Interview

ULVER

Dimanche 16 février 2014

How are you doing ? What's your feeling about the show tonight ?

Kristoffer Rygg : I'm doing okay. The show was a bit delayed. It's been difficult, challenging, because we're not playing things that we rehearsed. If we play dumb notes, we can't really get away with it.
We had some trouble with the soundcheck. Some lines making noise, things generally being a bit difficult. So you know, I'm just happy it went okay. It seems like it went okay.

How did it go with the previous shows of this tour ?

K.R. : Well we only played three. I would say Helsinki was quite shaky. Gdansk was good in my opinion. Some of the other guys were not happy with that one. But I think everyone is quite satisfied. With this kind of free form thing, it usually takes a few concerts to sort of find the symbiosis within the band.

© ChamO

Why did you decide to play improvised music on this tour ?

K.R. : Just because I'm sort of fed up with pre-thought music in a live setting. Erm... How to say it ? I like refined studio productions and things like that, but in a live music setting, I personally find the best live music to be music that happens in the moment rather than being something overly thought-out, like we have an encore and then we play this and then we play that. I suppose it's just a jazz way of thinking of music. Live music is supposed to be live and not pre-planned in a way. Obviously we tried to play a few songs from albums but mostly doing a lot of things on top of those elements, stuff that doesn't exist in our albums.

You recorded an album with the Tromsø Chamber Orchestra last year, you just released an album in collaboration with Sunn O)))

Sunn O)))

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... Why so many collaborations ?

K.R. : I would say there's no particular reason but it's always interesting to create something with interesting and talented people.
The Tromsø Orchestra thing was a big deal for us, to have an orchestra at our disposal and to try to write music for an orchestra without actually knowing how to do that.
We've been working recently with a theater as well. We wrote music for the National Theatre in Oslo. It's just a way to learn new things and also sort of widen the perspective I would say. Because if it was just Tore and me, we'd be making the same album over and over again.

Well it's not exacly been like that in the past. Ulver is not a band that ever released twice the same album.

K.R. : No, that's very true, but I think it a lot of it has a lot to do with external influences in forming what we do. I actually talked to Tore about this the other day, that if it was just the two of us, we'd be making Shadows of the Sun again and again and again.

So how do these things happen ? Does the National Theatre just contact you and ask you to write music for them ?

K.R. : More or less.

That's pretty cool.

K.R. : Yeah. It comes with age I suppose. You get old and you have a reputation.

© ChamO

The band has been around for twenty years but you started playing live not so long ago.

K.R. : Four years. A lot of things happened really in the last four years. We made several albums, we played quite a few concerts. We've been very active.

So why did you decide to start playing live at some point ?

K.R. : To be honest with you, there's a personal reason for that. It's something that we wanted to do but were afraid to in a way, because we were quite content just not having to relate to people. So it was a quite scary prospect. After fifteen years and several albums, you have lots of expectations. That's something I struggle with to this very day, that people come with this sort of idea of what you are or how you're supposed to do something. So playing live and especially this tour is going a bit away from the rock'n'roll formated way of doing things. We're a bit challenging these pre-conceived notions. It's difficult to explain.

What are your projects after this tour ?

K.R. : The play for the National Theatre premieres today so we more or less delivered the music a couple of days ago and then we had to go on tour.

© ChamO

I wondered what your opinion is about your audience. Last time I saw you in Belgium, it was at Biebob, a typical metal venue. And also today, there seemed to be a lot of metalheads in the audience.

K.R. : I suppose I'm ambivalent to it. In many ways I understand it. I respect it because we were part of something that became a very big scene and a whole genre in a way. But on the other hand, I feel personally very disconnected to it. So it's just a bit weird to be honest.

When I talk to people about Ulver, the question that always comes is "Are they playing material from the first albums ?" although you haven't played metal for more than fifteen years.

K.R. : Exactly.

And what shocked me at the two gigs in Belgium was how empty the venues were.

K.R. : Actually for Europe Belgium has been one of the least attended gigs we did. There were about fifty people at the first show. But I think it's because it was sort of a last minute booking. So I think many of the Belgians went to Tilburg. So it hasn't been overly visited when we went to Belgium.