Interview Avatar: Johannes Eckerström

Artiest: Avatar

Geïnterviewde(n): Johannes Eckerström

Interview afgenomen in: De Kreun, Kortrijk

Label: Gain Music

In De Kreun in Kortrijk stond de Zweedse metalband Avatar klaar om een vurig optreden te geven in deze gezellige clubzaal. Voor het optreden praten we met zanger Johannes Eckerström, toen nog zonder geschminkt gezicht, lange jas en hoge hoed. Een review van het optreden kan je hier lezen.

How is the tour going so far?

It's fine, it's awesome.

Earlier this year you visited Alcatraz Metal Festival and now you are back in Belgium, do you love us so much or did it just happen to fit in the schedule?

Yeah, I think Belgium has been good for us on a smaller scale. Doing a festival always helps when you want to go on a club tour. This is our biggest show as headliner to this point in Belgium and it's just that the time is right, it's good to be here.

What do you actually know about Belgium?

Well, of course we know everything about the beer culture... Your multilingualism, you speak Flemish is it, right? And French and...

German.

And German! And then I also know about from some dark past that I’m not completely sure about, you’ve got the history of the Belgian Congo.

That's impressive! Most people say beer and chocolate.

Yeah, but we make that in Sweden as well. We didn't have Congo though.

About that last album called Hail the Apocalypse, where did the inspiration for this album come from?

Our writing style and how we make albums is a quite explorative experience for us. The inspiration comes from many places along the journey, we don't know the end result before we start working on it. This cool thing that happens to a musician is that when a musician plays together with the same musicians for 10 years, is that you start to become a really tight groovy unit. So we took the whole groove thing a whole step further this time. The biggest inspiration was actually the documentary for the Sound City Studios. That was one important source of inspiration, musically I was having a period of writer's block, so I listened to Judas Priest, to reignite the metal in me, and other than that it can be in so many places.

There are a lot of Swedish metal bands. How do you think you can separate yourself from them, in other words what makes your music special?

I feel again that what we do is making a point about being inspired by many things but not be like anything else. I think most great bands are doing exactly that. I think also because our roots are In Extremo and a lot of melodic death metal, I feel the way we put the groove in it and emotions, it makes it our own thing. I think that we are always making a point about being ourselves. We are getting better and better in that, the older you get, the less you care because the world around you is more secure. I feel more secure now than when I was 16, we don’t worry about fitting in. It makes its own thing because we dare not be like others. But it's not like if I stand on my head and spin around and paint my face green, that would be different you know, it's not that calculated.

Next to Judas Priest that you mentioned and melodic death metal, do you have any other bands  that inspire you?

Genre wise there is no limit to it. The Roots is a great hip hop band. Artists I'm very inspired by... I'm a huge fan of Devin Townsend for instance. When we started to play, The Haunted was a very key thing. Further a lot of stuff with groove, hard rock and unique groups that bring unique groove to the table, like Rammstein. It can be all these different things, no matter what the genre is.

Being from Sweden, do you think the influence of melodic death metal came just from being there?

Well, I discovered metal in general before getting to know all the Gothenburg bands even though we are from that area, it came later along the road for me. I was learning and discovering that music the most when we were starting out with Avatar, it kind of happened at the same time. There are so many great bands from around home, so I think we would have enjoyed them anyway, but it's extra inspiring when you think that if they can do it, so can we. You know, if you are in a Polish glam band, Los Angeles seems so far away. But being from Gothenburg, it seems not so far away. There are artists just walking around the street, so it made the dream of succeeding accessible because you do live in that environment. Of course there are also small towns in Sweden but every little town has its own The Hives, it's a thing for the whole country.

Typically Scandinavian I think?

Yeah, Sweden is the 3rd biggest music exporting country in the world. Only the States and the UK export more music. When you think there are let's say 320 million Americans out there and only 10 million Swedes... That's pretty cool.

How would you describe Avatar to someone who doesn’t know the band yet?

When I talk to someone who doesn't know it, it's hard rock of the hard hard hard kind, haha. When I talk to my friends or parents or so, I say I scream and I probably sound angry to you. But at the same time we do it in a way that you snap your fingers in the air and stomp your feet. I think that's essentially what it is, it's heavy metal rooted in extremes but hopefully always with that fingersnapping goodness (snaps his fingers). More groovier stuff, that's the general idea. We dare to treat what we do as art. Everything what we do, we look at it as art. We can go Pink Floyd on that shit if we feel like it, you know. Those are the 3 pillars: the extreme, the groove and the art. I think that's the reason why people start liking it more and more, we are getting better at doing what we like. You are usually the best at doing what you enjoy doing, it's the very simple truth.

Do all the stage attributes and outfits contribute to something like that?

The whole idea is that we wanted to make a concept where everything is more connected. The lights should reflect the way we look, the sound should reflect what we say, we should reflect what we look like, ... It comes in a circle and that’s the idea and it's like art. The visual presentation and how we look is all part of that.

What are the plans for the next years?

Keep writing, keep touring, keep improving, keep evolving. Just be better than we were yesterday. We are writing right now, but the writing process is always ongoing. Sometimes then by accident we end up having enough songs to call it an album, and there you go.

So when you are on tour, you also contribute to writing new songs?

Yeah, I didn't do it as much on these European dates, but we were in the States for 2 months and I wrote a lot actually, I was quite surprised because I haven't been able to on tours. But we made sure I had a working environment there in the tourbus. We had a backlounge that had enough room for writing and everybody could sit in the front and I could say “fuck off I'm going to work, don't bother me”. For once it actually worked.

I have one last question which is probably asked to you the most. Short and simple: why the outfits? Why choose that concept and not something else?

It’s just us. It started with that we knew we wanted to do something special. One thing we tried was putting me in a lake of fire. Then maybe we could call the album lake of fire, that's cool with lots of fire, it was an experiment. But Photoshop is not cool, so I went down in a real lake and really set it on fire. That was awesome, and the guy who helped us, he showed some other stuff he could do and we thought “that’s cool like that would be perfect for that waltz song we got, let's do a video with that and we have that hat and coat and so on. But let's not put the whole band in there because that would be too many people for the performance. Ok fair enough, so what do we do with you... Circus, sideshow, oh scary clowns, that's cool, so maybe it can look like this”... And then I looked in the mirror and pling, it just clicked. for all of us'. I felt like I was expressing myself in a way I wasn't before. It also expressed the music, it really came all together. It was just luck, it was an idea for a music video and then we stuck with it because it was so good and it kept on growing. As long as it keeps us growing, it keeps inspiring us.

Could the concept and the outfits be completely different for a new album?

It could be, if necessary. I don't think it will be necessary next time, but it could be. Maybe in 10 years or 15 years we will look like the teletubbies istead, I don’t know, haha. It’s open, we’re not Kiss, you know.

This was very interesting, thank you for this interview!

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