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Album Reviews
The Psyke Project
Previous Nextauthor PP date 11/09/08
The Psyke Project is slowly but surely starting to become a Danish household name when it comes to the metallic music scene at least. With three excellent full lengths under their belt and a fourth one underway, the band are among the favorite Danish bands of this magazine, and one that we try to promote for the readers as often as humanly possible. They recently had some big news to announce, a new guitarist and a new studio album to be recorded in Sweden, so I figured it's about time we sit down with the guys for an in-depth interview about everything The Psyke Project. The interview took place in a tiny room behind the merch stand at Templet, Lyngby, on the evening of the first date of the band's looming tour of Denmark, and turned out really well. The band's vocalist Martin and drummer Rasmus went into great lengths of detail in many questions, so this is it for those who want to get to know this band a little bit better.
Martin: My name is Martin and I'm the lead singer.
Martin: It has a good angle because I think it's.. the angle of being a soul project. It's something we have very close to our hearts, all of us. So that's the reason why we stuck with the name. It's a good idea to call it that.
RF.net: Did you guys then ever play your music to your English teachers, whom you asked about the name?
Martin: No I don't think so. I think we'd be kicked out of class if we did that.
Rasmus: Yeah, he was very crazy!
Martin: And then it just developed into less rap and less singing and more screaming. And then we found the style of hardcore by Zao and all them, and were inspired by that. And then we started making hardcore, making only screaming vocals.
Rasmus: On the first demo we had singing, rapping and screaming, and our producers back then, from a city called Helsingor, they said to us: "Guys, we really like what you're doing, but you should definitely cut off the singing and the rapping, and just stay at screaming". And they actually took the demo we just made, and they gave us a version two, where they have just removed all the singing and rapping, so we only had the screaming on the demo. And I remember the guys just stood and said "I don't know about this.. this is one bad idea". Just one year after, in 2002, we made the demo "You're So Beautiful", which is only screaming vocals.
Martin: And then came "Samara", which is plain straight out hardcore, and then "Daikini"...there's a story for those three albums as well. We started making a bit skizo, thought as a crazy mathematical hardcore, like trying to be something that we actually weren't. We tried to make this chaotic hardcore, which I think on "Daikini", is much more us. It's more dark and there's much more soul and atmosphere in them.
Rasmus: But actually I don't agree on that, because we did mathematic music back then because we felt like it. We didn't feel like we had some kind of dark approach to it, but we couldn't do that kind of music, so we just chose to do mathematic. "Samara" was just a product of what kind of inspirations we had back then, and on "Daikini", we just wanted to do.. we just wanted to have another approach to the music, a more dark approach.
Rasmus: Well, for the first one, "Samara", it was actually Mikkel. The "Samara" one was actually a kind of a virgin album, because we did a lot of rehearsing, and we didn't know what to expect, and we just called the album an EP. And suddenly we got the Roskilde Festival gig, and then we got to the Antfarm Studio. We had nine songs, which were very good, so suddenly we just had to get the title right away. And he had just seen the movie "The Ring".
Martin: And the girl in "The Ring" is called Samara. So that's a perfect idea what to call our album.. after a fucking evil girl.
Rasmus: Yeah, and then some guy who made the cover was one guy with crazy hair, so it was cool, "Samara". And then with "Daikini", we were hanging out at my place, checking out the movie called "Willow", and there's a scene where the midgets have a first encounter with the human being. And they say something like "Oh, don't trust them because they're Daikini", because they find the Daikini dangerous.
Martin: "Don't go near it, it's a Daikini"... then "Why dad, what's a Daikini?" and then he says "A Daikini is a giant living far far away" and that's just perfect, because the whole "Daikini" album is about the human race.
Rasmus: So what we needed to find back then was a word which could tell you something about the human kind seen from another perspective. That's why "Daikini".
RF.net: What about "Apnea"?
Martin: "Apnea" means you are out of breath. That you're almost... for example, when you're drowning, the last breath you'll have in your lungs.. almost dying, breathless. We found out that title before I started writing the songs, so we had the title of the album, and then I'm going to write the lyrics after that. So I've got the negative and positive sides of being breathless. For example, when you meet the love of your life, you can get breathless. But if you lose her again, you can get breathless. If I see my friend get hurt, I can get breathless. So there's good sides and bad sides of that, so that's how the album is built up lyrically.
RF.net: So does that mean that the next album will also just have a one word title. Have you decided on that yet?
Rasmus: That's a very good question. "Samara", "Daikini" and "Apnea" have to be seen like as a trilogy, and the next, the fourth album, we're going to record it in another studio in Sweden, we have a whole kind of new approach to it. The three albums we did actually like three months before we hit recording sessions, because we were very busy with touring and stuff. So the albums have been very intense. Now we have been keeping it low for touring, just to focus a lot on the album, so we have been working very intensely on this album for a long time. And this is going to be a new sound, a new album, so we don't want to continue the single word pattern. The album's title is probably going to be "The Great Telos". Telos means the most important actions you do in life, kind of.
RF.net: So are we still talking about really long songs as many on "Apnea"?
Rasmus: Some of them... actually most of them are about six minutes. And we've also tried to keep a very big distance to the post-hardcore music scene. That's been very important to us, to try to compose songs which are six minutes long in another way, that isn't so typical post-hardcore.
RF.net: Why's that?
Rasmus: Because we're a bit tired of that traditional way of building a song up to the climax...
Martin: Some of the songs are long, but they're still going with the same flow, if you know what I mean. As if you're getting hypnotized, liked "gong gong gong gong gong gong" just all the way through the song, so we don't have these climaxes and all the breakdowns and all that cool stuff, just one good flow all the way through. Rasmus is making some incredible drums on this album, just wait for them, they'll be AWESOME. When you stand and listen to it, it's just like a machine walking through a city, and burning everything around.
RF.net: You mean like Meshuggah?
Martin: No no.. not at ALL like Meshuggah. If Jeppe was down here, the bassist, he'd say yeah I love Meshuggah [laughs].. not me. More like.. The Psyke Project!
Rasmus: It's definitely The Psyke Project. [laughs]
Martin: Yeah that's excellent! This is between me and you. The only reason why we got Bono in the band is because we're pretty old now. When you've got one under 21 in the band, you look younger! [laughs] I feel like 24! Nah, he's awesome. We've been trying a lot of guitarists and Bono has always just.. he played in some other bands called Harasser and Full Nelson, which is really good. And we thought.. actually it was Mikkel who thought about trying to ask him. It was a good suggestion.
Rasmus: The cool thing about Bono is that he has not been passive. He's been composing a lot of the things on the new material, he's been very hard working at getting all our old stuff ready for the tours, and he's also very friendly and a nice guy, he has a great sense of humour. So it actually just clicked right away.
RF.net: So he's actually been in the band for quite a while before the announcement?
Rasmus: Two months, since June!
Martin: That's the cool thing about Bono. He didn't come into the rehearsal room and just played what he should. He said "no man Mikkel, I think it would be much more cool if you did like this" and Mikkel was like "oh man, fuck yeah!". Already then, there was a bond between the guitar players. And that's really important in a band. The four of us could see right there that he's really good.
Martin: Yeah, seeing how we were touring and how much we were doing in the band. If we were passive or if we were actually working for this. And then they noticed we were good workers, "so we will take them into our home".
Rasmus: Yeah, back in the summer of 2007, our Scandinavian label, Copenhagen Sound, they broke down, and they actually left us the whole business. So we were actually our own record label for eight months. And I think that's why they decided to choose us, because they saw that we still have all the booking agencies, we still have all the distribution agencies, and we're taking care of business, we're composing, and playing live and stuff.. and it's a very cool label. Actually I couldn't imagine a better label for our kind of music. [sounds of Vira's guitars being tuned up on the background]
RF.net: Yeah, or the last couple of years.
Rasmus: That's a difficult question. All kind of music. When we're sitting backstage, we would listen to Veto, and we listen to hardstyle techno.
RF.net: Really?
Rasmus: Yeah...
Martin: For me as a vocalist, I think I must say there's a band called Zao, and in the newer time it must be Buried Inside from Canada. That's what I've been listening to. [Vira starting their set in the background]
RF.net: Both. Or lets say music scene.
Rasmus: I think the Danish music scene has, for the last two years, been going through a very important development. I think we have a lot of bands now sounding quite interesting, like Veto, Duné and those bands, but we also have very talented bands in the underground. It's like that the Danish bands have now understood that if you want to have your music out, it requires hard work, and you just can't stay in the rehearsal room waiting for some record label to give you a record deal. You need to work hard, and you need to stay focused, and you definitely don't need to sound like the newest UK thing. For many years, we have just, after two years of the biggest UK band, all the Danish bands sounded like that. I think bands now have seen that one of the most important things is to have an edge to the music, to try something new. I really like a lot of Danish bands, both in the rap, rock and in the electronic music scene. I actually think that the metal scene is still lagging behind, if you should ask me.
Rasmus: Yeah and do your sit ups!