No, when we started the band we didn't have any idea or didn't give that too much thought. We were just really excited about forming a band and making the music that we wanted to hear ourselves. That was the goal all the time and I think it's been very gradual. We've never been a band that focused too much on fans and publicity or anything like that. We focused on the music so it's the other way around. It's more like the fans and the publicity have come along as a result of the music that's been there. It's been gradual and it's still as fun playing in a band and that's what counts. It's our life.

It seems like every record you guys put out is an improvement on the previous one. What do you attribute that to? Do you just experiment with each record?

Thanks. I think that one of the key factors for Enslaved is that as much as we enjoy very much what we're doing, as I said this is our life, at the same time I think we have a very healthy self-criticism. I think we always put as much pressure as possible onto ourselves and when things are going good, we take that as motivation to work harder and see if you can make it better the next time instead of using it as a sort of pillow or as a crutch. Sometimes it can be tempting to lay back a little bit when you feel that you've done something good and relax and enjoy. That's been the best for us. Just start over again every time and if there are things we're happy with, we just use that for motivation and if we feel that something needs to be improved, there's no reason to feel bad about it. Let's just get out there and try to do something with it.

Have you at any point looked back on some of the music that you've released and felt like you could have improved on it or do you feel a good sense of satisfaction with every release that you've put out?

It's both actually or neither. I think it's somewhere in the middle of those two. There are things about every album I think that we see in retrospect and think "okay, we could have spent more time on that" or "that thought should have been excluded" or something. At the same time the albums are capturing how we felt about our own music and how we felt in the studio. What we did right there and then and that needs to be preserved that way. I think it was meant to be understood like it was. I don't think bad about anything we've recorded actually. I think it's different but at the same time stuff we recorded in '93, that's 13 years ago and of course it's going to sound a bit different from how it sounds now. We had only existed for two years when we recorded our first album so it has its flaws but I find them rather correct for the time in a way.

You guys have had a lot of lineup changes in the 13 years you've been together. Is it really difficult to keep the same people in the band or is it your rigorous touring schedule that causes people to come and go?

It's very demanding to go into a band that's been around for such a long time. Actually, yeah the first release was 13 years ago but the band started before in '91. Some 15 years that we started the first lineup and we had a steady lineup from '91 to '95. That was after the first world tour we did with both Europe and North America and even a trip into South America. We'd been touring extensively for the whole year and that finished the first face of the band and we wanted to move on and the drummer changed. That was the first time we changed a lineup. Then as you say, we've changed quite a lot. We've had three drummers before the one we have now. We've had one guitarist before the one that's in the band now and we've added a keyboard player which we never had before. I think we've had a very clear vision about this since day one. Me and Grutle the singer, he's the other original member. When it comes to music, the lyrical concept, hard work, and how we want the band to appear sort of in the world. We have certain things that we feel that we should focus on as a band and some things that we should avoid focusing on and et cetera. It's quite demanding for someone to go into a band that's been around for let's say 10 or 15 years and adapt to all these rules that we don't think about anymore but that's grown around the band. We've been easy about it. We've tried a lot of different solutions and when we come to a point where people cannot dedicate themselves enough to the band, then there's nothing to really think about. You just have to cut it off before it turns into a personal thing. I think if early on you see and say this stuff isn't really working and agree about that, then it's okay and we're great friends with all our ex-members. I think the problem is if you try too hard and too long to fix something that's really impossible to fix, that's when it eventually just turns sour and people get into fights. That's my experience.

Yeah, I think that's really sad when people don't part on good terms and there's a lot of animosity. I think that's a terrible thing.

It is a terrible thing considering that you've been in the band and being in a band as far as that can go between friends, it's very intimate in which everybody is really dependent on each other. For a band to be successful, everybody has to give it the fullest and all that. Yeah, it's quite bad to see when people have been working so close together for many years and then talk shit about each other in magazines and stuff like that. That's pathetic and sad.

I remember before Dimebag got shot that Phil Anselmo and Dimebag and Vinnie were shooting barbs at each other back and forth in magazines and it was pretty childish.

Yeah, and it didn't end very well either.

No, it didn't.

Horrible. It's probably one of the best illustrations that people should keep that within the walls of the home or something.

It ended in a tragic situation and a whole bunch of people wishing they hadn't said some of the shit that they said. I think that particular situation is a good example for people to live by. Don't ever get yourself into a situation like that.

Exactly.

When you put out your album Isa which is the one you did before this one, I read that you received raving reviews in all territories except Finland obviously. What did you mean by that?

That's more or less a joke. I think that's a generalization but it's some truth. It was very obvious we had some extremely good reviews all over the world and it was just funny because one of the guys at the record company noticed that the 10 first reviews he got from Finland were quite negative and they were quite displeased with all the stuff that the rest of the world seemed quite happy with. While American, Norwegian and German reviews were stating that it's exciting to have a band from the extreme metal scene that had included some new influences in the music and the Finnish reviews were like too bad that they've included these influences. It should have remained like it was in the early '90s. Obviously that's not going to happen with us but this thing on the website is more or less a joke dating back from the early '90s when the Norwegian black metal bands were developing, right? There are some Finnish black metal bands and they thought the Norwegian black metal bands were really ridiculous with the corpse paint and everything. They would put stuff on their albums saying anti-Norwegian black metal and stuff like that. They were trying to start some kind of war and the reason why nobody else heard about it is Norwegian bands didn't care. They're like "yeah, okay. Whatever." They just did their own thing and this is an old joke. The Finnish will never accept us anyway.

I thought the corpse paint and all that shit was cool. I even thought the burning down of churches was pretty funny.

Yeah, it's a statement.

That was some wild ass shit. Is the black metal scene in Norway still wild like that or has it tamed down a little bit?

No, speaking seriously about that it was a very limited group of people that were involved in these activities. I guess you can narrow it down to maybe one or two persons now. You can actually call them activists in this sense. The bigger part of the Norwegian extreme metal bands, black metal or death metal or like Enslaved, are like us. They knew the people that were quite close to the scene but they didn't really actually participate in anything criminal. Then you have some bands I guess like Emperor and some of the members were involved in something and spent a few years in jail. Then you have this guy from Burzum and Mayhem. It's rare but at the very eye of the storm, most of these things happened in their proximity. It's understandable of course if you're from the outside like the media. They were looking in at this and this must have looked like just something really extreme like a black metal militia or whatever trying to overtake the Christian world by means of satanic warfare. The actuality of it is quite different. A lot of so called artists and writers must take some of the blame for that also because they went in and provoked a lot of let's say people that were not necessarily interesting musicians but maybe interesting in terms of having a certain need for being heard and seen. The Norwegian newspapers would even link you to people that weren't in the band. Somebody in the woods with corpse paint was saying that they love Satan or whatever and the newspapers would give them two pages and call them representative of the Norwegian black metal scene. It would just be some freak that saw this and felt attracted to this whole turmoil that was going around and around the black metal scene.

I think it's funny how a couple of people can do something and become notorious for it and then these Christian people totally blow it out of proportion and over exaggerate it and all of a sudden it becomes this worldwide movement of Satanism and it’s just three people.

Yeah, it’s chaos theory in practice. It’s like this little, tiny thing happening in one place and it just brings about all this other shit. Of course I’m not going to write it off totally but it has even just recently, I think it was Canada or something, some kids burned a church and claimed to be influenced by some of these incidents early in the ‘90s. A Canadian moviemaker just made The Headbangers’ Journey where some Norwegian black metal people were still encouraging young people to burn churches in this movie so it might be a coincidence that they did it just recently. It’s been like that for many years. People burned churches and attacked Christian property a long time before the black metal scene came around. It’s not like the churches were there because people wanted them there in the first place. They were put there and forced there so it’s going to happen.

Yeah, exactly. I was looking at your website and read several things. I was reading an article where some female fan took a photo with her Sony Ericsson camera phone and put it on their site and someone got upset about it and all it shows is just a guy playing guitar.

Yeah, that was pretty weird. We joke a lot back in Norway and I guess it’s a friendly kind of joking. The Germans can be very serious and conform. We didn’t expect them to be this conformed. We really tried to find out how they could have come to the conclusion that they had to remove the picture. It was just Grutle standing there with his bass and there was no evil t-shirt. There’s no nothing. It’s just basically a man in his 30’s with a bass and Sony Ericsson found that to be offending. That says a lot about their policy. That’s why I changed back to Nokia immediately afterwards.

All you see is just a fucking bunch of hair.

How can that be offending? That’s pretty weird. I think that’s pretty offending. That statement from Sony Ericsson saying that guys with long hair are offending to mobile users. It’s pretty nasty.

Yeah, I would say so. A lot of bands out of Germany, those guys have hair down to their asses. Who knows?

Exactly.

Well you guys just came out with your new record Ruun. Tell me a little bit about it. You guys recorded it in one place and then you had it mixed someplace else.

Yeah, we recorded it in one studio in Oslo called Amper and it was a studio we never recorded in before. It’s actually a studio that was recommended by our record company because they wanted us to use a more traditional rock studio because they felt that it could be a good thing for Enslaved to have a bit more organic sound. A lot of the metal bands today are leaning quite heavily on recording technology and sound replacement and whatnot. All these tricks and they wanted us to go a bit backwards again and try and record it in a more old fashioned way to get the energy across all the way from the playing onto the album and don’t lose it in all those technical labyrinths. That’s what we did and recorded it in another studio in Oslo called Propeller. That’s where the mix went. That was also interesting. That’s normally a studio that’s working a lot with rock and roll and hard rock stuff. Not so much extreme metal. It was just a great experience. Some of the stuff we recorded ourselves like the vocals and the keyboards. They’re recorded in our own home studios. That’s where we I guess had the most detailed level and adding and subtracting really small elements and so that’s good to have at home so you can spend a little time with that.

A lot of people are into this Pro-Tools thing which is kind of odd because I feel that if you can’t reproduce that live then what’s the point of doing all that?

That’s a good point. I knew very few bands that sound exactly the same live as they do on albums. Just like Tool or something. They’ll probably sound exactly the same both places. The rest of the bands normally have some variations. They have to solve the whole orchestration a little bit different live than in the studio. That’s part of the live experience I think. It should be some difference but as you say you should at least be able to play the basic ideas from the albums. If it’s too difficult to record, there’s no point in doing it.

What did you guys incorporate in this record that you haven’t incorporated in other records? Like where did the keyboards come in?

We’ve been using keyboards for quite some time. I think it’s difficult to find very specific elements that are new on the album like concrete examples. It’s more like the whole thing. It’s more unified in a way. We’re an extreme metal band that’s been drawing more influence from the more melodic side of music I guess and more experimental parts like hard rock and prog rock from the ‘70s or heavy metal from the ‘80s or whatever. All this stuff is mixed up and I think this album is the more solid one because these influences and the different directions are more melted into the Enslaved sound now than before I think.

I was curious as to where the album title came from.

Ruun is the old Nordic way for the word rune. That’s the alphabet that we used in Europe in pre-Christian times. It was both much like the Egyptian hieroglyphs or the cavemen picture letters. They were both used to communicate in letters but they also had a lot of magical significance for these people. It’s sort of a tribute to the pagan people. The people that were here before the Christians came and sort of enlightened the world with their dark thoughts.

That’s fascinating. You guys have done two videos for the record already. Tell me a bit about them and when we’ll be seeing them.

One is for the song “Path To Vanir” and that’s a video that we really had to risk. It’s sort of in the vein of traditional metal videos in the sense that it includes both a live performance bit with the band performing outdoors obviously. There are a lot of interesting things outdoors in Norway. There’s also bits and pieces from the storyline that’s mixed in with performance bits. You can see both the representation of the band and how that would look and also some bits that are influenced from the lyrics. The video is already being viewed a lot in Norway and a few channels there are showing it. Also the Nordic MTV is featuring it on their Headbangers Ball and I’ve heard that they’ll put it up on MTV in the States quite soon if they haven‘t done it already. Also I think people can already view it on Candlelight’s MySpace site. I’m not sure of exactly the address but they should be able to find it. Just search for Candlelight on MySpace. Then there’s the second video but that’s not going to be ready before June or July for the song “Essence” and that’s a bit different. It’s like a short movie that’s being made to accompany the song. There’s no direct connection between the song and the video but it’s a short movie that’s inspired by a mixture of the lyrics and some parts from Norse mythology.

So the theme of the record is paganistic stuff.

You could say so. I think that’s definitely the images that are being used like the aesthetic language of it. There’s a lot more to it than that. There are definitely a lot of personal views and our take on the world and existence and all that. The metaphors we’re using are mostly a derivative from Norse mythology and especially rune mysticism. That’s the main focus of the album.

Shit like that is so fascinating. There was life before Christianity and I don’t think that Christianity has been such a wonderful thing.

Exactly.

Religion definitely isn’t my bag at all. I read that book once and I thought it was filth. Utter filth. You guys are appearing at a film festival and playing a live soundtrack to a classic Norwegian silent movie.

We are going to do that actually on the 17th of June. We’re actually in the process of preparing for that these days. It’s going to be something else.

Yeah, that sounds different. What’s the movie about and why did they select you guys to play a soundtrack to it?

It’s a movie that’s based on a very famous Norwegian poem. This Norwegian poet Henrik Ibsen. He was writing in I guess it was the 19th century. I think his most famous play was A Doll’s House and it made some movies that were played all over the world. It’s a poem about a character called Vigen. It’s a semi-true story. It probably happened but the character himself is a fictional one. It’s about in I think the early 1800’s, the English had a trade conflict with Denmark and Norway because back then Denmark and Norway were one country. Norway was more or less occupied by Denmark so the governments were all based in Denmark. They got into this trade conflict with England which responded by cutting off food supplies to Norway because all the food was coming in from Denmark. All the corn and stuff like that. What happened is that we had a lot of extreme deprivation and hunger and desperation along the coastline of Norway. South of Norway. So this poem is about a character that they don’t know actually if this was a guy or if it’s a myth down there or if it’s someone else. During that starvation time, one person allegedly spent almost every waking night rowing across from Norway to Denmark. That’s like rowing for 12 or 13 hours in pitch black night going over to Denmark. He would hide all day and then would fill up the boat with everything he could find for food and would row across back the next night and that would feed his little village. He’s risking his life and he was nearly killed several times actually on these trips across the ocean and he became a hero. At least a legend of him became a heroic one. So this Norwegian poet wrote a very long poem about it. It’s almost like a little book and then in 1928 a Swedish silent movie director made a movie based on this poem about a heroic figure and there’s been several classical composers writing music for the silent movie. Finally the Short Film Festival found that they wanted to present the movie with something a bit more unexpected and new and that’s when they asked us. We knew the poem and we knew the story and we found the whole thing to be quite challenging so we wanted to do it.

I don’t know what it is about the Anglo-Saxon people but they can be some really cruel sons of bitches. They were big on that. If they really wanted to give another country a hard time they’d just make sure the people couldn’t eat. That’s such fucked up shit and to this day when the United States imposes sanctions on some other country, it always affects the every day people and it always involves not having enough food or medical supplies. That’s fucking inhumane and cruel.

Yeah, it’s a very essential strategy.

At the end of the day it’s politicians getting into an argument with each other and just make the people of that particular country pay for whatever.

Exactly.

That kind of shit just totally pisses me off. What kind of touring plans do you guys have?

We’re doing a Norwegian Nordic festival this summer starting with the Short Film Festival early in June and after that we’re going to do a U.K. tour in early September. Then it’s going to be a full blown European and Nordic countries tour. That’s going to be September and October. Then we’re going to have a short break and hopefully it’s almost there now, a U.S. tour in November or December. Around that time. It’s about time. We’ve only done a couple of half assed small shows in 2000 and 2003 and we’ve been working so hard for a few years now to put up a proper tour.

So you guys are going to come see us.

Oh, yeah.

We need some really good kick ass black metal shows. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing so many cool bands like Dimmu Borgir and Satyricon and Children Of Bodom. They’re a real favorite of mine and I know they’re from Finland, that bad country.

They have some good people too.

Absolutely. Any other thoughts or comments?