[Interview conducted Jan. 20, 2010]

When it comes to seminal bands of the 1990s, it is hard to find many bands as influential as Emperor.  Their reach extended far beyond just the black metal underground that spawned them, finding admirers in all corners of extreme music and beyond.  Climbing out from a shadow as long as the one cast by Emperor is no mean feat but guitarist/vocalist Ihsahn has had critical success with his Peccatum and Hardingrock projects and particularly with his solo work.  Album number three, After, has just been unleashed and it is arguably the most progressive and diverse metal album he has done to date. 

Did you approach the writing and recording of After any differently than the first two solo albums?
Technically, it was very much the same procedures as my previous two albums.  What was different was more the concept.  I have a tendency to kind of sketch out some notes of what kind of album I want to make before I even start writing any music.  That’s what I’ve done with these three albums, so in that respect it’s similar.  It’s more the concept and what people I worked with and some technical aspects that have been different. 

How close was the final result to what you had initially sketched out for this record?
I think it came out better than I hoped for (laughs), in the sense that there were some nice surprises for me.  I guess it was a result of being more confident in my solo efforts, having done the previous albums.  It’s been easier for me to open up to impulses from others and also deciding early on to have Jens Bogren mix it.  There were also some nice surprises like the collaboration with Jorgen Munkeby on saxophone.  All of these elements are not so much in my control, so I get a more objective perspective to the whole album, rather than what I’ve done before where I play most of the instruments and also record it and mix it and all that - it becomes very subjective. 

The addition of saxophone on this record is quite cool.  Was that something that came along after the songs were written or did you have it in mind from the outset?
It came quite early on in the process.  With the concept being quite different from the first two albums, I wanted to continue this - I like to think of the three albums as a trilogy - to continue this tradition of having a guest soloist.  I had Garm from Ulver on the first one, Mikael from Opeth on the second one, I wanted to have a guest this time, too, but I didn’t want it to be a voice, with words, but still something quite personal and special.  The whole thing with saxophone is an idea I’ve had for quite a few years because I’ve always liked the sound of the saxophone and thought it would be cool at some point to incorporate that.  For this album and the kind of atmosphere I was going for, I think it was a good idea.  A bit risky (laughs), depending on who would play it.  I never wanted to use the saxophone for shock factor; I wanted it to blend in with the music the same way as a string arrangement and brass instruments before.  All in all, I think it worked out really well and the interpretation that Jorgen did was very much in line with what I wanted but also has some very nice surprises. 

Did you have more input from the other guys this time around?
On the first album, I programmed everything very specifically, all the drum parts and I wanted Lars to stick quite close to what I initially programmed.  This is all done over the Internet - Lars has played bass on both the last two albums and I’ve only met him once.  It’s more a matter of me sending the material and score and them making interpretations, sending MP3s back and forth.  But [this time], I’ve given them not so specific details of what I want them to do; I’ve given them more space for ideas that should come up during their work with it.  Heidi, my wife, has had probably the biggest influence in the sense that she has been my balance.  When you’re working with things for a long time like this, it easily gets very subjective and very technical as well, when you’re wearing all the hats, and sometimes it is very good to have someone there to tell you if it sucks or tell you if it’s good even if you feel it is all crap.  She’s always been involved but particularly with this album, with the concepts, she’s done all the pictures for the cover artwork and been very helpful in commenting and making suggestions for instrumentation and arrangements, vocal stuff.  As I’ve gotten more confident in myself, it has gotten easier to lend an ear, or borrow an ear.  

I’m just trying to imagine how much harder it would have been 20 years ago to put together an album like this, without the home recording technology and fast Internet.
Yeah, we probably couldn’t even do it or it would take much more time and resources.  The way I write music, now, it’s very much dependant on having my studio available.  It would not be very economic to do the whole album in Fascination Street. (laughs) 

Can you tell me a bit about the main themes that run through this album?  I didn’t get a lyric sheet with the promo.
The lyrics aren’t included with the artwork either and it’s kind of deliberate.  This is the first album I’ve done that didn’t include the lyrics in the layout, just fragments of lyrics really.  It’s kind of just to illustrate the atmosphere of the album.  The previous two albums were very concrete and direct and confrontational, very Nietzsche-inspired, and very in-your-face.  The title of my first solo album, The Adversary - that was pretty much all it was about, being very much in opposition.  But to end this trilogy, I wanted to go beyond the conflict part of it and look into the more abstract and lasting inspirations.  You know: what’s life underneath?  Hence, the concept for this album is much more symbolic and the lyrics deal very much with open landscapes, a lot of references to the sea.  The opening song is called “The Barren Lands,” so there is no sign of life in any of the lyrics, it’s more observations, more contemplations.  And musically, too, I think it’s an album that is much more at ease.  Like the last song on the album, “On the Shores” - from a technical and writing point of view, on my previous two albums, I probably wouldn’t end the album with two minutes of held repetition of two chords and saxophone over it.  But at this time, it just felt right to do that.  So in that sense, it is much more…  I just let the music kind of live its own life and haven’t been too technical about it. 

The vocals on After seem to mesh with the music more effectively than the first two records.  How much planning goes into the vocal lines?
I usually write all the musical material first and then I may have some idea of a lyrical concept that might adapt to that.  I usually then write lyrics for the song in particular and, when writing it, to make the rhythms fit, I kind of write in how the vocals will be.  So writing the lyrics and working out the vocal lines is very much part of the same process. 

Do you have any plans to tour for this record? 
I won’t be doing any traditional touring, but I’ve been rehearsing with my live band since the Christmas holidays and we’re looking to do quite a few summer festivals this year.  We’re already booked for Hellfest and Brutal Assault and Wacken Open Air and there’s more to come.  I’ve hired a full band called Leprous, they are a progressive band and have an album out there now called Tall Poppy Syndrome.  Half the band are previous students of mine, because I’ve tutored guitar and music, so they are young and eager and most of them are taking higher education within music.  I can rehearse at their rehearsal space and just send them a score - I tend to score everything that I write so that I can remember it myself (laughs) and I can just send them PDFs with the score or tablature or since I record everything and have all the files saved I can do special mixes for them so they can hear their part.  They can rehearse them and then when I come to rehearsal, we can just play the songs, they already know them. 

Is touring not feasible or just not something you enjoy doing?
I never really liked the traditional club-to-club touring, with drunken or stoned people all around and bad working conditions on all fronts.  The whole live thing, I had a bad relationship to the whole thing, but when we did the Emperor reunion gigs in 2006 and 2007, it was much more comfortable.  We had a proper crew and the working conditions were much better so you could focus on just doing the show in a proper way.  If I am going to be doing live shows with my solo band, that’s how I want it to be.  I kind of tried it out last year, doing a couple of shows before the summer, and it worked out really good.  I kind of like being in that position.  The first gig I did was as support for Opeth in Oslo.  Compared with the last Emperor shows we did…  people came to see Emperor, they knew what to expect and we played the songs that they wanted to hear, so that was a whole different thing and fun in a different way, but not so much of a challenge, there’s not so much to convince.  It’s kind of predetermined what is going to happen.  But I really like, and I guess it’s just in my nature, being into this type of music for so many years, I like being in kind of a challenging position.  There’s just something more inspiring to playing my new stuff to an Opeth audience, where the majority of the audience didn’t really know what to expect, so it takes more energy to try and convince.  It kind of puts you on the edge and I like that.  It also worked well due to the very talented live band that I have, which makes it all the easier for me. (laughs) 

The Hardingrock album was quite interesting.  Was that enjoyable change of pace, working on a project where you weren’t the main driving force?
Yeah, that was a really funny project to do on many levels really because Knut Buen came to us and just mentioned this idea.  He had this idea to fuse the Harding fiddle music with rock music since the 80s or something and he had this name for it, Hardingrock.  We gave him the last Peccatum album and…  he is in his 60s and had no clue about extreme metal or progressive music at all.  So he was very taken by the dynamic range, from the really quiet parts of just piano and electronics to the most extreme black metal parts.  The last Peccatum album was very diverse in that sense, so he really wanted to make an album like that.  It was really fun for me and Heidi because after Peccatum we were working separately, she was doing starofash and some film music and I’ve been doing my solo stuff, so this was kind of blending my metal stuff and her diverse stuff and his Harding fiddle.  It was a nice opportunity to work together for three people who usually work very much on their own.  Neither me nor Heidi have a very strong relation to Norwegian folk music and all that, but he is kind of a cultural institution himself in Norway, probably the most famous folk musician we have.  In a cultural sense, he’s very elite and we were very surprised to have him wanting to do this with us because we come from such different backgrounds.  But talking to him, he’s passionate and extremely intelligent - he’s like an encyclopedia of literature and philosophy, he’s read everything.  Many of these big Norwegian writers, he knows them, and the big Norwegian artists.  So his stories, his perspective on things, the best part was all the good conversations and finding how much we had in common.  We come from two different extremes of musical life, especially in Norway.  What we do, you know, electronic, instrumental music and black metal-related music and also Norwegian folk music, they are all on the outer borders of musical life in Norway.  We had very similar experiences in our musical life; it was just a very, very interesting project.  It was released on his label, it was just an experiment and we never thought that this would really… we had no commercial intentions at all. 

I recently interviewed Brendon Small and noticed you did one of the voices for Metalocalypse.  What was that experience like?
I was just kind of thrown into it really.  It was in combination with us being in Los Angeles.  The other guys in the band knew more about it than I did.  I think I had heard it mentioned but had no clue what it was all about.  I just knew it was some kind of cartoon and had the guy from Cannibal Corpse doing one of the main voices and it was very metal-related.  It was a fun thing to do and the guys who do it were really cool.  Also, the really conservative fans went crazy because it was absolutely ‘un-black metal’ to do cartoons.  That, in itself, almost proved the point: it’s all about not being dictated what you’re not to do.  I thought that was the whole point of what black metal was. 

Yeah, that mentality has always escaped me.
It’s a huge puzzle to me, too.  I get so many questions about like how will this or that fan base react to the use of saxophone.  I mentioned the word ‘love’ in one of the lyrics, in one of the titles on the first album - ‘What’s this?!’  I think I kept the attitude of black metal in that I do whatever the hell I want to, I try to be as honest with it as I can.  I think the moment that you even consider doing something else or listen to advice on what you could do or should do to keep within the borders of black metal, it’s not black metal anymore. (laughs) 

Do you have any plans yet for what’s next?  Will it be another solo record or something else entirely?
It all depends really.  It’s been a while since the album was finished - it was mastered in the first week of September - so much time has passed by, doing press and doing rehearsals preparing for live shows, I think my next move is really open-ended.  I will definitely do another solo album and it will probably be metal-related and continuing that, but at what point, it all depends on what happens next.  My wife and I do all our work under the Mnemosyne Productions umbrella and she’s already been doing, apart from all her albums, film music and music for media.  It all depends on what comes up first.  We’re always trying to expand our working realm in that sense, keep interesting projects going through here.  Maybe something else like Hardingrock, who knows. (laughs)

http://www.ihsahn.com
http://www.mnemosyne.no/productions