In the
woods March 1999 Mindview
IN THE
WOODS
Experimental
music as therapy
Norwegian
In The Woods has always been one of my favorite bands. Their new masterpiece
"Strange In Stereo" is once again a very complex, wonderful piece of
inventive music, a quest to the deepest corners of the human soul. When Jan
(Ovl Svithjod) calls me on a dark rainy evening, we have a looooong chat about
music, feelings, some pholosophy and of course the meaning behind "Strange
In Stereo".
March 1999
Jan kicks off immediately with great news for the fans:
Right now we’re doing some rehearsals and usual stuff
that bands do, you know. We actually go back in the studio in a month’s time to
record a 7”.
A nice new 7” again? What can we expect from that one?
It’ll be another cover song, of King Crimson this
time, together with a self-composed new track. But you’ll have to wait and see.
Most of the bands members seem to avoid media
attention, am I right?
(thinks carefully before answering) Well I can’t speak
for everybody but most journalists seem to have a very straight opinion when
reviewing cds, usually very far from the truth. I think that the music, in many
ways, should speak for itself. Of course when Misanthropy sets up interviews,
we do them and we try to cover as many fanzines as possible because these are
at least equally important as the major magazines. We don’t try to avoid the
media attention but we do try to avoid the clichés and focus more on the music,
basically.
Where in Norway do you come from?
The southern part, almost the southernmost town,
people call it the gateway to Europe. There’s a ferry going from there to
Denmark and it takes about two hours or something. It’s okay like any other
place but it’s important to get out once in a while and view it from an
objective point of view. I’m very much into travelling but it’s an okay place
for a start. I’m not sure whether we settle down here or not, it all depends...
I have a lot of vagabond blood in me.
You must have been around the world then?
(wishful sigh) Not really, as usual it’s always the
money that’s standing in your way. Making a longer journey costs shitloads of
money. Furthermore we don’t work fulltime, most of us still study so there you
go, no funds...
Do you still study too, Jan?
Actually I’ve been working for a few years but I
stopped doing that a couple of months ago. I was actually doing carpentry, like
building houses and stuff but I figured its wasn’t really my cup of tea. I’m
probably restarting my studies but I don’t know exactly when because I’m
getting ready to travel again in a couple of month’s time and I’ll be away for
quite a few months and may restart studying after that.
Shit, that must mean that we’re not going to see the
band perform live?
It seems like the live situation in Europe, especially
in this underground thing, is hardening. I’ve heard from a lot of people and a
lot of bands that there seems to be so many bands on the road all the time,
there’s so many options, so many different gigs, it gets hard to make people
come there. You don’t make any money on tours like that. Each time we tour or
do individual gigs we lose a lot of money. If there comes a good offer before
our travel we would probably do that but if we’re still gonna lose money on
playing live I don’t think it’s really that important anyway. We’re not really
striving to reach any goal, if there’s an option that pops up with good
conditions then it’s fine, we don’t have to make a lot of money, a zero profit
is even fine. But it’s not really that important for us go and play live on
the road.
Wouldn’t
your music be extremely difficult to perform live?
It’s not
that bad, each time we rehearse songs we usually come out with different
versions for the songs. As for a live situation we don’t see the point of
copying the album live on stage but we try to make them sound a bit different.
When I go to see a band I expect them to play something different that on the
albums, or else you could just playback the album and hang up a photo of the
band, same experience.
Which
bands would you like to tour with?
Oh that’s
a hard question. I haven’t been following the underground for the past 3-4
years, it’s hard to see things moving down there but the best option would be
to make the organizers find a local band because it’s good to support a local
act without a record deal and give them a chance.
Organizers
also should try and make a happening of it. I don’t believe in just coming to
venues and just play songs, I want something extra to go with a live situation.
Besides
playing in In The Woods and travelling, do you have other interests?
Yeah sure,
I’m very much into reading, especially the long heavy novels and I’m fascinated
by history too. It’s very important to see the lines through history to
understand why things are like they are at the moment.
Would
you ever write a book as an outlet to your imagination and feelings?
I dunno, I
write a lot of poetry in Norwegian but I have no ambition in that field either.
I use it as some therapy towards whatever I may feel. I really like writing but
I have no ambitions at all.
The new
album is even more like a therapy than Omnio...
Some of us
had a lot of problems during the past years and most of the band members had a
lot of personal problems during the period "Strange In Stereo" was
written, we came together as a band and used the whole thing as an outlet for
those kind of feelings and emotions. Many topics are about love, not only about
love for the opposite sex but love between people in general. The albums is
related to the theme of lost love but there’s also a lot of longing in both the
words and the music. Sometimes is describes something better that the present
situation. 90% of the music is about emotions, 10% is intellectual stuff: we
don’t think about our music that much, we just let go and see what comes out of
it.
The
more I listen to this masterpiece album the more I’m addicted to it.
Thanks a
lot! It was a lot of hard work and there’s a lot of depth to each of the albums
that we do and it takes quite a few listenings to get into that.
What
would you advise to someone who has never heard of In The Woods before and
listens to "Strange In Stereo" for the very first time?
Oh it’s
very hard to view that from an objective kind of view when you’re in the middle
of a process. But I think it’s very honest and contains a lot of opposites.
Some parts may be very heavy and others very calm, we’ve always used that as an
effect. It creates a lot of tension and gives the music a pulsed-like feeling.
We focus a lot on variation and that’s also why we have two vocalists now. On
the next album we’ll probably have three! We try to evolve and do something
different for each album, push the boundaries. Our music is very experimental
in many ways.
You’re
so experimental that I describe In The Woods as a subtle delicacy for a happy
few people.
Yeah I
reckon that in many ways. If you take a look at the artists or bands that sell
a lot of albums, with a few exceptions of course, most of them do the usual
trivial things. In today’s music industry there’s not much new. We don’t really
see the point in doing what thousands of bands have done before, I think music
is about trying to expand the horizons and try out different ideas. Our
evolution is also quite natural, not like many bands who suddenly change styles
drastically because a new style is more interesting for selling copies and
becoming rock stars. It’s always possible for an experienced ear to hear wether
a band’s evolution is for sellout or for artistic reasons, you know.
That’s
why I call In The Woods’ music real art!
Thank you,
that’s a nice compliment.
In The
Woods has slowed down quite a bit, the music is more melancholic than in
the early days.
Yeah I
guess so, but yet some parts on the new album are the heaviest things we’ve
ever done. It sounds very heavy because of the big opposite between the calm
parts. We’ve always said, from the day we started, that none of the releases
that we’d do are gonna sound the same because we want evolution, we don’t wanna
do the same album twice. When you’ve been listening to heavy metal for 15
years, somehow you wanna try out different things, you know.
The
only drawback is that you use less strings than on Omnio.
There’s a
very natural explanation for that: concerning the sound of SIS, the strings
wouldn’t fit in as much. Omnio is a very epic album with very long songs, the
string parts fitted in very well there, as opposed to SIS which is more
compact. But when we took out the strings we replaced them with something
different, we’ve used a lot of different guitars this time as a substitute for
the strings. On Omnio we found that strings were very necessary, this time
around we used one guy with a viola on a couple of songs. Maybe they might be a
bit more present again in future releases, who know?
Surprise
us!
Definitely,
don’t worry!! (laughter)
I’d
like to ask a few questions about the lyrics, I’d like to give you my interpretation
after reading them and maybe you could comment on that to see if I got them
right or wrong?
If you
read the lyrics and make your own interpretation in a way, you can never be
wrong, the lyrics are written very open, they can be seen from loads of
different points of view. Whatever your interpretation is, you’re just as right
as I am, we leave a lot of things up to the listener and make the whole thing a
very individual experience.
Still
I'd like to give it a try... "Vanish In The Absence Of Virtue" ?
It has to
do a lot with the deep moral of each and everyone of us. I can put the whole
lyric into one saying, it goes like this: “And what is good, and what is not
good? Need we other people to tell us these things?” I don’t think people
should tell us what to do but I think we should go into the depths of ourselves
and find out what is good and what is not good. Moral is very universal in many
ways but it depends on your personal background.
The
most fantastic title is “Generally More Worried Than Married”.
Ah you’re
not the first one :) Its a sort of funny wordplay, joking around with something
which is more serious in the first place. I’m very into using metaphors that
may sound like children’s rhymes for instance, it’s a good effect to make the
seriousness of something come through. Metaphors help bring forth the actual
tension in each lyric. What do you get out of it?
(reversed
interview mode)
I
think it’s about someone who lives in an appartment and who might be secretly
in love with a neighbour women but she doesn’t know it. It’s about longing and
solitude.
Yeah it’s
about longing, more specifically the fear of being abandoned or alone. Also a
fear of yourself in a way, and if you can’t figure out your own fear then
you’ll never be able to give anything back to the people around you. It might
be very easy to find a girlfriend but if you don’t have the necessary peace
with yourself, your girlfriend probably wouldn’t gain from anything you say or
do.
The nicest
piece of poetry is in my opinion "Path of the Righteous". These must
be the final thoughts of a dying man?
That’s a
fine way of putting it, yep.
"Titan
Transcendence" must be about a mourner who thinks back of his beloved one a
week after her death, something like that.
Wohoo, you
might be getting close :)
Ahah, is there a special story behind it then?
(tries to
find a way out) You don’t necessarily have to experience everything you write
about yourself, but trying to create a microcosmos about another person that
you write about is a very interesting thing to do. Yeah you’re getting
close.................. (no further comment).
That’s
just the interesting thing: you always find new things in an In The Woods album
no matter how many times you’ve listened to it.
That’s the
whole point indeed. Like I mentioned, we provide a lot of work on the songs, we
do a lot of rehearsing usually before we enter the recording studio. When we
rehearse the songs over a period of 1-2 years, they change their own in a way
because we always do small different kind of things, they change without us
even noticing. With this band, the songs take their own direction, we just go
with the flow.................