Ελληνικά
Last Updated on 04:00 PM by Lilliana Tseka
I had the honor to speak with A.A. Nemtheanga, I don’t think that he needs any special introduction, he talks about everything and doesn’t hold back, anyhow I don’t believe he really has anything to prove. Love him or hate him, it seems he doesn’t care much, he is who he is. Enjoy this interview with him.
-Congratulations for “Gods to the Godless” your first live album. Even though “All empires Fall” in 2010 was your first live recording, still it was out on DVD, “Gods to the godless” is your first live album. Why it took you so long for it.
– There’s no huge secret, basically Bang Υour Ηead recorded it on a mobile recording device behind the stag, we happened to play a particularly good gig and when I listened back to the tape I realized that it was something we could work with, so I mixed it in Sweden. We listened back and thought “oh we could do something with that”, for people who love the band is going to be something really nice to own, it sounds great it looks really beautiful I think and us we personally grew up with albums such as “Live after Death”, “Unleashed in the East”, “If you want blood…you got it”, “Live and Dangerous”, “Strangers in the Night” and I know things are micro cosmic now compared to what they used to , but the idea of releasing a live album just sort of appealed to our sense of romance and nostalgia for old heavy metal and rock.
-However, even though it was on a mobile device, didn’t make you think twice of it? I mean you released a double vinyl for this I’m really curious about that.
– I don’t really care. We don’t pay that much attention to be honest, when you play at festivals, very often someone says “Hey we will film you”, “Hey we will record you”, “We can charge you this, we can charge you that” and I just don’t listen, because we just don’t really allow people to make money from us for nothing. “Can we film your performance and sell it to you?”; yeah fuck you! Bang Your Head always have been cool to us and the opportunity just arose. I can’t say there’s a big dark mystical secret to it
Perhaps “Gods to the Godless” is a great introduction for new fans to the band or is it a release that marks the end of an era and the beginning of a new one?
-What, another 25 years? No. If you never gave us the time before and heard the name around then this is probably a very good place to start as the sound is strong and big and it captures the old songs played the way we play things now, with a bit more muscle and aggression. I think it could serve as a pretty good introduction to the band. If you thought we were fucking boring before you’re still going to think we are boring, we don’t care. If you thought we were great, yeah it sounds great. It’s a nice thing to have, its not going to change the world, it is what it is you know.
-Why did you choose the specific show in Bang Your Head Festival Germany 2015 and not various recordings all over Europe? It would make a strong bond with your fans worldwide I guess…
-It’s because that would have been way too expensive and complicated. We couldn’t, unless we were Opeth and probably had the technology to bring our own desk with us everywhere we go, take 2 or 3 hours to sound check and have everything set up perfectly, then it makes absolutely no financial sense to do that. So the fact was that Bang Your Head recorded us anyway ,we just happened to then listen back and go “Oh well we played pretty good”, in fact there isn’t a single overdub on it, nothing has been changed it’s just a happy coincidence. If you think that it sucks that it’s not your CD, maybe you can play with us to record it next time
-As we haven’t done an interview for your last studio album “Where Greater Men Have Fallen” can we make 2-3 questions for it, as it was a big success and it seems that almost everyone loved it. As for Metal Invader it was the album of the year (2014) as you may already know… Was the album’s title a direct reference to your country?
-No, nothing is a direct reference to Ireland and that’s one of the points of Primordial, that it’s not about being Irish, it’s not about Irish folklore and its not about Irish mythology. And don’t use the word Celtic in reference to Primordial, there’s nothing fantastical or mythological about Primordial. It’s about here, now, the real world and anything that references the past is used in a form of allegory, to the way the world is right now. So “Where Greater Men Have Fallen” is really saying that whatever you may try and do, a greater man has already failed, before you. It’s a message of, more or less, absolutely no hope about the future of human race, just being a boot crushing its face. It’s realistically about the end of empires, about the birth of the 20th century and at the end of the 20th century’s hope that people felt. It’s a century of progress and technological evolution and yet we just figured greater methods to kill each other on the fields of the WWI, so it’s about the build up of the WWI in the end of the 19th century and the build up to the war that’s coming now.
-So in your opinion what would be the best path to choose for the people of Europe to find a way out of this mess?
-In the last 100 hundred years, the population of the Earth has increased threefold. There’s no fucking hope. I’m a sort of contradiction in terms, for some people. I have some views that some people consider leftist and some people consider on the right. I’m not really interested in neither, I’m only interested in cutting straight to the heart of what logically makes sense. Primordial is not a pan-European band, it’s about themes that are global. I would hope that people in Peru can feel the same when I sing about alienation or sacrifice, that they can feel that, within their culture as well. People in Honduras can listen to the record and feel the same way. People in Palestine. The concepts are not about being Irish or necessarily about being European and it’s not that everything is without hope. Primordial is not without hope, there’s always a sliver of light on some level, but at the moment we seem to be entering at some de-evolutionary social scale, where people seem more divided and willing to pursue political extremes than they ever were before. And its obvious that the old institution is failing and the old systems are broken. We saw an example of that today. Systems are broken and the people are angry so what can we do to fix that? It’s very very hard to fully know; it would seem to me that maybe the villages that are going back to printing their own money and systems outside the banking system, might have the idea. We’re reaching the end of a cycle for cities to have the control and power over the moral and economic structure of Europe. Maybe that’s not the answer you wanted.
Its your interview, I didn’t expect any particular answer. Any answer would satisfy me. Let’s continue, hehe. Is it a new territory for Primordial the making of a video clip? What urged you to create the video for “Babel’s Tower”? Will you make some more videos for the live album?
-The live album was filmed as well, but we decided to not release the pair of them together, this is more the label’s choice. I think we need to look at the live footage and maybe we will release a live visual song of it, but as for making a video of a new song… Personally making a video for “Babel’s Tower” doesn’t really sit with me either. I’m not very patient and when you’re making a video, you have to sing the same thing over and over and over again, so standing out in the rain and cold for days, to just do the same thing, it drives me insane. I don’t even like recording albums that much. To me, the live situation is my favourite thing because it’s instant, it’s there at that moment. The others prefer other things. For example, Ciaran loves recording, Pol loves making a video, but it’s a compromise. We all get to take part in elements that we have different opinions on, so it’s cool. We have to be honest, that people these days play music through Youtube and streaming sites are going to own everything in the future. So having a cool video is kind of important. I do think that videos could have and should have done more.
-Even though this is your 8th album, you seem to have such a fresh air in your compositions. I think the production here has its own power and it has slightly improved since “Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand”. Can we blame the new studio and the new engineer for that?
-Not exactly. You know you keep learning, you’re always adding and learning things. I had a particular vision that I wanted in this album and I wanted this bigger open sound, where the bass is occupying the bottom and more, maybe this album sounds a bit more to what I would have imagined, than the last album. The last album had a hell of a lot of pressure and stress, time constraints and was made under a particularly bad atmosphere, which maybe helps the sounds of the songs, because I think it has great songs on it. The thing about Primordial is that we are not a professional band; we don’t have the time and space to sit around all day writing music. We come together when we need to do something, so we don’t hang out together. We’re not like bored of each other and we don’t do anything because we have to. We do something because it feels like the time is right. We don’t have to do it because the festival season is coming up; we don’t have to do this or that, so it’s a little bit different
-The middle part of the album (Ghosts of the Charnel House, The Alchemist’s 
Head, Born to Night)is more experimental musically, always in a Primordial way. Where did you draw your influences, lyrical and compositional, for these parts?
-I don’t know whether we drew influences musically from anywhere that’s different. I mean, it may sound like a cliché, but when we’re writing music together, there’s no conscious decision or no conversation like “This bit is inspired by this”. The riffs from “Ghosts of the Charnel House” are like Metallica playing Black Sabbath circa “Call of Ktulu” and something from “…And Justice for All”. Probably our influences are the same things we loved when we were kids, so probably hasn’t changed that much. You can hear, maybe in some of the songs, that there are some elements of the bands we like; Deathspell Omega or Funeral Mist. Some of this dissonant and modern Black Metal, but we were also playing riffs like that in ’93-’94, so it’s not that different. I think the biggest thing is to be able to stand out of the bubble, is to step out of the process and listen to what you ‘re doing and think to your self “Do we still sound like we mean it?”. And if you can do that then I think the music can still sound right. Lyrically, is hard after 8, or how many albums I’ve written, to come up with new ideas but you never quite know what’s going to inspire you, or what you’re going to take for a lyric.
-Generally speaking, musically Primordial leans towards to a more epic/doom songwriting approach in the last releases. Is this a result of opening yourselves to new musical soundscapes through the years?
-No, not really. Like I said, to me the riff of “Ghosts of the Charnel House” is like Black Sabbath; there’s nothing new about that. We’re at a stage where we can play pretty much anything. We can play a grim, rough Black Metal song like “The Seed of Tyrants”, that’s probably the most extreme song we’ve ever done and we have riffs that sound like we played them in ’92. I think we can rip off ourselves because we re such an individual band. If we put a riff like “Ghosts of the Charnel House”, that could be in the Black Album, who cares? I don’t really care (haha)! We don’t really think about it. I know that sounds a bit weird, but there isn’t a big master plan. There comes a moment when a song clicks together and you go “Oh this sounds like us”, when you know this is right.
-After “To The Nameless Dead” the band is much more popular and became very high in the estimation of the metal world. Do you believe that this has to do with the gradual diversification of the band’s style of music over the years which have resulted in the penetration of fans of different kinds of metal or is it an issue of company promotion and management?
-It’s a mixture really. I think that sometimes, what goes around comes around and if you stick around with a certain quality, eventually people start to notice that and maybe “To The Nameless Dead” was a perfect storm of everything that seemed to have happened at once, with the label at a peak, for the first time streamlining the sound of it, so that it had bigger choruses, it was a bit more memorable, more powerful, also a bit more Heavy Metal. None of it was conscious; it just happened to be what we wrote. Like I said there was no grand plan, we didn’t sit down with the management and go “This is our 5 year plan to become a bigger band” or else we could have been bigger. But I’m really happy that the most popular albums are the recent ones and that we re not a tribute act to our past, stuck in a world where old people only want to hear our debut and don’t care about any new songs. That would suck and that’s a horrible place to be as a musician. I’m quite happy that we reached some notoriety, it could always be bigger but we could also split up after our first album, who knows?
-Is this reflected in your album sales?
Noone comes to me and say that it’s a shame that the band never got that big. You don’t really know how many we sell. We probably sell way more than you think and way more than bands that you assume that are bigger, because they are on the cover of a magazine here and there, or they got press, maybe they are Scandinavian or whatever. One thing that’s very interesting is that our sales don’t go down; because most bands lose a 30-40% of their physical sales after a release every year, due to downloading and streaming, but ours remain quite constant, which is strange, which means we have loyal fans.
-Your debut record “Imrama” is more than 20 years old this year. Looking back at your career, how do you feel about your accomplishments as Primordial?
-It’s a cool thing to have gone for so long. It’s like an institution in all our lives. I never thought we get this far we did and it seems like a lifetime away, but at the same time it seems like yesterday. It’s a fascinating journey to be a part of, the ability to stand on a stage in different continents in the same month and sing your songs. I’m not tired of that or do I ever take it for granted. Its’ been a very worth while journey. I’m not a man to dwell in nostalgia or regret. We still have things to do.
-Have you heard the last albums by Cruachan and Darkest Era? Are there any other bands from Ireland that we should check out?
-Yeah, there are. There is Malthusian, ZOM, Mourning Beloveth, there is quite a few bands. I think Mael Mordha has something new going on. I’m not going to sit around and tell people to sit home and listen to this new generation of Irish bands. Not many of them are to my listening tastes, without a doubt. You’ve got bands like Slithr, is a cool black metal band. There’s a whole new generation of people coming up, maybe a little bit younger than us.
-What do you listen to at the moment?
-At the moment I’m listening to the new Deathspell Omega album. There has been some really good records this year. I’m not a person that only listens to old stuff, I’m not going to tell you that I listen to every new underground release, I’m not quite as active as I used to be, but I’m still active with getting new stuff. But yeah there was a lot of good stuff lately.
-Last 2 years have been great for Metal music.
-Yeah mostly in Black and Doom metal. This year we have some good Heavy Metal, Eternal Champion, Sumerlands and stuff like this. I’m still trying to keep my eye in there. I don’t want to be one of those guys that go “Oh nothing it is as good as it was”.
-It is known that you have an outmost love for your country, but at the same time respect of everyone’s diversity. Given the exploitation of these values from the set of the extreme right in Europe, can you think how thin is the line of the patriot to sleep and wake up chauvinist?
-I’m not quite sure that I agree with that statement, because there are plenty of things to not love about Ireland and in the last 10 to 15 years, my views on Nationalism have changed quite a lot. So in a sense I’ve fallen out of love on some level, with the country because I used to say that I was against the church, against the state, and for the people. Then I thought about the more I discover really and looked into the last century, the more I’m also against the people, because the people peered the abuse by the church, they hid the abuse by institutions, they sent their children to work houses, they sent their children to mental institutions, they banned the books. My relationship to what Ireland represents in terms of Nationalism is not the same. When people see no future for their children, they will traditionally move always either to the left or the right, the extreme left or the extreme right, at some level. We can learn from history for this, seeing from the post WWII, European Union model obviously didn’t work. When it comes to financial and economic union trying to move 20 something countries’ economies, at the same pace, some get left behind. And we got left with this massive economic collapse. There are big problems in Europe right now, we can all see this, I’m there every single month, I see the problems of unchecked migration caused in the streets of Germany, I see the problems that Wahabism taught in the Mosques of France 40 years ago, unchecked has given birth to a radicalised Muslim youth. I see the right moving to capitalize on this, I see the left attacking the right for that. Everyone is claiming on some level some state of victimhood and is like everyone is singularly shouting at the same time and no one is listening to anything. The first movement towards being understood is understanding. Maybe, instead of shouting through social media how chauvinistic Trump is, people need to ask themselves “Why people vote for him’? And those reasons are much more difficult to comprehend. People are willing to do that because they are so indulged in embracing their own opinion and their own state of victimhood, all the time. We’re in fucking trouble and both the extreme left and the extreme right, are going to capitalize on it and on many levels they have the same enemies. It’s very complicated, I just think there is a massive percentage of people across Europe, who feel ignored, disenfranchised and alienated. They feel that they are constantly accused of this and that, by the left and the right, especially the new left and they are coming out to vote and protest and that’s why you have Brexit. That’s why you have Trump. That’s why you will have the equivalent in the rest of Europe. Because no one voted Merkel to do what she did and people aren’t happy. It’s fucking complicated. I put my neck on the line by talking about politics, because I know most people don’t even read past the headline. Most people will decide what I am purely based on my fucking haircut or what band I’m in. Nobody wants to listen anymore, arguing online is like spilling shit on a sewer; it’s absolutely irrelevant. Nobody will ever change their mind, everybody only wants confirmation bias and even speaking about politics can get you in trouble, because someone, somewhere, will take issue with it. We’re living in the ultimate end times of a selfish movement of civilization, where everyone thinks every single opinion they have, is not only worthy and righteous, but it just needs to be heard no matter how ill informed. And so you get millions of people, all screaming at each other at the same time. Yeah, we’re fucked. It’s time to head for the hills and start your own commune; print your own notes, get your guns.
-How close, do you think, is your beliefs as well as these things who Primordial profess through their lyrics? Ηow consciously the audience follows you, watching your concerts or buy your records; In other words, can you discern the flame in the eyes of your fans?
-Of course I do. I mean Primordial is a serious band, it’s not fantasy, it’s not folklore, it’s not fucking Folk Metal where you bring plastic swords. I mean I get it. People get this band seriously and what we sing means something to them. They know that Primordial is about inclusivity and not exclusivity, is like a rallying cry for the disaffected, disfranchised anti-heroes and I love this ideal, but like I said, I hope people, no matter where we would go in this world, they’d see themselves in the lyrics. The concepts of alienation, sacrifice, martyrdom, these are things that people everywhere suit, you know. So in this sense, I think we’re always outsiders, maybe we’re a band for the dispossessed. It’s fine, people take it that seriously because we take it that seriously, it’s fine for me that people live vicariously through the band.
-Should we expect a new studio album soon?
-No, I don’t think so!
-No? Why?
-We haven’t even rehearsed a single riff. Things take a couple of years with us and like after 8 albums, we sοrt of settle down on… I don’t know what to write about anymore, so I guess we will see, maybe in 6 or 9 months we will look at something like “Hey I have a riff”. We’re not one of these bands that meet for no reason, because otherwise we would stand around in a room playing Black Sabbath riffs, which is cool, but we live long away so…
-The closing is yours, thank you very much for the interview.
-Τry and make me sound a little bit less negative and pessimistic, I’m just a singer, in a Heavy Metal band, not a fucking politician and I think people need to take a step back from the constant need to share, the constant need to feel that every situation is about them, the constant need to project their own feelings of anger, victimhood and adequacy into every situation, and they should really ask themselves and also read beyond the headlines. And also, buy our live album because it sounds great!
I promise you I will try my best, hehe. Everyone is a little pessimist at these times.
