Dimmu Borgir
Invaluable Darkness

28.04.2007

Norway’s Dimmu Borgir are among the leaders of the present-day extreme metal scene, and their latest album “In Sorte Diaboli” once again proved this fact. Controversial as usual, it alienated some of the band’s fans, as Dimmu Borgir made one more step away from their black metal roots, but still retained their uniqueness, aggression and bombast. Lyrically-wise “In Sorte Diaboli” is also something new for the band - it’s a concept album describing the main character’s path from a novitiate in a Catholic church to renunciation of religious beliefs and a turn towards the dark side. We were lucky to catch the author of the concept, the band’s guitarist and co-founded Silenoz on the phone at the peak of the new record’s promotion campaign. And even though it was not his first or last interview for the day, he never showed a sign of tiredness or irritation while handling the questions. And as to us, this was the realization of something we wanted and tried to do for years…

Following the release of “Stormblast 2005”, there were announcements that Dimmu Borgir are taking some time off and slowing down their activity a bit. How did you enjoy your life without constant touring and recording?

The wait wasn’t too long. A month after the end of touring I was already working on my ideas for the new album. The other guys were busy becoming fathers, and I was pretty much just working on new ideas.

Does it mean that Dimmu Borgir basically occupies all of your life? Do you ever have a vacation?

No, not really. The band is a 24/7 kind of job, it’s a very enjoyable job, of course, but I can’t really take any time off. I can do some short trips here and there, but if I don’t have my cell phone or my computer with me, I’m kind of fucked, because I need to be able to check my e-mail more than once a day. I take care of the band’s administrative and business side, too, so I never really have spare time.

You have done a lot of gigs and big tours over the past few years. But what is touring for you personally – is it something that must be done to support an album release, or do you enjoy it as much as working in the studio or probably even more?

Actually I enjoy both touring and working in the studio, because they’re just two different ways of working with the band. In the studio everything must be perfect, and live it’s a totally different situation, where we show aggression and intensity. Of course, when we’re touring, there’s a lot of waiting around, there’s a lot of time that you could have spent doing something else. But at the same time, I think it’s really important to show our appreciation of the fans that buy our albums and support us, we must be able to play our music live.

I was quite surprised by the bonus DVD on the “Stormblast 2005” album. I’ve seen you on stage twice – at Wacken and in Moscow, but this Ozzfest recording is totally different – you played in daylight, which is not an ordinary situation for Dimmu Borgir. Why did you choose this particular recording to be released on DVD?

We asked Sharon Osbourne if we could be filmed while playing at Ozzfest and then use the recording for the future. She was cool, but as long as we didn’t make any money on it. That’s why it’s just a bonus thing on “Stormblast 2005”. The package is sold at a regular CD price (of course, it’s not quite the case for Russia – ed.), and we thought it would be cool to have an extra bonus feature for the kids who don’t have the original “Stormblast” album. It’s not a big deal, it’s not the right way to experience us in a live setting, because, as you said, it was in daylight, and we played only five songs, so it doesn’t really show the band’s potential as far as the live aspect is concerned. I think it’s just a cool extra free thing for the fans.

Don’t you think it’s time for Dimmu Borgir to make a full-length live DVD – to film one concert from start to finish and release it? I’m sure many fans are waiting for it…

Oh yeah, I totally understand. We plan something like that, maybe after this album. I think it’s important for us to have something really good to release. We could probably release a DVD every year, but I don’t think that’s fair. It’s better for us to concentrate on quality, and that’s why our first DVD “World Misanthropy” (2002) came out really good. We have to do the same thing again, and for me, I would like to do it better next time and include a lot more stuff. We’ll see, but it will happen in the future, I’m sure.

You said that in some aspects American festivals are organized better than European ones. And what about the audience – are American fans very much different from European ones as well?

They are a little different, because this type of extreme music is still quite new to them. We have a lot of different types of fans in the States, but they all seem to be really enthusiastic, they seem to open their eyes to this type of music as well. Every time we tour in the States, our fan base is growing, and that’s great, that’s an inspiration.

Do you write any music or lyrics on tour? Or do you need silence and 100 percent concentration to come up with some music or lyrics?

I always write down some lyrical ideas on tour, but when I write the actual lyrics, it happens at home, because that’s where I’m away from everyone and everything, and that’s where it’s easiest for me. Ideas can come everywhere, I always carry a pen and paper with me wherever I go. My cell phone is full of ideas – sentences and words that I can use later on.

When and how did you come up with the idea for the new album “In Sorte Diaboli”? What motivated you to do a concept album this time?

The motivation, I guess, was simply that we wanted to do things a little bit differently when it came down to the lyrical aspect. There are limits of what we can write about with this band obviously, but within those limits there’s still a huge variation of topics. I felt it was time to do things a bit different and basically position all the lyrics around the same story. That’s something the other guys liked, too, and I think it came out really good.

A lot of bands are doing concept albums these days. What concept releases by other bands do you personally like, and which ones, in your opinion, were a failure?

I haven’t really noticed any bands that failed at concept albums, I guess I’ve been lucky to have been listening only to good ones. Queensryche’s “Operation: Mindcrime” was a very good concept, but that’s way bigger and more grandiose than what we did on this album. Iron Maiden’s “Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son” is a sort of concept album as well, and it’s really great, I love the lyrics to that one. King Diamond has done a few good story albums. So far I haven’t really paid attention to any bad ones.

As far as I understand, the concept of the new record is not based on any book or movie. But in general, do Dimmu Borgir members get influenced by any form of art, or do you only use your own imagination when you write something?

For this album, I used my own imagination, but it will of course have similarities to certain movies, books or whatever, I don’t know. That’s purely coincidental, because I don’t really read many books, and I try not to copy what I see in films. I think it’s safe to say that we all in the band are very interested in obscure and macabre parts of the human being, and that transfers into our music. We look upon our music as art anyway, because to me it’s not only music, it’s everything around it, too – the feeling, the mentality and everything that gets transmitted with our music.

A lot of people expected you to continue working with an orchestra on the new CD. But this time there is no orchestra, there are no guests, there are only the six musicians playing. What made you stop using contributions from the outside?

It was just natural for us not to use the orchestra this time. First and foremost, most on the songs were written on the guitar, and we knew pretty early on that it was gonna be a guitar-based album. Mustis (keyboardist) didn’t participate so much in the songwriting, at least not until the very end, so we knew it wasn’t gonna be a huge symphonic album like “Death Cult Armageddon” (2003). The new album still has symphonic elements, but not in the same way, so to say. We figured out that we could do it ourselves, and Mustis did a great job building up the symphonic parts. They sound like it’s an orchestra playing anyway.

What is the current status of Hellhammer in the band? Is he a permanent member or still a session drummer?

He’s technically still just a session member, and I think we will keep it that way. It just works out really good, we have had a stable line-up since 2000 apart from the drumming position, so we’re gonna try and have it like this for the future. Hellhammer is busy with so many other bands, too, so the current situation is good for both parts, really.

The regular version on the CD contains nine tracks. But there is also an exclusive European bonus (“The Ancestral Fever”) and an American bonus (“The Heretic Hammer”). How are these two tracks connected with the rest of the concept? Why did you decide not to put them on regular versions?

It wasn’t really a problem, and it was OK to have bonus tracks for each territory. The two songs that you mentioned don’t really take away or add anything in particular to the story. Every song on the album is a description and an explanation made by the main character in his diary. If it was another song, not one of these two, then it could have been problematic, because a few of the songs on the album have to be in the right order, both lyrically and musically. But those two bonus tracks don’t make any difference really.

It has become a sort of tradition for Dimmu Borgir to record with Fredrik Nordstrom. But for the re-recording of “Stormblast” you used Peter Tagtrgen, and now you are back with Fredrik again. How do you choose a producer, and what are the main differences between working with Fredrik and with Peter?

First of all, for the re-recording of “Stormblast” we wanted to go back to that Abyss-sound and really show people that this is how we want the original “Stormblast” to sound like. We managed to do that, and I’m really happy how it turned out. I think Peter and Fredrik have a lot of similarities, because they’re both perfectionists as producers. They have the same type of background, they’re both metal musicians, they play guitar. They know this type of music very well and they seem to understand also where we come from. It’s very hard to find a good producer in Norway, and Sweden is not that far away, so we always preferred people with more knowledge and experience to help us out doing the sound.

I’ve talked to both Fredrik and Peter while interviewing them, and I had an impression that on a personal level they are very different from each other. Fredrik is always making jokes, can Peter never says a single word more than it is needed…

(laughs) They’re both lunatics in their own sense. Fredrik is probably the craziest one in the sense that he can do crazy things when he’s sober. (laughs) Peter is the guy who’s getting looser when he has had a few drinks. We’ve become good friends, too, they always want to do the best for the band, they take pride in their work… They are very different sometimes as personalities, but as professional producers and musicians, they’re pretty close.

Another long-time member in the Dimmu Borgir team is Joachim Luetke. But I’ve heard from a few musicians that Joachim has a very clear vision of the artwork he’s working on, and it’s not very easy to persuade him to change something if the band wants to…

He’s sometimes difficult, but I think it also shows that he’s very serious about what he’s doing here. As you said, he sometimes has a clear vision from the starting point. For this album, we pretty much had the same ideas, we wanted to have the dark ages portrayed in the artwork and on the cover, we wanted this type of coloring and everything. We were on the same page basically from the start, and that’s great. He’s a great artist, he has a great eye for the dark and obscure, he’s thinking twisted, and that’s what we need. He’s also very experienced, he’s not only a painter but also a sculptor, he does all the different types of art. He’s definitely a great person to work with, but I have to say that he’s extremely expensive. If we had wanted to save money, we could have hired someone else, but at the same time, what comes out in the end is what matters, and then money doesn’t really matter.

You use the Internet a lot in the promotion of the new album. When other bands release CD singles, for this album you are going to release an Internet single called “The Serpentine Offering”. Do you think the CD as a music medium will soon become a thing of the past, and it’s time to switch over to online marketing and distribution of music?

We have to use the positive sides to the Internet thing, everyone else is using it, and there’s no way around it anymore. I think the Internet is somewhat of a necessary evil. It’s a totally different world with the Internet than when we started playing, because tape trading was the big thing then. It took forever to receive stuff, and that’s maybe why the stuff was more special – you had to wait for it, and you built up anticipation to get it. Now you can get everything in a couple of clicks on the Internet, and people have gotten a bit spoiled by doing it over the years, some people expect music to be free these days. It’s not like that. It’s hard work for us bands that actually live off this music, we depend on a certain income, otherwise our budget for the next album will go down drastically. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that. Of course the Internet and the downloading thing are great for the bands that don’t have a record deal, that’s the perfect thing because they can spread their music and get attention.

Speaking about the Internet, I heard that Nuclear Blast are going to sue an Italian reporter who put the promo version of the new album online illegally. What does the band think about this situation? Are you indeed willing to go to court over illegal mp3s, like Metallica did in the Napster case?

The band doesn’t really have to get involved, because the label will take care of that. The guy in Italy knew the deal before, he was the one that made the fool out of himself, he didn’t follow the rules. He was aware that what he did was wrong, and that sometimes needs to have consequences. I hope that the label will make an example of him. It’s downright stealing someone else’s product, the principle is not different from going to a CD store, taking a CD and walking out without paying for it. It’s basically the same thing.

One more question about legal issues. The re-recording of “Stormblast” contains a previously unreleased track called “Sorgens Kammer – Del II”. What happened to Part 1 of this song which was on the original “Stormblast”? I heard there were some legal problems as well…

That was a really embarrassing issue. Our former keyboard player (Stian Aarstad) apparently stole a song from a computer game, and we didn’t know about it until many years later. The author of the song actually contacted us, and we thought it was just a crazy fan making fun, but he turned out the man who made the song. I gave him the address and the phone number of our first keyboard player, and since then I haven’t heard anything. I don’t know what they agreed on.

Apart from Dimmu Borgir, you have a side project called Insidious Disease. What kind of music are you playing there, and who are other musicians in this band?

Oh, it’s pretty hard, groovy and brutal stuff. We try not to focus too much on technical aspects, but it’s gonna be a guitar-driven, catchy, old-schoolish kind of death metal. The people that are in the band are Shane Embury from Napalm Death, Tony Laureano, who used to play with Nile and Angel Corpse, and the other guitar player is Jardar, who used to play for Old Man’s Child. They’re all really good friends of mine, and that’s basically why we have this band – just to play together and have fun. It’s of course a serious band, but our main priority is other bands. We just hope to be able to record an album in the summer, because we’ve had all the music finished for over two years now. I’m really looking forward to get it out of my system, so I can put all new ideas for Insidious Disease down on tape, too.

Speaking about side projects – everybody in Dimmu Borgir is doing something else musically outside the band. But does Mustis do anything of this kind? I’ve never heard of his involvement in side projects…

He’s too lazy. (laughs) He probably would like to do some movie scores or theatrical-theme type of music, because he’s not really into metal anyway. That would be something appropriate for him, but so far he hasn’t gotten off his ass. I’m sure he will do it when the time is right.

How did you get Mustis in the band? As far as I know, he didn’t play in ANY bands before he joined Dimmu Borgir. Does he have a musical education or was he spending all the time at home learning to play the instruments before he met you?

I don’t think he has much musical education actually. He probably got the regular basic stuff down when he was eight or nine years old, but he’s developed his own style from then. He doesn’t know how to read notes or anything, he just knows D, C and A. I think he played with in a band before he joined Dimmu Borgir, but that wasn’t anything serious. He met Shagrath some time in early 1998 or late 1997, he came down to the rehearsal place, tried it out and did really well. It’s been working good ever since.

Do you like Shagrath’s solo project Chrome Division and the album they did?

I think it’s pretty good, it shows Shaggy’s other side. He’s always been into rock’n’roll, everything from Kiss to Motorhead. His music is a bit heavier than that, but it’s something cool. I think it’s really healthy for a band like us, at least now – after being so long into our career, it’s great to have something on the side.

And in general, what do you think about this movement back to the roots that is becoming quite strong on the Norwegian extreme metal scene? I mean, if we check out Abbath’s new project I, Chrome Division and even the latest Darkthrone CD, they are musically-wise going back in time, to the days before the creation of black metal…

I think it’s because of the music we all grew up on. Usually the type of music you hear first sticks the longest. Even if the older bands you mentioned have their own expression, you can easily hear the influences from the early days in their music. It’s just natural, it’s part paying tribute and part developing your own style. It’s the same with us, too, but maybe in our music it’s a bit more camouflaged. You can’t really hear the 1970s stuff in our music, at least not evidently. (laughs)

I wonder when do you personally realize that the music you want to play is going to be black metal? Was it after discovering Bathory, Mayhem or was there any over event that sparked your interest in this particular music?

I think it was definitely Mayhem and Darkthrone that sparked my interest, and not only in music, but also in the vibe that the music creates and everything around it, the mystique, the atmosphere and the whole ore. I used to play in an extreme death metal band in 1990-1991, and I guess I was just looking for something more extreme on the artistic side, not only on the musical side. That’s how I really got into the whole mentality of what black metal was back then.

You said many times that you were never satisfied with the recording quality of “Stormblast”. But what do you nowadays thing of the first album, “For All Tid” (1994)? Do you consider re-recording it as well some day?

I think the first album we did shows a lot of potential. It was recorded in two sessions, and the first part sounds pretty OK to me, the sound serves the songs well, it adds some kind of dark metal feeling when I listen to it, it’s very laid back and melancholic. I think even if the sound is not that good, it’s alright. It’s definitely different from the “Stormblast” production, because that was when we decided that we want a bigger and harder sound, and that’s something that we never got. That’s why we had to re-record “Stormblast”.

You are the main lyric writer for Dimmu Borgir, and you write songs in both English and Norwegian. What language is more challenging for you? Is it easier to express yourself in your mother language, or in the language that the whole world understands?

It’s a lot easier for me to write in English! (laughs)

It’s the same for a lot of Russian bands. Russian lyrics in heavy metal sound terrible on many occasions.

I think it’s because people are not used to it. It’s weird to hear your own language in the lyrics. It used to be like that for us, too. And in general, it’s harder to write lyrics in Norwegian than in English. The English language comes really easy for me, I’ve always been interested in languages, especially in English, it’s something I’ve always been cool with. But it’s cool that we still have some Norwegian lyrics from time to time, too.

You were a singer in Dummu Borgir in the early days. But why did you stop doing vocals after the “Godless Savage Garden” (1998) album? And how was it like to start singing again during the re-recording of “Stormblast”?

For the re-recording I didn’t have much choice, because I did probably 80 percent of the vocals on the original “Stormblast”, so I had to sing on that one. But generally I don’t think I’m a good vocalist, Shagrath is so much better, so I guess that’s why we changed back in the day. When Shagrath started playing drums in Dimmu Borgir, I was playing the guitar and singing at the same time, so that’s how I ended up being the vocalist on the first two records.

Dimmu Borgir often play at various events that don’t have much to do with extreme metal. You have appeared at gothic festivals, such as Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig, or at Ozzfest with a lot of nu metal bands. What is more comfortable for you – to play for the fans who have all your albums, or to try to capture a totally new audience?

I don’t think we feel comfortable anywhere, because I always look upon us as outsiders, and that’s the reason why we played in so many different places and saw so many different countries. That’s also one of the reasons why we attract a lot of people – we’re not afraid to do it. We’re taking all the risks and going ahead, doing whatever we feel is right for us. It just shows that we have a huge fanbase and that it’s growing with each album.

One more question about live shows – are there any chances of seeing you live in Russia again some time in the future? It’s been more than three years since your previous gig…

Yeah, I certainly hope so! We had a great time last time when we played in Moscow, the audience was amazing. Of course, we want to do our best to come back and play, put on a good show again. I’m sure our agency is working with a booking agency over there, and I’m sure it’s gonna happen for this album. Maybe not this year, but next year. Basically everything for this year has been booked already…

Dimmu Borgir on the Internet: http://www.dimmu-borgir.com

Special thanks to Alexei “KIDd” Kuzovlev (Irond) for arranging this interview

Interview by Roman “Maniac” Patrashov
Questions also provided by Adele
March 27, 2007
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