Atrocity
Death By Metal

13.12.2013

Sometimes you listen to a new album and you realize instantly that you just gotta interview the people behind it. It doesn’t always have to be an album that you fall in love with (even though this is often the case), it rather has to be something multi-layered and with so much depth that you want to learn more about it that the actual CD can give you. Atrocity’s “Okkult” is a perfect example of that. Even though, this German band made it clear over 20 plus years of its existence that none of their records is like the ones before, few could foresee the impact that “Okkult” makes. Even though the last time we talked to mainman Alexander Krull was nine years ago and Atrocity published two more releases since then, we decided that in this interview we would give more space to their latest offering, as well as discuss the band’s upcoming Russian shows, due on December 14 in St. Petersburg and December 15 in Moscow. But of course, an interview with Alexander can never happen without references to his involvement in Leaves Eyes, the band led by his wife Liv Kristine, which will also appear in Russia this coming weekend…

You’ve played in Russia two times with Atrocity and Leaves Eyes. How did you like the country and the crowd? What are your expectations from your third visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg?

It was more than that, actually. Last year we did not play in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but we were in Vladivostok and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, further from our side of the planet, I would say. (laughs) We have had very good experiences of playing in Russia, the audiences were fantastic all the time we have been playing in Russia, so there’s no doubt that we have really loyal fans there. I remember last time we were getting a lot of presents from the fans, some very worthy stuff, and it was a real honor to receive such a warm welcome. I remember another thing – last time there was so much snow that they had to bring the snow out of the town by truck. Is it snowing again in Moscow?

Yes, it is!

Oh my god! (laughs) Of course, we like the Russian winter! This time there will be another adventure for us when we’re gonna go by train from St. Petersburg to Moscow. That will be awesome, I think, everybody is looking forward to that. We’re really anxious to come back. We’re gonna play some new stuff with Leaves Eyes, the album “Symphonies Of The Night” has just been out, and with Atrocity we’re gonna play a very brutal set. It’s gonna be a very contrasting live experience. With Atrocity, we’re gonna play death metal classics we did in the past, and the new album “Okkult” is also very heavy, songs like “Death By Metal” have to be played live! (laughs)

How did you end up playing in Vladivostok and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk? Not many bands from Germany go that far to the east of Russia…

That was a kind of special thing, both shows were special Halloween events. We only played there with Leaves Eyes, not with Atrocity, but I remember very well that people were asking why we couldn’t play with Atrocity as well, because they would love to hear some of the “Werk 80” staff, this would fit to a party vibe or something like that. It’s really interesting for a band from Europe… We’ve just returned from an Asian tour, we were flying for many hours, and had a long journey, and then meeting those people who know your band and know yourself makes it very comfortable. We played in China, Taiwan, and Thailand, and everywhere we had a great feedback from the fans. That’s something we really appreciate, and it’s a big honor and pleasure for us to play in other countries, also those far out. It’s a hell of a trip, of course (laughs), but we’re a metal band!

We remember when you came to Moscow for the first time, Leaves Eyes played first, and Atrocity closed the show, but the next time and this time the order of performances is vice versa – Atrocity starts the show and Leaves Eyes closes it. What is your attitude to such changes?

The first time we let the lady be the first to enter the stage. (laughs) In 2004, it was always like that, Atrocity was headlining, and then we turned it around. The reactions of the people showed that it’s logical to have such a package. Both bands have a common history - before we formed Leaves Eyes Liv was a guest on several Atrocity albums, and the family – I would call it like that - was always there. We don’t really think about who’s closing or who’s opening, it’s something that is right at the moment. At this moment it feels like that - Leaves Eyes has a new record out, and it’s also a big name in the scene, and we will have the 10th anniversary of the “Lovelorn” album next year… It makes more sense this way, it’s like we add something at the end of the show – first we  play without Liv, and when we return to the stage, it will be the band Leaves Eyes with Liv as the front singer.

Atrocity’s latest album, “Okkult”, was quite different from what people expected from the band. I searched the internet a bit and found out that people didn’t expect it to be so heavy, didn’t expect it to be so dark, didn’t expect it to be focused on occult topics, and so on. Do you intentionally try to challenge people’s expectations, so to say? Or do you just write music and pay little attention to how it will be received?

Of course, it’s very important how people will react if you do a band like Atrocity or Leaves Eyes. We love our fans! But in the first place, we do the music for ourselves, we wanna be artistic, and you cannot please anybody anyway. (laughs) You talked about expectations, but regarding a band like Atrocity, I would say another thing – somebody once called Atrocity a surprising box, you never know what you get out of it. But I see it a bit different. I feel like a painter - if you want to paint a picture, and you want a horrifying picture with dark colors, you paint it like that. But if you have another idea behind it, you would paint it in a different way. A picture for Leaves Eyes, for example, is more romantic, Liv is writing her lyrics about nature and things like that, and you write the music to it differently.

We are very spread-out artists - we have a huge range of our musical tastes, and we have a huge range of lyrical topics. Even in the early days of Atrocity, we were writing quite occult lyrics which were not like ordinary death metal lyrics, not just splatter and gore and all that stuff. For me, when I’m doing this, I want to have a vision for an album, and now we’re even making a trilogy!

The idea was born when we were finishing the “Atlantis” album (2004). We thought what else could be in that context, because it was so great to do a concept album like “Atlantis”, and we started thinking about a possible next step. At that time we knew there would be one more “Werk 80” album and one more album with my sister Yasmin, which will be more acoustic and more like ethnic music. I said, “OK, if we’re gonna do this, let’s make it even bigger than “Altantis”, let’s write about the mysteries of Planet Earth. We need more space and more time, because we want it to be varied”. And that ‘s how the idea came about to make a trilogy. We knew from the beginning that it would be bombastic and it would be brutal at the same time, for us it was very clear that this album, or trilogy, would turn out like it is now. (laughs) Probably other people are much more surprised than we are, because we were planning this.

We have many sides of Atrocity, we did so many stuff in the past, we were very experimental. In a way, together with Lacrimosa and Das Ich, we were one of the bands that built up this gothic and metal fusion. That’s something that we wanted to create from the start – very outstanding music. When we were playing death metal, there was no other band in Germany doing this. Maybe Morgoth was there, yeah, but not many others. It was very exciting for us to be a kind of forerunning band, we were not expecting to go out in the whole world and play in 40 countries, as we have done today! Maybe that’s why the band has survived for such a long time – thanks to all this variety in our music.

The album has a great artwork and design, but the lyrics in the booklet are written in a quite complicated way and they are nowhere to be found on the Internet. Some people believe that all things related to occult subjects must require some efforts to get into – was it also your purpose when you made some of the lyrics in the booklet not so easy to read?

(laughs) That’s actually true! I remember when I was doing the research for the “Atlantis” album, I had to go through a lot of old books and stuff, and I compiled a file which you could use to write several books or make a film trilogy. (laughs) There was always something there that was connected to other interesting topics which nobody really knows about or only people that are really into the ‘nether’ are interested in. That was also the intention of the whole thing. For me it’s important that we have something that is not a normal or general way of writing a lyric. We want to have something that would make a kind of experience for the people. That’s why we started the “treasure hunt” for the hidden song, for example – it’s something that no other bands did before.

We started with an occult concept on the “Blut” album (1995) when– not the whole album, but a big part of it was connected to vampires and the historical side of this mythology. Since then I have made my own experiences, I have had some, let’s say, strange adventures going on (laughs), maybe it’s too much to explain in an interview. Because of that I had to admit that you as a human person don’t know anything. We don’t actually know anything, it’s too much information for us, we try to explain supernatural stuff in the way we as human beings know it, but we are not able to explain it, that’s a fact. We can suggest, we can believe in religion or whatever, but then you always get in danger that other people can manipulate your society in a way that it is manipulated nowadays. Or it has always been, actually, throughout the history of mankind. (laughs) The distance between the real world and, let’s say, the occult world, is not so big as you would think, because there has always been a political and religious aspect in between, with all these conspiracy theories, and people actually using fear to rule people. This is something that we also talk about on the “Okkult” album. There are not only horrifying stories like “La Voisine” or “Haunted By Demons”. But actually I would see the former song as a very good example. “La Voisine” is about a witch who was involved in a poisoning in old France, and then it came out that there was a political side of it, too. People were murdered or poisoned to death in the aristocratic circle by those witches, but on the other side, they were also holding black masses, because they thought they would get political power this way. That’s a really weird story. We thought that it would be good to spice up the music by doing such a big trilogy about all these mysteries in the world.

But do you have any idea why the lyrics for “Okkult” are nowhere on the Internet? Sites like DarkLyrics.com or Metal-Archives.com have lyrics for all other Atrocity albums and for nearly all metal albums around, but they only have one song from “Okkult”…

To be honest, I don’t know why, I haven’t even known about that. (laughs) I think people can get lyrics easily by buying a CD. I hope that’s the ultimate reason for getting the full package. I think it’s something that really goes hand in hand. I know that some people don’t care about lyrics, they just care about the music, or they care about the lyrics just a little bit. But I think we have such interesting lyrics for “Okkult”, and they’re fitting the whole concept very nicely, it’s like a soundtrack for an unmade movie or something like that.

It’s the same with the cover - a lot of people are asking me about the cover artwork, “What is this lady with the snake? Do you wanna have just the big tits on the cover?” (laughs) The answer is, no, it’s not like that. In the first place, we didn’t know that the snake artist would be such a beautiful lady, it just came out like that. I told the photographer, “We need a mystical snake artist, or somebody who can symbolize the witch Erich-To, whom we actually sing about on the album”, and he came up with this lady and the snake. It was perfect, I said, “Wow, that’s great for the cover artwork!”

The “Okkult” cover is based on the story behind “Necromancy Divine”, which is a cruel tale about ancient witch Erich-To. She was a necromancer, and she lived in the times of the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey 50 years before Christ. The brutal part of that is that she took dead bodies from the tomb and brought them back to life with painful rituals, instilling boiled blood into corpses and whipping them with snakes - that’s why we have snakes on the cover. By bringing the dead back to life she forced them to forecast the future, they believed that the dead can tell you about the future. There was a civil war going on between Julius Caesar and Pompey, and they wanted to know who will be the ruler, and what will be the future of the Roman Empire. We used original Latin lyrics of rituals in “Necromancy Divine”. I remember it was quite funny when we were doing this intense session, some guy said, “If you continue with these Latin ritual sentences, we’re getting in danger of a zombie attack here”. (everybody laughs) There is an old battlefield not far from our studio, by the way.

The photograph on the cover is real. A lot of people thought it was fake, they said, “Ah, they took that model with big boobies and then put the snakes on the photo”. No, it’s all real, I personally put the snakes around the neck of our witch Erich-To (laughs), and we filmed the process and used some of the footage in an “Okkult Making-of” episode on YouTube. We had a really cold winter, but we had to go down to the tomb where we were doing the photo session, and we had to heat it up because of the snakes – the snakes would not survive in an ice-cold tomb. So we were heating the whole fucking thing up and risking death for ourselves. It was minus 15 or minus 20 degrees, it was really crazy!

You had Katie Halliday, famous for her work for “The Saw” movies, doing sound effects on “Okkult”. Some years ago you also had Dita Von Teese posing for the cover artwork of “Werk 80 II”. Is it difficult to get in touch with such people, who are not associated with extreme metal, and persuade them to collaborate with you?

Usually you would think you cannot get in touch with people like that. But it was actually the other way around, because Katie is a big metal fan. We met her on tour when we were in Canada. We were hanging out in a bar in Toronto after the show, we were talking, “Well, what do you do?”, and she told us about her job. It was twice funny that we met somebody who was into that genre and who could help us out or, let’s say, improve the atmospheric part of our music, because she’s a professional horror sound designer. That was quite lucky to meet somebody like that, it was something like fate. (laughs) She was totally enthusiastic that a metal band was asking her, and she really loves Atrocity and “Okkult”.

Your original intention was to release the album on December 21, 2012…

That was actually a cool idea! We were not 100% sure until the very end if we were gonna make it or at least release something then. In the end, we did release some music, but the original plan was that we were gonna release the album. It was just technically impossible, because distribution companies of rock and metal bands avoid the Christmas period. The mainstream market is flooded with the releases by Michael Jackson, Robbie Williams, and various Christmas songs and all that stuff, so they have a very tough time with getting metal bands out to the market in that period. We didn’t manage the original date, but the world is still going on (laughs), and we were lucky that we could release the “Okkult” album afterwards.

Were you really expecting the end of the world to come on that date? As long as you are interested so much in occult things and obscure cults, do you consider any predictions of an upcoming apocalypse, so to say, to be legitimate?

I don’t believe that. The fact that I’m interested in occult topics doesn’t mean that I’m interested in any occult religion or stuff like that. Sometimes people just misunderstand the whole point of that. There were times when science and the whole development of mankind had to be in the dark. Scientists had to work out their ideas behind closed curtains, because they were called occultists or they were just banned by religion and authorities. We still have that going on, some religious laws are completely against modern scientists or modern thinking. It’s really strange how human beings come up with all this fanatic ideas, but it’s a typical manifestation of fear. I think that emotion is an important tool of the control over people. Darkness is the biggest fear of mankind, it has always been like that. If people were not so afraid of each other and other cultures, there would probably never be a war. OK, sometimes there is a war for greed, money and all those things, but sometimes fear is just too big. Just remember the days of the Cold War, when people were thinking about each other, “The guys from the West are monsters”, and “The guys from the East are monsters. Fuck them!” (laughs) For many years the philosophy was to build an enormous amount of weapons, and people were scared of each other. It is much more important that people would not burn each other down, than anybody writing 2,000 years ago when the end of the world should be.

Now a very obvious question: when can we expect “Okkult Part 2”, and what shall we expect from it?

We actually said within the band when we had some rehearsal sessions in the run-up to the Russian shows, that we already have some material and that we want it to be released not so long after the first part. We decided that we want to grab the live atmosphere of the songs, we want to feel the songs in another context, not just in the studio or rehearsing, but also have the live experience and then, with the energy going back, write the rest of the songs. That is something we had in mind from the very beginning. We’re in the middle of touring, we’re gonna go to the States as well, we’re gonna do a UK tour, and in between we will always be writing songs. We hope to be able to bring out the next part of “Okkult” in 2015 or something like that. If it happens before, I will be more than happy to release it. It’s just very complicated nowadays with scheduling an album, because record labels need such a big advance of delivering an album. Let’s see how it goes. I think you can look forward to some more brutal and bombastic music.

Three years ago Atrocity parted ways with guitarist Matthias Roderer, who had played in the band for 20 years. What happened to Matthias? Did he retire from music completely?

I’m afraid yes. This decision was more connected with his private and family life. His wife and he have the second kid, and he was just not able to go on tour anymore. He decided to retire from the band, and it was a pretty hard decision, I think.

By the way, there have been a lot of line-up changes in Atrocity and Leaves Eyes in the past few years, mostly when it comes to drummers and bass players. What is the reason for it?

(laughs) That’s true! I think there’s a very simple reason – maybe it’s not so easy to find the right people for the band. (cracks) But sometimes it’s difficult to answer that, there’s always an individual part of it. We have had situations when the people who were really cool guys were just not able to continue – as I said – because of private reasons or whatever. Sometimes you also have people with different opinions, it’s also happening. Another thing is that if you wanna go out touring, if you wanna go steadily on the road, it’s not so easy sometimes. You have to be away from home for such a long time, it’s really a problem. If you want to be in a professional band, you have to make a lot of sacrifices in your life. In the beginning, most of the people are really up to it, like, “Yeah, of course, I wanna tour the world, I wanna spend a lot of time on the band,” but after a while they realize that it’s not possible for them. That’s why we had some changes. It’s not that we are the people nobody can get along with. (laughs) That’s not the case, I guess. It’s just the real life that creates a barrier in the way of continuing sometimes. We had a really steady lineup of Atrocity for many years, and we were never thinking that we would be confronted with the situation when we have to deal with other people. We always thought, “Yeah, that’s us, we’re gonna continue like that for ages”. We were not really used to getting somebody else to the band. Some other bands had a new member every week or whatever. For example, I saw a documentary about Iron Maiden, and Steve Harris said in an interview, “For a period of time there were people who were members of Iron Maiden for one week, and then we would get another guitar player”. (laughs) Of course, it was before they became so big, but it says everything actually - not everybody is able to do all the things that are needed to be in a band. The bands that always have the same guys are really lucky, I have to say. They are not many.

You and Liv have been working with Napalm Records for about 10 years. I think it’s a label that suits both bands fine, but do you think it is the right label for Liv’s solo albums? Don’t you think that they deserve more attention from the mainstream media and from the mainstream public?

Napalm Records have changed a bit over the years, they have spread out a bit now. They have other bands that are not in their typical vein of marketing. But it’s a tricky question, because you never know. Both Atrocity and Theatre Of Tragedy, when Liv was still a member of that band, were signed to major companies. They know all the mainstream marketing, but it was still not functioning 100% for the bands. It’s a very complex situation sometimes. Of course, you are doing music and you want to spread out your art. In Liv’s case, she has two careers at the same time, one in the gothic metal / symphonic metal genre, and on the other side, this more rock- and pop-oriented solo thing. She’s been doing this successfully for many years, for example, she was on German television, her music has been in several movies, and there were some shows like Germany’s Next Top Model or Austria’s Next Top Model where Liv’s music was constantly played, by the way. Heidi Klum and these models talking on their fashion shows, and they were playing Liv’s songs in the background. But that doesn’t mean that it’s just up to the artist, it’s always connected with the label and the marketing. Of course, you can say, “Yeah, Napalm Records is a metal label, it’s maybe not the right label for a pop artist”, but on the other hand, you have artists who are rooted in the gothic metal genre, for example, Anneke, ex-The Gathering singer, who are going out and reaching other people. It could be that if Liv were on Sony, Universal or whatever, they would be marketing her in a totally different way, but who knows if it would be better? I don’t know.

How do you manage to balance so many bands and studio work, on the one hand, with being a father, on the other hand? How many hours a day do you sleep?

(laughs) It’s a good question. Too much work and too little sleep – this may be a good answer. (everybody laughs) It’s a miracle to myself that I can bring it all together. We just had a discussion about it today. I brought my father to the grave three weeks ago… He died in between our tours, there was a funeral, I was holding a funeral speech, and they were waiting to bring him to the ground while I was coming back from tour. This is an example of how my lifestyle is – even if my father dies, I can’t be here. I was lucky that I could say goodbye to him in the night he died, but that was just by accident – I had just returned from a gig Bulgaria, and the day before we went to Italy I could say goodbye to my father. I just spoke to my cousin today, he is also working very hard, and he said that it’s crazy – we’ve just come back from Asia, and we’re already on our way to Russia, and in between we have such a sad family meeting. But that’s the path I chose, and that’s the path Liv also chose. We have very busy times, but we also have our family, and our son is very important to us. He’s our top priority, of course. It’s just a matter of organizing things properly. There was a year when I was getting very good offers from bands who wanted me to produce their albums in Mastersound Studio, but I had to decline all the offers, because we were going on tour, and I had other bands to do. People were talking, “Uh, is Alex still doing other bands, or is he only doing his own bands?” Of course, I would love to do everything, but that’s the other side of the story.

Our condolences on the death of your father… But let’s not end an interview on such a sad note. I remember an interview with Liv that I did back in 2005, and Liv told me that for your son Leon Alexander, the band’s then-drummer Moritz Neuner was a sort of idol, that he enjoyed sitting behind the drumkit very much. What is the situation at the moment, does Leon Alexander have any musical aspirations?

He does have an artistic side, we see it every day. He has a great imagination, he’s a great storyteller, and he’s already writing his little books. Music-wise, he was actually getting drum lessons, but he was fed up, because he was not patient enough. He was on tour with us, he saw that we were doing concerts, and he wanted to start like that. But he didn’t like very dry lessons with “one two three four” and then playing it like the teacher is telling him. That’s something he may choose again in the future, or he might play any other instrument, who knows? Also he had very long hair, but now it’s very short!

Why??? (everybody laughs)

Don’t ask me! It’s actually the second time already. Originally he had a long tail, but then he said, “Oh, I want to have a different haircut”. He thought that he can glue his hair back. I told him, “Sorry Leon, but you cannot glue your hair back, you have to wait until it grows again”. “Oh my God! I didn’t know!” Then he had long hair again, and in May this year we were in Norway with our Norwegian family, and he cut it again. He’s doing some karate and stuff like that, and he thought he has to have short hair. (laughs) We will see how it will turn out, it’s always his decision. I would never force him into anything, and Liv would do the same. If he wants to do music or whatever, he will always have our support.

Well, thank you Alexander for a very interesting conversation and for giving us so much of your time. We are looking forward to see a great show on Sunday!

Thank you! I hope everybody finds the time to come to come to the gig. I promise you we will play a hell of a show with both Atrocity and Leaves Eyes, it will last 2.5 hours, and we’re really looking forward to come back. I think Tosso (Thorsten Bauer, guitar) has his birthday is on Sunday, and I hope we will have a great birthday party, and Torso is looking forward to that, too. Prepare all the vodka! I don’t drink alcohol, but the rest of the band does, and we hope for a great Russian party!

Atrocity on the Internet: http://www.atrocity.de

Special thanks to Eugene Silin (Alive Concerts) for arranging this interview

Roman Patrashov, Natalie “Snakeheart” Patrashova
December 9, 2013
© HeadBanger.ru