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Interview with Aphazel (24.3.2006)
How and when did you get involved in creating music ?
Aphazel : I think it must have been around 1986 I started playing the guitar, playing covers of Metallica, Slayer etc., I had a few friends who played guitar and I found it interesting, I never had any guitar lessons of any kind though, I’m completely self taught. A friend of mine joined me and we had some kind of bands, mainly for fun, but after a while, around 1989 we formed a death metal band with some other guys we knew. At this point I wasn’t doing much of the compositions but was rather playing the music mainly created by the other guitarist, I guess death metal never really caught my heart 100%, although there are some bands that I really like in this genre. The drummer of this band was an old friend of mine, since 1985, Grimm, after about a year this band broke up as most of the members lost interest and me too I was also getting a bit bored of the musical direction and wanted to create my own music, this was around the end of 1991, and in early 1992 I started making demos of my own songs with help of a drum machine and this was the beginning of Ancient, songs like Trumps of an arch-angel and Det Glemte Riket were the first tracks I made, then around the end of 1992 I decided to ask Grimm to join me, and it started becoming a real band.
I enjoy creating music a lot, it’s a way for me to express feelings and open up some new “worlds” I have inside my mind, and it gives me a lot of gratification to take out these and have them recorded, I suppose it can be the same type of feeling a writer has when writing a book, although I think of my music as something a lot more emotional and deep than a story in a book.
What where your goals when you started Ancient ?
Aphazel : I really didn’t have many fixed goals except creating my own music and take out something powerful and strong I knew I had inside me, just the passion of doing this really, I didn’t think much about getting a record deal, forming a band, touring or any of that stuff, that just kind of happened by itself, or that’s what I feel.
I’ve understood you and Grimm were friends already as kids. Can you tell something about your common past and how did you end up asking him to join Ancient ?
Aphazel : Yeah, I have known him since 1985 when we were both listening to thrash metal etc., he lived very close to me and I noticed he was into metal and so he became a friend quickly. He started playing the drums around 1988 or so, and as mentioned earlier, he joined the death metal band and he was a natural choice for me when I wanted to get a drummer for my project.
How did you feel when Grimm decided to leave the band ?
Aphazel : It didn’t come to me as a real surprise, I knew he was not very keen on signing to Metal Blade, doing long tours etc etc. and I kinda expected him to leave, it felt a bit strange to me that he decided to leave exactly when the band was starting to grow, but he was also getting a bit bored of the music, so I guess it’s understandable, for him the band was always mainly a hobby and he didn’t want to make it something more than that.
How do you see yourself and Ancient have evolved since you got started ?
Aphazel : I know I see it all from a totally different view and angle than everybody else does, I think it’s great that the band was lucky to get signed to a big label so fast and get to tour the world etc. even though I somehow didn’t feel really surprised by it all when it happened, musically the band has evolved a lot, a bit too much in some people’s opinion but I don’t regret anything that we have done. There’s been rather big musical changes, a lot cause of the line-up changes, but I’m proud of all the albums we have created. Personally I feel I’ve somehow set a number of “children” out to the world that are living in the homes of thousands of metallers out there, and that’s a good feeling, sure the band has had affected my life and personality somehow, I think I would have been a somewhat different person if I never had started the band, maybe for better or also for worse, hehe, but I certainly don’t regret anything I have done.
How was your first time on stage ? And what things make a gig succeed ?
Aphazel : I remember it quite well, it was a festival in Bergen in august 1993, I have it on video still, we actually headlined the whole event, which was quite remarkable for the band’s first live performance ever. We had a lot of adrenaline rush on stage, but I think we did a good performance and got a lot of good comments afterwards, it was an overall very dark atmosphere during the gig, we wore robes and there was lots of smoke a low lights, the bassist was a session from the band Molested. There’s a lot of things that is necessary to make a gig go well, and a lot of them are things you can not really control, like the general feeling of the audience that night, it’s always different to play in Germany or South America for instance, people are so different there, a lot cause in South America there’s few concerts happening and people just go crazy when they do get some gigs there, whether as in Germany you have metal gigs almost every day if you live in a big city. The audience always influences us and the performance we do. It also is very different to play on a Monday instead of a Friday for instance. The only things that we control is ourselves, how prepared and inspired we are that night, to go out and do a great show. Things like a good club with a good stage, nice room, good PA etc is of course always very important to make a gig work out great.
Has there ever happened anything really weird or funny during a tour ?
Aphazel : Yeah, only way too much to mention here ! For instance I remember back in 1998 when we toured the US, we stopped the bus and Erichte picked up bones of a cattle that was left by the road in upstate New York as she was collecting bones of dead animals, hehe.
Or in 1997 on our first European tour, with Dark Funeral, at one concert I had a very bad hangover and I had to do the whole concert sitting down by the drum stage and played most of the concert with my eyes closed!, that was crazy, but it worked out !
Do you keep in touch with the previous members of Ancient and do you
check out their current musical careers ?
Aphazel : I do have good contact with Kaiaphas, Deadly Kristin and some of our session musicians, it’s a while since I have seen Grimm now and also Krigse I haven’t been in contact with since a few years.
What is your opinion about Grand Belial’s Key’s behavior towards Ancient and Kaiaphas ?
Aphazel : I honestly haven’t noticed much of it, just a few small things here and there, and I think it’s quite pathetic, they just make themselves look less respectable than they otherwise would be, but that’s their problem, not mine. Isn’t it a bit strange that their “bad behaviour” started exactly when Kaiaphas left them and joined Ancient ? I mean, if they disliked him and Ancient so much, why did they play with him in the first place and hung out with us, it doesn’t look very intelligent to me. It’s a pity they stopped playing together, Kaiaphas could still have been recording with them even if he was with Ancient. I really enjoyed the old demos of GBK, the music was great and they had something original going on.
What are your thoughts about ”The Cainian Chronicle murder case” and the publicity Ancient got through it ?
Aphazel : I think we never really realized how much it actually was blown up in the media up there, we just got some info. On email and saw some scans of newspaper acticles etc., certainly it was a bunch of very sick persons that was guilty in the crime and I can imagine how it was noticed up there, I guess, but still, it’s hard for us to really see how it was in Finland. We have practically been banned from playing in Finland since 1999, just maybe this year we can be lucky to get a gig booked there. It seems quite absurd to me how they can somewhat “blame Ancient” for what happened, I mean the music business has seen similar things before and I thought it was a generally established fact that you can not blame a musician or artist when some nutcase out there goes and commit a crime “because he was influenced” by that album, song, or whatever. You don’t see movie producers or writers of books get into these cases, but the metal bands always seem to be some kind of scape goat when crime takes place. I feel bad for the victim and think it’s a very ugly case, of course !, but I think I would never be able to “feel guilty” about it as I am so far from having done any crime at all. They were referring to a small phrase in a lyric ( that was not even written by me), and the phrase mentioned Caine murdering his brother Abel, the famous story from the bible, and they say that this influenced them to a ritualistic murder ? Give me a break… I guess the other 25.000 people who bought the album and didn’t commit a crime just doesn’t count in the decision in blaming Ancient for the murder.
Svartalvheim and Trolltaar are considered as classics of Norwegian Black Metal. How do you feel about participating them ?
Aphazel : It feels very good to see that people appreciate them so much, I remember when we were in the studio we were a bit concerned with the sound, we though it wasn’t exactly how we wanted it, but when I look back at it now, I am satisfied with it all, and there’s a lot of great work on these albums with a unique atmosphere that reminds me a lot about the nature and nocturnal atmosphere I felt in Bergen back then.
Do you have a favourite Ancient release, and if so which one and why ?
Aphazel : I am not sure, but it might actually be Mad Grandiose Bloodfiends, just because there is something magical about that album when I listen to it, it reminds me a lot about the time I spent in the USA and the vampiric lifestyle we led in those times back then in northern Virginia the summer of 1997. The sound on the album isn’t so great, but the songs have something very special and unique about them. I also enjoy every other album of Ancient, but each one is so different from one another so it’s really difficult to compare them and say which one is the best, it would be a bit like asking “who is the favourite among your children”, you know, it’s something so personal you can’t really decide, there’s not one album we made that I dislike, there’s always things that could be better but in general I am satisfied with each one of them.
How do you see the future of Ancient ?
Aphazel : At the moment we’re having a kind of break, I recently moved to Greece and we’re about to hire a new drummer, so it will be a few months, at least, before we’re ready to play live again. We also have to look for a new recording contract as the one with Metal Blade has expired and it doesn’t seem like we will work with them again. After the summer we will have a good number of concerts and we’re started working on new material as well, although it’s hard to say when a new album will come, it’s a pretty tough situation at the moment with all the people who stopped buying cds but rather download or copy the music instead, of course it makes the record companies a lot less willing to sign bands and invest money into it, but we will get something done for sure, it’s mainly a matter of finding a label that can work well with us and give us the support and work that is necessary.
Any final words to the fans ?
Aphazel : Rape the children of Abel !
Thanks for the support throughout the years, it’s been great !
See you on tour !
Aphazel