Ihsahn – interview met Ihsahn
Ihshan: “It is the most complex thing I have ever done. In the forest, when I was writing the music, I decided that I would write the orchestral elements in a way that it would support the metal production, but also that they would function in a way independently.”
Eén van de meest vernieuwende en steeds geïnspireerde muzikanten is zonder twijfel Ihsahn. Als jonge knaap richtte hij samen met Samoth Emperor op en verlegde de grenzen van toenmalige black metal in de jaren negentig. Maar inmiddels zijn we meer vertrouwd met zijn solocarrière. Op die manier brengt hij reeds het achtste studioalbum ‘Ihsahn’ uit en dat is een lijvig werkje dat grote bewondering afdwingt, want deze uitgave bestaat uit twee schijven. De metalen versie en de songs in orkestrale vorm. Deze uitdaging vergde heel wat doorzettingsvermogen en we hadden een bijzonder lang, hartelijk gesprek met de mastermind dat we hier samenvatten.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 1 maart 2024
How are you doing?
It is getting better and warmer here, because for a long time we had minus 20 degrees/ minus 25°. The downside is that the snow melts and then – as soon as it gets minus degree – everything becomes ice. It is really unpractical in regards to drive and everything, but fortunately we can always stay home (chuckles). We have our studios at home.
It is nice to talk with you again. We had the EP’s in recent years, but the last full length album was ‘Amr’ in 2018. Actually, why did you choose for EP’s for a while?
If I think back on the times after the ‘Amr’ album, I had some ideas. When we talk about the ‘Telemark’ EP, that was very old school prog band-ish and ‘Pharos’ was the opposite in a sense. I was kind of going into exploring the two extreme elements in my music. I felt that the two extremes were too kind of limited to think about a full album of it. EP’s are like a side dish, It can be a bit extreme, but you don’t want it as a main course. It made me reach out to some extremes and in some ways, I think, that prepared me to – more unconsciously than conscious – to the album that I have done now, which is very much down to the centre of what I have been doing since the beginning. This is like classic stories, classic black metal, expression, orchestral elements. Very down the centre if you will and why did it take so long? I think when I did the EP’s, I was supposed to be touring for these EP’s, but then we had the pandemic. The pandemic lend me the opportunity to produce, do some orchestrations, I did some remixes, I did other things anyways. Of course I also started writing this new album. It is the most complex thing I have ever done. In the forest, when I was writing the music, I decided that I would write the orchestral elements in a way that it would support the metal production, but also that they would function in a way independently. That was quite a puzzle and also a lot of other technical limitations that I put to myself, like playing the atomic chord progressions in its entirety and so on. In essence it took a long time and also I had, when the pandemic stopped, there was a lot of touring we had to make up for and then, in the middle of recording and arranging this album, I did these ‘Fascination Street Sessions’ EP in between. So it is not like I have been lazy. I delivered the masters of this album in the middle of April 2023. So it has been finished for a long while and then – because of the artwork and different videos – everything was taking a long time to complete all the pieces to finally present it.
Indeed, I noticed that you made videos for the metal and the orchestral versions of three songs… but let us focus a bit on that writing process. The info sheet says: ‘it all started with a piano’. What about the writing process of this album?
Just on the musical side, I decided to do this: incorporate an orchestral soundtrack within the context of a metal production. I wanted to write it in parallel and the only way I could pull that off – at least for my self-taught experience (laughs) – was just doing things one after another. It is not that the album is written on the piano, I’d love to be a good piano player, but I am not. I literally just use a piano sound in my program and write several things on top of that. One for bass lines, one for the chordle passages, one for melodies and contra-melodies, one for embellishment, so it is like drawing a sketch with just a piano sound, without relying on production or certain particular sounds. It is like making a big complex picture with a lot of detail, when you probably make a sketch of dark colours first and then you add the real colours. I built it up from that piano sound, adding different instruments, whether it is bass, strings, cellos or bassoon and build it up from there. It only made sense in that way to make sure that the musical core was good enough in itself and then colouring it.
There is a kind of story involved on the album. Did you write it after or before the music?
I was gathering my influences to create the conceptual ideas for the album. I wrote like a synopsis for a novel type of story, a very classic story and that created a certain emotional arch and that allowed me to create themes for certain archetypes and characters in the story and the development. That is why – if you pay attention – there are musical elements that reoccur throughout different songs, like it would be a movie soundtrack or something like that. Then of course I created the lyrics on the backbone of that story; like scenes of the story. You can listen to it without studying it and later you can go into details all the way (smiles).
Were you inspired by real things for this story or was it just a fantasy in your head?
I think however much we use our imagination, I think it is unavoidable to let your own personal experience and passions into what you create. I mean, there is nothing original in the elements that I have used. There is nothing original in using a symphony orchestra or a metal band or writing this kind of classic hero’s journey for the story, but of course it is just all expressed by the distorted lands of who I am, which we all do. We all express ourselves in this limited distorted land. I don’t know how to put it differently. And of course there are personal experiences into that, because in metal the general vibe is more universal and that is what I said about the story. It is not important that people understand my story, but hopefully there are enough archetypical elements in there to trigger people’s imagination for their own kind of version or interpretation of the story. I am sure you have experienced that before. If you reread a book that you read when you were younger, and experienced it in a certain way and then you read it many years later and your interpretation of that book is entirely different. It is all very subjective.
Most of the time disappointing when you read it again…
(laughs) Sometimes indeed. It is like rediscovering some old songs that you had really great memories of and then you hear them again and it is like ‘it was not that great hehe’. I have it in the same way with albums. If you kind of go back to some albums from years ago, I probably should have made other decisions, but then if I go even further back, it is so long ago that obviously you were someone else and you kind of accept them as testimonies of where you were. It is like old pictures of yourself, it brings up memories. The way I was feeling back then made sense that I was making music this way.
You have been working with your son, Angell. He did some percussion. Can you tell something about that?
It is fun that they put it in the press release (laughs).
Indeed, I thought that you will make you a proud father…
I am, on both my children I am very proud. There are both involved in small whispering parts or small percussion parts. He has done that before on previous albums and it has never been a big deal. We have several studio set ups in our house. They have grown up with it. With uncle Einar from Leprous and my mother in law runs the local musical things they are part of. Our family, we make a lot of music and of course my son is a drummer and for this album I had both Tobias Ørnes Andersen and Tobias Solbakk, my two drummers, who I think are probably two of the best drummers in Norway. And my son is a drummer. We had a session where they both were present and of course he was there. When they were doing the percussion parts, it made sense to involve him. It is all very much by coincidence and for us it feels natural. People should not make a big deal of it. (smiles)
What fascinates me is that you always have a kind of evolution, which is unpredictable, but still having your own sound, because now – even on the metal version – there are many symphonic layers.
This was really hard for me to do. I have been doing elements of this before and I tried to do some more untraditional harmony in the past, but this time I really wanted to go all in, a deep drive into the more typical film score language where you use more polychords and all the kind of scales that I associate with Jerry Goldsmith and Bernard Herrmann and all these kind of orchestral sounds. In essence I went into this project, I wanted to focus probably on some or the core elements that I have been doing since the beginning, but subjectively to myself, I wanted to elevate my level and I wanted the compositions to be deeper and more complex. Not complex in a sense of being strange time signatures and making it inaccessible and experimental, but like complex in intensity and layer. For me personally the most gratifying part of making this album is, at this stage of my career, being the one Ihsahn I am, to be in a position where I learn so much from the process. So that was extremely gratifying. It was a really tall order from myself and I regretted it sometimes, writing the orchestral parts to support the metal versions, that’s what I already did before, so I feel fairly confident about that it sounds okay in that respect, but from that to having an arrangement that would do that job but would also function independently, that is multiple time consuming and complex, at least for me. I don’t have a music education or anything… but I am very proud of what I achieved, given my subjective background in rock-‘n-roll.
Another challenge will be bringing this live… How do you see that?
As a consequence of writing this the way I did, this film score format, the interesting thing is that in the same way that the orchestral parts function on their own, I think there is not much that the orchestra plays, that the guitars don’t play and vice versa. All the music is basically there in all versions, so in principle I think I could easily perform these songs just without orchestra. Still they will be the same songs. Given the context of everything and the atmosphere I think people are very used to that, so I will bring the orchestral elements digitally. That is very typical now for live performances. There will be an emphasis on the metal part of things. Of course I have been asked if I would consider doing this with a real orchestra live, and of course nothing would make me happier, but there is the practical element and not at least the financial element. I did already some research and I think if you want to do it properly – and I think that is the only way of doing it – it would cost a lot of money. One of the challenges of doing this, was that I wrote it as if I was writing it for a real orchestra. Literally I printed out the score but we will see. I want to do it properly.
In the meantime we can look forward to some concerts in the metal version of this new album…
Yes we are working on that intensively and I will come to Graspop Metal Meeting with both bands: Emperor and Ihsahn, on the same day: Sunday.
That is something to look forward to!
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