And then there was… Vintersorg
In 1998 you released your first EP, next year that will be 15 years ago. How do you look back to those 15 years? What is the absolute highlight and what the worst moment?
Mr V: Oh..it’s been quite a journey with so many different side paths to follow and new angles to investigate in our music. We’ve never had a steady course with a straight path to wander, instead we’ve made a task in not follow any other course than the one that constantly change. It change because of our eagerness to evolve and explore as musicians and as humans. So, it hasn’t been a logical journey from base A to base B to base C….more like A to F to K to B….Just to figure out one highlight is hard and I can’t just pick a single event. The last two albums are among the highlights from our perspective but still we love all the albums as they’re all a part of where we are today. The worse moment: I don’t think that we’ve had any really bad moments..of course it have happened travel-wise…you’re sitting in this mountain village in a country you don’t really know wanything about and the bus/taxi/flight dosen’t arrive on time etc…but that’s not really bad in the real sense of the word.
You began in Swedish, then switched to English and then back to Swedish again. Didn’t English fit to your music? Do you have the idea you reach the listeners in a better way with Swedish lyrics, even though most fans don’t understand that?
Mr V: I love languages and I love to explore them throughout music. So when I was too comfortable with my mother tongue I was keen on writing in English and it was a new challenge…but my other bands are doing the exact same thing(writing in English) so I was missing to write in Swedish after a while. So, now I have both…eating and having the cake at the same time. I don’t think that languages is that much of a problem when it comes to music, the music itself bear so much emotions and you don’t need to know every singel word, I think that people that like Vintersorg are open minded people that doesn’t really see that as a problem.
How do you record the drums? Is there a session drummer or do you use a drumcomputer?
Mr V: We’ve used both…on some albums it’s a real drummer on others it’s programmed drums that comes out of the speakers. On some albums it’s a combination of the bother mentioned methods…we do what feels proper and as it sound as we want it to sound we don’t put any more thought into it.
Often your lyrics are about the origins of humanity and the universe, where does this fascination come from?
Mr V: I’ve been a astronomy freak since childhood and have always had this huge interest in the relation between Man and Nature, and as I see nature in a wide scope that relation is base a lot on the basis of the universe. It’s as simple as that even though the theme by itself is very complex and hard to really understand as we’re a part of the equation.
Between The Focusing Blur and Solens Rotter there were two years and between Solens Rotter and Jordpuls even 4 years of silence. Why did you need more time for these two albums than for the others? And then why already after one year the release of Orkan?
Mr V: It’s all about time actually. Between FB and SR we were very busy with other project and by the release of FB I had just became a father…two years later I became father again , to my second child…so everything was quite busy back then…even worse now 🙂 but the kids are a bit older now so they can do so much stuff by themselves. And now we’re in a very creative phase and are already recording the new album.
Together with Jordpuls, Orkan is part of a Quadrology about the elements. Does this mean the album about fire will be really aggressive?
Mr V: well…not necessarily..we work a lot with contrasts in this band and I like albums that has many angles and dimensions. I think that fire has many different aspect from the raging state of a forest fire to the calm and comforting warmth from a fire place for example. So I guess the album will be very diverse again.
Orkan sounds light, like the air but also contains darker, more black elements. How do you balance this? And where do all the different influences come from?
Mr V: I don’t really think that much when I compose music I just go by heart. Of course I can reflect on things like “ we may need a fast song” but mostly it all just happened naturally. I think that I’m influenced by many aspects in life but not that much by music actually. Art is a very broad description of things that inspires me but mostly the visual and linguistic art…and science of course. Exploration in nature is another thing that really triggers my inspiration to write music.
Vintersorg is just the two of you and you don’t tour a lot. Does this give you a certain creative freedom which doesn’t exist in, for example, Borknagar?
Mr V: I don’t know…haven’t thought about it from that perspective. We write the music we want and the same goes for Borknagar as well. We don’t have any given formula that we follow every time and we like to explore new musical grounds to feel motivated to keep writing music. What I don’t like is when stuff goes into a routine, it becomes just so boring. I have much higher ambitions in my art than that.
Is there anything you would like to say to the Dutch fans?
Mr V: Check out our last album, it’s an adventure .Cheers!
Tack så mycket!
By: Dorien