture into the debut album cover for Beast In Black?” He did it, and that’s how we again started to work together. But as you said, he isn’t so active in promoting himself in the metal scene as an album-making artist, he does works for Beast In Black whenever we ask, “Hey, can you do something like this?” and he tries to arrange some free time. But he has different things in life that he wants to do, and it’s up to him whether he decides to do it full-time or part-time. We are happy that he has always accepted our requests to make a Beast In Black album or some other additional works, like T-shirt designs or some side-drops for the stage, kind of basic stuff but important nonetheless.

We saw Beast in Black twice in 2019, and you didn’t play a single Battle Beast song. We also saw Battle Beast the same year, and they only played only two of your songs. We understand that you want to move on from that era, but isn’t it a pity for you as a songwriter as well that nobody plays such fantastic songs as “Let It Roar” or “Touch In The Night” live anymore?

Oh, thanks for the compliment. Actually I have nothing against playing those songs, we just think it’s not the right time for it yet. Personally of course I would like to play those songs in the future at some point, but it’s always about timing and how to make space for something that you’ve done in the past. You’re always trying to make space also for something new that you’re making, so you have to find a compromise, a way to make them all connected together, a way to squeeze them in one setlist, so to speak.

Speaking about live shows – where do the electric sunglasses that the entire band puts on during “Crazy, Mad, Insane” come from? Are they custom-made?

No, they’re not custom-made. They’re called Chemion, that’s their brand, and one of my best friends, Eric, here in Finland had these glasses with his own band at a show in Helsinki some years ago. I asked him, “Hey, I wonder what those glasses are?”, and he showed me those. Then I got the idea, “Hey, why don’t we use these glasses with Beast In Black in this song “Crazy, Mad, Insane”, because it’s kind of Italo disco, with lots of keyboards, there’s very little guitars in that song, and we had to come up with something that fits in with this Italo disco feel, something retro-like. That’s how it was – I originally got the idea from a friend. I didn’t know that those glasses existed until I saw them at his show.

Your tour in support of “Dark Connection” is scheduled to begin at the end of November. What are the chances of it actually taking place as scheduled, do things look good for live shows in Europe? And do you have some Plan B for what you’re going to do with the band if it doesn’t happen?


Yeah, there’s Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D. (everybody laughs) The work never ends. Actually we’re quite hopeful regarding the upcoming tour, this November-December tour. There’s a good chance for it to happen, but the situation of course changes constantly. It’s definitely not yet out of the picture, we still have the trust in it to happen. If it happens, great, then we hope that in the next three or four years we can just tour massively. (The tour was eventually postponed to March 2022 – ed.) We don’t wanna release another album in 1.5 or 2 years; even if we make an album in the next year or two years we would still not release it, because our plan is to tour really massively, as much as we can. Let’s see how it will go, it’s all about adapting to the situation, but eventually I believe the world will start to work normally, the world will adapt to this COVID thing, we will find solutions how to make things quite normal, hopefully.

Beast In Black on the Internet: https://beastinblack.com/

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

Roman Patrashov, Natalia “Snakeheart” Patrashova
September 22, 2021
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