KREATOR Frontman: Downloading 'Helps The Music To Become More Popular'

Simon Milburn of Australia's The Metal Forge recently conducted an interview with KREATOR frontman Mille Petrozza. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

On the band's 20-plus-year career:

"Oh, man, to be honest, it doesn't really feel like that long. To me, it's been going from one album to the next. I never planned on a career so to speak. I was just doing it. There was never any point where it was like, 'I need to do this or that to achieve certain things.' It was more like, 'Let's go with the flow,' and that's what we did. Like I said, it never felt like, and still to this day, it doesn't feel like 20 years, man."

On the digital age of music downloads and file-sharing programs:

"I don't know, really. I mean, we never really had to experience any major… all the 'downloading kills the music,' which I think is total bullshit because people are just checking out music online and if they want it they buy the album, y'know? It's almost like listening to the radio but you can control the radio. Of course there are a couple of people that'll never buy an album anyway that will download and steal the music. I doubt that those people would've have bought an album anyways. Back in the early days, they probably would have recorded it to a tape or something. I don't really think it hurts anything. If anything, it just helps the music to become more popular."

On the state of the modern metal scene:

"It's healthy man! This is great. Like you said, there's all these trends that come and go, and are just trends. It's not music to be taken serious to be honest. I do like some of the metalcore stuff I have to admit, though. Like I said, as a musical genre, I don't take it seriously because it will not survive. There will be, like in two years, or maybe even in one year, there will be two bands left from this whole wave of metalcore. All the bands will be like, 'OK, we've changed our style and we're more metal now.' They will start to realise that it's better not to be a part of a trend but to be a part of a musical culture which metal, in my opinion, is. It will be hard for some bands."

On the band's writing process:

"The process is always there. The songwriting process always takes place even though I'm not in the right mindset. Subconsciously I'm writing down stuff, I'll have some music in my mind and I'll have some riffs. I always collect riffs. I have a riff tape already that is an hour and a half of riffs and song ideas but I have not really worked on them yet. There's different steps of song writing — writing down little notes and then working on the ideas — which is two different parts of the whole process. . . It's a collaborative arranging process. The writing is already mostly done when I go into rehearsal. They (that is, the rest of the band) definitely have an influence on the way the songs are performed at the end of the day. Early on it was more naïve and more … y'know, you cannot compare, let's say the songwriting process for 'Endless Pain' with what we do nowadays. Nowadays is more planned out… maybe because we're more experienced. Back then we were just going in and just wrote some riffs and put it together. I mean, 'Endless Pain' was written in… we had like four songs when we got the record deal and five weeks later we had to go into the studio. So we wrote six songs in a couple of days or something. They were put together real quick. We put together the whole album which was, back then, it was like we didn't really know and we really didn't have time to write the album. But we had this record deal and we wanted to do an album, so we just rushed it a little bit."

Read the entire interview at www.themetalforge.com.