A: Hi Jonas! Can you tell us about the reactions to the new album as of now?

J: In the mean time all the reactions I got were very positive, people tend to like the album, I think.

A: In what ways is the new album different from the former one?

J: Its quite different then the last one, we wet through some line up changes since, and we also wanted to move on, to progress, the old-school thing was taken as far as we could take it, so the new album had to have some different stuff, its much more varied, much more interesting to listen to.

A: Why the changes in the line-up?

J: At first we just though about doing another album, and Century Media wanted us to do another one anyway, at first we were very busy with our own bands, but then we just made sure we had the time to work on the next album,
The problem was that Mikael, from Opeth, our former vocalist, just couldn’t do it, he had prior obligations with Opeth, so he said he won't be able to do it this time.
In any case, we decided on making a different album, so each band member started on working on new songs.
In the meantime Dan Swano, Our former drummer, decided he wanted to move to the guitarist position, both of us knew that even though he's a great drummer, he's just not a death metal drummer, he started out as a drummer, and had a lot of experience, but he was never into the double bass thing that you need to do as a death metal drummer, so with the new material we had we just had to get a real death metal drummer, and Dan is an excellent guitarist as it is, who writes great tracks, do we decided together on him switching roles.
We then brought in Martin, who's an accomplished death metal drummer, we gave him demoed songs that had a drum machine on them, and he wrote the drum parts, which we then heard, and were absolutely stunned by, he's an amazing drummer.

A: How did you contact Peter Tagtgren as your vocalist?

J: We already knew about Mikael not being able to do this record some time ago, and Peter was already interested to do it,
He's a good friend of Dan's, and Dan recommended him, said he has a great death metal growl.
We were quite amazed at this voice on the album, it was exactly what we wanted for the album, this deep, throaty growl.

A: what were the writing procedures within the band?

J: We really didn’t have too much time to write the album, each of us took like four songs and wrote them, and we didn’t even have time to really rehearse

At this point an indistinct crying sound comes from Jonas' side of the line, and he asks me to wait a minute, his son is crying, I wait for a minute, and he's back…

J :We sent each other the CDs with the songs we each wrote, and then just met and did then.

A: who wrote what songs?

J: Well, the first one, for instance, is Anders's, Brave New Hell is Dan's, Soul Evisceration is mine, Outnumbering The Day is Anders's, you can pretty much hear each one's style in the songs.

A: How did you guys fit each other's schedules together?

J: We talked a lot about that before we started out, we just looked at out time tables, and saw that the spring was the best time to work on the album, we originally wanted to do it last winter, but we had prior engagements, hopefully we'll also get a chance to do some live shows, something which we never got the chance to do.

A: What was the reason for doing the band, in the first place?

J: It was just something that we all wanted to do, Dan just bought new equipment for his studio, and he wanted to try it out, so we came over and started to play and write, mostly for fun, but then somehow Century Media got a hold of our demos,

A: You demoed the album?

J: Yea, it was intended to be like the old days, when bands recorded demos on cassettes and sent them to other bands and people across the world, so we recorded a three songs cassette, with phony names,

A: Kind of like Brujoria?

J: Yea, something like that, but then Century Media got hold of the stuff, and said it's better with our names on the album.
The thing was that we wanted to do some good, old fashioned death metal, I mean, I got into metal through death metal, and even tough my band, Katatonia, doesn’t exactly do death metal, its still one of my favorite genres, my first one.


A: What were your influences when starting out the band?

J: Things like Entombed, it’s a style which when we started out there were no bands that did anything like it, now there are a couple,

A: Such as?

J: There's Chaos Breed, that do something like that,

A: And Fleshcrawl…

J: Yea, but Fleshcrawl are not a new band that does tribute to death metal, they actually play old school death metal, and have been doing it for a long long time,
I mean, the band has been on forever, they are really veterans, and I have a lot of respect for them, doing their thing, no matter what is the current fashion.

A: In any case, what is your main priority, band wise?

J: Definitely Katatonia, we’ve been together for 13 years, and its certainly my main band, we working on new material now, hopefully to release a new album soon.


A: The band uses a lot of horror film imagery, are you into such films, and if so, which ones?

J: I think that death metal has always been about horror imagery, films and such, it just goes hand in hand, we are all big fans of horror films, and we use and are influenced by them when writing songs.

A: What films did you watch recently that influenced you?

J: I saw The Ring lately, which was a great film,

A: Did you see the new Dawn Of The Dead?

J: No, I saw a promo and its looks great.

A: A question about the song, Eaten, it sounds based on the news story of the German cannibal who ate someone which contacted him to do so.

J: It's exactly based on that, that was the idea behind the track.

A: Peter is known as being extremely prolific and a massive writing force, did he have anything with writing the tracks?

J: No, he just sang, I think he was actually relived to just sing this time, since he does so many other things, so when he got the chance to just sing, I think I was actually happy about it.

A: Well, good luck with the band, and thanks for talking to me!

Alon Miasnikov

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