Founded in 1995, Borknagar have always stood apart somewhat from the black metal community that ostensibly spawned them, with frontman Øystein G. Brun so convinced of the band’s potential that, upon leaving molested, he simply wrote the material, gathered together a remarkable supporting cast of musicians (including members of Gorgoroth, Immortal, Enslaved, and Ulver), and demanded Malicious Records sign the project, which they duly did. So much for history. To date, Borknagar have released twelve albus, with each one evolving the band’s sound, taking in black metal, folk, and progressive elements, forging a truly unique sound in the progress.
With the band’s latest offering, Fall (reviewed here), making quite a stir, and deservedly so, we caught up with Øystein in his home studio. A gregarious host, he considers each question carefully, before launching into a detailed response. Calm and courteous, he also laughs often, despite some of the heavier themes touched upon in the interview, digging into the history and influences of Borknagar, the magic of music, and the recording process of Fall along the way.
Good evening, sir.
Good evening, thank you so much for joining me.
No problem, thank you for having me.
I had a great plan for this interview, and then I started looking at previous interviews you’d done, and it caused me to change direction a little. So, I read an interview where you talked about one of your favourite bands being Pink Floyd, and you specifically talked about the song High Hopes, and one of the things I was fascinated by is that it’s a very visual song, in terms of the lyrics and the slow, steady music, and it makes perfect sense to me that that song would resonate with you, in the sense that I’ve always seen the music of Borknagar as very elegant and very visual.
Oh yeah, to me High Hopes is, objectively speaking, the best song (or even subjectively), but I just love the sweet and sour feeling of having “high hopes”. I think that is one of the most brilliant songs in the world when it comes to this kind of duality. It has this nostalgic, profound feeling to me at least, yet still there is a glimmer of hope. There is an optimism, but it’s pitch black in my opinion.
I don’t know, maybe it’s an emotional thing, but when my father passed away and we had the burial, we wanted to play a couple of songs at his funeral and one of those was High Hopes, and that was my decision. And, you know, he was a big fan of Pink Floyd and, to me also, there’s a side of it that kind of connects. My whole musical upbringing and my musical childhood was laid out by him – he was a huge collector of LPs back in the day – he was even importing a bunch from the UK because we weren’t able to get a hold of all the albums, especially the rare albums, in Norway and especially not in Bergen. So, he was importing boxes of LPs, I remember, and then he would record them on to these big tape rolls that we had back in the day and, yeah [chuckles], resold them in order to fund new investments.
So, yeah, I guess in all this, High Hopes is one of those highlights, maybe – so it’s both a musical and a personal thing for me. And yeah, what I appreciate is this excellent way of how they are able to project the very sad and nostalgic vibe, but still there is something uplifting about it.
I don’t really find the best words for it I guess, but to me the duality, the sweet and sour feeling of the song is one of a kind.
And to me, there’s another connection as well, because the artistry of Pink Floyd as a band was that they tried things that were new to them and they weren’t comfortable with – so, whether it was the suitcase synth or the Household Objects project (some things worked better than others)… the idea, for me, as an artist is to try to push yourself outside of your comfort zone and do something different and it’s that spirit I hear in Borknagar as well, where always, there’s something new in every album. There’s evolution and growth, and that’s where the artistry sits for me.
Oh yeah, and I totally agree. That is my musical mindset in a sense, and that makes music interesting and alive to me. That is also music that I find interesting myself as a music lover. And when we’re rehearsing, when I’m doing music, that’s my musical or visionary goal. Whether I achieve it or not, I don’t know – others have to judge – but I’ve always had this very visual relationship to music myself.
When I’m listening to Pink Floyd, or other bands of course; I’ve always had this kind of idea about music being something moving forward, something expanding. Almost to me, it has this shape of a life – you know – it’s like life. You start some place, and you end up in another place, it’s a very human thing to lean forward and to explore. You’re curious and all that stuff. To me, that is the essence of being a human being. People should do whatever they want musically and otherwise of course, but to me… yeah, to make music alive, it has to lean forward somehow, it has to mirror life somehow, it has to have all these facets of life – the rainy days, the sunny days, the sorrow, the hate, but also the love. All the things that kind of… it’s a part of life basically, and I don’t know.
Maybe it’s childish, I don’t know, but I’ve had this idea, basically since I started the band, I wanted to make this drifting music as a bubble that is unique in that sense – that is only us. There is no limitation, there is no trend. We’re not dependent on trends or anything like that. We’re kind of floating our own way without any kind of bonds to the music industry or trends or whatnot – at least that’s the mentality, that’s what I try to do with my music. That’s my standing in all this. Whether we have succeeded or not, I don’t know. But that’s what we’ve tried to do.
It’s interesting because, when you take that approach, there’s going to be a core sound that you stay tethered to, but you can then stretch that in lots of different directions. So, with Borknagar, there’s some extremity, but also folky sounds and ambient moments, so you’re sort of colouring in the gaps between genres to create your sound.
Well, that’s another scenario. I spend a lot of time, maybe more than people think sometimes, making mental maps of music and I also have that when I listen to music. I have a very visual relationship when I listen to music somehow. It’s a weird thing, but it’s me, and when I’m doing music, I want this… again maybe a bit of a cheesy way of putting it [laughs], but I kind of picture myself walking through the forest or the mountain, and there are a lot of different elements going on there. And it’s different from day to day.
I have a route going to the mountains here and I’ve probably walked it a thousand times in my life, with my father and later on without my father, and now with my son. And I know this place so well. I know every stone, I know everything almost, and that is the clue, because it’s always a little bit different. There’s always different lighting or a different bird circling around – those things – and those kind of natural or human (call it whatever you want) imperfections, give that complexity, that kind of unpredictable aspect to nature.
That’s something I sort of want in my music. There should be some rocks and stones and hard stuff going on, but there should also be some leaves waving in the air. Again, I know it sounds a little silly, but it’s the way I kind of map out my music or think about my music. And I guess over the years we have learned to master our craft I guess and yeah, it is what it is, basically.
And I really try to, rather than be an entertainer and being a guy playing a guitar in front of a bunch of guys – I try to be musically adventurous – kind of inviting people onto a musical journey in a sense. And there should be ups and downs. There should be challenging parts and easy parts. There should be beautiful parts, but there should also be untamed wildness – this unpredictable, scary, or ominous or whatever you want to call it element of nature. And I’ve always had this very deep fascination about nature and, again, this sweet and sour thing in life. Nature is so beautiful in all its glory, but at the same time so damn brutal and merciless – like if the weather changes or anything like that.
So, this duality of life and duality of the forest; of the nature. It’s something I want to bring into my music. I think it makes it way more human and way more organic and way more inviting. It’s kind of a universal thing, I think. It doesn’t matter where you come from, your religion, or politics or whatever – I try to play on this very human, universal sense. So, yeah, I firmly believe that music should be beyond and above anything in politics and religion and all that, so it has this universal kind of approach or attitude, or something like that.
I really like that perspective and I was speaking with an artist about two weeks ago who’s an ethnomusicologist. And he was talking about how, in his view, music started out as a form of connection – it predated language – and it was a survival tool and a way of bringing people together with a kind of innate spirituality. Not in the sense of organised religion, but in terms of communing with nature and communing with each other and communing with something inside yourself, and I think that’s still… when you take away the more commercialised aspects of music, that spirituality is a key factor and what connects music listeners around the world.
Yeah, definitely. I think that music is some sort of token of humanity. It’s a big, important piece of what humanity is about. A lot of other stuff that we do in this world, like buildings and bridges and whatnot, it’s kind of a thing – It’s something you build with bricks or whatever. But, with music, in my opinion, and again, maybe it sounds a little childish [chuckles], but it comes from nothing. Of course, I have my instruments and all that. I have my stereo system and all that. But, at its core, music is nothing but wavelengths.
And, on the flip side of it, it kind of amazes me, especially over the years as I’ve grown older and had kids myself – I see the word a little bit broader maybe. I guess – travelling around and meeting fans and all that and seeing the awesome impact music has around the world on people’s lives – I see the unifying force it is. It doesn’t really matter what language you speak, or even if you understand one another, but you kind of meet on the same ground with music no matter what, and I think that is a very beautiful thing about music.
Otherwise, when I did my bachelor’s degree whenever it was – twenty years ago – I was actually looking at music therapy. That’s kind of alternative thinking is a little bit – a little bit spiritual and all that. And I’m a hardcore atheist – that’s always been me, but I still believe that we humans – because of our brains and all that, the way that we think and the way we’re able to predict the future, I think music is so important. The rhythm in it and the melody in it, it’s the foundation for language. It’s the foundation for everything basically,
So, I think yes, I think music is an extremely important part of humanity in that sense. And we all know, for example – there are quite solid studies that people with dementia… I had a grandmother with dementia, and she wasn’t able to talk at all at some point. And of course it was horrible, but she was still able to sing and keep up a melody, no problems at all. And it’s the same when people die – the last thing that actually disappears is the hearing. So, it gives us all pointers that the whole thing about music and melody and rhythm is such an important thing. I mean the heart – when we are born, we are born with a quite high heart rate, but it kind of beats slower and slower across the years, and eventually it stops – but its symbolic and even scientific. We have a lot of pointers that music is such a profound thing that we do, so to speak.
Thank you for such a detailed answer – I find this topic really interesting, and I like the idea of music coming from areas outside of music itself, because we can talk about bands that we like, and bands that have influenced us, but it’s more interesting to me when we think about landscapes and nature, and the journey that we travel, because that’s when we start to get music that is unique and has an artistry of its own, and that’s something I’ve found in a lot of the artists I like the most.
Yeah, for me, it’s almost… if you ask about my car – I get my inspiration to buy my car because a neighbour has the car, or someone advised me to buy the car because it’s a good car [laughs]. But it doesn’t decide how I want to spend my time in the car or what kind of road trip I’m doing, so it’s… for me, music is some kind of vessel in this world. Of course, the instruments I use are based on old technology, and it has evolved, and I use guitars and of course we are inspired by metal and black metal and all that stuff, but for me and the creative process of it, when people ask me, I can’t point at anything musical. It’s rather life itself inspires me – the things that are happening around us. Of course, not directly, because I don’t want to… I’m not a news supporter or anything like that, so I try to leave out politics and religion and all that – and, again, music should be above and beyond, but still of course we are influenced by the world we live in, what we see and my concerns about the future for my kids. I don’t care about myself anymore. Ten – twenty more years, I’m good! [Laughs] But I really want my kids to have a good future. Of course, that has some influence on the music, and I think, to me, life is the main source of influence when it comes to music and, again, back to my ideas about music as such a human token or construction or whatever.
To come back to Fall, conceptually (and I know you don’t like to be too explicit), but I believe that in the main it’s connected to these ideas that we’ve been discussing and that one of the central themes is the brevity of existence and trying to aspire within the time allotted to you, and the savagery of nature around that, is that right?
Yeah yeah, definitely. But there’s a lot of layers to it. Even the title has layers to it and that’s how we like to do stuff. I mean, it should be open for people to dig in and dig deep if they want to, but they can also hang around, drink some beer, and have the music in the background of course – that would also probably work [laughs]. But, you know, I try to have some depth to my music and, you know, I think it’s kind of cool. You know, back in the day, Alfred Hitchcock, he always had a kind of scene with himself in his movies, just walking by or crossing the street or something like that. And that kind of idea I always loved, so you’ll find a lot of links between the albums in terms of visuals, lyrics, and the music of course.
The point is, it’s quite complicated and there’re a lot of layers and I think that, at one point, there’s a main line through the whole thing. I mean, we use nature as the main scope – the scenery of everything. Of course, on different songs we have different approaches and different ideas. I’d say there isn’t really anything new under the sun on this album, lyrically speaking, but we have a new approach on it, and I think that the main focus on Fall is… it’s hard to say, but it’s kind of about this duality in life. This fall, this great fall – the fall of man, you know, the change, people tend to fear change. If new things happen around people, it scares them off. And also, the fall of man…
And then, also, we have this dimension with falling water – it’s a very destructive force. I love the symbolic duality of that. Falling water or crushing water will eventually grind up every stone and every mountain on this planet, at some point in the far distance, but it’s also… we’re so dependent on water. We cannot live or survive without water. So, this waterfall thing to me is very symbolic of the extreme duality of life, this sweet and sour, this beauty and the beast kind of thing.
So, yeah, there are different layers, and it depends on, a little bit, how you look at it, to be honest. But that’s the way we want to do it, because we want to leave the door open for people to just join us – come in and you can dig however you want to. Or you can just surf along and keep it easy, of course. But there is a lot of… if you want to sit down with headphones and dig into the lyrics and the music, there is a lot of room for that, and I think that kind of musical depth or quality, or whatever you want to call it, to me that’s very important also as a music lover myself.
When I listen to Pink Floyd, they get me in a mood or in an emotional state that nothing else on this world gives me. It’s very personal, even though they’re one of the biggest bands in the world – it’s a very common band, everyone knows about Pink Floyd. Even so, I have a very intimate relationship with some of the songs of Pink Floyd, and again that duality, the beauty of the music, that is kind of… in my world, magic – even though I’m a hardcore atheist! [Laughs]
In terms of the process of making the album, you’ve got two of, probably, the best singers in this field and, if I understand correctly, when you start the process of who’ll sing what, you go through the material, and they identify the songs they connect with?
Yes and no. To some degree. Of course, we have to plan stuff because we have responsibilities to the label and the studio, so we need to have a schedule. But otherwise, we actually try, and I really try to keep some of the unpredictability of the whole process of it. We kind of leave the door open a little bit for stupid ideas, or mistakes even. Some stuff we have done in the past, I think even on Fall, it’s wrong – but damn, it’s cool! So, we keep it.
To me, the whole process of being creative is adjusting during the process of it – those musical Kodak moments. If you have a feeling. If you get something on tape that works, it feels weird because you didn’t expect or plan something like that. But then, in the second listen you realise there’s something cool about it, and on the third listen you know it’s cool, and on the fourth listen you realise you have to keep it. And that’s what I mean by challenging yourself musically.
Sometimes I do, with full intent, create weird riffs. I want something that is off – that completely derails the whole song sometimes, and that’s the way I think. And it can sound weird, it can sound crazy, but during the process of creating stuff and arranging stuff and, of course, producing stuff, the pieces kind of melt together in a way and give this, I don’t know how to say it, this diversity and liveliness in my opinion. And sometimes it is important to take the dangerous path, not always the safe path – to risk something a little bit.
For example, we did the song called Wild Father’s Heart, and we did that sitting here in my studio – the vocals – and I was outside, just hanging around enjoying the weather or whatever and talking about the song and we had this idea that, of course, we could do a typical Simen vocal on the verse, and we kind of knew that that would work out and people would love it – Simen doing his stuff. But then we decided to try something we hadn’t done before and so Simen decided to try to do a little bit more of a vocal style that he’d never really done before. So, it’s a kind of a risk, a musical risk, but if you don’t play, you don’t win. You have to try, you have to lean forward, you have to push yourself a little bit – to challenge yourself and, yeah, that’s what we try to do.
Do you have a process for how you approach the songwriting on the albums?
Actually, that varies a little bit. I have my routine. I’ve done it for so many years – most of my adult life I’ve been sat around playing riffs and recording riffs. Very often, I spend quite some time and, again, it’s this visual side of music – I sort of map out the music for myself. I have different ways and people sometimes ask me how it works, and I can’t really answer it because I can’t put words on it. It is shapes, it is colours, it is grains, it is nuances, that give a kind of persona to the songs, and then I kind of sit down and, yeah, lay down some riffs, record some riffs and try to find the right thing. Then it takes me, for example, writing a song – that might take me two days, three days, a week maybe, to actually write the song. The basics don’t take long anymore because I’ve done this so many times. But I really spend a lot of time, when I have the demos, when I have the sketch going on, I spend shit loads of time producing, in a sense – adding melodies, adding details, trying out different guitar sounds, amp tones and whatnot. So, let’s say that writing an album takes a month, and then I spend half a year re-producing the album afterwards in a sense.
That’s kind of how it has evolved over the years. That has also been my intention, because in the early years I was at times frustrated, because I have this very crisp and clear vision of my music and what I want to achieve. But, as a musician at that time, you always depended on a studio, the gear, the budget you had in the studio, whether the engineer in the studio had a good or a bad day [laughs] – all those things.
So, very early in my career, I had this idea that I wanted to have a much firmer grip on my music in a sense, so the music that I put out – that the music we have done – is actually what people get to listen to. If I was a painter, I’d probably paint some mountains and forests and I’d put it on a wall and people would actually touch what I had been doing with my hands. You can’t have that with music in the same way, but that has been my drive – so, I’ve spent shit loads of time and money to establish for myself a really high-end studio here to have the possibility to marry me as a musician and as a producer.
So, to me, these things kind of float with each other in a way. Sometimes, it might work a little bit differently, sometimes it can be just some keyboard notes that is the whole foundation, or an effect, or a sample that gives me the starting point. Then the question is how it would work if I placed a riff on it. So, I don’t know, I guess the answer is I just do it, I don’t think too much about it anymore. To me, that is also a little bit of the whole magic of music and keeping the passion for music – just letting it flow. Just do it! Just daring to jump out with whatever idea you have and just do it and try it and don’t give up in the first run. Very often I sit down to do a riff or an arrangement or whatever, and it’s like “what the fuck? This doesn’t sound good at all!” Then, I leave it for a couple of days, I come back, and I start to realise that maybe if I do something different or change something, it’ll be different.
So, yeah, it’s a lot of hard work, that’s what my “simple” answer is [laughs].
It is, and I think that that’s the exciting part – there’s a sense that there’s always an exploration in your music and that’s what attracts me to it because it has that spontaneity to it, like you’re surprising yourself as you go along and, as an artist and a musician, these are the things that make it exciting and give that passion and give that feeling.
Yeah, and also, I think it has something to do with… there is a lot of science. The human brain is a beautiful thing, but it’s also trying to preserve energy in a sense, so the human brain takes a lot of short cuts.
So, we know for a fact, for example, that a lot of the big hits in the world are three-minutes long, which is pretty much the focus that a human being has when listening to one song, you know. But I kind of try to confront this a little bit. How can I do music that keeps your brain awake through ten-minutes, for example. And I think if you pass this three-four-minute song, you need to be aware of what you’re doing, you need to add some dynamics or something progressing or something going on that keeps the listener on the journey in a sense. So, I guess we use some tricks, some psychoacoustic tricks that make people… that tickle you in the ear a little bit [laughs] with some details.
It’s complicated though, I spent thirty years crafting this and doing this, I don’t know, it’s very complicated, but I have all these thoughts and ideas about how to do it and, well, it seems to work somehow.
On that note, thank you very much indeed for being so generous with your time and for talking through these things with me, it’s been a pleasure.
Thank you, man, and thank you for the support and everything, it’s been a pleasure.
Borknagar’s Fall is out now via Century Media
