THERION Mainman Discusses New Lineup, Forthcoming Album

Studio Rock recently conducted an interview with mainman Christofer Johnsson of Swedish progressive/experimental metallers THERION. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Studio Rock: I want to ask you about the new lineup of the band. You have only played together for the recent Mexico shows. How do you feel about them and the band chemistry at this point?

Christofer Johnsson: It works excellent. Of course, every time you make a new tour the first shows are a bit shaky until everybody finds their pace. It is the same no matter the lineup. When we did the "Gothic Kabbalah" tour, the first show was terrible. But now it all goes very well. The show we had today (at the Graspop Metal Meeting in Belgium) went very good.

Studio Rock: What about the new guys catching up with the old stuff? How difficult is it for them?

Christofer Johnsson: Christian Vidal, the new guitar player, is very true to Kristian Niemann's solos so when he plays them, he does it with a great deal of respect. I think that's very cool. I think Kristian would be very happy to hear this. The bass player and the drummer, they are a bit more rock'n roll than the guys we had before, more groovy, more straight. Johan Niemann, the old bass player, and the previous drummer were more of progressive rock players. The new guys have played in AC/DC-like cover bands, so their style is a bit more straight forward, but I think it suits Therion at the point we are now. Plus, they manage to do the old stuff excellent as well.

Studio Rock: A few words about the new album ["Sitra Ahra"] that you are going to release in September. It is mastered already, as far as I know. How do you feel about the final result?

Christofer Johnsson: Yes, the mastering is done by now, I am very happy with it. As always, every new THERION album is going to have such different reactions, since we change so much from album to album. "Gothic Kabbalah" was quite a big change so people had very strong opinions about that. Some considered it awesome, some crap. It is going to be the same, some will consider it the best thing we ever did, some will be disappointed because they expected some other direction. But in general I can tell you that we've been fooling you guys all these years. You have been listening to the kind of music that your parents used to listen to, it's just that we wrapped it in a way to fool you into thinking it is modern music. But in reality you are listening to the '70s rock. The new record actually sounds like the music we listen to. A lot of things influence me such that when I listen to it I just end up writing music. I even happen to steal things that I really like. For example, I stole from the '70s SCORPIONS and feels like a little tribute, especially when something is very good but you think it is very underrated and people don't understand how good it is. You take something, make a verse or the chorus out of it, or the intro. Like the song "Melez", for example, the beginning I stole from a song called "They Need A Million" from SCORPIONS' album "Fly To The Rainbow", 1974. At that time I was so much into '70s SCORPIONS. Some people found it hard to believe when I mentioned the influence.

Studio Rock: More about the album. You said you have started a trilogy or actually a quadrilogy.

Christofer Johnsson: Actually, with the "Gothic Kabbalah" it became a quadrilogy. Some of the songs are very old, even from 2000. I mean it's the same pool of songs we had for "Lemuria" and "Sirius B" that I started to write about the time after "Deggial". There are also a few songs that are new, since we took some of the existing songs and put them on "Gothic Kabbalah" instead, like "Adulruna Rediviva" and "Der Mitternachtslöwe". They were taken from this record and given the fact that "Adulruna" is so long, we ended up with much space for this album. Then we had four new written songs. We recorded fourteen songs and eleven made it on the record.

Studio Rock: Now you have a recording studio yourself?

Christofer Johnsson: Yea, it is made only for recording. I made it in a way that you cannot really mix there. You could but it wouldn't be good. I like to go somewhere else for mixing. The Polar studios were excellent and I don't think I'm gonna mix anywhere else, ever.

Studio Rock: Does the studio steal any of your time? Do you handle other bands there?

Christofer Johnsson: No, it's a private studio. Maybe if it had been like a favour or if I had a good producer with another band. I don't want to be a producer myself, but if I hear something that is fuckin' amazing and they would ask me, and if they had a proper budget… It would be very frustrating to work with a budget that you cannot do what you want with. I actually produced the new Therion record. It took a very long time, but I am very happy with the outcome. The whole production is made from a different perspective. The problem with THERION production is that you don't hear everything that I wrote. There are too many things. You come up with one thing, something else disappears, you put that back, and so on. It just raises the level of different things until you can't raise it any more. And in the end there will be things that I've spent weeks of working on details and you won't be able to hear on the record. There is not room for everything. So this time I worked from the perspective of having room. Not of getting the heaviest sound or whatever it took. It's more of a '70s-type of production. For some people it will take a while to get used to the production, because it doesn't sound modern at all. It sounds like 20 years old, sounds very analogue. It is not analogue, but we used any mean possible on the planet to make a digital recording sound analogue. Especially on the drums.

Read the entire interview from Studio Rock.