Vogelfrey plays with the Storm
Vogelfrey has released a new album ‘Sturm und Klang’ a little while ago, now the storm is lying down a bit. We had a nice chat with Jannik of this German Medieval-metal band, about their new album, the DVD and more.
Before we start to fire our questions, I first like to congratulate you with the new album.
“Thank you very much!”
I suppose you have had a lot of reaction to it by now, wow are the reactions on this new album so far?
“Conveniently very positive! Fans and critics seem to be equally happy with the new album. Quite interesting to see, they people don’t experience the album in the same way. We hear a lot, it’s our hardest album, other are of the opinion it’s our most poppy one. Personally I think, both are right, these things come together in this third CD, with which we are very satisfied.”
Klang
Listening to the songs it seems ‘Sturm & Klang’ is the theme of this album, can you tell us something about this?
“The basic idea for this album was to call it ‘Sturm und Drang’ (Storm and Urge), after the era in literature with the same name, with ‘The young wild ones are coming’. But our bass-player Chris had a much better idea and mentioned the idea to alter Drang in Klang (Sound), and that was of course much better. But it’s not a real concept-album with a continues story in it, but it’s more a compilation of songs which fit the main theme ‘Storm and Sounds’.
All songs seem to fit well to this theme. In this way all songs have a connection, is it difficult to write lyrics with one main theme?
“It would be hard for us to write song with just one theme, we like change and diversity to much, to do that. So, we haven’t done that one this album.”
Vogelfrey did a wonderful job with this, an album full of songs with different subjects, which all fit under the umbrella ‘Storm and Sound’.
Jannik explains enthusiastic: “In a lot of song the theme is obviously shipping and natural disasters (“Land unter”, “Gold”), in other ones the stormy psychic state of mind (“Tandaradei!”, “Apocalypsis”) is the taken as theme, other ones on taking by storm (“Abschaum”, “Bluthochzeit”) or simply on stormy partys “Hörner hoch”, “Strohfeuer”). Without an main story, we illuminate the album title in many very different ways in the songs. Some of them don’t have a direct link.
On the previous album was the song ‘Schuld is nur der Met’ (‘We can only blame the mead’), now you have ‘Alcoholverbot’ (Alcohol Ban). Is this coincidence or do you plan to have such a song on all albums?
“These things happen spontaneously, when a nice song-idea is born. We don’t plan these to put such Drinking-songs on each album, in a neurotic way (there’s no such songs on our début-album for instance), but it’s a theme which well known throughout this scene and it has a certain tradition.”
Let me ask you a cliché question, like some of our colleagues keep asking bands if metal-bands have a connection with the dark side, what are your feelings towards alcohol?
“You have to be careful with alcohol of course, when you don’t like to end up like a human shipwreck. But when the dose is right, it helps a lot to have a boisterous party and that’s nice. But don’t exaggerate, Boys and Girls!”
Klang
With these serious words of Jannik it’s time to ask him about their new DVD. You started a fund-raiser to make a DVD. This has been a while ago, how are things going with this project?
“That’s a really tough thing, which has unfortunately took a lot more time than we had planned for. In fact everything is ready for some time now, but now it’s ready, the DVD falls in the release-period of this new CD. And this is something which doesn’t work well either. Unfortunately we have to fix a few technical problems, but then nothing stands in the way of a release.”
It seems to be quite difficult to make a nice DVD, what are the problems you faced while doing this?
“Despite the crowd-funding and the help of fabulous fans, we didn’t have the means to let the complete DVD material be worked over by a external producer. The concerts are done by professionals of course, but we didn’t have the money to do this with the bonus-material as well. And of course a DVD like this, must have appealing bonus-material as well for our fans, this was very important to us. So, we have almost an hour Interviews (“Behind the songs”), and 10 minutes of at
appealing bonus material, 10 minutes Tourfilm (“Das Familienalbum – unsere schönesten Erinnerungen”) (The Family-album – our most beautiful memories) and almost 20 minutes of Wacken Backstage Film, all produced by ourselves. This took a lot of time of course, in the mean time we had our regular jobs and we wanted the product to be awesome of course. On top of this the translations for the English subtitles and such stuff, took an awful lot of time as well.”
Well, that sounds as a tremendous amount of work, any idea, when we can expect the release of this DVD?
“We became very careful with announcements on release-dates ;). We will let you know, when it’s time.”
We have to wait for that announcement then.
In our previous interview you spoke of the big desire to play in the Netherlands, now you did this, are you satisfied?
“Of course not! It was a lot of fun to play over in the Netherlands, but we have to do this more often. Neuken in de keuken!”
Note from the editor 🙂 This such a ‘nice’ sounding Dutch expression, some Dutch feel the need to teach foreigners this, giving them the nice feeling they can talk Dutch as well. Hopefully nobody of the Folk-metal.nl team was responsible for this… Folk-metal.nl is taking no liability for this 🙂
This style, mixing medieval with rock and metal, seems to be far more popular in Germany, can you describe the differences when you play in Germany or in the Netherlands?
“There was a smaller audience, compared to our shows in Germany, but that was to be expected. The mood was fabulous on the contrary. Someone was of the opinion, the Dutch would not buy a lot of Merchandise. I don’t know if this was the case this evening. I can only advertise this a bit, buy bandmerch when you liked the show. Doing so will bring the bands back for sure 😉
Drang
So you’ve played the Netherlands, have you done more gigs outside you own country?
“Except for the Netherlands, we have only played outside Germany in Austria.”
With gigs at Hornerfest, Burgfolk and Wacken, which festivals are on Vogelfrey’s wish-list?
“We would like to play at M’ere Luna and an official slot at Summer Breeze would be cool. We have played there in 2011, but we were on the newcomer-list in those days.
Nice talking with you Jannik, hopefully we get to see Vogelfrey a lot at festivals and at home at DVD.
By: Michel