The Gauntlet: Alright, so, how’s the tour going so far?

Robin Staps: It’s been really cool. We didn’t know what to expect when we came here, because it’s our first time over in the U.S., and we’ve been positively surprised. The show in New York was amazing, the show in Boston was really cool, Connecticut, too. Yesterday was kind of shitty—Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend, I guess, and the turnout wasn’t the greatest. But it’s been really cool so far. And we’ve been treated really well, which we didn’t expect, because every American band tells us that touring in America is shit and they’re always surprised how well they’re treated in Europe, in terms of food and hotels and stuff like that. It’s been cool so far, we’ve been fed every night (laughs) and given things, and we have our own hotel on wheels pretty much, so we don’t care about accommodations.

The Gauntlet: Hmm. That seems to be an ongoing issue with American versus European bands, and the responses people get from those audiences. I haven’t been to shows in Europe, but just from seeing footage of concerts, they seem to have a very vocal audience.

Robin Staps: Yeah. It really depends on where you are in Europe, too, both regarding the way bands are treated and the way audiences respond to the bands. The further east you get the more crazy it gets, because fewer bands are touring there. We just finished a huge tour in the eastern part of Europe—Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, and over there—it’s just really sick, because few bands actually make it there, and when a band from the States or Western Europe comes there, the whole town comes out and people just go nuts. It’s not like that in Germany. People are more bored, because so much is happening there. But that makes it really interesting to tour in Eastern Europe. The treatment for bands there isn’t the greatest, not like in France where you get huge buffet-style dinners, which is really awesome, but the crowds [in Eastern Europe] really make up for it.

Gauntlet: And you’re going back to Europe for more touring after this, right?

Robin: Yeah, yeah. Right now we’re in the middle of a big three-and-a-half month tour, basically, that we started in mid-March, touring with Rotten Sound, Victims, and Trap Them in Europe for two weeks. Then we did France for a week, headlining shows, and then Eastern Europe for about a month or a little more. And then we had about five days off, and now we’re in the States with three Canadian shows and the U.S. And we’re flying straight back to Hellfest in France, which is one of the biggest metal festivals, and after that we tour with Cult of Luna for a couple weeks and play some headlining shows in the U.K. So we’ll be out until mid-July.

Gauntlet: Wow. That’s busy. Those are some good packages, too.

Robin: Yeah, very diverse. Rotten Sound on one end of the spectrum and Cult of Luna on the other. It’s awesome, I love it. I love all these bands and touring with all of them so far has been really cool.

Gauntlet: Good. I read that you’ve actually performed on a boat before.

Robin: Oh, yeah.

Gauntlet: Wasn’t that in Paris…?

Robin: Yeah, in Paris, it’s called the Batofar. And also in Porto Rio in Portugal. Two different shows. The Paris show was really awesome; it was about three or four years ago. It’s a boat that was a mobile lighthouse, actually, that they used to mark shallow waters in the river. And they turned it into a venue and it’s really beautiful, and apparently the perfect place for us to play. It was really cool.

Gauntlet: Hah, yeah, seems pretty appropriate. How many people can fit in that sort of thing?

Robin: It’s pretty big. I would guess about 200 people, something like that. It’s not a huge venue, but it’s pretty good.

Gauntlet: Could you actually feel the deck moving under you?

Robin: Well, no. The boat wasn’t actually out on the sea or moving when we were playing. It was attached to the quay, basically. Actually, I heard a funny story…. Good Clean Fun were playing there, and people were really going crazy and doing the Wall of Death thing, and the boat actually got torn loose. And I guess the engine isn’t working anymore, since it’s just a boat where they have shows now, so they actually had to tour it back to the quay.

Gauntlet: (laughs) That would have been a pretty epic story. Wow.

Robin: That didn’t happen in our case. Our audiences are more like—(Folds arms and nods slowly)

Gauntlet: Right, right. Doesn’t seem like the sort of Wall of Death-style music.

Robin: Yeah. Like I said, in Eastern Europe it gets really crazy, but for us it’s really different from country to country. The differences are huge in how people respond to our music, it’s amazing to see that.

Gauntlet: Well, yeah. It’s got a real depth of sound to it, so I can understand how people would interpret it differently in different places.

Robin: Yeah, it’s really like that.

Gauntlet: Hmm. Well, alright, I’ll just come right out with it then. How do you connect Precambrian geology to Lautréamont?

Robin: (laughs)

Gauntlet: I was trying to put together some questions for the interview—introductory questions and then real questions—and I was trying to figure out how to transfer from one to the other and I just couldn’t do it.

Robin: Well. We strayed from the Precambrian concept a little bit in the lyrics, and that was intentional because it doesn’t make sense to write an album about a time on Earth where there was just no life at all, no human life, not any life. That would be boring after at least one or two songs, where you just write about rocks flying through the air and erupting volcanoes. So, we do make reference to that in a metaphorical sense in many regards, but we didn’t just speak to the concept very strictly with the lyrics. If lyrics want to be emotional they have to deal with human issues, and that’s where Lautréamont comes into play. I’ve always wanted to make use of his poetry. I read the book Les Chants de Maldoror about seven years ago and always thought it was the perfect metal novel, you know? Full of hatred for humanity, and I was like, ‘Yeah, you have to use that for lyrics of a song’, and now I actually made that happen. Three songs off ‘Precambrian’ are entirely Lautréamont. We took passages of the book and made them lyrics to the song, so it’s not just like some quotes in the booklet. Those are there as well, but three songs are just lyrics by Lautréamont that we’ve used for that.

Gauntlet: And, I may be mistaken, but I think I read that you did a lot of writing of the album and coming up with the Precambrian framework, and then paired it with the lyrics sort of after the fact?

Robin: Right, right. That’s the way it worked. The music originated in two waves, basically. The ‘Proterozoic’ songs, or like the core five songs of that album, was the first wave of writing, and then the ‘Hadean/Archaean’ part of the disc, songs that ended up on that disc, were written probably six or seven months later. And actually in the middle of that process, we were looking for a concept to unite those two halves, basically, and that’s when the whole ‘Precambrian’ thing came into play. The lyrics were written as the very final step, actually. Once the music was already written and the concept was there, that’s when we did the lyrics. So we could have made it entirely based upon the ‘Precambrian’ theme, and I actually tried to do that at the beginning, but realized that it would be too restrictive for the lyrics and the music and the emotional quality of the music would suffer. So that’s when we decided to use it in a more open metaphorical sense.

Gauntlet: When I was following along with some of the lyrics, it was really interesting to see how they kind of humanized the concept. They seemed to be a little vague in some parts, or very personal. And, it seemed that the writing of the lyrics was handled by a couple different people?

Robin: Hmm, it’s all my lyrics, but like I said, there’s Lautréamont in it. And there are a lot of references, and there are some Nietzsche quotes, too. And actually one song is a poem by Georg Trakl, a German-Austrain poet that nobody will probably know over here.

(Laughter)

Robin: That’s the song ‘Ectasian: De Profundis’ off ‘Proterozoic’. We’ve always done that, we’ve always plagiarized poets and writers and used their work for our songs. And I think it’s perfectly legal, and I think it makes some of these long-forgotten people and authors shine again, and also makes it attractive for kids who may have never heard about them. On ‘Aeolian’ there’s ‘The City In The Sea’, which is a poem by Edgar Allen Poe, and we slightly modified it to make it fit the music, and that’s what we did with ‘Precambrian’. So it’s a mixture of plagiarized poets and self-written lyrics. Probably a percentage of 30 to 70 percent, something like that.

Gauntlet: Yeah, and that seems really add a gravity to the lyrics, which I think is really interesting. When you were writing them, were you writing them from your own personal experiences or as a reflection or response…?

Robin: It’s both. Some of them are really personal. But then, when you deal with personal experiences you always reflect upon them and then respond to some theories you’ve been thinking about, or those you’ve heard from other people, and make up your mind about it. So it’s a mixture of really personal, unique experiences and really broad, philosophical reflections on why these experiences happened and what the driving forces are behind them. Something like that.

Gauntlet: And I noticed that when you were doing the citations, they were only in the ‘Proterozoic’ booklet. Now, I’ve got my own guesses as to what this means, but I was curious as to why you did it this way.

Robin: Give me your guesses first.

Gauntlet: If ‘Hadean/Archaean’ is before all life, then there would be no need or possibility for those quotes to apply to anything.

Robin: Right, that’s exactly right. The whole music of ‘Precambrian’ is an evolution, basically, from more simple songs with limited instrumentation—just drums, bass, guitars, vocals, and simpler arrangements as well—to the huge, multi-layered ‘Proterozoic’. And that of course reflects the evolution of planet Earth from a place where there was only sulfur and lava and no atmosphere to a place where simple forms of life sprang up and everything became more complicated. And we tried to reflect that evolution in every regard, as in the music, which I just spoke about, and in the lyrics as well. And, yeah, that’s why the quotes appear in the ‘Proterozoic’ booklet. Apparently there was no human life at that point, either, but something was happening, and it wouldn’t have been appropriate in the ‘Hadean/Archaean’ booklet.

Gauntlet: Alright, well, figuring that out makes me feel good.

(Laughter)

Gauntlet: If you’re narrating the progression of the planet Earth with this ultimate metal novel that’s filled with hatred for humanity, it seems to have a kind of dark outlook on the proceedings…

Robin: I don’t want to give any outlook to the future, because I’m not a prophet, not really trying to be. The whole ‘Precambrian’ theme can be seen as a metaphor to modern life. It’s pretty much asking, ‘How much life is there left in the lives we lead today?’ We’re all working shit jobs to sustain ourselves, doing things that we would never do unless we got paid for it. And a lot of people are really miserable about that. And making an album about a time when there was no life on Earth whatsoever is kind of a statement in itself that I think reflects that, too. Do you know what I mean?

Gauntlet: Yeah…yeah, I think so. It did seem as though the character of Lautréamont and the general album itself wasn’t quite as antagonistic as maybe it originally had been. It almost seemed like it was being presented as a protagonist, not unlike Faust, for example. A character who is technically against what most people would consider their morality, but in the context it tries to point out themes like those you mentioned and make a statement that isn’t necessarily promoting evil.

Robin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that book is really ambiguous, I think. It’s really hard to say at times what is sarcasm and irony and what is pure, genuine hatred. And think it’s a good mixture of both. Sometimes the moments that are clearly sarcastic and surreal are even stronger than the moments that are pure hatred. I think that’s what’s really interesting. It really depends on the listener and the reader’s perspective of the album, and that’s something that I don’t want to dissolve by giving a clear answer to everything, because it makes it much more interesting when people come up with their own solutions and interpretations of certain passages. A song like, ‘Legions of Winged Octopi’, for example, the fourth song off ‘Hadean/Archaean’, that’s a song that entirely employs Lautréamont’s lyrics. There are so many images in that that don’t make any sense if you just take them literally and look at the words. But as a whole, it does make a lot of sense for me, and I don’t want to really give interpretations or explanations for that. First, it’s not my lyric, it’s Lautréamont, you know, and I may be mistaken as much as anyone else. But I think that’s what makes it really interesting—that everybody can come up with their own more detailed explanations about what this sort of stuff is all about.

Gauntlet: It certainly gives you a lot of food for thought. And, also food for thought, and on a lighter note, I was surprised to see the rather aggressive commentary against the influence of the Myspace generation.

Robin: (chuckles) Yeah.

Gauntlet: And, I know you said you are not a prophet, but it seems that you are of two minds with this, in that there’s the negative impact of Myspace, but that there also positive things it can do. So, in general would you say that you are optimistic or pessimistic about the direction that it is taking us?

Robin: I was speaking with Seldon Hunt [New York City-based graphic artist] about this two nights ago, actually, and he says that the really scary thing about it is that a lot of kids these days who listen to music or download music only on Myspace don’t have that history that we have of buying records or buying CD’s. It seems to us that they’re kind of living in a virtual reality, but to them it really is reality. He told me a story about a giveaway action at some record store where everybody could just go there and take them, and of the 2,000 CD’s, 1,700 were still there because nobody really wanted them, because apparently a lot of kids don’t have use for that or appreciate having a CD as a physical product. I thought that was a really striking story, and I think that the outlook is pretty grim. But I don’t want to defend the CD and say that we always have to have it. For me, personally, when I really like a band I want more than just the music. I want to get the artwork, I want to get the full packaging, I want to read the lyrics, and I want to have something in my hands. Maybe I’m just from a dying generation. And I can see why kids don’t do that when bands don’t put effort into it, and that happens quite a lot these days. You know, when you buy a record and you think, ‘Oh, this is shitty. I’ll throw away the packaging and just put it on my iPod, that’s cool.’ But we really try to fight for the album as an album, and that entails all these different aspects. And Myspace is kind of ruining that, in a way. It also affects the quality of the music being release. Being a site that only allows four or five songs for download essentially makes people focus on certain songs and not on the quality of the album on the whole, from the first to the last track where every song has its role. That is not possible when you just get a glimpse of everything. Usually it’s like one track from the first record, another one from the second. The thing is, it gets really troublesome when that is the first and last step of the chain, and that is what happens today. A lot of kids just listen to music on Myspace and they don’t really go out and buy the CD’s and promote the band as a whole and their evolution. As a promotional tool it is a cool thing. We have our own site there and we use it to promote the band. It’s kind of a grassroots DIY tool, you don’t need big budgets to get an audience. That’s great. Those are the aspects that I’m in full favor of, but I think the negative aspects are probably more serious and more severe, from my perspective.

Gauntlet: Yeah. I personally couldn’t agree with you more.

(Laughter)

Robin: There are so many more aspects. Why would you waste thousands of Euros on making a really, really good-sounding record when you know that 70% of your audience is going to listen to it on shitty streaming Myspace quality? That’s bullshit.

Gauntlet: Right. Or just on their iPods with the little earbuds.

Robin: Yeah, exactly. That doesn’t make any sense at all. You can just go to a shitty studio and record some crappy-sounding music. There’s a lot to it.

Gauntlet: When I’ve heard certain people really promoting it, they seem to argue in favor of it as a response to the singles generation—

Robin: It’s really weird how that has sort of sneaked its way into the whole metal and experimental music thing, because…I don’t know, that’s kind of a new phenomenon, I think, that metal and experimental bands try to adapt to that hit-single approach to music. But it’s really like that when you listen to a song that you like and you say, ‘Okay, I’m going to get the CD,’ a lot of times you’ll be disappointed because on the CD there are two good tracks and the rest is just filler material. Because bands don’t pay attention to making albums anymore, they just try to write the perfect song and that’s cool. And maybe the perfect song is what you hear on the metal radio show, but then when you buy the album you’re disappointed because after 10 minutes it gets really fucking boring.

Gauntlet: But it seems to work for them…. Not necessarily from the artistic perspective—

Robin: Well, yeah, it’s nothing new. It’s how it’s always been working out in the pop culture. It’s just interesting to see that metal is just as much a part of popular culture, no matter how extreme it is or how different it is trying to be. It’s still the same mechanisms of culture industry that are really present everywhere.

Gauntlet: Hmm. Well, on a lighter note (laughs), back to the album. With the previous album, you needed to split it up into two releases, and that with this one you were able to put everything together—two CD’s in one package. That must have been nice, first of all, but—

Robin: Oh, yeah!

(Laughter)

Robin: We finally could do what we wanted to do.

Gauntlet: Did that change your songwriting at all, knowing that that was going to happen?

Robin: We’ve always had these two sides to our music, the one being the kind of songs that were on ‘Aeolian’, mainly, and the other being the songs on ‘Fogdiver’, our first album. In one case really heavy simple songs with simple instrumentation, short—like four to five minutes—with simple instrumentation, the other one being at times instrumental, at times with vocals as well, with big orchestrations and classical instruments. For this new album, after thinking about how to get the two things together, rather than trying to merge it I thought the greater challenge was to take it as far apart as possible. And that’s not a new idea, that’s what we wanted to do with ‘fluXion’/‘Aeolian’ in the first place. But at that time it didn’t really work out, because our label said, ‘We cant’ do that, it’d just be too expensive.’ And then knowing that it was not going to happen, we didn’t really stick to that approach so strictly. ‘fluXion’ is still a pretty heavy album, but it is the more atmospheric and the more epic of the two. ‘Aeolian’ is the more heavy and simple album, but there are still a couple of epic tracks on that, like the last track, for example. So we didn’t stick to it as strictly as we did with ‘Precambrian’, knowing that we’d be able to release a double CD with one concept behind the whole thing. And we tried to make the difference between those two discs as large as it could possibly be.

Gauntlet: Yeah, I’d say it was pretty clear. I remember listening to ‘Hadean/Archaean’ for the first time and saying, ‘Okay, that was pretty intense,’ and then switching over to ‘Proterozoic’ and there’s this saxophone leading into it all. ‘Oh, wow…this is going to be different.’ I forget, was this your first release on Metal Blade?

Robin: No, the second.

Gauntlet: Second release, okay. On a similar note, insofar as inspirations, I’ve read that yours range from everything from prog rock to hardcore.

Robin: Yeah.

Gauntlet: How do these influences coalesce into The Ocean?

Robin: Ooh, that’s a question that is really hard to answer, because I can’t really look at that from a third-person perspective or a bird’s-eye view. Everything that has influenced me over the years that I’ve been enjoying and playing music myself finds its way into what I write, apparently, but it’s not like a conscious process, you know. It’s not like I’m saying, ‘Okay, now I’m going to take the Krautrock part and put it together with the hardcore part,’—

Gauntlet: (laughs)

Robin: It’s a subconscious process. You have all these things that you’ve heard somewhere, that you’ve listened to, and they stay in certain areas of your brain that you don’t always have access to. And when you’re writing, they just come out and it all flows together and produces what is an Ocean song in the end. But what is inside that black box, I can’t really say. It’s sometimes impossible for me to understand where a certain idea is coming from, and then sometimes you find yourself going back to some older records and you’re like, ‘Hey, okay, this is where that was coming from.’ But I didn’t know that at the moment when I was writing that part. So it is a really amorphous process and difficult to see through.

Gauntlet: Mm. Almost seems like if you look too much at that black box, you might sort of lose the inspiration that it gives you—

Robin: Yeah, yeah. I don’t want to do that, really, exactly. I don’t want to analyze that too much. I think it’s good if you just let it flow and see what happens. That’s the more interesting aspect of it. Too much analyzing can sometimes really ruin it. That’s what I witness with a lot of classical musicians that I’ve played with on this album that are brilliant, brilliant technicians. That’s what they’ve been trained to be on the instrument. But there’s not so much creativity left, and when you ask them to try something out or to improvise they’re lost, helpless. And that’s what perfection can sometimes lead to, and too much analyzing and knowing what it is that you’re doing can sometimes lead to that. It doesn’t necessarily have to lead to that, but I’m a little bit scared of it, so I’m trying not to think too much about what it is that I’m doing.

Gauntlet: Hmm. It seems odd to try to write in just one locked-in style. I’ll sit down to play guitar sometimes and play something one minute and then something completely different five minutes later and try to figure out how the two would be enmeshed at all. When you sit down to write, do you just let that flow or do you say, ‘Alright, I want to write a heavy song,’ or, ‘I want to write an atmospheric piece’?

Robin: I generally have an idea of where the whole thing is going when I start out with an initial idea, but other than that there is no plan from scratch to construct a song, or anything like that. Usually I have a certain song in my head and it all evolves from there, or just a certain riff. Sometimes you just have a melody, and then the next question is instrumentation. What is that going to be? Is that going to be a cello, a guitar, a vocal line? Sometimes it’s much more precise, like when you have a riff in your ear and you know it’s going to be a guitar riff, you know. Both can be starting points for a song, really. I wrote a lot of the ‘Proterozoic’ songs while backpacking in Australia, and I was just watching endless beaches all day and I got a lot of really crazy ideas in my head. I got back to my place where they had an old used acoustic guitar with like four strings on it, and I’d try to write down these ideas so I’d remember them later.

Gauntlet: That must have been a challenge. (laughs)

Robin: Yeah. It was really cool, though, because when I’m not at home and I’m traveling I just have this flow of ideas all the time. It’s really important for me to not be in a room like this or at home where I have all my distractions, but to be somewhere else, basically. The idea environment to write is to just take a laptop and guitar and go on the road, just leave for a couple of weeks. That’s what really gets me to composing more than anything else. But, yeah, like I said, it can be anything from a really precise idea, in terms of what instruments going to play it, to maybe two or three ideas that evolve together. Like the basic root of a song, that it’s going to be a short song or a heavy song or a more esoteric piece. But sometimes they really develop into something that is completely different from what you intended it to be when you had the initial idea. That’s the really fascinating aspect. A song like ‘The Greatest Bane’ off our ‘fluXion’ record, for example, is a thirteen-and-a-half minute piece, I think, or fourteen-and-a-half. That was not intended to be so long in the beginning. It was really supposed to be a pretty epic track, but only six or seven minutes, and then the whole second half just evolved from there. And there it is.

Gauntlet: Hmm. And then, on a similar theme, in terms of the environment as inspiration—this might be going back to the black box, and if it is then we can go elsewhere—but you seem to have a clear and enduring fascination with the ocean, water, things like that. What draws you to it, and how does it influence The Ocean?

Robin: The ocean has been very, very important to me for almost my whole life. I almost drowned, twice, and I’ve spent some of the most beautiful moments of my life in or near the ocean, too. So I’ve always been fascinated by it, and that’s something that I can’ really give reasons for. I just love to sit by the ocean, look at the waves. It’s something that calms me down a lot and that I just need to do sometimes. It’s kind of a mystic thing (laughs), I don’t know what it is. And I’ve only recently how much of an influence this has been on rock music and how many bands have actually mad reference to ocean-related themes and metaphors throughout the history of rock. That’s something I wasn’t even aware of. So I guess I’m not the only one who has that fascination, that weird fascination that you don’t know where it comes from. When we started out with this band, we wanted to have a name that would allow us to do whatever we wanted to musically, from the really calm, slow stuff that is on ‘Fogdiver’, certain songs there, to the really heavy outbursts of metal that are on ‘Aeolian’ or ‘Hadean/Archaean’. And The Ocean is the perfect name for that, because the ocean can really stand for the really beautiful scenery with palm trees and whatnot and the setting sun, and it can also be a raging tsunami. So that’s just as much true for our music, and that’s why we picked that.

Gauntlet: The last band that I talked to that said they wanted to have a name that was kind of open was Dew-Scented.

Robin: Dew-Scented? Really. Interesting.

Gauntlet: I wouldn’t have pegged them for wanted to do that, but so it is.

Robin: Yeah, yeah, that’s cool.

Gauntlet: So, this leads me to the art and the merch for the band, which I think are fantastic. How did you begin working with Martin [Kvamme], and will you continue to work with him in the future?

Robin: Yes, definitely. I just met him for the first time, actually, at the New York City show two days ago. We’d been shuffling emails back and forth for years—a lot of them—

(Laughter)

Robin: Because the ‘Precambrian’ artwork was just a ridiculous undertaking. But I had never met him in person, so it was really cool to see that happen. Martin is absolutely awesome, and I originally found him because of the Tomahawk CD, I think it was the second album that he designed with all the saloon-gaming-casino type of look and the leather packaging with golden print. That’s how I first came across him, I said, ‘This packaging is amazing, this is really beautiful.’ And from seeing that I knew that this guy was really good and could do something completely different, more in the vein of what we were looking for, too. And I looked at his website and saw what other projects he had done and became a fan, I guess. And that’s why we chose him. I sent him some music and asked him if he wanted to do it, and he was down for it, and that’s how it all started. He did the ‘Aeolian’ artwork and did an outstanding job there, I think, I was very, very happy with that. And sometimes it’s difficult for me to work in a creative regard with external people because I’m used to doing everything myself. I write all the music myself and basically tell people what to play, all the classical instrumentals…. With Martin, I gave him rough ideas and he took it from there and came up with something that I would have never been able to come up with my myself. And he just did an awesome job and surprised me everything, and that is awesome to see that happening, to be able to work with someone like that. Martin is an artist in the truest sense of the word. He’s really willing to put as much time and effort into it as need be to make it absolutely outstanding and to make himself happy with it. He’s not the kind of artists that just wants to do a quick job and get the money; he’s really dedicated and very talented as well. So I don’t ever want to work with someone else again. Definitely my man. When you have found the one, there’s not reason to look for something else. It’s like with a girl. I’m not going to marry him, but…

(Laughter)

Gauntlet: Yeah, it shows. Pretty outstanding stuff. So, when you met him, were you guys already kicking around new ideas?

Robin: Well, we’ve been talking about…I’m getting a custom guitar done by First Act, who are endorsing us now. And I’ve been talking to him about designing that guitar, actually. That’s going to be the next project—a ‘Precambrian’ style guitar.

Gauntlet: That’ll be sick.

Robin: With the flash gloss UV kind of finish on the body and the bubbles and stuff. It will be very, very cool, I’m really looking forward to that. And of course I want his advice and his ideas to make that happen.

Gauntlet: A squid inlay…

Robin: Yeah, something like that. (pause) Wow! Yeah, that would be cool.

(Laughter)

Robin: It’s probably just going to the filigrain of the logo on the twelfth fret. Just want a plain, simple ebony fretboard, and then the filigrain.

Gauntlet: Well, I’ll keep my eye out for that.

Robin: Yeah, it’s going to be awesome.

Gauntlet: And, oh, I saw that the ‘Precambrian’ artwork won an award [silver in the 2007 Visuelt] in Norway, too? That’s good pretty excellent, because the entire packaging, like you were talking about, gets recognized.

Robin: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Gauntlet: And, then, as far as the music is concerned—who would you like to still work with? I’ve read Jonas, for one, Jonas Renkse.

Robin: Oh, yeah, definitely. Jonas was actually supposed to be on that album, but it didn’t happen because of timing issues. I approached him very late, and we were trying to make it work, but then it didn’t because of their touring and studio plans. He knows the band, he really likes the album, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to be on the next album. I love that guy’s voice, and I have a lot of respect for that band and the transformation it has gone through. That’s very rare and one of the bands I really, really want to tour with, because they are amazing. Hmm, who else? There’re a lot of people that I would still like to work with, but I don’t really want to call names before I get the chance to ask them. I would like to get some people from completely different contexts—not metal singers or hardcore vocalists. I would like to…(long pause) I can’t get this name out of my head for the past couple of weeks, but I’m writing some more calm and acoustic stuff…and I want Sinead O’Connor.

(Laughter)

Robin: That kind of voice. That would be really cool. She’ll be hard to get, too.

Gauntlet: Wow. I can imagine. That would be quite a coup, if you could pull that off. (Laughs)

Robin: Yeah. I think that would work really well in the context of The Ocean, I can see that voice work very well with certain parts and ideas. It’s probably hard to imagine for a lot of readers and listeners out there. So…be prepared. (Laughs)

Gauntlet: Definitely, definitely. That would be quite interesting. Did you hear, speaking of Jonas and contributors, his work on the new Ayreon album? Do you listen to that at all?

Robin: No, haven’t heard that at all.

Gauntlet: I think you’d find it interesting, insofar as a project, a concept, bringing in lots of different people to help realize it, and lots of different styles and sounds. And he’s on the album—weird concept of space age, putting life on earth and things like that—and he’s on there with some other vocalists. Anyway, good stuff, I’d recommend it.

Robin: Cool, yeah, I really want to hear that.

Gauntlet: So, yeah, that was another one of the questions I had, in terms of the dynamics you were looking for. Because on ‘Precambrian’, for example, you have a lot of contributors, but in terms of the vocal range it’s all fairly well within a familiar context—

Robin: Mm-hmm. (nods)

Gauntlet: So, the question was whether you’ve either musically or vocally considered going crazy-elsewhere. Well, Sinead O’Connor, of course, but also maybe something like electronics, what have you.

Robin: Yeah, I think I just answered that one. In the future, I want people from different contexts to do guest vocals. The whole thing why we had so many guest vocalists was that we tried to get as much variety as possible. Because all the vocals are in the realm of scream-vocals—that’s just what a lot of parts in these songs call for—it makes it more interesting if it’s not the same voice all the time. And if people can actually sit there and say, ‘Oh, who’s that? That sounds similar to the guy on the first song…’ That just makes it interesting when you listen to it on headphones, you know? Live, we do it with two vocalists and that’s perfectly possible—Nico [Webers] and Mike [Pilat] can cover the full range from high-pitched screams to ultra-low death metal grunts to everything in between. They can do it. But in the live environment it doesn’t make so much of a difference because the nuances tend to disappear in a live setting. On the album it’s different. Another aspect is that it’s just awesome to be able to work with people from your favorite bands. We worked with Sean Ingram [Coalesce] on ‘Aeolian’ and Caleb [Scofield of Cave In] and Nate [Newton of Converge] again on ‘Precambrian’—Nate was also on ‘Aeolian’. It was just really cool to meet those people whose bands you’ve been listening to for years and hear their voices actually fit on the music that you write. That’s just a really cool moment. Usually, when I write and come up with the vocal patterns and everything, I always have a specific vocalist in mind for a certain part. And that’s actually how this all happened, too. That’s sometimes how I call a part, like “the Caleb part”, or whatever. And then I try to find someone who can do that kind of vocal style or, with how I came up with the naming idea, why not ask the person you were originally thinking of? And that’s how we approached Tomas Hallbom from Breach, for example, because there were a lot of Tomas Hallbom parts before he ever heard about the band.

(Laughter)

Robin: So I just finally said, ‘I’m going to ask this guy if he wants to do it.’ And he loved the band and the music and wanted to do it, so, that’s how it came together.

Gauntlet: It sounds at one point like there’s Steve Austin [Today is the Day] on ‘Precambrian’…

Robin: Oh, yeah?

Gauntlet: Could that be so?

Robin: No. Which song is it?

Gauntlet: I wrote it down, let me see…‘Calymmian’.

Robin: Oh! Yeah, I know what that is. That’s Nico.

Gauntlet: Really?

Robin: Yeah, that’s one of our two vocalists.

Gauntlet: Wow. I heard that and immediately thought Steve Austin, and then I looked in the booklet and thought, ‘He’s not here…’

Robin: Yeah, it’s that kind of style.

Gauntlet: Huh. Then, I’m very interested to see that live, and you’re right, that’s quite a range.

Robin: Yeah, definitely.

Gauntlet: Did you at any point, given all the contributors that you’ve had, think that you wouldn’t be a touring band? It just seems uncommon to take this kind of project out on the road.

Robin: Ahh, no. I think everybody knew about the band and that we’re touring quite a lot, actually. You can see on our website that we really never take a break; over the course of the last four years we’ve been touring continuously, pretty much. I mean, not like nine months a year, but we’ve always been touring and then maybe took a break for a few months and then went touring again. I think everybody knew that and we’ve always had these guests. And we were always organized as a collective, with the core line-up of fixed members and then more members that are more loosely associated and come into play in the studio or whenever we need them. Sometimes they are there on certain live occasions. And this has just grown over the years. Originally we started out with five or six people, and now on ‘Precambrian’ there are 26 people playing. But we can’t bring everyone on the road with us so we have to compromise in a live environment, but I think the compromise is very little, actually, and you get live what you hear on the album. It’s just that not all the cello tracks and strings are played live, they come from the sequencer, but it’s the studio tracks at studio quality. It’s not some shitty samples or anything, you know. And with the vocalists, like I said, with a live environment you can cover the whole vocal range if you have good vocalists, and no one’s going to complain that it was not Caleb singing, or it was not Nate singing. Just from looking at the list of vocalists on the album, people are going to understand that we’re not going to bring 11 singers on tour and have each one sing three parts in the whole show. That just doesn’t make sense. So, on the album we tried to do something different than live—that’s just what makes it interesting. In another way, we have certain things live that we don’t have on the albums. We have the visuals, for example. We have the lights show, and you just don’t get that when you listen to the CD. So it’s just a totally different story, and I never wanted to limit myself to saying, ‘Okay, we have to do live exactly what we do on CD.’ It just keeps it interesting if you stray from that a little bit.

Gauntlet: Right, right. It just seems like a lot of bands would have taken the excuse of having that many contributors to just consider themselves a studio band. So, I, for one, really appreciate that you make the effort to take it out on the road, and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing it. And finally, I know I’ve taken up a lot of your time and really appreciate your patience—

Robin: No worries.

Gauntlet: Just kind of a final note. In looking through other interviews in preparation for this one, it’s uncommon to see a member of a band be so vocal and involved with other music, talk about it, and just be a fan in general. It seems that a lot of times people get in a band and then say, ‘Oh, I don’t really listen to that much music anymore.’ Because they’re playing it all the time.

Robin: Yeah, I have to agree with that, actually. The last year when I was recording ‘Precambrian’, I didn’t follow at all what was happening. Of course, you read the magazines and get an idea of what’s going on, but when you’re working in the studio for ten-to-eighteen hours a day, sometimes, when you come home the last thing you want to do is turn on more music, you know?

(Laughter)

Robin: It just doesn’t work like that. I totally know and understand that feeling, and I’m not listening to so much music myself these days, but it’s because I’m on tour and we’ve been spending a lot of time on the recordings. When I’m not tour, not recording, I listen to music all the time. There’s so much more to discover in the past, actually, which I find much more interesting these days, than what is happening in contemporary music. But, yeah, of course, I love music and I will never lose that, I think. It’s just that when you do too much yourself, you kind of step back from that a little bit and don’t follow every new band that is coming up. You focus more on your own stuff.

Gauntlet: Hard to play music and listen to it at the same time.

Robin: Yeah, exactly. (Laughs)

Gauntlet: Well, again, I appreciate again the time and look forward very much to the performance. Should be outstanding. Thanks.

Robin: Cheers, thanks to you.