Eluveitie have long found their very own trademark sound, a sonic adventure based in Celtic visions of a Gaulish past, and the band are excited to be bringing their brand new line-up, darkly atmospheric new album Ategnatos and classic works from their entire 17 year history to Australian fans. We caught up with Chrigel Glanzmann to discuss the new songs and the difficulties of putting together a setlist for a tour.
Andrew: Hey how are you going?
Chrigel: Alright thank you! Just got back from a South American tour so we’re happy to be back in European climate now!
Andrew: [laughs] Yeah and on top of that topic, it’s good to see you back in Australia again. I guess we saw you about 3 years ago if I remember correctly?
Chrigel: Probably yeah, I think it’s something like 3 years ago.
Andrew: I caught I think either the first or the last show of the tour in Perth and it was the first time that I had seen you live and I was absolutely blown away by how fantastic that show was. How did that tour end up going for you?
Chrigel: Thank you very much, glad to hear! It was so long ago and so much has happened since just trying to remember but as far as I can remember, it was great. To be fair it’s always great to play in Australia so it must have been good!
Andrew: Yeah definitely and like you mentioned, you have obviously been busy in that 3 year period. A lot has happened, you’ve released an album and you have a new one coming out, you’ve had new members join the band so I guess it’s been a very interesting and busy time for you guys in the last couple of years.
Chrigel: Definitely yes, basically I would say it was very intense.
Andrew: Well looking forward to seeing you in the country again but lets talk about the new album you have out in April. Talk us through the process this time with this album and what were some of the things you wanted to achieve with these new songs.
Chrigel: To be honest there wasn’t anything actually that we wanted to try and achieve, the whole album grew very organically. Basically I would say it is the result of the work of the lyrical content of the album, “Ategnatos” deals with the Celtic mythology simply said but it was a completely different approach this time. I mean we had albums with Celtic mythology before just as the previous one obviously “Evocation II” but “Ategnatos” does not re-tell stories of mythology on a scientific or historical level, of course the album is completely historically correct and scientifically well founded and all that but the album does contemplate ancient parables and allegories and archetypes of Celtc mythology from the viewpoint of our everyday lives. Not that we did that as a band for the lyrics but we also did so for ourselves and that was a pretty intense experience, it turned out to become a very intense experience actually, you could say almost a spiritual one. That was what shaped the album and basically I would say that was the result of the process and these experiences.
Andrew: Oh wow ok very interesting. What were the very early beginnings of these songs? Did you have a certain thing in mind on what you wanted to do or was it just letting everything come naturally?
Chrigel: Yeah very much. Actually we talked after the last show we did in Australia, with our current lineup there was this development of working differently somehow and that kind of grew from the working process of the last album “Evocation II” and became more which basically means we work together as a full band and a group of people more than ever. It’s awesome it happened for this album, we basically just locked ourselves in for a couple of months and worked together and everything else musically just improved organically and mainly out of intuition. It’s not like we had this strict focused line that we had to follow, it’s let creativity come and take us where ever it wants.
Andrew: And because comparitively speaking to a lot of other bands, you have quite a lot of members in the band so the dynamic to me always seems to be quite interesting. How does that dynamic work within the band? Does everyone have a certain role they play or do you throw ideas at each other and see what works? How does that process work for you guys?
Chrigel: It’s like what I mentioned before about working together, in the past I basically wrote everything like all the lines and instruments and all that and this time more and more changed. Like I said before we locked ourselves in together and each member contributed things for their instrument and that also makes a lot of sense. I used to write most of our guitar riffs for instance and I still wrote a lot of guitar riffs for this album but after all I’m not a guitar player so it makes more sense for an actual guitar player to write. This also gave us new options and new opportunities and more possibilities in composing that but I mean especially with the guitar work I also have to say that with Jonas Wolf we have an incredibly talented skilled guitar player to our band and he’s definitely among the 3 best guitar players in Switzerland. So that also gave us more possibilities in song writing. But also some folk instruments like Michalina [malisz] on the Hurdy Gurdy, she developed this death metal shredding on the Hurdy Gurdy which we also didn’t have music like that before and she brought that in so stuff like that.
Andrew: Well it sounds fantastic and we are looking forward to hearing these new songs live. It may be too early to say but you do you know roughly how many from the new album that you might be bringing down to play live at all?
Chrigel: Definitely a couple of them. We haven’t decided yet, we haven’t even started rehearsing. As I said we just came back home from a South American tour but we will definitely play quite a few songs off the new album. It’s basically also why we want to play a 2 hour set because there’s quite a lot of new music you want to present, also with the previous album the acoustic “Evocation II” so yeah there’s a lot of songs to be played! So we definitely want to bring on some new Eluveitie songs.
Andrew: For sure and forgive me if I asked you this before when you last came to Australia but I’m sure putting a setlist together must be, especially at this stage in your career with this many albums, quite a difficult process then.
Chrigel: I fucking hate it to be honest!
Andrew: [laughs].
Chrigel: I mean of course I don’t hate it. I love creating setlists and I think it’s something very interesting maybe also demanding but it’s exactly what you just mentioned, with each album we put out there’s more songs that we love that we would love to play and it becomes a bit much. If it was up to us we would probably play a 4 and a half hour set or something but of course you can’t do that to people so the decisions get heavier and heavier with each album.
Andrew: What do you think is more difficult then? Picking out the ones you do want to play from the new album or is it more difficult to throw out some of the older songs that you have been playing for such a long time?
Chrigel: Whenever we sit together and talk about shows, there’s always half of the band, ‘Oh hold on a sec, this and this song we haven’t played in years! It would be so cool to play that again’. Everybody has a couple of songs like this and then we kind of end up with a 4 or 5 hour setlist which we can’t do.
Andrew: I’m sure the hardcore fans would love to see that! But yeah it can be a long show I guess with that many albums to choose from. I wanted to quickly go back to the album as there’s a question I wanted to ask you about the featured guest vocalist, Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe on the song “Worship”. What was that like working with him and why did you decide to go with him on that particular song?
Chrigel: Yeah that was also one of those spontaneous occurences I was mentioning before. We were just in the studio recording the songs and it was late at night or early in the morning, I was sitting in the kitchen at the studio together with Jonas and we were discussing the info of the song. The song has this rather long, cinematic, kind of apocalyptic intro and we do have a voiceover, a narration artist for the album and it’s Alexander Morton, a Scottish actor that we have worked with for at least 3 other albums already and he also recorded for this new album. We were just talking about this song “Worship” and we both agreed that Alexander would probably not fit into the atmosphere of that song because it’s rather modern, it has this dark, end time feel to it and we just thought this epic, Scottish highlander accent and sombre voice doesn’t fit into the atmosphere of that song.
We ended up thinking that some American accent would actually fit much better for some reason, I don’t know, probably because it has this cinematic feel to it. So we just started to thinking about who we could ask and we thought of Randy who would have a perfect voice for that, we’re friends with Lamb Of God for years so I just dropped Randy a message but I had no idea what they were doing at that moment and then Randy wrote back, ‘Yeah sure! That’s perfect as we’re on tour at the moment in Europe and in a few days we’ll play in Zurich in Switzerland’, which I didn’t know but it was like the perfect coincidence. So a few days later some of us drove down, picked him up and drove to the studio and recorded with him. Originally he was just supposed to speak that intro and then he really liked the song and also did additional vocals for the chorus.
Andrew: I love when things like that happen, the spontaneous side of things is I guess one of the thrills of playing music like this. You never know what’s going to happen.
Chrigel: That’s pretty much it I would say yeah.
Andrew: Well as I said before I really enjoyed the last time you came here so I’m looking forward to seeing you guys again in May. Thanks for your time, really appreciate it and congratulations on the new album. Look forward to hearing these new songs, we will see you very soon!
Chrigel: Thank you very much and thanks for the interview. See you in May, very much looking forward to it.
ELUVEITIE May 2019 Australian Tour Dates:
Wednesday May 15 Adelaide – The Gov
Thursday May 16 Sydney – Manning Bar
Friday May 17 Brisbane – The Zoo
Saturday May 18 Melbourne – Croxton Bandroom
Sunday May 19 Perth – Rosemount
Tickets available from www.drwe.com.au/tours/eluveitie2019
