#mar2000

BAL-SAGOTH

Interview with Byron Roberts by Daniel Hinds

(conducted March 2000)

It's sad to see how few noteworthy bands have emerged from Britain in the past ten years, considering the country's past glories.  I mean, this is the land that gave us Sabbath, Purple, Priest, Motorhead, Maiden, Venom, the entire NWOBHM - the list goes on and on.  Yet, something seems to have happened in the mid 80s, with the number of great, innovative acts declining rapidly in favor of cheap copies of whatever lame trend was spewing forth from the U.S.

Still, that creative urge was bubbling in the underground and we are now seeing some truly excellent new bands coming out of the UK.  Bal-Sagoth isn't exactly new, but with a recent worldwide release via Nuclear Blast, they are bound to reach vast new audiences this year.  Mixing elements of black metal, power metal and classical music with some of the most elaborate fantasy and science fiction stories ever committed to disc, Bal-Sagoth have created a highly distinctive and infectious sound.  Vocalist Byron tells us more…

Now that it is done and has been out for a bit, what are your feelings about The Power Cosmic?   Overall, we are very pleased with The Power Cosmic.  We think that it is our most polished album to date in the sound department.  It certainly has a clearer production than the other ones, which unfortunately a lot of people seem to have resented.  They like the more aggressive, barbaric production of the previous albums, but this album is very clear, very sharp.  It has kind of an edge to it.  It combines a lot of the best elements of the early work with the best elements of Battle Magic and come out with kind of a hybrid of it all.  But yeah, overall, we are very pleased with it.  We like all our albums.

Did you do anything differently in the studio or did you just have more time? Not really.  In fact, we actually had less time to record The Power Cosmicthan we did for Battle Magic.  All it is is because we've used the same engineer from the first album and we've used the same studio and the engineer is very familiar with our way of working.  With each album, we do get better at what we do and we are more able to maximize our time.  As we've progressed, we can get a better production and we're able to realize our ideas a lot better and put them into practice and get a product at the end of the day that is closer to what we had in mind.  We'll always aspire to achieve that level of artistic perfection, which I suppose every artist aspires to but ultimately never reaches.

Is this your first album to be get a proper release in the States? Is it?  I don't know.  Cacophonous, our previous label, they did have distribution in the US, but it was very, very limited.  I think the previous 3 albums were available over there, but you really had to dig for them.  Hopefully, with Nuclear Blast, because this is the first time we've been on a label that actually has an office over there, it should be available more widely.

What kind of reaction are you getting from people over here? It's funny because from the beginning, from day one of the band, some of our most really positive response has been from the USA.  I think what it is is over there, there aren't many people who do like us, but the people who do like us, really do like us.  People say stuff like it is the soundtrack to their life, they just love it so much.  We do, interestingly enough, get a lot more response from Canada than from the USA.  I don't know if it is because I used to live in Canada or just something peculiar about north of the border.  And interestingly enough, it seems to be more French-Canadian than the English-speaking Canadian.

The style on tPC is fairly similar to Battle Magic.  Do you feel like you've found your sound or will the next album branch out into new territory? I know that our guitarist is very pleased with his guitar sound on The Power Cosmic.  He wasn't as pleased with it on Battle Magic, because it was kind of lower in the mix.  As The Power Cosmic is kind of an amalgamation of the best elements of our sound from the previous three albums, ultimately we have found kind of our ideal sound now.  We're not going to tune up to constant pitch or anything.  We still downtune our guitars to B, to get that really dense, heavy sound.  And the keyboards will always be insane and they'll always be totally weird.  We're not going to start doing Yes type numbers…  I think we have achieved kind of a level playing field with the sound.

I think it's cool that you guys don't limit yourselves thematically.  What are some of the writers on the sci-fi side that have influenced you? Essentially that whole side of thing, the science-fiction and swords and sorcery, is just stuff I've been into as far back as I can remember.  As time has gone on, I think I've intensified the science-fiction aspect.  Throughout the three albums, there has always been elements of science-fiction in there - songs like "Vortex" and "Astral Gate" from the Starfire…album and songs like "Return to the Praesidium of Ys " from the Battle Magic album have always had very strong flavors of science-fiction to them.  This time, I just kind of increased that level of SF, upped the intensity of the science-fiction iconography.  That is a big kind of pulling point with us.  A lot of kids write to me and say, 'I'm not really a fan of black metal or death metal, but I do like science-fiction and fantasy, which is why I've been turned onto your band.'  Through that, they have also come to have an appreciation of black metal, which is always a good thing.  That kind of high concept of the band is really the adamantine base to it all, because it governs what kind of riff we write.  For example, if Chris comes up with a riff that sounds like Anthrax or Pantera, it will be rejected, because it doesn't sound….Bal-Sagoth enough, if you can.

Unlike a lot of metal bands who are determined to make every riff more evil-sounding than the previous one, you guys actually incorporate some happier melodies alongside the darker ones.  Is this balance important to you?   It is, definitely.  There is more to metal than the minor chord.  We do use a lot of major chords, a lot of bombastic, uplifting melodies in the stuff.  A lot of victorious parts, a lot of reflective, ethereal, kind of dream-like parts as well.  Of course, we can always shift straight into the aggressive, cataclysmic darkness.  We can run that whole gamut of emotions in the music, which is a good thing.  A lot of that is due to the fact that Johnny the keyboard player is such a damn good musician.  He has been trained in classical piano since he was a wee laddie (laughs) and he can play a lot of different instruments.  He can play bass, guitar, drums obviously, keyboards, the trombone even.  A lot of it also boils down to the fact that not everyone in Bal-Sagoth is big fan of metal.  I love all the bands like Bathory and Celtic Frost and Slayer, that kind of thing, but Johnny for instance, his favorite bands are The Police, A-Ha, and Queen, that kind of thing.  So that mixture of influences and tastes enables us to be a little more interesting in the musical aspect.

How do you compose your music?  Is it done initially with keyboard or guitar?   Johnny writes most of the music and Chris contributes a little bit as well.  All of the songs these days are written first and foremost on the keyboard.  Johnny comes up with keyboard riffs, he tells Chris what kind of guitar part he wants to put to it and then we work out the bass parts.  Essentially, yeah, the prime facilitator is the keyboard.  In the early days, we did write a few songs on guitar and added keyboards later, but these days it's all on the keyboards first and then the guitar comes in and fulfills the role that the keyboards used to fulfill.

How do you record the keyboards?  Are all the different parts played live or are some of them sequenced? We record them by each constituent instrument.  So, we start off with the brass track and Johnny will play all the brass parts to a particular song.  Then we'll work out where we want the strings to go and then we'll put the string parts on another track to compliment the brass.  Then we'll put like the woodwinds, the choirs, the timpani - all that sort of thing.  So we do record in a truly symphonic sort of way.  It's almost like getting an orchestra in and having the musicians play their own individual instruments and building the whole thing up.

What prompted the split with Cacophonous?  Are you pleased with Nuclear Blast thus far? We'd recorded three albums for Cacophonous and we finished Battle Magic, we had fulfilled our contractual obligation to them.  And they gave us a pretty attractive offer to stay with them, but what happened is that, just after we completed Starfire… I was contacted by Marc Steiger from Nuclear Blast and he said, 'I love your albums and if you're not bound to do another album for Cacophonous, I want to sign you now.'  I said to him, 'We've got one more to do and after we've recorded that, we can negotiate, if you're still interested.'  And he said, 'Yeah, the offer is always open.'  We had some other offers from Peaceville and Hammerheart, but ultimately we figured we'd go with Nuclear Blast, strictly because they have a bigger distribution service.  I used to get so many letters from people who said they couldn't find our albums.  They knew they were out there, they had heard tracks on samplers, but they couldn't find them in the stores.  Or if they did it was like $30 or something ridiculous.  So we thought we'd see what Nuclear Blast was like and we've done one album for them.  We are actually signed for another two, but time will tell if we decide to stay with them.  They are doing a decent enough job, I suppose.  The trouble is that, on Cacophonous, we were the main band, but at Nuclear Blast, we're just one band among many.  We're like band number 10763 or whatever on the whole roster, so we can't get the same amount of time spent on us individually as we could on Cacophonous, but hopefully other things will make up for it.

What are the latest plans for the re-release of your demo on CD? Very much so, yeah, because the demo was never actually made available.  I had to take the decision not to release it because we weren't entirely happy with it.  We wanted to record intros, outros, and put a lot more sound effects on it, but ultimately what happened is Cacophonous got wind of the demo, they asked for a copy, I sent it to them, and they were like, 'Right, okay, we'll sign you.'  So we didn't really have a chance to release our demo, because they wanted us to go straight ahead and do an album.  But what we can do now is take the demo, do what we wanted to do to it, add the intros, remaster it, put some interlude tracks into it, repackage the whole thing and also add a CD-ROM track to it as well, with some video footage or some band-related features.  Then we can get it out there for not too much money and all the kids who wanted to hear the demo will be able to get a hold of it.  It's just a matter of getting time to actually do it.

Are there any other unreleased tunes that might see the light of day someday?   Everything we've ever recorded in a recording studio, apart from the demo, has been released.  What we do have are a lot of tapes from the Starfire… rehearsal days.  We had so many fucking songs for Starfire…, we had to pick and choose which ones would go on the album.  So there are perhaps 2 or 3 songs at the moment, which are of that kind of Starfire-esque feel, but have never been recorded.  They exist only in that rough form.  Hopefully, one day we can release like an EP on Nuclear Blast with those kind of forgotten scenes, if you like.

When you play live, how to come up with a set-list?  Do you take songs from each album or run through an entire album?   Yeah, especially because we have so many songs now, we would have to pick and choose which ones would go down best live.  Plus, a lot of the fan favorites are the really long songs, like "Circus Maximus" and "Lemuria," things like that, which do tend to take up a big chunk of the live set.  We haven't actually played live since the tour with Emperor in 1997, so hopefully by the time we get around to playing live, we will take into consideration the fan favorites, as well as the ones we enjoy playing, as well as the ones we think will work live, as well as the ones we can actually play live.  A lot of the songs, the new guys can't actually play yet and Chris has forgotten so many of the songs as well.  We tried to play "Dreaming of Atlantean Spires" the other day and he'd completely forgotten it.  So we will take a lot of time to get a good set list together.

Do have any plans yet for a tour this year? Well, hopefully.  We've got a date coming up in Athens here in the near future, because Greece is one of the territories where we are quite well received, sales-wise anyway and we get a lot of fan mail from there.  Then maybe do something like the Dynamo open air festival.  What we'd like to do is get a tour together that covers territories where we'd actually like to play.  Nuclear Blast at the moment are pressing us o play Germany again and again.  We don't have that much of a fan base in Germany, we don't sell that many records over there and the response from crowds over there has always been pretty bad.  It's a shame because we'd like to play places like southern Europe, Spain, Italy, Portugal, where we know we have a very devote following.  We'd also like to get over to Australia, Japan and North America, but labels and promoters have another idea.  They want you to go where they think they can get the most money and with Nuclear Blast being a German-based label, they want us to play Germany, which isn't something that…  We will play Germany, but out of a 15-date tour, we don't want 10 dates to be German dates.

You guys have a very detailed and nice-looking web-site.  How involved with it are you? Very much.  All the features on the web-site, I've designed them all and our web-master takes my designs and puts them into graphical reality.  Things like the chronology, the glossary, the map, the A-Z, that's all kind of designed by me.  I've been trying to get Chris to work out some tablature to make a tabs section, but he has to learn how to reads tabs first, so that won't be for a while.  But yeah, I think our web-site is one of our most versatile tools right now.  We have galleries and pretty much any piece of information anyone wants to know about the band, they can most likely find it at the web-site.  People can send in their own drawings, they can send in comments, so it really is cool, the whole interactive thing.  And of course the lyrics to the new album are exclusive to the web-site, so that is how important I feel the web-site is.  (http://go.to/Bal-Sagoth)

Do you guys hang out much outside of doing band-related stuff?   I don't tend to hang out with the other band members too much, but we do occasionally go to the same bars and places like that.  There's a pub across the street from where I live, so that's where I tend to spend most of my free evenings drinking.  As far as anything else goes, we sometimes just get together, have a six-pack and mull over a few ideas.  Unfortunately, a lot of the metal scene in Britain these days is very centered in certain areas.  London is a big area for it and there are a few cities up north, but this area isn't really well known for the extreme metal scene.  Most of the people here are into Korn, Marilyn Manson, all that kind of shit.

I thought it was cool that you mentioned Sabbat as one of your influences, as they never get the credit they deserve. What it was with them is they released two wonderful albums, History of a Time to Come and Dreamweaver.  At the time, I think it was about 1987 when I first heard them, in that era of very street-level metal, with jeans and T-shirts and thrash and those big fuckin' sneakers, Sabbat really stood out for me.  Here was a band whose image and lyrical topics were so much what I was into, that whole paganism and fantasy thing.  And the sound was so abrasive and so wonderful to me, that I immediately thought what a wonderful band.  With Bathory and Celtic Frost, they are still to this day one of my all-time favorite bands.  I saw them live so many times, I saw them once with Manowar which was excellent, and they are just a brilliant band.  They are nice guys as well.  Well, Andy Sneap was a bit arrogant when I used to speak to him, but Martin was a really excellent guy and they were just an excellent band with so many good ideas.  They were so good musically and Martin was such an excellent lyricist and brilliant vocalist that it really did gel.  It was just a shame that they split up before their time.