ENSLAVED Guitarist Discusses New Album

Metal Experience recently conducted an interview with guitarist Ivar Bjørnson of the Norwegian Viking metallers ENSLAVED. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow.

Metal Experience: Now to the new album. Why the album title "Vertebrae"?

Ivar: It has a pretty bizarre story behind it. I was starting to work on the new album and I was thinking about the concepts, you know, where can we go from here. And we were talking about the evolution of the concepts and the lyrics of the band, which has gone along with the music I think. There has been a change, gradually. Or perhaps not a change, but a development, a broadening. From the early albums where it was very external in a way. We would read about mythology, runes, and mysticism, nature's mysticism, and basically just reflect that. And gradually we would internalise it more. And on "ISA" and "Ruun" there was some more personal input, they were more contemporary. I don't know if it's a positive or a negative thing, but objectively speaking I think ENSLAVED is maybe the most contemporary pagan-inspired band. We have a lot of personal and present influences. Not only the revivalism and role-playing aspect of it. So how can we take it even more into reality? Not only through the metaphors, we keep on working with the metaphors and the mythology and we bring them into this world now. And then I read this small piece in a magazine where they talked to Tom Waits, an eccentric artist that I really like. So I thought, "Oh, Tom Waits, I have to read what he says," and they asked him: what are you thinking of right now? And he said: I'm thinking about the vertebrae that is similar in the mouse and the giraffe. They come from the same family and it blew his mind to think of evolution in that aspect and how everything is tightly knit together. Not in a religious aspect but in a very physical way. At least, that is how I interpreted it. And I looked at the word "vertebrae" and I started thinking about how symbolic that is. Talked to some friends, English-speaking Norwegians. In every language when you say something about the vertebrae, the backbone, it gives you very strong associations. Physically, because it's something that creatures around us and humans have in common. But it also has a very symbolic meaning all around the world. If you say: that guy has a strong backbone, you might think, "Oh he can lift a lot of weight." But it also says something about how he reacts on a psychological level.

Metal Experience: When I tried to describe ENSLAVED to friends, especially the last two albums, I'd say it's like black metal meets PINK FLOYD. Now on the back of the promo PINK FLOYD is actually cited as a reference. Is this a logical comparison for you?

Ivar: The text on the back of the album was written by the record label, I think. But we asked Joe Baressi, who mixed the album, if he could maybe give us a few lines on the back because we thought that if people would Google his name (as he did the production),maybe they would come across ENSLAVED and wonder what this band is like. And he said: it's very serious. It's a mix of darkness, evil and PINK FLOYD. And I was thinking that he was making fun of us, being ironic. Because darkness and evil now have a bit of an ironic edge. But he said, "No, I'm dead serious." It's very sinister and dark, it's got an evil energy like in horror movies. And at the same time you've got the PINK FLOYD quality. It's beautiful but you don't know if it's horrific beautiful or nice beautiful. As you can see, I have a PINK FLOYD tattoo on my arm. It's the first band that I ever related to. I know a few riffs, but I can't play anything for example. But for my 10th birthday my father gave me all his PINK FLOYD albums. And he said, "I don't know if you're going to like it, it's a start and you should enjoy listening to it. It's an important part of life." He would go away to work on some weekends and I would have some evenings and nights to myself. What to do? I’d put on the albums and something happened. It's been following me, so for me it's natural to sink into the music. I din't want to sink into the music because that would be too obvious with all my enthusiasm and my collection, but it's impossible to avoid. I have listened to "Dark Side Of The Moon" a couple of hundred times a year since I was ten.

Metal Experience: A very notable difference with the previous albums is the enormous amount of clean vocals by Herbrand. Was this a conscious choice or did this slip in during the writing process?

Ivar: It think it just happened because of the way we write our music. I write the structures of the songs. And then we work in a sort of democratic way, everyone works on their own field. My role in the band is to provide the blueprints, the main structure of the songs and then everybody does their handywork on top of that. So Grutle and Herbrand, they worked something like six months developing all the vocals. And they tried so many variations and they worked so hard. I think it just happened in the end, when we looked back we also said 'hey, there are a lot of clean vocals'. But it's basically a question of timing and the right solution. And coincidentally that meant a lot of clean vocals.

Read the entire interview at Metal-Experience.com.