In The Woods… – interview met Kåre André Sletteberg
Kåre André Sletteberg: “This one was more natural. Everyone was involved. In The Woods… have always been about the people in the band, and it is a copy of who we are as a group. That was really important for us as well, to be able to do it that way.”
In 1995 openbaarde het Noorse In The Woods… het debuutalbum ‘Heart Of The Ages’ met een zeer merkwaardige benadering van black metal. Sindsdien hebben ze vijf andere albums uitgebracht en elke schijf was anders, telkens de creatie van die bezetting. Voor de eerste keer in hun illustere carrière hebben ze een album gemaakt met dezelfde muzikanten als op de voorgaande plaat en dat scheelt. ‘Otra’ blijkt een knaller van jewelste te zijn voor avontuurlijke muziekfans van atmosferische black metal. We praatten over dit veelzijdige werkstuk met gitarist/keyboardspeler Kåre André Sletteberg. Zo vernemen we meer over het album, de band en nog veel meer.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 17 april 2025
PERSONAL INTRODUCTION
Let us start with zooming in on you. You joined the band around the first comeback in 2014. Can you tell how you got involved into the band?
Me and Anders Kobro played at this small festival here in Kristiansand. We played covers. Then we just started talking. He kept asking me a lot of questions about music and about what I play and everything. We decided to talk on Monday, because that was a Sunday and we were on a festival. We talked and talked. I did not know it was about In The Woods… but we agreed that we should play together again. Then he called me and asked me if I wanted to be part of In The Woods…
You knew In The Woods… back then?
Yeah because the first time I moved to Kristiansand, I am from a little bit eastern here, coming here as a musician, you always ask about local bands and bands that are known from there. So it was always about Green Carnation, it was always about Blood Red Throne, it was always about In The Woods…
You are also a multi-instrumentalist, so Anders was lucky…
Yeah that was a bit later that I started to evolve with different instruments. Now I play guitar of course, both acoustic and electric, keyboards and bass guitar and a little bit mandolin.
In 2014 the decision was made to return with In The Woods… but there was some turbulence for years. The Botteri brothers left, the singer left and so on, but ‘Otra’ is the first album that you have made with the same line-up as the previous one… Did that change anything on the making of the album?
This one was more natural. Everyone was involved. In The Woods… have always been about the people in the band, but a lot of certain people have written the music for years. With ‘Otra’, the name of the new album, we all have written music and it is a copy of who we are as a group. That was really important for us as well, to be able to do it that way. We all contributed and we were all really happy about the music.
Anders is like a father watching over the sound…
(laughs) Yeah people think so, because he is the one from back in the days from the first albums and all over the years. I mean, I have been in this band now for ten years and we don’t think like that. If it is him or me or one of the other guys, it doesn’t matter. We all take care of each other, we are all really good friends and we all trust each other, so… Playing in a band can be really difficult.
Did you have experience with other bands before you joined In The Woods…?
Yeah, we played more classic rock-‘n-roll almost, that was the band I spent most of my time with and that is how we met because I played in this rock-‘n-roll band and that’s how I got dragged in to play these cover songs and how I met Anders.
OUT IN THE FIELDS
One of the highlights in 2024 was your concert at Prophecy Fest. How do you look back on that happening?
We were stuck in traffic for hours! We were supposed to be there really early, to have a lot of time to say hi to people and to prepare, we arrived one hour before we were supposed to be on stage. So we arrived, we ate some food and it was just like ‘okay we have to go on stage’. I didn’t have time to see the cave before, so I go on stage and just see all the people and the big cave. Wow! This is amazing, I thought and the Prophecy guys were so professional and so good. They do such a good job for that festival!
It is also my favourite festival of all festivals…
I came down there and I had some food and still 45 minutes before stage time… usually 45 minutes before a gig, I have to prepare myself. I change my clothes, I start warming up… but I was just standing there talking to Arthur Brown (laughs) That was all I could do. I had to talk to him and we had a long conversation. That was really beautiful. I was supposed to get ready, but I think that was the best I could do that moment. We stayed a little bit after our gig. I watched Arthur Brown’s set and they make these books for Prophecy Fest where every band has a page. So we signed those pages and albums there. We did that and then actually we went to the hotel, because we had to go to the Netherlands the next morning.
2024 was a rather calm year for In The Woods… but did you play a lot live in 2023?
I think we started in 2022 again after the pandemic. We played a few concerts here and there. In 2023 we also played a few shows here and there and then we played in South American that was the first time for In The Woods… We started in Mexico and did Brazil, Chile and Argentina. We come home, we were home for ten days and then we went on tour five weeks in Europe. So 2023 was really busy. In January 2024 we started to record ‘Otra’. That is why we only played at Prophecy Fest and we played a concert in the Netherlands, in Zwolle.
Soon you will play at Inferno Fest now I guess?
Yes we are going on tour, so we start at Inferno Fest. Then we go to Austria and play at the Dark Easter Metal Meeting in Germany. Then we play at Nummirock festival, finally again, and then we play a few shows in France, like in Lyon. It is going to be a nice one, that tour. It was good with a year break (chuckles), but the album was a lot of work. It took over one year before it was done. That was good for us. We recorded everything in Kristiansand, drums in a different studio over here and then Frédéric Gervais in France did the mix and mastering. It was his third album with us. He made the sound exactly how we wanted it. Kind of metal and mellow and on the single we released today there are over ten guitars in there somewhere. There is something happening all the time, it is really cool.
THE ALBUM
What about the album title ‘Otra’ and the lyrics?
‘Otra’ is the name of a river, the biggest river in the Southern part of Norway. It ends here in Kristiansand. When we talked about deciding the name of the album, we did not know what to do. The two last records had really big names, like ‘Cease The Day’ or ‘Diversum’, but we thought it was maybe time to bring it all home, to bring this a little bit closer to where we are, to what influences us. So then we decided on using the name of our local river that we all know so well. Just to bring us back home from all those wacky names.
What is very typical for Kristiansand?
Right now it is really boring. There is too much mainstream clubbing and things like that going on. Unfortunately there are no good festivals left and there’s little places to go and watch good music unfortunately. Something happened. One place closed down and someone never opened a similar place. In the past you could go any day of the week and you met people. You don’t have that anymore. Things have changed a lot.
It surprises me, in Norway, the epicentre of black metal!
Yeah it was, but it is not anymore. It changed so much. In the last ten years, things have changed so much. We used to have places we could go and meet people and talk about music. We can still do that today, but it is more private. It is in a property and you have to plan it, it is not like you can get out and meet someone anymore, because you don’t know where to find them because there is no specific location anymore.
There are a few guest musicians on the album. What can you tell about them and their contribution?
We have Alf Erik Sørensen. He is the brother of our guitarist Bernt Home Sørensen and he did a lot of keyboards on ‘Diversum’ as well. A really good musician, he is really old school type of keyboard player. When you record, today you can cheat, but he doesn’t want that. He is the old school way, a really nice guy. He helped us a lot. On one song we have keyboards from a Mexican guy called Hector Montero. He is a friend of mine. We met on line and we did one album together in a different project. When In The Woods… played in Mexico, we were able to meet him. When I wrote the one song on the album where he plays on, I couldn’t delete the keyboards that he wrote for that song. So they stayed in there. It is a funny story.
Talking about stories, what can you tell about the stories on the album?
If you see the album title ‘Otra’ you should think there are a lot of stories connected to that title, but the songs are about life, things that happen, things you go through and things you don’t want to go through. The album name is more of a statement of us being home. This is the first time the band, the same musicians recording two albums in a row, as you mentioned and for us it was really important to use a local known name to put that statement out. The stories of the songs are about life, about things that happen. Emotions like love, sins, you can mention it all, it is all in there.
I have written down that ‘A Misrepresentation Of I’ had to do with a battle you have with yourself…
These last years – for everyone I think – have been really hard and tough, the last five, six years. They were really tough for everyone. It is about a battle with yourself, like do you want to keep doing things or do you want to change? It is about breaking out from what we don’t want to do.
VISUALS
At the moment there are two video clips out. The first one was ‘A Misrepresentation Of I’ and that showed the band in the video and that is a good presentation of the band. There were some mixed reactions on the sound, that is funny.
When we decided that we wanted to do ‘A Misrepresentation Of I’ as the first single and the first video, we knew already then that it would cause reactions, because it is in the title, it is a misrepresentation so to speak. It is always really funny for us. Let us take for example the first three albums ‘Heart Of The Ages’, ‘Omnio’ and ‘Strange In Stereo’. They are three completely different albums and somewhere along the road a lot of the old school fans of In The Woods… have forgotten it. If you consider: three records, three different bands on those three records. We get a lot of credit for In The Woods… today and it is okay, we don’t care about the negatives and that’s why we did ‘The Misrepresentation Of I’ as first single, more like a statement of who we are, instead of a statement of who we want to be, because the album has a lot of black metal elements in it, it has a lot of doom, it is a really diverse album, but we really wanted to shock everybody with that first one and I think we did.
That is smart. Then you have the attention of people, which is important because people are shallow these days…
They are and people are really weird these days. They seem to forget that In The Woods… is a really complicated band, a lot of members, a lot of people being involved and people did not say this with ‘Pure’ for example because the Botteri twin was there. With ‘Cease The Day’ it was a bit different. With ‘Diversum’ there was a new singer, but it still kept being the story of In The Woods… The story of In The Woods… is still untold, so let us keep on telling and telling and telling and telling, which is really important for us. The really good diehard fans we have today, they can see that this is what we do. They don’t care about who sang on the three first albums or on the last albums. It is about the music and the stories been told, about the story not ending. We are not finished now. We will probably do another one. We get a lot of positive comments as well, probably more than negative ones, but it is more the negative ones that get the attention. You can take so many bands as example where things have changed, but for some it is just harder to accept.
Yesterday there was a new video for the song ‘The Things You Shouldn’t Know’. This one features the melancholic feeling of the band which is rather present in every song… What can you tell about it?
This song is an older song that was written five or six years ago. We were first taking it in consideration now, because we were looking for stuff and ‘what can we record and what not?’ This song had the potential to do what we wanted now. The lyrics… for me or for the band it is very hard to sit down and explain lyrics. We feel that we can write lyrics and we feel what they are, but it is up to the listener to decide what is actually going on. We did some fun with the video where we sent a lot of pictures from our phones. It is just a lot of bad photos from chats or from being on tour or whatever. It is the backstage life and the meaning of the title. The things you shouldn’t know. (laughs) I think it is a really cool song, it brings back a lot of the slow black metal, atmospheric black metal stuff.
The photos are in sepia, that makes it very archaic and that suits with the artwork…
Yes of course, that was the plan. (laughs)
Who is Seiya Ogino from Ogino Design who did the artwork and layout?
The three albums we did lately was with the same designer. It was Dr. Winter from Austria and we found that we needed some change for the next one. So we got in touch with Ogino Design, it is from Japan. He did a really good job and the good thing is that these days, you get a lot of artworks that are artificial pictures, made on a computer, but when you hold this album in your hands, every page on the album is a physical picture taken with the subject of being close to home. The main cover is a photograph I took myself, and we used it into the cover art which is really cool.
FUNNY KNOWLEDGE
In the beginning In The Woods… claimed to be a pagan metal band, is that true?
Yeah that was the first album. Back then they just… with ‘Omnio’ they became something else. The lyrics are not religious in any kind, but the last four or five records are about life. On the first one it was about paganism, it was about nature and mother nature is the healer of everything, all that stuff. I guess metal archives should probably be updated. It is really hard to put a genre on the band though. Well, we just play heavy metal. I cannot label it, it is really hard to put it, maybe alternative black metal.
In the beginning they showed woods instead of pictures of band members and that caused a lot of fuzz…Is that true?
That is about the audience change. In the 21st century you have to show the faces or at least the contour of faces to be able to do something. I think this was really mysterious and really cool in the nineties, but it does not work today, because of social media and everything. Unfortunately. It would be nice to have not my face out there, but we have to.
There are band that use masks…
Yes of course and these bands build it up, it is a mysterious thing. You cannot just say ‘I am wearing a mask’, that would be strange.
I remember being very disappointed when seeing Kiss Unmasked.
I never saw them live though. I just saw Ace Frehley live.
Are there still other bands you regret not to have seen in their best era?
No, because of the year I am born and everything like that, I am just happy that I can listen to the music, but there is one band, or two bands I really wish I could have seen or at least talk to some of the guys. For me Agalloch is really important, American band, right? And they played at Prophecy Fest the year before we did and it was like a big reunion. I thought: ‘oh my God, I got to go’, but I couldn’t. We haven’t crossed path with them or anything and the other band is Canadian: Woods Of Ypres. They are really, really cool. They move me somehow, I don’t know how but it is just so good.
I wish you a great time on the road to support ‘Otra’…
Yes, we are looking forward to the April tour with SAOR. That’s a great band. Unfortunately it does not cover the Lowlands, but we hope to tour again in Autumn and cover different areas then. We definitely want to come back to Belgium and the Netherlands.
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