Rockezine.com interview with Axamenta on Jul 13, 2006

with Sven Deckers on Jul 13, 2006

The Belgian black thrashers of Axamenta recently unleashed their latest CD “Ever-Arch-I-Tech-Ture” upon this world and it was good. It literally blew me (and a whole lot of other people) away and got raving reviews everywhere, including here. So I decided that I wanted to fire a few questions, in the name of Rock-E-Zine, at this particular group of friendly southern neighbors and rhythm guitarist Sven Decker was my unfortunate target.
		First of all, we at Rock-E-Zine would like to congratulate you guys with your fantastic album, “Ever-Arch-I-Tech-Ture”. That’s some real hard work you guys did put on there. Tell us something about it please. Thanks :) It was indeed one hell of a job. We worked on that album for about 2 years. Luckily our guitar player (and main songwriter) Ian didn’t have a job for like a year, otherwise it may have took us even longer. With the concept story, we wanted everything to be connected: lyrics, artwork, music, atmosphere… So sometimes, a piece of music that was already written, had to be rearranged in order to fit the part storyline that was being told there. We also didn’t want to make songs that were just a collection of riffs pasted behind one another. We wanted a ‘whole’. If you listen to the album a few times, you will even notice that some musical parts will reoccur throughout the album, be it n different forms. And oh yeah, we’ve had some mayor delays with the mastering and especially with signing a contract, but that’s all behind us now.
		Why did you choose for the Jacob Hansen Studios in Hvding, Denmark and not some studio that is more easily reachable? During those 3 weeks, that studio was more reachable than anything! We slept right next door haha… We were looking for the best solutions for this album. We wanted to put an equal amount of effort in giving this album the best sound, than we put in to writing it. Plus, we were totally isolated there during the recordings, so we could really focus on what we were doing there.
		How did you came in contact with Daniel Gildenlöw, and how was it to work with him? We know Daniel from his work with PoS of course; 3/5 of the band is a big fan. Ian was writing a ballad-ish song for the cd, and while he was writing it, he got more and more convinced that only Daniel’s voice would réally fit the song. Again, we tried to reach top-stuff in every aspect of the album. And here we certainly managed to do so :) We made a little pre-production of the song, and mailed it to Daniel with some extra info about the band, the album etc. After some doubts (he had a busy tour schedule back then), he finally gave in and said he’d do it. He wrote all the vocal patterns and melodies, and even adapted our lyric a bit to fit the song better. He recorded it all by himself at his home studio, so unfortunately we didn’t see him at work.
		There were some pretty incredible reactions to “Ever-Arch-I-Tech-Ture” in the Dutch metal scene. So how was it received in the rest of the world? In Germany we’re getting great reviews in online magazines too. I sure hope everything connected and we can go play abroad a few times.
We were once accused of being Opeth clones once. Now that’s a nice comparison :-)		Are you tired yet of the Cradle Of Filth and Dimmu Borgir comparisons? Haha, we’re getting used to it, though we hope the reviewer doesn’t stop there. Of course, it’s not easy to put our sound into one pigeon hole. The atmosphere of both Cradle & Dimmu is still in there somewhere, but they only make a small part of the overall sound. There are a lot of progressive and Swedish influences in our music too, that are not found in the aforementioned bands. We were once accused of being Opeth clones once. Now that’s a nice comparison :-)
		Who wrote the concept story for the album, and where did the inspiration for this story come from? The story is totally Ian’s. Peter and Sven translated that into lyrics. Ian got his inspiration from reincarnation theories and philosophised further into that. We added some “higher realities” and biomechanical stuff, time loops and paradoxes and the Ever-Arch-I-Tech-Ture story was born.
		How long did it take you to design the entire concept? Well, about 2 years I think.
		Tell us a little something about your writing process. Who writes what? What methods do you guys use to write your songs? Mostly for this album, it was Ian who came up with a partial song. And then he finished it later on, or we worked with that on rehearsals. The nice thing about having a concept story, is that you have a ‘fil rouge’ as a starting point to write a song. For instance, for “Shackles Cross” we needed an aggressive and weird-ish song. In a way, it’s nice to have such direction when you start thinking about a song.
		The previous album “Codex Barathri” has been released by the LSP Company, which soon after the release went out of business. Why did you decide to sign to Shiver Records, which is a continuation of LSP if I’m not mistaken? No, you’re right, it is a continuation of LSP. We were kinda in between labels when our album had already been recorded. We went to the LSP store to buy some albums, and let Carl listen to a master version of the album. That’s how things started rolling...
		What can we expect from Axamenta in the future? We sure hope to do a little tour this year, or next year. Concerning a follow-up to EAITT, it will surely not be a “Part 2”. But we’ll be bringing the listener a lot of things we haven’t done before for sure.
		You recently played on Graspop in Belgium. How did it go? Very well! It’s always great for a band to get such an opportunity of course. The crowd reacted great, we got good reactions afterwards… We’re very grateful for all that.
		Any upcoming major tours or gigs we should know about? November 4th we’ll be in Edegem(B) at Catacomb fest with all the headliners of the previous editions, like Aborted, In-Quest, Suhrim etc. That surely will be a killer show. The 22nd of July, we play at Nevelfest Open Air with Aborted, Prejudice etc in Merksem(B). And then we have a couple of clubshows in the pipeline.
		So if Axl Rose approaches you guys and asks you to open for Guns & Roses on their next show, you say: Of course, fucking of course!!
		Any last words you want to say to our readers? Thanks for your interest and we hope to see you at one of our shows! Prepare to be incognated …
		And thank you for your time. We wish you all the best for the future and we’ll surely keep a close eye on you guys. (Youri Fambach)