Interview с Lake of Tears : DARKSIDE.ru

Are you satisfied with yesterday’s show? How can you compare it with the one you played in Club Tochka a year and a half ago?

Daniel: Afterwards we were very satisfied, there was a fantastic audience. There were some technical problems at the stage, some things going on maybe affected us a little bit. As to comparing the gig to the one we did in Moscow last year, I think the first gig was very magical. Yesterday’s show was maybe not as magical as the first one. But we have another one today, and this one will be more magical, I think.

Mushroom hats have become a sort of your stage image over the past few years. Nevertheless, you did not wear them yesterday. What was the matter? And what did it symbolize?

Daniel: We had played a lot of shows before we got mushroom hats, we only had them for a year or something. Then we had a really good concert in Bucharest, and I had to throw my mushroom hat away. I don’t know what the mushroom hat means, really. We are a kind of mushroom band, we always had mushrooms from the first album, they’re a bit strange and magical and fit really well into our atmosphere, which is a mixture of dark and psychedelic. It’s great for us. And now at the shows we play, at almost every show someone shows up in a mushroom hat, so I think we left it over to the audience. (The mushroom hat reappeared on stage at the last show of the Russian/Ukrainian tour in St. Petersburg a few days later – ed.)

When you were putting together the setlist for the shows that followed the release of “Black Brick Road” (2004), you said that you mostly included the songs that you personally wanted to play, and these were mostly new songs. What are you guided by when you are choosing the songs for the current shows?

Daniel: Of course, you must respect what the people want to hear. But at the same time, the songs that you play must feel comfortable for the band, so that you can put your energy into the song. Playing is all about energy – y

ou give energy, the audience gives energy, and if you don’t feel energy in the songs that you play, you won’t rise up to the right level.

Johan: Yesterday we played a song from the first album (“Greater Art”, 1994), which we hadn’t played for 10 years. But a lot of fans asked us to do it, and we did it especially for the fans.

When you returned to the live scene after a few years’ break, you said that it felt great to be back of stage. What do you feel now when you play live? Have these great feelings subsided after a while?

Daniel: When you have such a break, you are used to doing totally different things in your life, so the first time we played a show it felt like driving a car at 100 km/h straight into a wall of stone. But now we’ve played a couple of shows, and it is getting better and better. We are growing into this again, and now it feels much better to play live then what it did before. Now we feel much more secure, and we are much more honest. When you are a quite new band, you want to follow into different places, but now I don’t think we want to follow anywhere, we just want to go where we want to go. Every step we take feels quite comfortable for us. We are now quite comfortable playing live, and I remember that before we mostly liked being in the studio.

Some time ago you were looking for a keyboard player to play Hammond organ live at your shows. Have you abandoned this idea, or are you still searching?

Johan: We’ve found a keyboard player that’s really small. (laughs)

Daniel: I think we’re still searching. The keyboard have become quite an important instrument in our music, so it would be really good to have a keyboard player who could also play like a human being on stage. But we’ve been together as a band for such a long time, we’ve grown together like a family, so it’s really difficult to get somebody new into our band. But I think some day something will happen, I don’t know when though – maybe in one year or in 1

0 years, we’ll see.

And what about your second guitarist Magnus Sahlgren? He’s been recording with you in the studio and playing live for a few years, but still he is a session member…

Daniel: He is already a full-time member. We’ve worked with Magnus for a long time, he’s grown together with us, so about a year ago we discussed his full-time membership and all decided that this would be great. He’s a full-time member, but he has some friends in Moscow, so he couldn’t be here today.

Your latest album “Black Brick Road” was released via Noise Records, but soon after the release date you switched over to Dockyard1. Were you satisfied working with Noise? And what made you leave such a prominent label so quickly?

Daniel: Let’s put it like this: except for the fans, one of the reasons why we started playing again was the guy who worked at Noise Records. He was pushing us all the time, “Please, please, make a record!” So we did it, but something happened at Noise. Some people didn’t want to work at Noise anymore, and they started their own label. You see, it is really important – if you are at a big label, and nobody is working for the band, it’s no good. For us it was really important that someone at a label will work with us, will communicate with us, because we never had that at Black Mark. We were here, and Black Mark was over there, there was no communication. Now we found some really nice guys who communicate with us, with whom we can talk on the same level, so it was quite natural to move. But we haven’t yet released a record with Dockyard1, we have to wait and see how it feels after the record is released.

At yesterday’s show you played a new song called “Children Of The Grey”, which is quite heavy. Will your new album continue in the vein of “Black Brick Road”, or will you return to your 1990s style?

Daniel: That’s difficult to say, since the album is not finished yet. The song we played is not even recorded, so it’s not

a finished song, but we decided to play it. Regarding the continuation issue – we don’t think about it in the mathematical way, but of course, in some ways it’s a continuation, because while we are doing music, we are growing and getting older. As to the sound, I don’t think we have started to think so much about it.

Johan: Probably it will be a bit more guitar-based this time.

Daniel: Yeah, this time the songs are made mostly in the rehearsing room by the band together. But we have some other songs, and they are not that heavy.

Will the new album contain any songs with female vocals? And when can we expect it to be released?

Daniel: We have no plans yet, because, as I said, we haven’t really started finishing the recording process. We will see to it in the studio – if for a song that we come up with it feels really good to have female vocals, we will probably have it, but we have no plans for it now. I think the record will come out in January or February next year. But we’ll see, it’s not easy, the songs are not growing on grease, you need to get into the right mood to fix them together.

And what about a live DVD or some sort of video documentary? Have you filmed anything in Russia maybe?

Daniel: There are no concrete plans, but we are starting to discuss it more and more, and people around us are discussing it. We are recording some stuff in Russia as well. I think one day we will do it, because everyone is doing it, and the people want to see something as well.

Johan: Maybe it will contain some of our old video material, some early concerts from the 1990s, it will be nice.

Daniel, how is your book doing?

Daniel: My book? Oh, not good! (everybody laughs) It’s still just a thought inside my head.

And what about plans for a solo project of any kind?

Daniel: Again no plans, but no plans not to do it either. Making such pl

ans for music would be strange, because that would mean that you plan how to feel in your life, whether you would be happy next year and sad the year after that. “Next year I will not cry, and the year after that I will cry all the time.” You cannot plan such things, you have to wait for them to come.

At yesterday’s show the opening band Inside You played a cover version of your song “Sweetwater”. Did you like their version?

Daniel: I think it was fun to listen to. (laughs) It’s something strange when you hear another band playing some of your songs.

Do you pay attention to the development of the Swedish metal scene? Can you recommend any young Swedish bands to us?

Daniel: Not so much. Of course, you hear about new bands, especially when a band becomes big you see its name. But for most of us it’s not so important to listen to a certain kind of music and get the inspiration for a certain kind of music. We listen to a little less music nowadays than we did before. Or maybe not less music, but it’s just we don’t sit down and specifically listen to it. Music comes in from aside and mixes with everything else.

Johan: Also the spectrum of the music we listen now is much wider. When we started, it was only metal.

Daniel: When you’re 15, you really like heavy metal guitars, and you enjoy all songs with heavy metal guitars. Then when you’re 25, you learn that there’s a good techno song, a good pop song, or a good rock song – the style is not so important anymore.

And now, of course, the obvious question about the name of your Russian/Ukrainian tour (“Pizdatu Tour”). How did you come up with using a Russian curse word (this means something close to “fucking great” in Russian – ed.) as the name of the your? Do you like swearing in Russian?

Daniel: I think we like swearing in all languages! After our last trip to Russia, we wanted to thank all the audience, so we made a posting on our web-site, willing to thank everybody with this word, because it feels good to say this word. (everybody laughs) But we spelled it wrong – “pizdatu” instead of “pizdato”, and the booking agent thought it was a good name for the tour.

Special thanks to Eugene Silin and Artyom Golev (Alive Concerts) for the invitation to the press conference.

Decoding and editing by Roman “Maniac” Patrashov
Photos by Ksenia “Wolfin” Khorina
September 10, 2006
26 сен 2006 the End

Lake of Tears

Mushroom Band