#aug1999

[theplaguezine]

LEFAY

Interview with Charles Rytkönen by Daniel Hinds

(conducted August 1999)

When it came to classy power metal, you would have been hard-pressed to beat Sweden's Morgana Lefay.  Combining epic arrangements, soaring vocals and plenty of stellar musicianship, the band delivered album after album of consistently top-notch material.  Unfortunately, they ran into some sticky legal trouble and the result was a two-year low profile, a line-up shuffle and an unwanted name change.

Fortunately, the band survived with their artistic integrity intact, and has emerged this year as Lefay with possibly their best album to date, The Seventh Seal.  Vocalist Charles Rytkönen explains the current situation and leads us through the hurdles the band has overcome…

Now that the album has been out for a bit, what are your feelings about the album? It feels good. (laughs)  We did another album and released it, so that's about it, I guess.  We are satisfied with the songs and with the mix.  I don't know how the sales figures have been, but I think it has been pretty good in Europe.  I'm really curious about the States, how it will be.

How have previous albums done in the States? I think not so good…  Then again, perhaps you could blame the company we had at that time (Black Mark) a little bit.  I don't know if they had a good promotion in the States - I can't imagine they had.  Noise Records, at least here in Europe, is very good.

What does the title 'The Seventh Seal' refer to? It's based on the story about the Seventh Seal in the Book of Revelations by St. John the Divine, in the New Testament.  It's based on that armageddon, doomsday news kind of story.

The cover art is quite beautiful.  Was the concept for it the band's or did you leave it up to the artist? The basic ideas have always been the band's, but then we say to the artist, Kristian Wåhlin, he can do whatever he wants.  We really trust him because he is so good and he has the same kind of fantasy as we do.  So it's a combination between our basic idea and his talent and feeling for it.

How did you first get in touch with him? I don't really remember that, actually.. (laughs)  I think it was a rumor from the beginning that he was really good and so on.  I remember that I called him up the first time, when we made the Knowing Just As I Album, and I asked him if he could do a cover for that with an angel holding something in his hand.  He came up with the sandglass, actually - that was his idea - and we thought it was a cool thing, so we've used it ever since.  It's like a story itself, the cover art.  I would like to collect the originals. (laughs)

I'm sure you've heard this one too many times already, but what exactly happened with Black Mark that resulted in the name change? Mmrrrrrh - wrong question!  (laughs)  No…oh god, it was a mess actually.  We weren't satisfied with Black Mark and we felt like we were being fooled a little bit and we signed a bad deal from the beginning.  We were really green, we knew nothing about this industry at all, and we just signed it.  'Wow, we have a record deal here!'  It could have said in the contract that we would have had to run around naked in the city, whatever - we just signed it.  We have never seen any money from that company, so we were really bored.  Then we were on tour in '95 and some guy from Noise Records came up and asked if we wanted to be on their label, and we said, 'Yeah, for sure, no doubt about it!  We can go right away!'  From that moment we had hard times.  We had lawyers involved for nine months, struggling about something, I don't know what - I just want to play, you know.  In the beginning of that mess, three of the members decided that they wanted to move to Stockholm and get some real jobs so they could earn some money for once in their life.  It was okay with us and we told them they had to come to Bollnäs, that's our hometown, if you want to stay in the band.  You have to come to us and do the rehearsals.  They couldn't do that, so we had to take three new members.  Then we had to change the name to Lefay because of some stupid…I don't know why exactly, but we're Morgana Lefay under disguise now.

Was there ever a thought to change the name completely? Yeah, a quick one. (laughs)  We thought about it, but then we were really pissed that we couldn't use the name Morgana Lefay because I invented that name a long time ago.  When I was a young kid, I wanted to have a band with the name Morgana Lefay, so I was really pissed.  We decided to just take away 'Morgana' and keep Lefay and Noise Records agreed with that as well.  We were thinking of names like 'Fuck You All' and "Fuck Black Mark'…'No Name'…(laughs)  Stupid names, you know.  But we're used to calling it Lefay now.

What was it about the name 'Morgana Lefay' that made you want to use it for a band name for all those years? I have always been interested in fantasy stuff and old tales, occult things as well.  I was really into that story about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table for a while there and Morgana Lefay was like…wow, what a name for a band!  So we took that.  Before that it was Damage and before that it was Superstition.  Before that it was…something I don’t remember. (laughs)

Can you tell me a bit about the re-recording of your first album, Symphony of the Damned? Yeah…  We made the original album in 1990 and we made it on vinyl, 537 copies, just to see ourselves on vinyl.  We didn't have a contract at that time and everyone was happy, every day. (laughs)  It was badly produced and everything was bad with that album, but now since a couple of years ago, there are some die-hard fans who have bought that album in Germany, even though we never sold it in Germany, and they are willing to pay 1000 Swedish Krona (about $122) for it.  They were telling us, why don't you re-release that album?  We had thought about that from time to time, but we've lost the master tape.  Perhaps that is good luck, since it was so badly produced.  Now we decided to re-record it instead, plus we have four cover tunes on it as well.  We did this for two reasons.  It is a dedication to all the former members of Damage and Morgana Lefay and it is for our fans.  And perhaps it will buy us some time to make some new material for an upcoming album here. (laughs)

What are the covers that you chose? It's "Crazy?!" by Nazareth from the Heavy Metal soundtrack, "Captain Howdy" by Twisted Sister, "Strange Ways" from Kiss and "Cocaine" by J.J. Cale.  It's some odd covers, perhaps, but we think they are good and a little bit…you can really relax to the last song, "Cocaine." (laughs)

From what I understand, you've never had as much success in Sweden as in other places like Germany and Japan.  Has that improved any in recent times? Mmm, Sweden is a tough market when it comes to heavy metal.  There are bands like HammerFall, for example.  They had good luck - they were doing what they did at the exact right time, so they are really big in Sweden.  Big is not BIG like Metallica, but very well known, even for people who don't listen to heavy metal music, while we are well known among the people who are really into heavy metal music.  So there is a bad metal scene in Sweden.  It's okay underground and I think it is growing, but the people of Sweden are really fast to fall into the trends that come from the States and England.  So there is a lot of fuckin' techno and hip-hop and Ricky Martin shit.

Do you keep up on the metal scene much? Nah.  The rest of the band does, but they are single or perhaps they have a girlfriend.  Me, I have a house and a family, a girlfriend of 15 years and we have three kids together, so I'm a busy man actually. (laughs)

Does that make it difficult to tour? Yeah, of course.  You have to deal with your brain all the time, having a bad conscience and stuff.  But I have a wonderful girlfriend who is behind me on this 100%.  Our oldest child, she is 8-years-old and she's also used to this, even though she thinks it sucks when I go away for a month.  I'm really scared about going for a long tour, like 5 or 6 months.  I actually don't know if I am capable of doing that.  One month or five weeks, that's about the limit for me.

I've heard that you have an interest in blues.  Who are some of your favorite artists? Almost all the black artists, like Howlin' Wolf and…whatever.  The really old, original blues.  Then I also like some blues mixed with rock and I am still quite fond of some of Janis Joplin's songs.  I mean, I don't sit and listen to blues all day long, but it's really relaxing to listen to when you're in that mood, it's perfect.  Mostly, I listen to metal and hard rock, especially old hard rock like Uriah Heep.  The 90s is almost totally unknown to me, I'm more into the 70s and 80s as well.

When did you first become serious about singing? I never became serious about it. (laughs)  It was in school, in the 8th degree and some friends of mine said they were going to start playing in a band and were like,' I will play the guitar and he will play the drums and he will play bass and he will also play guitar - do you want to sing?'  'Okay," I said and then I started to sound something like…I don't know, it's really embarrassing to think about how it sounded. (laughs)

So you were self-taught? Yeah, definitely.  I don't know if I can do this, but I've come to accept my voice since a couple of years now.  I'm doing my best and I really like it, but then there are a lot of singers that I really admire and I'd like to sound like some of them, like Rob Halford.

How do you get inspired to write lyrics? It can be I wake up and I've had a dream, which was really weird, so I have to write something about it.  Or it can be from a book that I've read.  I read a lot of fantasy books and horror books.  I was really into the occult stuff when I was like 18-years-old and I'm still very interested in it to this day, but at that time I read just about everything I could about good and evil and all kinds of unexplainable things, and that has given me a lot of things to write about and to think about as well.  Is good that good and is evil that evil?  There's a lot of questions and that inspires me to write about such things.  And also just fairy tales, about goblins and elves and stuff like that.  Everything that is not so common.  We live in reality, we can see reality on the news every day.  Of course, I can write about stuff like that as well.  Like David Koresh, the mad messiah thing over in the States, that is a real thing but it is still so strange and that people can be affected by one person so much that they commit suicide, I think that's amazing.  It's so sick and it really pisses me off, actually, because one should have a distance to everything, even to oneself.

Morgana Lefay Official Facebook 

[theplaguezine]

ARCH ENEMY

Interview with Michael Amott by Daniel Hinds

(conducted August 1999)

Michael Amott has certainly done his fare share for the metal community, serving time with Carcass through their best years, then founding both Arch Enemy and Spiritual Beggars afterward.  While the latter takes a more retro approach, Arch Enemy are much more aggressive and modern.  Mixing classic metal riffing and technical ability with modern death metal aesthetics, Arch Enemy have firmly established themselves as one of the leaders in the scene.

With their third opus, Burning Bridges, recently released in the States, it was a good time to tap Mr. Amott's brain for some insight into his metallic creations…

What separates Burning Bridges from the previous two Arch Enemy releases? In my opinion and the band's opinion, this is by far our best effort, production-wise and songwriting-wise.  It just feels like it really clicked this time.  It's got a lot more going for it, in the songwriting department especially.  It's far more catchy than our previous two.  Just overall an improvement and that seems to be the overall reaction that we're getting from the media in Japan and Europe, where it has been out for a while already.

Was there a change in the song-writing process for this one? All the music is written by myself and my brother Chris and that was the case in the past as well.  I don't know if there was much of a change, really.  We just sat down and tried to write the most catchy and brutal…the most interesting songs that we could come up with.  Just tried to focus on quality songwriting instead of…  On the Stigmata album, we got into a lot of the technical sort of stuff and maybe it was a little bit too much.  We're happy with the new approach that we've got, where we go more straight to the point.

Is that a difficult balance, between the technical side and the actual song itself? I think it's got to be a really strong song.  To me, it doesn't matter what kind of music it is, as long as there is a good song there, that's the most important thing.  The same goes for the kind of music that we're playing:  it's got to be strong material, lots of hooks and catchiness, but also to keep it interesting for ourselves and for the fans, we throw in a lot of more progressive elements as well.

What are some of the lyrical themes covered on this album? Overall, I would say the lyrics are a little more personal than in the past.  There are a few songs on there, like "Dead End Side," "Burning Bridges" and "Seed of Hate," that kind of is about life, relationships - lots of negative stuff.  I think it worked really well, writing these kinds of lyrics, with the new material.  It gave it a bit more depth.

How did you pick "Burning Bridges" as the album title? The meaning is more on a personal level.  Basically, everybody burns a lot of bridges in their lives, with people and relationships, but you just have to move on, go forward.

Do you consider Arch Enemy to be your main band? I've got two bands and I divide my time quite equally between them, which can be quite difficult with schedules and stuff.  Arch Enemy is definitely a real band, though - it's not a project or anything like that.  We're all committed to this band and we're going to be touring in Europe for six weeks in Sept/Oct, then we go to Japan and there is talk of bringing us over to the States with Nevermore possibly.  We're definitely going to do stuff to support this album, but I don't like to think, 'This is my main band,' or, 'That's may main band,' you know.  I'm really dedicated to both of my bands.

When you write songs, do you write them specifically for one band or the other? Yeah, I think it's always quite obvious when a riff or a melody or song idea should be used for one of the bands.  The riffing style is quite different from each other.  They're both heavy bands, but the style of riffing and arranging is quite different.

Have you written anything that falls completely outside the scope of both bands? Yeah, I've written stuff that's outside of that framework.  Sometimes I write stuff that is way to wimpy or whatever, like pretty little things on the acoustic guitar or whatever.  Things that will never be used probably.  But I usually find places to work in all my ideas, if they're any good.  That's the case with the song "Still the Wing" on the new album.  Me and Chris made this melody, the actual chorus of that song, that's a major chord progression instead of a minor chord progression, which is the normal thing for Arch Enemy and most metal bands.  We were like, maybe this sounds too positive, but we though, 'what the hell?'  It sounds good, why not use it?  I think we got away with it…  (laughs)

I read somewhere that you prefer emotional guitar-players to the technical ones.  Who would you consider some of the best emotional players? I'm a big fan of guitar-players from the 70s and 80s.  I haven't really heard anything in the 90s that has blown me away completely.  I don't see myself as a totally original guitar-player or anything, but I'm inspired by some of these guitar-players and I put that into a new context.  I like melodic players, basically, mostly hard rock or heavy metal players.  Frank Marino, Michael Schenker, Uli Jon Roth, Gary Moore, John Sykes - very sort of traditional players.  I'm not really into jazz or fusion or anything like that.  I mean, you have Yngwie Malmsteen and you can't ignore his influence on everyone playing heavy metal and hard rock over the last fifteen, twenty years.  He started a new style of guitar playing.  I'm very much into older stuff, like Ritchie Blackmore with Deep Purple, stuff like that.  But a lot of that stuff can be quite boring music, because these people's careers go on and on and they don't write interesting material anymore.  Obviously, they are still fantastic players, but often I'll find myself listening to their older albums.  Everyone has a peak in their musical career and it's going to happen to me as well.  Oh, and you can't ignore Tony Iommi, especially for the riffing style.  I don't think there would have been any heavy metal without the kind of riffs that he came up with in the early 70s.

How old were you when you first started playing guitar? I think I was probably about fourteen when I started playing.  I bought a guitar when I was fourteen, but I didn't start seriously playing until I was about sixteen.  I just had this guitar lying around at home and I learned to play a bit, but I couldn't find anybody else to play with, so I didn't really develop my playing.  From sixteen onward, I started finding people to play with and I started getting more and more into playing.

When did you decide to make it your career? That just kind of happened, I didn't make that decision.  In the late 80s, I had my own death metal band here in Sweden, called Carnage.  We were very much into brutal death metal, everything being as brutal as possible.  We got a little deal and put an album out, but that wasn't a career, it was just our love for music that made us play.  Then I got an offer to play with Carcass after they put out Symphonies of Sickness, so I joined them and toured for the Symphonies of Sickness album, in the States and Europe.  Then later on, I recorded two albums with them.  Carcass were a band on the way up and the sales of that band made it into a career for me, I guess.  'Oh, we're getting paid now,' where as before I was working day jobs and stuff.  I've had that ambition, but I couldn't really see a career in it.  In the late 80s, there were now really successful bands in that style.  I couldn't see the kind of music I was playing becoming successful.  Headbanger's Ball and MTV over here was all like Warrant and Poison, there was no heavy stuff being played.  But then a few years later, the whole thing exploded and obviously death metal came to a peak around '92.  Grunge came along and suddenly it was okay to play downtuned and dirty.  I've worked in record stores and stuff between gigs when I haven't had enough money, but the last two years I've been able to just focus on the music, which is really nice.

You did an Iron Maiden cover ("Aces High").  Was it difficult to choose one particular song? We did it for Japanese tribute album that only came out in Japan.  We got involved at a really late date on that album and the guy from the label really wanted us to do "Aces High" and we thought that would be cool, so we didn't really think too much about it.  We just went ahead and did it and it turned out pretty cool, actually.  It's never been available in Europe or the States…it might be some day, I don't know.

So is Japan your biggest market? Yeah, that is definitely true for us.

What do you attribute that to? I don't know…  We released an album called Black Earth in '96, the first Arch Enemy album, and it did okay over there.  It sold like 10,000 or 11,000.  We went over there and supported Cathedral for three shows and that was really cool and seemed to go down really well.  Then we released Stigmata over there and that sold 20,000 and we went over and toured for that one, so it's just been growing.  The new album came out in May over there and has already done 30,000.  With 30,000 albums sold, that makes Arch Enemy the biggest extreme metal band in the Far East, which is pretty cool, if you don't count like Sepultura.  But we sell a lot more than a band like Fear Factory or Machine Head in Japan.  But that's the only place in the whole world where that will ever happen!  (laughs)  I think the reason is just that Arch Enemy embraced the metal of the 80s that they still love so much over there.  We just incorporate traditional heavy metal guitar-work into this death metal sound.  Death metal has never really made it big over there, so it's still rather fresh to them.  We have a lot of guitar solos and me and my brother are both pretty well respected as players over there.  We have a lot of guitar deals and we're giving lessons in the guitar magazines - a very different situation than here at home. (laughs)

Do you get treated differently by the fans and the press in Japan? Yeah, both the fans and the press are really, really different over there, compared to Europe.  The fans are a lot more into it - they know all the lyrics, all the music.  Like when we play the melody lines and the solos, the crowd will be singing along to that.  They're just more dedicated.  They know everything about you.  If they get into something, they totally get into it.  At a show, there might be a thousand kids, and they are all totally into Arch Enemy or whatever.  But they demand a lot as well.  You just can't give them shit (laughs).  You can't go over there and play like shit and fuck up, because they notice all that.  The journalism is totally different from the Western journalism, the metal press anyway.  It's 100% focused on music.  Over here, the bigger magazines like Metal Hammer and Kerrang! are not focused on the music.  Like, there could be an interview in Metal Hammer or Kerrang! over here with Marilyn Manson and it could be five pages long, but not have one question about the music.  But in Japan, the big magazines know that the fans want to know about the music and they want to know EVERYTHING about the music.  They want to know about the recording, what influenced you…so in a way, it's more like the underground press in the States and Europe.  They are genuinely into music, instead of like, 'Let's sell a lot of copies by talking about somebody wants to rape a child on stage' or whatever.

How involved are you in the business side of things and have you done pretty well in terms of not getting ripped off? I've been ripped off like everybody else, but it's been okay.  We just signed a management deal with a big company over called Sanctuary, and they do like Helloween and Iron Maiden, stuff like that.  So hopefully things will get more organized now.

Are you interested in science-fiction, in terms of books and movies? Yeah, I love that kind of stuff, especially older science-fiction movies, like late 60s and early 70s.  Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Omega Man, 2001, Rollerball - I love that kind of vision of the future that they had then.  Actually, most of these films are like set in the year 2000 or whatever and…that's like next year. (laughs)  When I watch movies like that I feel a bit fooled really, because it's a future that is never going to happen.  We're never going to have those cool, huge-screen TVs covering the whole wall and all this cool furniture.  (laughs)  We're not going to wear these really cool suits and stuff.  It's sad, it really is… (laughs)

It seems like those movies were a lot more imaginative than current sci-fi films. Oh definitely.  The whole vibe then was more imaginative.  The concepts that they had then were really, really cool.  A lot more of the moves and books from that time that were science-fiction related were a lot more original.  It's not a like a bunch of aliens that are going to come and kill everyone on earth, like Independence Day - that really sucks.  For me, that's not a science-fiction movie, it's a Hollywood action movie that happens to be set in space.  I like movies like Rollerball, that have a really dark sort of atmosphere.  They were a lot more thoughtful and intelligent.  But I don't think a movie like that would do well commercially today, because it's too dark for people.

www.archenemy.net

[theplaguezine]

DARK TRANQUILLITY

Interview with Mikael Stanne by Daniel Hinds

(conducted August 1999)

Dark Tranquillity really established themselves as the forerunners of the melodic death metal movement in the 90s, with such albums as The Gallery and The Mind's I.  Their unique blend of fast, thrashy death metal and highly melodic riffing and leadwork helped make them a household name in the metal community relatively quickly.

With their latest album, Projector, the band has taken a turn to explore new vistas, utilizing clean vocals and a more organic sense of melody than before.  On the eve of the album's Stateside release, vocalist Mikael Stanne braved a hoarse voice and overseas connection to give me the low-down on one of Sweden's finest…

How would you say Projector differs from previous DT albums? I think it differs a lot.  We tried to experiment a lot more with this album, to kind of break free from what we'd done before.  Going in and writing for this album was really different for us because we wanted to keep all alternatives really open.  We got back from touring a lot for The Mind's I and we were like, 'Nope, we don't want to play this really fast stuff anymore.'  We wanted to do something else, like focus more on the emotional parts of the music than we have in the past - take it a bit further.  And the vocals had to change for the music, but I think that's the basic change - it's more open, more dynamic, more emotional.

Were you scared at all how people would react to the changes? Not really.  We thought about it, but we just said, 'This is exactly what we want to do,' so if people hate it, that's fine.  If people love it, that's fine, too, it doesn't really matter.  We just realized that we had to do this album, otherwise we couldn't go on playing.  We couldn't do another Mind's I or another Gallery or whatever.

Has the songwriting process itself changed any? Yeah, a bit.  We're started writing using portable studios and computers and stuff, so we can make a lot of the arrangements at home and then present it to the other guys.  Then we work on it from there and develop each idea.  It's an easier process, since we know each other so well.  Also, our drummer Anders contributed a lot to the music now.  It's much more open and we feel we can do just about anything.  It's really interesting and kind of a new start for us.

Are you looking forward to playing the new material live? Oh yeah!  This Friday is the first show, we're going to play a festival in Finland, so I'm really looking forward to that.

Why the title Projector? Well, it came from the time when I was writing the lyrics, about a year and a half ago.  I was having problems sleeping and just a lot of problems that I didn't really want to write about, but felt that I had to eventually.  I started digging up all this stuff that I didn't really want to talk about and once I got it all to the surface, I had to see all these things from a different perspective.  That's why you kind of put your distance to it.  The more I thought about it, the bigger it got and that's what the 'projector' is:  it kind of blows things out of proportion in order to make it more real and to see it with fresh eyes and from a new perspective.  That's what it meant to me, to put light on small things and make them huge, make them a monster.

Could you tell me about some of the specific lyrics on the album? They kind of deal with things that I hate, things about myself.  Mainly, weaknesses and errors and all the stuff that you do and you hate but you can't do anything about, you know?  I've come to realize that recently, that I do so many stupid things, I had to change my ways.  As a step towards being better, I write about it first and expose the problem.  A lot of it is about relationships between people, both my personal ones and other people.  Basically, what really annoys me about hanging around in the city with the people I socialize with.  The lyrics cover different aspects of this.

DT has always been blessed with cool artwork and I was curious how important the visual presentation of the band is to you. We've always been interested in the graphic side and artwork and everything.  Me and Niklas always kind of developed the concepts for T-shirts and the covers and everything, so it's always been a big part of it.  For me and Niklas, anyway.  We drew the first demo covers and EPs and stuff, so that's always been going on.  Now Niklas is self-employed and doing graphics.  He really wanted to do this whole concept for the album, with all the involved imagery.  He does all the T-shirts and homepage and everything, to create an overall feel for the music.

I understand you've done a video for one of the tracks on Projector. We just finished it the day before yesterday, actually.  It's for the song "ThereIn" and we did it with a couple of friends of ours.  We basically left ourselves in their hands and they did a video, which turned out pretty cool.  Not as good as we expected, but it's okay.  These kind of videos never get shown anyway, so there's no point in spending a lot of money on it.  It represents the song and represents us, so it does what a video should do, without being too much.

There is a major tour in the works for DT soon.  What details do you have so far? Right now we're just doing festivals, but on September 17th, I think we start and go for six or seven weeks with In Flames, Children of Bodom and Arch Enemy through Europe.  It's going to be our biggest tour yet.  That will be a lot of fun.

Sounds like a pretty killer line-up. Well, I think it is, it's a great package and we're all friends.  It's going to be crazy and hazardous to our health. (laughs)  Hopefully, we will do an American tour in November.  We've been talking about it a lot.  We were supposed to do it in August, but we didn't really feel right about that, so we'll do it in November, perhaps December.

Any new stops on this tour? Umm…yeah, Poland, I think that's the only one on this tour.  We also go to Japan in September, just for a couple of shows, and that's gonna be great.  We'll probably go to Mexico as well.  After that, we can retire. (laughs)

Do you get to see much of these countries you visit or is it mostly 'do the show and move on?' Pretty much just move on, yeah.  Sleep all day, eat, do soundcheck, do interviews, play, then leave. (laughs)  Sometimes we get a chance, though.  Sometimes we'll have a number of hours to just stroll around the city and that's great, but usually…  Like when we went to Rome, we were like, 'Oh, great!  We've gotta see this!'  We didn't see ANYTHING!  A big line of people, the inside of a bus, the inside of a club and that's it.  It can really suck sometimes, but it's great anyway.  The people are usually more interesting anyway.

Do you enjoy playing the big festivals? We actually haven't done many festivals, just a couple small ones.  When we were with Osmose, they weren't into doing festivals, as they thought of it as a waste of time more or less.  Century Media is really trying to get is on the festivals, though, so we're doing Wacken this year and Friday this really big one in Finland.  A couple others, I'm not really sure yet.

How did you get in touch with Century Media? We contacted the manager that we heard about and said, 'We want to have a record contract, can you help us out?'  So he sent out the record to several labels, and a lot of them were really interested and we started negotiating with like 6 or 7 labels.  Eventually it came down to Century Media because they were the most open-minded and agree to our terms more than the other labels.  We found out what a shitty, shitty industry that we're in.  All these labels wanted to change us, to have us re-record the album, and do all this and that and tell us what kind of image we have to have for the video, etc.  That's what we said in the beginning with Century Media:  you cannot control us in any way.  And they were like, 'Yep, totally cool, we agree to that.'

Did you have good luck with Osmose and Spinefarm? Yeah, all these labels have been great.  Spinefarm did a lot for us in the beginning.  They aren't really a record label, they're more a distributor in Finland.  That's their main thing and that's why they are kind of limited in their capabilities.  Osmose did fabulous work and we cannot thank them enough for bringing out our records, but we just felt it was time to move on and since the album is kind of different, we thought 'let's make a record label change.'  It felt like the best thing to do.  Of course, it's been great so far and hopefully it will just get better.

Are you at all surprised by the level of popularity that DT has achieved so far? Oh yeah!  We're just a couple of friends hanging out and playing, that's what we do.  Like in the beginning, when Skydancer came out, we didn't know what to expect, we just thought, 'This is not music that people get into nowadays, it's really a weird album.'  But people got into it and we were like, 'whoa! Cool!'  But it doesn't really affect us in that way.  At the end of the day, what matters is what we think about it and if we love it, that's okay.  If other people like, that's great.  But it's still really hard to think of it in that way and when people say that we were founders of this 'Gothenburg sound,' it's so hard to think of it that way.  We've just been playing forever.  It's nothing that we really think about, but of course it's very flattering that people buy the records and come to our shows.

DT has done a number of tribute albums and I was curious what your take on that whole market is and if there are any bands that you think deserve a tribute but haven't got one yet. It's a fun thing to do.  It's flattering that a label asks us to do one, that they want to hear our interpretation of another artist's music.  It's an opportunity for us to go into the studio and record some more, and that's always interesting.  It's a challenge to do covers, too.  I don't listen too much to the tribute albums, but if there's one of my favorite bands that have a tribute album, of course I'm going to buy it.  Sometimes they're good, sometimes they suck all the way through.  I listened to this Depeche Mode tribute album, it was pretty good.  Smashing Pumpkins were on it.

How did you first get interested in playing music? Like in '87, all of us in the band, we lived on the same street.  We hung out every day, just sat around listening to records.  We were nuts about music and calling up musicians and being really pathetic.  We were kind of bored, as well, just sitting around talking all day, so me and Nicky decided, 'Let's start playing and see if we can be as good as these guys that we listen to.'  So we started practicing and practicing and after about 5 months we decided we could play reasonably, and we asked our closest friends if they wanted to join a band.  They were like, 'yeah, why not?'  Nobody knew anything, so we just rehearsed and rehearsed, just to have something to do and our intention at the time was to do aggressive music that was also melodic.  That's more or less always been our goal, to mix the really extreme stuff like Kreator and Sodom and the mellow stuff like Helloween and Blind Guardian.

Okay, it's 1999 so here is the obligatory Y2K question.  How do you think things will turn out? Of course there is going to be some problems, that's inevitable, but I don't think it will be such a big thing as it is all hyped up to be.  I spoke yesterday about it with a friend of mine who works at Microsoft, and he said everyone is calling in, really worried, and all this paranoia.  But it really isn't that big of a problem.  It's going to be interesting to see like the suicide rate on New Year's Eve is going to be.  I think it will be weird and a lot of people will freak out, but I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the show. (laughs)

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