Enslaved Interview with Ivar Bjornson By                                      Elena Francis     13.11.2008

How’s the tour been going?
Extremely good. We’ve been looking forward to touring with this album, playing the songs live. It’s working very well and now we’re in London and it’s always one of the best stops on tours.

Why’s that?
A lot of people, good atmosphere, professional venues. It’s been like that ever since we started touring. London’s always been a home-coming sort of feeling for the gigs.

You’ve just released Vertebrae, your latest album. How would you say it’s different from your other releases?
It’s more based on atmosphere. It’s breaking maybe more of, let’s say, the metal rules or extreme metal rules at times by incorporating elements from other genres that we are fans of like the ‘70s and classic rock, even other more alternative metal styles and all that. Also, I think it’s the strongest album that’s linking the new Enslaved with the old Enslaved. I think we’ve never got that far in both directions at the same time so it really fits the solid identity of this album.

Why is it called Vertebrae exactly?
We were looking for a title. We’ve had a couple of pretty pompous concept albums in the past and this time we [wanted] something a little bit more loose. We have eight songs that were more like independent short stories but the whole album had this common theme of an outcry, so to speak, for the individual in the world today. There’s so much fanaticism in terms of religion, politics, in friends. There’s so much pressure on young, old, just people in general to force them into belonging to something and that’s sort of what attributes value to you as a human person, not quite who you are yourself or your potential but which group your belonging to and we really felt a need to protest against that, and we were looking for a word that could symbolise that and then we found ‘vertebrae’, the back bone the basic building stone to the human body, something that’s universal, something that links us to the other creatures in nature. It’s got so many symbolic meanings on all levels. It symbolises Enslaved as a creature that’s developed and mutated and gone back and forth but it still remains; the backbone is the same. When we found that word it was just an immense experience. I just had to call the other guys and: “I think I have the album title.”

And did you name the song after the album title or did you name the album after the song?
We felt the need to have a title song so the title was first.

Very interesting concept. On Vertebrae, I noticed there are a lot more clean vocals now compared to previously. Why did you decide to put a lot more clean ones in?
It wasn’t a conscious decision. I have to say that Herbrand and Grutle are the two main singers. They’ve never spent so much work and energy on an album before. They spent six months experimenting with every possible combination of harsh and clean vocals before they arrived at how it ended up on the album. I was really impressed thinking that Grutle doing most of the vocals, harsh vocals, in the way that he saw the same thing, that the album opened up [and] got new dimensions from pushing Herbrand further forward which was a very selfless act that I think also inspired the rest of us to think more as a unity, not so much about who’s doing the most and how it used to be ten years ago, two years ago, how it’s going to be on the next album. For me it was a surprise; I was expecting it to be, you know, being the one making the music delivering so much melody and so [many] mellow parts, I was expecting the opposite – a reaction from the singers, going harsher and being against - we do that a lot in song writing. But for some reason, they came to the conclusion that they would go with the flow instead of against it.

And speaking of the clean vocals again, you’ve brought Herbrand into the ranks of Enslaved. Before you had clean vocals and then you brought him in as a full-time member. How did that decision come around?
We wanted to bring the keyboards into the live setting. That was first and foremost all because I’ve been doing some keyboards live in addition to playing guitar. I’ve done stuff like playing keyboards with my feet and all those ‘70s tricks and then it became a bit exhausting and then the more complex keyboard parts that I did in the studio were missing live and we could see the audience were almost expecting it to come and: “Where’s the keyboards?” So we had met Herbrand in the studio and he did the engineering for Below the Lights and we discovered the guy was just multi-talented. He could play anything so he joined us playing keyboards live and then Grutle asked if he could do some backup vocals and surprise surprise! He was a brilliant singer too. Actually in London on our 2002 gig, we’re out getting really drunk after the show at the Underworld and everybody got sentimental and: “What a beautiful lineup. We would really love you to be in the band, Herbrand.” And then I got ready for all my arguments, before I could do it he was like: “Yeah, I’d love to do that!” The most positive guy in the world, I guess.

You mentioned ‘70s and classic rock bands. This new album, I would say, it has more prog rock elements. Are you influenced by prog rock then? I know you’re a progressive metal band.
Yeah, we listen to it a lot. I try to avoid picking up on it too directly. I have to admit that a lot of these bands put me in awe, a lot of Genesis and old-Pink Floyd and it would feel a bit cheap just to try and copy the tricks but I think just listening to it as much as we do, because Enslaved is something we could be doing seven days a week, many hours a day, and it just feels really good to listen to something else and a lot of the time it just turns out to be prog rock.

Do you listen to a lot of prog metal as well?
Not really if you’re thinking Dream Theater and the more technical bands now. That’s not really for me. Why I like the ‘70s prog bands and also newer bands like Opeth and those guys is that the atmosphere is in the fore-front, not the abilities or skills. I think you could be a damn good prog band actually without being very good with playing.

Enslaved are the band that says they came up with the term ‘Viking metal’ first. How did that happen?
Actually when we started in ’91, we were part of the Norwegian extreme scene and all of those other bands were black metal, right: Mayhem, Darkthrone, Immortal, Gorgoroth and what-not. And they all called themselves black metal and they had some very easy standards for calling themselves this and that. The basic plot was if you’re black metal, you’re a metal band with satanic lyrics. So I guess Danzig qualifies as a black metal band too. We went into ourselves and thought about it. We had an interesting fascination for Satanism but we didn’t commit to that ideology. We wanted to sing about the Northern mythology and the runes and that so to be honest with ourselves, the fans and especially the other black metal fans, we used that term for a while and then we felt people know what Enslaved is about now, so extreme metal is more than enough.

So you don’t really say that you’re Viking metal now?
It can be. If people want us to explain more about what our concept is about. It’s a nice term to use of course but I think extreme metal is more than sufficient.

A lot of people are using Viking metal now as a whole new genre.
Yeah, can you imagine if we copyrighted that? We’d be stinking rich by now! [Laughs]

You did a show in India, which isn’t exactly known for its metal. How was that?
It was amazing, one of the best experiences we’ve had. It was tough because of the infrastructure and the travelling and stuff is pretty complicated over there but just the response. We played a great Indian rock festival with eight thousand people. There were at least two thousand people outside who couldn’t get in because of the capacity. No alcohol served but a totally dedicated audience, extremely giving and made me feel welcome and everybody we met down there was so…Probably our own sort of prejudice but we got surprised by how updated they were on the whole metal scene so it was basically just going to any other show and you would talk to the people about the same things. I guess the only difference is the metal trends. Death metal is really huge and black metal is just coming up there.

But you were well accepted overall then?
Absolutely. And we experienced that Indian food is definitely best in India!

I can imagine!
It’s amazing! Every day…

Originally when Enslaved first started off, you were singing in Norwegian and old Icelandic. Obviously now you sing in English. Why did you decide to change?
We did it to begin with to have a complete package with the history and the themes and all that. We didn’t think too much about it. It was a cool thing and then we started to tour more, I guess, and also [got] more in touch with people listening to the music. Going to the States or England or Germany or whatever, we discovered that we put a lot of effort into our lyrics and we translated our lyrics in our CDs and people kept coming back to us and wanted to discuss topics in the lyrics. At some point, I think we just started to think about our own experience. When I go out and buy a CD of a band that I really like, I like to put on headphones and read the lyrics and get that instant insight into the emotion of the song. And it sort of struck us that we might be selling four or five thousand albums in Norway and the rest is going to people who don’t know a word of Norwegian. So we sorted wanted to make it the same for everybody.

Yeah, you’re quite a creative band. I mean, Mardraum and Monumension are very experimental albums. What were you hoping to achieve with those?
Basically, we describe it as being [laughs] as looking at a piece of land and you’re only seeing what’s in the centre and those albums helped us to enlighten the corners of that map to see how far Enslaved can go in either direction. So those albums are very experimental but they’re definitely extremely important in the process of arriving where we are now.

Do you have any ideas for a new album, your next album?
Yeah! I’m getting more and more ideas and writing them down. I had a couple of ideas actually yesterday. When I get back I’m having a few days of holiday, time off, and I guess I’m going to start writing again in January.

Is there anything else, any last words you’d like to leave for the readers of Soundshock.net?
I really just wanna thank everybody in Britain and everywhere else. It’s been so far so good and thanks for the massive support that’s come in from the album.

Interview by Elena Francis
Photography by Daniel Gray

http://www.enslaved.no/