Mortiis
Not Fearless, Just Stubborn

29.05.2026

Even though Mortiis has never stopped being in the news, it’s been ages since we heard new music from the charismatic and mysterious Norwegian artist, who has every right to be called not just genre-defying, but also genre-defining. This long wait is about to be over, as his new full-length offering called “Ghosts Of Europa” will see the light of day in about a month. Once again, it’s an album that is very hard to put on the stylistic map, even in the context of Mortiis’ own discography. Of all his works, “The Smell Of Rain” (2001) might be the closest, and it’s not a coincidence that in mid-April, just a few days after we spoke, the man embarked on a U.S. tour playing a set consisting mostly of that album’s material. Nevertheless, his new music has a lot of elements, both old and new, which nobody’s heard from him before. Quite intrigued, we jumped at the chance to do this interview and were totally delighted to find him much less reserved than you would expect from an artist with that kind of creative persona and output…
 
There was a long period when you were releasing your music on your own. Then for “Spirit Of Rebellion” (2020) you signed with Dead Seed Productions, and now you are with Prophecy. Why does an artist like you need a record label now, when you didn’t need one 10 or 15 years ago? And what makes Prophecy different from other labels out there? 
 
The thing with Dead Seed was that they were just easy, to be honest. It wasn’t really a contract, it was just like a handshake or whatever. Going back to a bigger label like Prophecy, which is obviously much bigger than Dead Seed - the reason for that was I’d been doing it on my own for so long, and it’s hard, if you don’t have a marketing budget - or even the connections, but mostly it’s about the marketing budget - to get a proper reach to make sure that people hear the record and that it’s promoted across several months, not to mention the network itself. I don’t really have any of that, so after a while I was just tired of wearing all these hats, which means to do all these different jobs. I just want to make music, at the end of the day that’s what I want to do. 
 
The reason I went away from labels in the first place was that honestly I got fucked over by them. It took a long time for me to even wanna consider going back to a label, but eventually I did because of the reasons I said before - I was just tired of doing everything myself, so I said, “Let’s try again with a proper label and see how it goes”.
 
Prophecy, first of all, were very enthusiastic, which is very important. Secondly, I like the way they release their records, they do a lot of really interesting formats and boxes and vinyl colors. And they have a really cool creative roster, a lot of their artists seem to be quite special. Those things combined, to me looked very attractive, and I figured, “OK, let’s try this”. And here we are. 
 
Making “Ghosts Of Europa” was a long process that took six years. But if we look back a bit, “Spirit Of Rebellion” was a reworking of the album from 1994, and “The Great Deceiver” (2014) was originally recorded as early as 2008. What got you started writing new music again?
 
Hmm…
 
Or were you writing all through those years, but just never releasing the material?
 
Yes, that’s exactly what was happening. I’ve been working on music for the whole time. It’s a little hard to explain how my life works, I suppose you can say it’s fragmented. I started recording material for “The Great Deceiver” even further back than 2008, then I worked on other things, so I put it down and picked it back up a couple of years later, and eventually I had a record. It’s sort of been the same thing with “Ghosts Of Europa” - the earliest versions of some of the songs were created during COVID, and then there was a whole lot of touring going on, doing the dungeon synth thing, a ton of reissues, where I kind of was involved in mastering and artwork and all that stuff… Everything takes time. And then more touring, so you have to put down your projects all the time, and you pick them back up when you’re back home and work on them a little bit more. Then, of course, I have a regular job too, I work a full-time job on top of this, which not a lot of people know, so you have to go to work for about 37 hours a week, doing something completely different. (laughs) Time flies, man, it just goes by real quick. The thing about me is - maybe I’m a little bit of an autistic person, or ADHD or something, because with every song I’ve ever made, I always get a lot of ideas, and I write them down, and the song is never finished for me until I’ve tried every single idea. Of course, most of those ideas turn out to be crap, but you have to try them, because once in a while there’s this magical thing that happens, and it takes your song in a completely different direction, takes it to a new level and makes it much better. In my mind, I’m not really able to ignore ideas, if you know what I mean, and that of course is also time consuming. You add all those things up - and years have fucking gone by! (everybody laughs)
 
On the new album you worked with so many collaborators, it’s like each song has its own line-up. Did you have a master plan of sorts regarding who you wanted to get involved, or was it more like a trial and error process?
 
That was certainly not a master plan, everything sort of happened as I went along. One of the people I knew I wanted to try something with was Sarah (Jezebel Deva, singer, ex-Cradle Of Filth), because I’d known her from before. Early in the process, when some of the music was shaping up, I was realizing, “OK, this is different from what I’ve done before, at least a little bit, and it sort of reminds me a little bit of ‘The Smell of Rain’ – not much, but just a little’. So I started thinking, “Maybe Sarah could do some vocals here”. That came early. But I didn’t have a list of all these people in the beginning. As you go along, you realize, “Oh wait, maybe this guy would wanna try something, that would be cool”. It could be as random as you have a conversation with a cool guy, and you know he’s a great guitar player in a cool band, and you kind of go, “Hey, maybe we should try and do something on a new song?” Other times, in the case of, for example, Laurie Ann Haus, who is an amazing singer – I was tipped off on her by some random person online, and I checked her out, and I was like, “Holy shit! She’s really good!” I just contacted her, because I thought, “She might do a really great job on some of my stuff!” It ended up with her singing on three or four songs. So no, not a master plan, it’s not like a big bucket list of people that I just cross off as I get them to perform, it’s been much more improvised and sporadic than that.
 
Could you comment on some of the contributing musicians – why you chose them, how was it like working with them, etc.? The first one is Christopher Amott (founding guitarist of Arch Enemy - ed.).
 
I’ve known Christopher since the mid-90s, I met him through his brother, I knew Michael a little bit back in the day when he was starting Arch Enemy. I used to live in Halmstad in Sweden, that’s where Arch Enemy is from. Michael was doing his band called Spiritual Beggars, which was like a 70s rock band he had after Carcass and at the same time as Arch Enemy for a while. I got to know Chris through him. Nobody knows this, but Chris actually plays on “The Smell Of Rain”, that’s him doing all the guitars.
 
Oh, really? That’s interesting.
 
That’s Christopher Amott, yeah! We couldn’t say that back in those days because of some legal contract mumbo-jumbo with his label. I’ve known him forever, but since I moved back to Norway and stayed there for many years, we were sort of out of touch. He contacted me again a year or a year and a half ago, because he had a project, and he asked if I would be interested in singing on it. Later he changed his mind, he was gonna try singing himself, which is cool, but we stayed in touch and just talked a little bit. So I said, “Hey man, I have this long strange song going on (“Tribes Of Dystopia”), do you want to try to improvise some shit on top of it? I’ll just edit out a bit that I like and do something with it”. I just sent him the files on Google Drive or whatever, and he did his thing down in Sweden, recorded at home and sent it back to me.
 
That’s pretty much the way a lot of collaborations on this album happened. Some of the guys were in my studio, but that was mostly with the guys that don’t live far away, like Vegard Blumberg, who does a lot of those fast crazy wall of sound fuzz guitars in songs like “The Faith That Fades Away” and “Violent Silence” that ends with this huge wall of guitar – that’s me and Vegard Blomberg staying in the studio and just going crazy with different weird fuzz boxes and echo machines and all kinds of stuff. But beyond that there’s Sarah – that was the collaboration where I pretty much emailed her the stuff and gave her a little bit of direction, “Can you try to sing like this and that melody?” Laurie Ann Haus is such a different type of singer, she’s very sort of Dead Can Dance-y, “The Lord Of The Rings” vibes and all of that. I didn’t give her all that much direction because the first thing she sang on was “Tribes Of Dystopia”, and she sent me back this insane performance that was so powerful, though I did edit it quite a bit to make it fit better. But after hearing that I knew it was better to just let her do her thing – kind of let the music inspire her and see what comes back.
 
Then there’s this sort of really deep male vocals in the background, that’s the guy called Christopher Rakkestad. He was introduced to me by Tomas Bolverk, who used to play in Ragnarok and Bolverk and a bunch of cool cover bands. Christopher lives in Sweden, but he works a lot in Norway, I think he works in Oslo sometimes, so we would decide on dates, and he would just drop by the studio and we would do one or two days of pretty long sessions. I would just have all the music ready for him, and he would do all this choir stuff and some lyrical stuff. He’s got a really great voice, it fills up the room, let’s put it that way.
 
And then there’s, of course, Thorsten Queshning from Tangerine Dream. How did he get involved?
 
He has a better memory than me. (laughs) He made a post of the first time that I started talking to him, which was apparently during the COVID period. There was this dungeon synth online festival called “Dungeon Siege”, which has its origins outside of Boston, it’s a physical festival, but they had to make it online during COVID. Thorsten was doing a semi-improvised performance, he has his Tangerine Dream sound, but I think he was morphing that into dungeon synth type of vibe, and it was a cool fucking thing! I think we started exchanging some messages around that festival or maybe right before it, because we were both gonna be on it. I was gonna “premiere” some music that I was working on, just a few minutes of it were gonna be played there, so that people could hear it – it was around that time that we started talking. Then I toured with Mayhem in 2022, and we had a show in Berlin – that’s when I met him met the first time: he came to the show and we hung out. I think at one point we just started talking - maybe it would be cool to do something together. I think I sent him three songs, and he decided to do work on “Ghosts Of Europa”. I know he really liked the chorus, he thought it was very catchy, so that probably inspired him more, so he added some really cool arpeggios, sequencers, synthesizers and things like that. His sound is actually quite prominent on the song. He really took it to another level, and I’m really glad that he’s onboard.
 
The press release says you started the album with Stephan Groth of Apoptygma Berzerk. Why did this collaboration fall apart?
 
It didn’t that much fall apart as I was just deciding that I was gonna do this myself. Stephan is a great guy, we’re still good friends and everything. From the beginning we had this idea, it was actually his suggestion, he called me one day, it was during COVID, so everybody was just sitting around, and he said, “Should we make a single or something like a tribute to the old Berlin school like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and all that?” I was like, “Yeah, sure, sounds cool!” I already had a few bits and pieces of music sitting around that I had had for years, to be honest, and that just ended up in the vault and sort of forgotten about. That reminded me – “Hey, I have some stuff sitting around!”, so I went over to his studio, and I played him that stuff – “Maybe we could work on this stuff? Maybe this is a beginning?” He was like, “Yeah, perfect!” Those were the very early versions of “Transcending Morpheus” and, I think, “Tundra, Heart Of Hell” and a couple of other songs.
 
I went back home and started working on it, developing it a little bit more. I sent it to him, and he was like, “Great, great!”, and then I went back to his studio probably a few weeks later and started putting a little bit of vocals on it just to see how it would work out. From then on, he started becoming a bit of a problem, because Stephan is an expert at making himself very-very busy. (everybody laughs) That’s when he stops picking up the phone and he becomes hard to get hold of. I spent a lot of time with that music not really going anywhere trying to get a hold of him to see when he was going to start contributing anything. Eventually I just said, “OK Stephan, you know what? No problem, I take the music, and I think I’ll just continue with this on my own, because I can’t really wait for you and whatever things that you’re doing”. And he was cool, there was no problem, it was just a decision that we made, it was like, “OK, I would like to continue this, I don’t wanna wait around”. From that point on, it became a Mortiis project, and that’s when I also started re-writing the music a little bit to make it more like me, and not like a collaboration thing with him, because if we had done it [together], it would have probably sounded way more Tangerine Dream-y 70s type of thing. That’s a great thing to do, but I didn’t want a Mortiis album in itself to be like that. That’s great for a collaboration, a “Havard and Stephan” project, but I didn’t want a Mortiis project to sound totally like that, so I started transforming it into a more recognizable Mortiis thing, I guess.
 
It has been announced that there will be an artbook edition of the album with a bonus CD in it. What kind of material will this bonus CD contain?
 
There’s gonna be a bonus CD and a bonus LP, there’s gonna be the same stuff on both. That’s gonna be a whole bunch of little snapshots, early versions of almost all of the album songs, so that people can actually hear what they sounded like a few years ago. I did those little demos and mixes, and they’re almost like a snapshot of a song, the way it sounds right now, or actually four or five years ago. People will be able to actually get an idea of how much the songs have transformed; especially some of them transformed quite heavily from what they were in the beginning. Other songs are more recognizable… yeah, I suppose it’s like an archeology thing – you’re digging back in time and you see what it was like back then. I think real hardcore fans are gonna love that; as far as everybody else, I suppose it’s still interesting, but for fans it’s gonna be a fun thing.
 
Now the question about the album title – why is it “Ghosts of Europa”, not “Europe”? Is there a deeper meaning behind that?
 
Not really. (laughs) I get this question every time now.
 
We’re sorry!
 
No-no-no, it’s expected, because it’s a very easy title to misunderstand with the current situation in Europe and everything. It’s easy to think that it might be a political statement, but it isn’t. It’s very coincidental. When you’re like an artist or a musician or some kind of creative person, many weird things happen in your brain. (laughs) One of the things happening in my brain is that very often I get these cool little lines, cool bits of lyrics or just ideas, and I hold on to them. I had back in the COVID days this line – “Ghosts of Europa”, it just appeared in my head. The reason I’m not saying “Ghosts of Europe” is because, first of all, I’m not really thinking of Europe, to be honest, it’s just a word to me, but also “Europa” sounds better, it’s more mysterious, and it invokes images in a different way than “Ghosts of Europe” does. Honestly it’s more like an artistical thing, and it really worked well with the set of lyrics that I had – “When you showed me the world / All I saw was bitterness”. It’s all metaphorical really for human nature and how we can perceive each other as disappointments and things like that. I never write about happy stuff (laughs), I usually write about psychologically fucked up things and bleak stuff, because I find it more inspirational. I guess I’m just weird, but… It’s hard to explain these things to people because it’s mostly just artistical freedoms that you take. They don’t always have a deep philosophical meaning. “Ghosts of Europa” is a great example of something that sounds nice and attractive and mysterious in my brain, and that’s enough for me to work with it and use it.
 
How many videos in total will you have in support of the album? The current one, “Ghosts of Europe”, ends with the line “To be continued…”
 
Yeah, there’s gonna be a part two (“Violent Silence” – ed.) in a few weeks. We have two videos lined up for this album. I wanted more, but basically we didn’t have more budget, so we did two. We filmed both of them at the same time over in Iceland, with all the little tundras and mountains and everything of Iceland. That was a fantastic experience. That’s my daughter actually in the video too. It was freezing a lot. (laughs)
 
Was it your daughter’s first shooting experience? Does she have any musical ambitions like her dad?
 
It was her first time shooting like that. To be honest, I think it’s the worst thing when parents are bragging about their kids, because it’s like, “Oh yeah, we know you’re proud…” But I was really surprised, she did a great job! I was expecting her to be a lot more nervous and self-conscious when the camera started rolling. She used to play a little bit of clarinet, but she just got bored, so she stopped it. Which was too bad, because she was starting to learn notes and everything, which is more than I can do – I don’t know anything about musical theory. I don’t think she’s into playing music, but you never know. I kind of hope that she might develop an interest in that again. I know she likes music a lot, but at the same time she probably sees how much work and how much struggle it is when she looks at me and sees how I eat sleep and drink fucking music and all the problems that come with it all the time. She might be looking at me and going, “No, I don’t want that!” (everybody laughs)
 
In mid-April you will embark on a North American tour with UADA and Rome. All of these bands are very different from each other, and we’re not sure you have the same or similar audience. How did such a line-up come together?
 
I’m not sure. I was asked if I wanted to do the tour, and the other guys were already sort of in the mix. I think it might be Jake (Superchi) from UADA who kind of put that together, and then I was asked if I wanted to be a co-headliner of the tour. I like the line-up, I have a pretty nice experience in touring with other Cold Meat Industry bands, and I think Rome was on Cold Meat Industry for a little while, so it’s got that association. That has worked quite nicely before, and I’ve known who Rome is forever. UADA wasn’t really familiar to me until a couple of years ago, but they’re cool. There’s an opener, too, called Wraith Knight, which is a one-man dungeon synth kind of thing, so that aspect is still there: I’m not doing dungeon synth this time, but some other guys are doing it. Still a bit of that on the tour too. But you’re totally right, I would expect a pretty mixed crowd for sure.
 
How will your live show in support of “Ghosts Of Europa” look and sound like? How many people will be in the band? What else will you play in addition to the new album?
 
Well, since the new album is not gonna be out until June, we’re just gonna do a couple of tracks from the new album on this tour, to be honest with you. You don’t wanna fill up the whole setlist with just a bunch of stuff nobody’s heard, that would be kind of weird. Honestly this tour is gonna be revolving around songs off “The Smell Of Rain”, but we’re opening it with “Ghosts Of Europa”, I think it’s a nice opening song. In my opinion it’s the only place in the set where I can actually put that song. It’s such a quiet somber song you can’t put it in the middle of a set that has started to have a bit of a high energy, and then this song comes it and kind of kills the whole mood. I see it put in the beginning and then kind of expand the energy from there on. We’re also doing “Tundra, Heart Of Hell”, nobody’s heard it, but I feel it really mixes well with a lot of those “The Smell Of Rain” songs. Then a few from “The Great Deceiver” towards the end, they’re way more high energy songs that I think will end the show on a high note. There’s gonna be me and a couple of other guys up there on guitars and drums, we’re sort of going back to the 2010-2015 line-up. Like I said, I don’t wanna gamble too much, I don’t want to play too many songs that people haven’t heard. Once the album gets out, from then on you can call it a “Ghosts Of Europa” tour perhaps, this one is more of “The Smell Of Rain”-style tour.
 
In the summer you will play a special show with Emperor at the “Beyond The Gates” festival. How do you feel about going back to such an early stage of your career? And what are your expectations from the show?
 
I’ve done this with them before, a couple of years ago we did a couple of festivals together. Among them was “Beyond The Gates”, so we’re coming back there again. (laughs) And we’re doing Wacken too – that one I’m nervous about because it is such a huge festival! I don’t play bass that much, so I had to practice a lot for these shows. I feel cool, I feel good about it, it’s completely different from what I do, but honestly I think it’s more of a fun thing. I get to do something completely different from what I do – different festivals, much more metal-based, of course, and if I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t do it. It doesn’t really… you asked how I feel about going that far back into my career – to be honest, I’m not really thinking about it in those terms, I just think about it in terms of – it’s cool music, and we get to play it.
 
A lot of artists these days stick to the same style, and they pretty much make it clear that they don’t want to lose their audience by trying something totally different. You, on the contrary, have never been afraid to change, yet you manage to retain a significant share of fans from one era to the next one. What’s your secret of being fearless?
 
(laughs) I don’t think I’m fearless. Sometimes when I work on music, I set up, and I think, “Hang on, is anyone gonna like this?” But at the same time, I can’t let that dictate me. If I feel inspired and motivated, if the music I work on makes me feel that way, then there’s something right about it. So I will simply continue, and I will deal with the problem of potential flop later on. I don’t know what you call that, I think I’m just being really fucking stubborn. (everybody laughs) Like I said, if I start making music that really motivates me and I feel inspired by, but it’s a completely different thing from everything else I’ve done or from whatever scene I’m supposed to belong to, I try not to worry about it. If I was gonna make the same safe album over and over again – I guess I could make another “Smell Of Rain” every year or every second year, and it would be quite safe, I suppose – but god damn it, I would be so bored! I wanna feel inspired, and repeating myself over and over isn’t really my idea of feeling inspired. I suppose I could make two similar sounding albums in a row, that’s fine, but beyond that I wouldn’t wanna continue, I’d try other stuff perhaps.
 
What’s your opinion on the growing use of artificial intelligence in music and video making?
 
I don’t really know. I know people are getting really upset about artwork being AI-generated, I’ve seen a lot of comments on social media, and most people don’t seem to like it a lot. I was a bit ignorant to it for a while, we actually started making a video in AI, and I liked the way it looked, but I took some advice from people, and I started paying more attention to the reactions, and I was like, “Oh fucking hell!” There was always something bothering me in the back of my neck – it looked cool, but it didn’t look right, do you know what I mean? So I ended up telling the video director, “Not, I’m not gonna do this”, I backed out of it. I mean, if it’s being used to take people’s jobs away, for example, if you create AI-generated music - I’ve heard rumors that Spotify is doing it so they don’t have to pay artists any royalties because they create their own music and they pay themselves – that’s fucking disgusting. I’m glad that I backed out of that and got my mind in the right place before I’d made a fool out of myself. I think it’s a useful tool for googling and asking questions and things like that, but once you start taking over people’s jobs… those people are not gonna go away, they’re just gonna be broke people wandering the streets – what’s good about that, man? What I imagine could be good with AI in the creative sense is it could help you generate ideas, help you along the way to get ideas for things. I’ve seen that, I’ve seen cool AI-generated art that inspired me. I didn’t wanna use the artwork created by AI, but it certainly gave me a lot of ideas that you could continue at a human level, if that makes any kind of sense. You could certainly look at AI as a useful tool, but not as something that takes over everything. That’s dangerous, and that’s gonna be like “The Matrix” if this continues.
 
So far you have released two books – “Secrets Of My Kingdom” and the fanzine anthology (“Zombie Anal Sex Terror: Zine Anthology 1990-1992”). Do you have any plans to do more books at some point in the future?
 
There is that one in the box, but that’s more like a photobook. I’ve been talking to people about extending the old “Secrets Of My Kingdom” – that sort of dark dimension that I invented to have as a backdrop for my music, and expanding on that whole world. We actually did start working on it a little bit with an author, but then I got so fucking crazy busy with my album and then a bunch of touring and all things, and we put that on ice. We sort of set that aside, but that’s something that I really wanna pick back up. Whether that might present itself like a Part Two or anything else, that kind of remains to be seen, but that’s one of the things about that I felt like, “Well, this could be quite a lot of fun” – just take all those crazy concepts that you have in the “Secrets Of My Kingdom” book and just expand on them, give them more of a back story maybe and creative stuff like that. That’s something I haven’t been thinking about lately, I’m still a bit too busy, but maybe in the summer I could pick that up. I don’t know, we’ll wait and see, but for sure it’s been talked about.
 
What do you think about the tribute album, “Echoes Of Wizards Chamber”, which was released a few years ago? Were you involved in putting it together?
 
I wasn’t really very involved. I think what they did was they asked me if it was OK, and asked me a couple of practical questions I can’t remember exactly, maybe there were a couple of emails back and forth. But beyond that it’s entirely the creation of all those artists and that label. Maybe I approved the artwork, I can’t remember. But I think it’s a cool release, it’s very ambitious, it’s like a big double CD with a bunch of fold-out panels, it looks pretty deluxe, you know. They sent me some copies, and I think we had it in my webstore – I think they might be gone, but I’m not sure. It’s cool, I like it, and of course, not everybody gets to have a tribute album made for them. (laughs) You have to acknowledge that, it’s a bit of an honor. It’s all good to me.
 
Mortiis on the Internet: https://www.facebook.com/officialmortiis/
 
Special thanks to Barbara Francone (United Forces PR) for arranging this interview
 
Interview by Roman Patrashov, Natalie “Snakeheart” Patrashova
Photos courtesy of United Forces PR
March 30, 2026
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