Intervista Avatar (Johannes Eckerström)

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Hi Johannes, welcome to TrueMetal, how are you doing?

I’m doing good!
There’s something familiar at the end of every tour in Europe, it seems to always end with Hamburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Gothenburg and it’s nice to fall into some familiar pattern after like…we’ve done as many shows this year as it was physically possible: we left for a US tour on January 6, when that tour ended we shipped all our stuff back to Europe and they arrived the day before our first show in the Netherlands, so we have been touring as much as physically possible.
So it’s been intense, and there’s something special about coming back to Sweden, there’s little things like what language you’re gonna hear people speak around you, you have to remember that, “Oh no”, you cannot talk about people when they stand next to you and get away with it and things like that, so it’s refreshing to be here.

I wanted to ask you about the tour, but you already told me something about it; how are the fans reacting to the new music?

They are embracing it and seem to be loving it.
This whole thing of us revealing the truth of our King and opening the borders of our country has gone over really well, which means that our estimation, the fact that we felt, “Okay, now it’s the right time to do it”, was correct.
Now this thing is going really well, the singalongs have been epic, especially, it’s funny, going on tour there are different levels of singalongs in different countries, I’ve noticed, for instance, that in Spain, France, Italy they are more keen to also sing along to guitar leads, riffs and stuff, which I really like, I do that when I hear Black Sabbath playing ‘Iron Man’, for instance, so I really like that.
‘The King Wants You’ was accompanied by an audience going “Who, oh, ah!”, so that was cool and ‘A Statue of the King’, the second video came out and it has become a staple of our live shows it seems.
It’s great, this has been our most successful headlining tour ever!

Talking about this album, what is the “Avatar Country”?

Well, Avatar Country is the nation that is ruled by His Royal Majesty the King, something that we have been aware of for a long time, you can look at our old booklets and as we were giving thanks to people, as you do, we always ended those lists with a special thanks to Kung, Swedish for the King.
We’ve been hinting at it for quite some time, but only now it was time to give people the full understanding of it, and Avatar Country is a very special nation that is…I mean, it’s a very real place, of course we have our ruler, our working government, our own currency, the Avataro, our flag and everything, it might be hard for people to find it because it’s not oppressed…no, it’s not held down by the oppressive chains of geography, so it’s tricky to find it like that, but at the same time it has this Neverland quality that if you truly believe it and if you hold Avatar Country in your heart, that’s how we declare people citizens of Avatar Country.

So, is this something that you had in mind for a long time, you’ve been planning to go into this album all along, or did you have just a vague idea that only now you developed?

Our understanding and knowledge of Avatar Country has been growing through the years, we wore the Avatar Country flag on stage also a couple of years ago, you must have seen it in the ‘New Land’ video as the King goes on an expedition to the Moon and elsewhere.
Again, we were aware for a long time that our King was King, so all those things meant that there was definitely a knowledge and a tradition and a mythology of Avatar Country long before and we just felt, I think it’s also connected to the fact that we did “Feathers & Flesh” which was, you know, a piece of fiction first and foremost, as we wrote a fable to go along with that album, and the story we told was very dark, it was about death, it was about fear, loss, weakness, I think there’s a weird kind of ping pong going back and forth, or a pendulum swinging, that you do when you make music, or any kind of art, once you have really dwelt into one side of things you want to go to the other side and explore the other.
So, after doing that suddenly here’s an album about life, strength, hope, victory, you know, and I think it’s the most hopefully sounding, definitely the most positive sounding Avatar you will hear in a long, long time, because this subject, what we were feeling, and what it was all about, influenced our decision to make a more positively charged album.

In the videos Jonas is the King, is he the actual King, or is he like a visualization of the ruler who, just like the Country, isn’t chained to the physical world?

No, he’s the actual King of the Avatar Country to whom we gave extra thanks on every album.
It becomes very evident also if you watch our performances that he is, in fact, very much the King of Avatar Country.

You went all the way to Thailand to record “Hail the Apocalypse”, for “Feathers & Flesh” you split time between studios in Germany, Finland and Sweden, but this time you’ve only worked at the Spinroad Studios, pretty close to your home in Gothenburg, why?

Actually that studio is walking distance from my childhood home, so it was really close.
A couple of reasons, the main one is, you go to Thailand to feel something different, just like you go to record in Germany, the main parts were in Germany, the vocals were two weeks in Finland and that was basically me wanting to be closer to home for a piece of it, and it was and option so it was good, and then I spent maybe a week in Sweden recording the choir parts and some other things.
Once you’ve been in Thailand, once you’ve been in a castle in Germany, recording walking distance from your childhood home, sleeping in the guestroom that used to be your childhood room, that becomes very different instead, so it was all about breaking away from behaviours and patterns we were used to, so that’s always the process with it.
That would mean that probably the next album will be, well, I’d like to do it close to home again, but as we usually do the initial phase of a recording session is all of us together, when we track drums we usually write away and track also bass so they play together, so it’s a good rhythm section thing, and while doing that we do the arrangements, re-write some stuff, so we are all there playing and singing and that phase will probably be elsewhere, then I will finalise it in Helsinki again.
It’s just about making it feel different every time; after travelling to the other side of the planet to make it feel different, it feels different going walking distance.

You’ve started as a classical Melodic Death Metal band, but you’ve expanded your sound in different directions overtime; was it a kind of unconscious evolution, or did you purposely decided to keep exploring different sounds?

I must say, it’s very conscious to the extent…we’ve just played in Hamburg the venue where in the basement the Beatles played their first Hamburg show, which made me listen to a lot of Beatles that day.
Usually when questions like this come out I talk about the Beatles as an example of a band that evolved a lot over a short period of time, and yet always sounded like the Beatles, because there are their voices, not just their voices as vocalists, but voice in terms of how lead guitars is being played and how the drums are, like your voice as a musician, far beyond your speaking voice.
That makes that they’re always definable as the Beatles because they are who they are, and I share that philosophy, I think it’s important for a band to reason like that, Queen would be another example, ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ sounds like Queen, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ definitely sounds like Queen, ‘I Want to Break Free’ sounds like Queen as well, but they don’t have much to do with each other, still it’s always Queen.
There’s that aspect, and speaking of the Beatles, I’m just thinking how in their early days half their albums were covers of Chuck Berry and stuff, and how overtime they evolved, changed and started pushing boundaries a bit more.
We didn’t record covers on our early albums, but they are definitely heavily influenced from a certain branch of bands that was really in our minds when we started the band and we learnt how to play this kind of music, because we weren’t very good at the beginning, so the bands that influenced our playing style the most at the beginning also influenced our writing style the most at the beginning , The Haunted and In Flames are very high on that list, Cryptopsy and other more extreme bands are also on that list, and that’s kind of where we were at, so technical, brutal Death Metal, but also melodic Death Metal, so that was the starting point.
But once you start to evolve as a songwriter, and as a group, and as a group able to communicate with each other it became more and more interesting and important for us to record songs you haven’t heard yet, or at least we haven’t heard yet.

 
Talking about influences, do you listen to the same music you used to listen when you started the band, or did that evolve together with the direction you own music took?

It has grown, I wouldn’t say evolve because I haven’t stepped away from the good old stuff, you know, I still think The Haunted’s “Made Me Do It” is one of the greatest albums ever made, still one ideal when recording, in terms of what sound to achieve, all that still gets me going, in party occasions there are some old albums you always go back to.
So, that is all still there, talking about The Beatles, the band I have probably obsessed the most over in my life, them and Black Sabbath, I’ve got into them when I was eight years old and still keeps going, there are still things to learn there.
But, yeah, I’ve been definitely adding things, I’m really more heavily into Steven Wilson than ever, when there’s a new band that is actually good we are all over there, they are not new now but I remember when they were new, Gojira, or when they were new to us, such as Behemoth, it’s been a while but it was at least after I was fourteen years old, if you know what I mean.
Now I really like Jinjer, from Ukraine, fucking fantastic, and I think we’re always listening to different genres in this band anyway so, everybody got a Bob Marley album when they were fifteen and so on, it wasn’t a strange thing, and we’ve always been heavily into classical music and all that.
It was always a kind of wide range, you know.

Your makeup is surely very recognisable, what was the thought behind it when you decided to use it? Was it just, “it looks cool”, “I want to be more recognisable”, “I want to give a stronger identity to the band” or what?

Yeah, identity was part of it, but it’s like, what we understood – ‘cause we were looking for something – is that whatever we want to do at the end we have to feel it in order to make it work, you cannot just go to the image store and pick a random image and have that work with any band, so it has to come from a real place, and we were looking for it.
We got kind of lucky because Hellzapoppin, who are in tour with us right now, they were in Sweden in 2011 in a period when we needed a photoshoot with some crazy fire in it, which meant we worked with Bryce Graves, the leader of Hellzapoppin, and that led us to shooting the ‘Black Waltz’ music video.
First and foremost we thought, “Okay, this is getting very circusy, so I guess I should…you know, how about I look like a scary clown?”, I don’t remember if it was my idea or somebody else’s, but the idea was, “Okay, there are so many performers in the video, we don’t need the whole band to be in it as well, that would be a lot of people, and it would be a good idea to have the singer sing the song so it looks like it’s a music video of our band”, so we just needed to put me in a context of fitting in that story, that shooting, but what happened is that once it was put on, once I looked in the mirror it just clicked and everybody felt it, it was “Oh my god, this is what our music looks like”.
That is a very strange question that is hard to…you don’t know before you know, but it’s just like Iron Maiden’s music looks like a colourful zombie who is an Egyptian king and in the future, it just looks perfect for Iron Maiden, it’s not just that it looks cool, it looks like their music; all the best examples of bands combining visuals with their music is that thing, Iron Maiden couldn’t have looked like Kiss, it just wouldn’t fit what they do, and vice versa, imagine Iron Maiden standing there and their songs are called ‘C’mon and Love Me’ and ‘Black Diamond’ it would be just weird, one thing is awesome and the other thing is awesome, but it’s just that perfect fit, it doesn’t have to be that theatrical even.
My favourite example is always that to have that package where everything makes sense together, in terms of Foo Fighters is that they look like they shower sometimes and have t-shirts, but it’s the perfect look for Foo Fighters, you get that whole complete feel.
While for instance, I remember, I guess it’s on Operation M…no, it’s “Rage for Order” by Queensrÿche, if you look at the pictures of them back in the day, they had those huge hair and long coats and I look at that and think, “This was made out of desperation”, I’m sure, because it makes no sense, that’s not what their music looks like.

That’s Europe, it can’t really be Queensrÿche…

Exactly!
They are a more extreme version of that even, it didn’t make sense.
It has to come from a real place, once we stopped thinking, “What is our image?”, and asked a more artistic question, “What does our music look like?”, that is when things fell into place.

The way you move on stage and interact with the crowd is very energic and captivating to you public, is it something that comes natural to you or is something you worked on through the years and the gigs?

Of course, it has developed through being on stage, but again it goes back to what our music looks like, it’s the same thing, because once I realised that we are…the short, simplified version is, “Okay, we are a Metal circus”, or something like that, what happened is that I started to express something that felt more accurate to me, and obviously to the rest of the band as well, that came from a more real place than just, again, being a The Haunted fan I went to a The Haunted show and I thought they look like, especially Marco Aro back in the day and now he’s back, [in a deep voice] “Oh, he could kick my ass”, so then I wanted to look like that, I was a 17 years old on stage [in a high pitched voice], “I can kick your ass”, you know, and I just hadn’t been in a fight since I was 12 [laughs], that wasn’t me.
But whatever was wrong with me trying to do The Haunted’s thing was expressed more accurately through being a clown, so it comes very naturally, but in terms of that becoming natural I spent time developing ideas for the shows and the performance, but it’s all a bit of a chicken and the egg thing, but it’s definitely more real to me than it used to be.

Another thing that strikes me is the way you sing, it seems so easy for you to switch from brutal growl to clean vocals, and vice versa. Have you studied singing or are you self-taught?

No, I have a…on a gymnasium level, I think it’s pretty much the same in Italy, at the gymnasium you can kind of pick a direction, in Sweden – at the time at least, I’ve been out of it for so many years – it was basically that 50% of what you learn in gymnasium it’s the same for every kid in Sweden, a little bit of history, a little bit of science, a little bit of whatever, but the other half was program specific, and most of us in the band went to a music program like that.
For me that included vocal lessons and choir and stuff like that, and I was also in this after-school program, a music school thing that you started as a kid, you’ve got to play the trombone, the clarinet or whatever, be in orchestras and also there I joined choirs.
Then, of course, going more extreme with it was maybe not something my choir teacher could quite help me with; I met them afterward and then explained to them and they were very fascinated.
Any form of singing, if you want to do it long term, is 90% the same, in my opinion: it’s about the breathing, the use of your diaphragm, controlling the tone with a space of your mouth without using the muscles and your throat for the force, bla, bla, bla.
All that applies to most ways of using your voice, from speaking and being a rapper, to doing Death Metal to singing Opera.
So, yeah, I have a foundation in that, definitely, but most of it has…you never get around the learning by doing and getting to know yourself, if I sat here, even if I had four hours to tell you about it, you cannot get around the hours and hours and days of learning by doing it, so my best lesson has been the touring, I wasn’t able to sing the way I do now around the time we did our first album, even though my voice was younger and fresher, it’s just that the technique lacks.
Writing songs I always end up putting in things that are hard for me to do, because that’s also part of how Metal to me…I think one of the more important aspects of Metal for it to get the right feel, there has to be some kind of physicality there.
It’s not just that you need a fast song, I can program a fast song with synthesizers and it would not feel Metal, it could be great for other reasons, but in Metal it’s the physicality of human beings playing it, pushing their abilities, the aggression, the power that comes from that physicality.
That is why we play fast, shredding guitars, hit high notes and scream, to get that emotional state you look after, first and foremost.
I always push myself technically in my writing in order to reach those points of physicality.
I think that’s very clear if you compare Judas Priest’s last two albums, I feel like the last one, “Firepower”, to me is infinitely better than “Redeemer of Souls”.
The thing is “Redeemer of Souls” has all those Judas Priest melodies and the sound is right and stuff, but it felt more energetic on “Firepower”; “Redeemer of Souls” is a bit more laid back and comfortable, there’s nothing wrong with the writing there, but the performance lacks that push.

You’ve gained quite a lot of success in the latest years, do you remember a specific moment when you realised the extent of your success, and that you could keep doing this professionally, for a living?

Well, there are those things you don’t really think about from the outside but, you know, there was the time when I paid my rent with money I made as a musician, and that is a big deal in a completely different way.
There are those feelings on stage, the audience response, you get to go somewhere cool, someone from the label waiting in a taxi to take you somewhere, but those things happen before, you know, because people invest their money and time in you, so can start to see through that quickly what that actually is, so you got that in result,  and in terms of having the artistic feeling of it, I don’t know, because we love to do what we do, long before anyone cared about the fact that we were doing it.
So…- why is this question so hard to answer for me now? – because we had these kinds of moments from early on, there were those memorable shows and the sense of going into the right direction, feeling the growth, it’s been slow but still we felt it along the way so many times, now it’s way more that, it’s always weird that since we are in the middle of it all the time we don’t stop and think about it as it is happening.
So, it’s a good thing that people are taking pictures of us a lot, so I have something to look at and realise in hindsight, “Hey…”.
With that being said, I am enjoying the moment all the time, I am living in the moment all the times, but living in the moment does not entail feeling, “Yeah, we are pretty big now”, we are always looking forward at what’s the next thing we can do, more artistically than growth-wise.
In terms of just enjoying the shows we are doing, seeing what our music is doing for people that listen to it, that happens all the times, luckily.
 

That was my last question, thank you very much, I’ll leave to you the last word.

The King loves you, the King wants you, and also you can be a citizen of Avatar Country.
Glory to our King!

Davide Sciaky