Sitting back stage at the union of London’s major university college next door to the swimming pool seems so un-black metal, but such are the times and the direction the genre has gone in recent years; and that is in no small part due to tonight’s headliners – Satyricon have been at the forefront of the modernisation and acceptance of black metal by the wider metal community in recent years, and look set to raise their stock in leaps and bounds with their majestic new opus The Age Of Nero.
Planet Loud – Tell us a bit about the new album, ‘The Age Of Nero’.
Frost: I think the entire album is magnificent, we felt right through the whole process that this was going to be something really good. We had certain ideas for the album and we knew we had the potential here to surpass any of our earlier albums with its totality, its sense of flow and the quality of the compositions. It was a matter of putting down a lot of hard work to get there because we realised this had the potential to be our best album from very early on. I like the diversity in it and that certain songs function particularly well when you are in certain moods. There are songs that really work well as party songs, you drink beer and you get this adrenaline rush; and there are songs that take you on these long journeys to dark depths of your mind, like the last track ‘Den Siste’.
Planet Loud – And what are your highlights from it?
Satyricon – In a general mood, the highlight for me is probably ‘Die By My Hand’, it has that freezing eeriness which is Norwegian Black Metal in a nutshell for me, those blood-freezing chords with the slow drum beats; it’s a beautiful composition, how it comes from something so intense and brutal and evolves into this deeper darkness.
Planet Loud – You’ve just started a long European tour, so how is that going so far?
Satyricon – It’s going really well, it’s the best tour we’ve ever done and the best album we’ve ever had. The material from ‘The Age of Nero’ is very live-friendly, and we are hungrier than ever, more able than ever, to pull of good shows. We simply have a better time, do better shows and get better responses, every factor is on our side on this tour. We’re keeping the setlist fresh and a little special each night because we don’t want to get into a routine, it helps our alertness; we pick up some older material that we haven’t played in a while in order to entertain ourselves, we need that fresh energy as it helps us display a better attitude when we are on stage as we don’t through the same songs in the same order night after night. It’s also better for the crowd, there are people who see more than one show so they will get to see different Satyricon shows if they go to different concerts.
Planet Loud – Rather unusually, you started the tour with three dates in India, so how did that come about and how was it?
Satyricon – We thought it would be exotic and refreshing to go somewhere we’ve never been before at the start of a long, long tour. It will be a good memory for us to have as we go on, we can say that we haven’t just been back to the same places we’ve always been to. We were really surprised to find out we had lots of fans over there, we were playing to three or five thousand people and they knew the songs and were singing along; it was a really positive experience.
Planet Loud – You’ve come in for criticism from some quarters for the cleaner, more modern sound that has moved away from the original Norwegian black metal sound – what has been the rationale behind the evolution of the Satyricon sound?
Satyricon – Everything needs to evolve; when we started to work with this band 16 years ago we had no resources, we were inexperienced musicians and had hardly any technical skills at all so the production on ‘The Age Of Nero’ was far out of reach. Today we have managed to build up the resources and the competence we need and so are able to bring into our compositions what we feel will bring out our full potential; it’s stupid to go for a sound that doesn’t bring out that potential because there is a certain principle that you have to adhere to, it just seems entire wrong and meaningless to me. Some bands choose to have a very lo-fi production because that is how they think their material sounds best, in a charming way, and it can be very good. Some types of music sound better that way, but Satyricon’s music these days sounds grand and majestic without being pompous; it has this size to it that is already there within the compositions, and what we do is to emphasise its qualities through our performance and the production.
Planet Loud – How do you look back on the time spent with Capitol now in hindsight?
Satyricon – I think it worked well in most territories, but there were also other places were it didn’t work at all due to how such a label is organised, it’s all really bureaucratic; Roadrunner is also quite bureaucratic, but with a major label it is far worse. These days, things are changing really rapidly and perhaps it is better to be a big independent label that still has certain merits rather than being this enormous but also sinking ship that the major record industry is now; I feel it was very good for us to be on Capitol while it lasted, but there were also some very negative aspects and I don’t think it would have been as good today as it was back then.
Planet Loud – And how does now being on Roadrunner compare?
Satyricon – I think we have get better back-up from a company like Roadrunner. If anybody has a problem that we have a record company that wants to help us in our mission to take this all the way and has an enthusiasm on our behalf, then fuck you. It tends to be the smaller metal labels that try to change your music, and we’ve never had that sort of attitude from Roadrunner, they have a deep respect for our integrity and see potential in what we do; they haven’t chosen Satyricon because they think we can be something commercial.
Interview by Dominic Hemy
