Satyricon are a band that need very little introduction to those who follow the black metal world. As the core members of the Norwegian act, Satyr and Frost, who initially started out as a traditional black metal act, the duo have taken the band to all new levels in recent years straying further and further away from the harshness and stock standard extreme elements widely formulated in the black metal genre and incorporating classical and progressive components together with a more rock n roll sound that just seems to piece together everything so satisfyingly well. That remark may very well either upset or make a few purists uneasy but extreme metal was never meant to be so easily digestable, heavy metal in general should be rebellious and challenging and that is exactly what Satyricon do. Their latest album “Deep Calleth Upon Deep” culminates the very best of what Satyricon is about and now the band are set to bring those songs as well as the rest of their back catalogue to Australia live on tour this September. I spoke to the visionary behind the band – Satyr – to discuss the tour as well as the challenges of the new record and what Satyricon means these days.
Andrew: So hows things been with you and the band over the last few months? I guess you must be busy touring.
Satyr: The whole time since September last year! It won’t be a full vacation but in a couple of days I’m having 5 days off and then after that I’ll be having a week off which will be a combination of work and holiday. It is something I admit I look forward to because pretty much since September last year we’ve done a full European tour and then a tour of Latin America and then toured Norway, then we did a tour of Greece, Russia and Israel, then we did more Norwegian shows and then another tour of Europe and then a tour of North America and we didn’t even manage to get our asses home before we started the festival season in Europe. We started that on the way back from America and in this time window from now and Australia we have about 12 days off starting the day after tomorrow so yipee [laughs].
Andrew: [laughs] Sounds like a busy one but I guess that’s a good thing because the release of the new album last year must have been quite successful for such a big demand to have you guys on the road for so long.
Satyr: It has been very successful for us. We’ve done this long enough to fully understand and appreciate that is a true privilege and we will have to enjoy and inhale it all while it’s going on because we’re selling out more shows than we’ve ever done in our career. I think the level musically is also higher than ever so I feel that the last year together with 2009 which was a very successful year, this has been the best one so I would say this has been better. It’s probably a higher musical level even though we were in a fantastic place with “The Age Of Nero”, it is stronger now musically and I think undoubtedly we have more sold out shows. But then again all of that doesn’t matter unless we feel good about what we do but we really do and it took a while to get there but when this world tour started in the Fall, I felt that even if we were doing great shows and people were loving it, I didn’t feel what I really needed to feel inside of me. That was maybe a little about my mental approach and where I was at when we started the world tour but now I’m in a better place than when we started and I feel fantastic about doing what we do.
Andrew: Yes good to hear and the quality of this album, and I’ve been a fan of Satyricon for a number of years now, but I feel this album is really the pinnacle of what you guys have been doing for a long time. It seems like it is the highest standard of quality that you guys have come up with, I mean do you feel that you have reached that point where there is a confidence in what you do these days?
Satyr: Well first of all thank you so much! Secondly I was speaking to another guy earlier today and I was telling him the same thing, that on the way to the gym I scrolled through the new record, listening intentionally to only 20-30 seconds of each song from the beginning to the end and it started to make me feel about this period. The atmosphere, the vibe, the energy, everything about it made me think that, ‘Wow this is truly who we are these days’. This sound, this atmosphere, it is Satyricon personified in 2018. While doing my routine at the gym, walking between the stations I started thinking about some of the moods that were made. There’s a lot of decision making involved in a record and I thought about how fortunate it was that there were some decisions that were made that were thankfully the right decisions at the right time, the first recording session we had just a few days did not turn out well for Frost at all and there were some things that were going on in the studio where he was just not cutting it. It was obvious that since the recording of the self-titled that he had started taking quite a few things for granted without really working on them the way he should be, that he had become a little speed blind in a way that there were places that he should be reacting where he wasn’t reacting. I had also moved on musically myself and he wasn’t playing the way I felt that he should be playing and we said that instead of forcing this, let’s just step aside, we don’t have to continue recording right now. Let’s just work and see what we can do and then someone suggested a drum coach that just turned out to be a fantastic drummer, a fantastic coach, a great match with Frost. They get along really well and they understand each other and he just brought out the best of Frost and made him see, ‘Ok this stuff you’re maybe the best in the world but doing that you have to work on these things, this is not right, come on’. And he just, in a very short period of time, took an already good drummer that had grown quite a few bad habits and got rid of those and also took some of the things that he was already world class at and improved them drastically. It’s like a soccer team, you gotta have a good goalkeeper and you gotta have a good drummer. It’s not going to be right without a good drummer and the work that he laid down on this record is so good, so many songs to prove that and I think that’s where it all starts.
Then I also had a great collaboration with Kjetil Bjerkestrand, a Norwegian composer and arranger specialising in classical music that I worked with on arranging the choirs for Satyricons “Live At The Opera” performance and we were talking about instead of working with choirs or string sections or brass sections, that we were going to work with instrument by instrument. So instead of working with a quartet of strings or something like that, we were just going to work with one guy on the violin and work with another guy playing the cello, have someone work with us on French horns, someone work with us on bass clarinets and things like that. So when we work with someone on these classical arrangements we didn’t have a bunch of people playing at the same time, we worked with different people at different times on different days and just lay down their tracks and then as it often is with these things is that something that is meant to strengthen what is already in the parts and in our riffs, it gets carried away into too much and I thought to myself that when doing the recording, the different tracking engineers that I worked with on the record, they both mix records and especially one of them he more or less specialises in mixing records even if he also does tracking. He was basically begging me to let him mix the record and I thought to myself, ‘Ok so with all the stuff that we’ve been through with Frost’s drum tracking, with all the stuff that we’ve done with people playing bass clarinet, violin, cello, French horn, guys playing jazz saxophone, an opera singer coming in and doing this thing on “The Ghosts Of Rome” and the title track, there’s so much stuff going on in this record and there are so many things that happened and unfolded during it’s tracking. What I need now is someone to help me filter stuff out and then I thought to myself, ‘That guy has to be Mike Fraser’.
Mike Fraser is a guy that mixed “Now, Diabolical” and he’s been AC/DC’s right hand man since The Razor’s Edge, he has recorded and mixed most of what they’ve done between Razors Edge and the last record, he’s AC/DC’s guy. We did “Now, Diabolical” with Mike Fraser and I thought to myself, ‘Well there were things about that co-operation that was fantastic and there were other things that I didn’t like at all and I spoke to Fraser about doing this record and he really wanted to do it and he seemed motivated and he also seemed to agree that yeswe did some great things together but there were also problems in our working relationship that we need to fix. That went really well but I would say that it could of just, given our history, that wasn’t necessarily meant to be. Already on day one we had issues in the studio where I thought, ‘Oh wow we’re really going to clash’, but then I decided that I’m going to walk away from this situation because if we do this confrontation now on day one, this will screw up my entire project. So I just let him say whatever he wanted to say even though I disagreed strongly and I just walked out and took a deep breath and came back in later and didn’t say anything and just sat and worked with him and as the days went by, things just got better and better. The last thing we did in the studio is that we went back to the things we did in the very beginning and we did it again.
So what that resulted in to me is that what was meant to be subtle as far as all these features with the classical instruments, it became too much but when Fraser and I started working again, we managed to keep what was supposed to be in the first place – a subtle feature that really makes a positive difference but nothing more than that and then we were able to sonically highlight the very best of Frost’s renewal as the drummer with the process that he had just been through. Many of the decisions made with this record could have easily turned the entire project into a complete disaster but we were lucky in all the decisions made went in our favour which made, honestly speaking “Deep Calleth Upon Deep” a much more better record than I ever imagined. So I’m immensely pleased with what we’ve managed to pull off together.
Read the review of Deep Calleth Upon Deep
Andrew: Yeah as I said it’s a great record and I pin it up pretty high on all the back catalogue stuff. I
am looking forward to hearing this stuff live, I imagine these songs are going really well in the live situation.
Satyr: They do and it’s a little bit different from night to night but we always play a minimum of four, sometimes five so we always play basically half the record and sometimes even more. It’s a long show, it’s almost two hours and we take the audience through “Dark Medievel Times”, “Nemesis Divina”, “Volcano”, “Now Diabolical”, “The Age Of Nero” through to the album “Satyricon” and a bunch of stuff from “Deep Calleth Upon Deep”. I would say that the way this show is, it’s a musical journey more so than a couple of hours of entertainment. As I keep saying, to me it has different temperatures and degrees of intensity, it’s not two hours of ferocious blast beats. It has it’s atmospheric, darker, more occult faces and it has it’s more ferocious and aggressive faces and to me more so than 17 songs it’s one hour and 15 minutes of music with out any breaks. During the show there is very little talking but there are a bunch of things that connect the songs together, you’ll see! It is very different from your typical black metal concert I would say.
Andrew: We last saw you I suppose 4 or 5 years ago at the Soundwave Festival if you remember, was that one of the first times here?
Satyr: The first time was with the “Now, Diabolical” record and then back with “The Age Of Nero” album so Soundwave was four years ago in 2014 so it was actually our third tour of Australia and it was the only thing that we happened to do with that record. So what we are doing now is more in the vein of what we did with “Now, Diabolical” and “The Age Of Nero” in that doing club shows and playing the full set. Soundwave was fantastic to be a part of and we did all the regular ones and we did club shows in Sydney and Melbourne, I guess it was Gwar and Amon Amarth and Satyricon together but again shorter than your typical Satyricon show. It is one of my favorite places on earth, I absolutely love Australia. I love the people, I love the vibe in Australia. It is in so many ways an absolutely unique country and perhaps it is a blessing in disguise that it is so far away because if I had the opportunity to go as often as I would have wanted to, maybe it wouldn’t feel as special as it always does when I come.
Andrew: When you have spent time down here over the years, what have been some of the highlights that you remember outside of the shows during the downtime? Do you ever get to see a bit of the country at all?
Satyr: Well I like the people and it’s impossible to enjoy any country if you don’t like the people, impossible! I like the people, Australians are very friendly. One of the funniest things I ever heard in my life was a girlfriend of mine from way back said, ‘I don’t like Australian people’, and I said, ‘What? You don’t like Australians? They are some of the nicest people on earth, who the hell does not like Australian people?’ She said, ‘Yeah but they love sports and are always so happy and positive and I hate that!’ [laughs]. I said, ‘Well I see what you are saying but I do not hate that because I have enough grumpy people in my life so to be surrounded by people who in general have a positive energy is good for me’. So yeah, enjoying a country, that starts with getting along with it’s people. Lots of good food in Australia, lots of good wine. After the Now Diabolical tour we had a few days of exploring, local wildlife and beaches at the Gold Coast which were fun times, just the band hanging out with no crew for a few days after our tour. Did the same kind of thing in Perth after The Age Of Nero tour where we had a few days there just dining and being able to take a lot of good wines from Margaret River made in microscopic quantities from boutique wineries that will never be exported to anywhere near where we live. So very much enjoyed that and things are very different when it comes to record stores today compared to what it was like 10-15 years ago but back then I did actually have fun going to record stores in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne for that matter.
I also enjoy about Australia how every place has it’s own vibe, to me Sydney is a very international type city, a metropolis kind of like New York or Tokyo or London, Paris. It feels like one of those big important ones and then Melbourne is interesting because Melbourne is like Montreal in Canada because when you go to Toronto, it feels like the United States Of America. Being there is like being in any city on the east coast of the US but Montreal is different, it has that European flare and it really has nothing to do with the people speaking French, it’s just about the way it feels. And just in the same way that Sydney feels like this big international powerhouse, Melbourne has this European vibe to it that I as a European enjoy experiencing in places outside Europe. Then of course Brisbane is crazy, I always feel like coming out in the airport in Brisbane is absurd like I can slice a bit of cake out of the air. The humidity is overwhelming and I know of two places on earth that are as extreme – Brisbane and certain places in Louisiana in America where it’s crazy hot but so tropical and humid that you think, ‘Fuck how am I going to get through this!’
Andrew: [laughs] As someone who is from a place like Norway, how do you deal with that kind of a difference in the weather like that? Do you enjoy the heat or are you more of a winter type person?
Satyr: I think one of the toughest things that we have done as a band ever was we actually had to, as a really horrible way of solving things, the promoter at the time set us up to pretty much play upon arrival in Adelaide from Norway when we were touring “Now, Diabolical” in I think 2006 or 2007 and I remember thinking to myself this was one of the hardest things to pull off ever. I still to this day whenever appropriate, tease our lead guitar player about the fact that he didn’t pull it off. He just could not cope at all because he was so exhausted and so jetlagged that even though his body was there on stage, the rest of him was somewhere else because he just did too many mistakes and too silly ones as well so it was an absolute disaster for him that night. So coping with travel and jetlag in that way is you learn from those experiences and take action and make proper adjustments so that you don’t compromise your gig and as far as climate goes, I think we’re so used to it now. We’ve been everywhere so many times that we’ve seen it all and we know how to deal with it. A lot of time when you deal with things as a human being, as a pro musician or as anything else, it really is about what kind of shape you’re in. I had a guy complaining about getting to my house which is in an extremely steep neighborhood and I said, ‘It wouldn’t feel so bad if you were not in such bad shape’ [laughs]. That is why I work out five times a week because in my work I’m being asked to perform at the highest international level of heavy metal music and I have to live up to the standards that people expect me to perform at and my own expectations and one way of defeating climate exhaustion, jetlag, far from ideal nutrition and so on, is to make sure that you have a functional body.
Andrew: Absolutely, obviously that is a big part of being in a band is to keep in shape, mentally and physically. As I said, I personally as is many of us down here are excited to see you back in Australia and look forward to it. Before I let you go, do you have any last words for the Aussie fans before you come down to Australia?
Satyr: I know that, and especially at this stage in my life that I cannot take anything for granted and I have no current plans to quit but I don’t go around thinking that, yeah I’ll always play Australia. I mean when I first wanted to play Australia which was in the mid 90’s and for a variety of reasons we were never able to pull it off so it took me from the day I started thinking about it to the day we actually did it, it took more than 10 years. I feel lucky that I am now going to Australia and I get to play there again and I would encourage anyone who loves Satyricon to think the same way. We are coming this September, don’t say, ‘Oh I have to work that night, I’ll catch you guys when you come back’. I don’t know if we’re coming back, I hope so! But it’s not something I take for granted so I feel lucky that I get to go and I hope that people who like our music also feel lucky that we’ll get to share a night of black metal together and that they come out.
AUSTRALIA TOUR DATES
Tuesday, September 4: Capitol, Perth
Thursday, September 6: Max Watts, Melbourne
Friday, September 7: Metro Theatre, Sydney
Saturday. September 8: Transit Bar, Canberra
Sunday, September 9: The Triffid, Brisbane
Tickets: Destroy All Lines
(All tickets for the original April shows valid for the new dates)
