Limbonic Art: “Well, if one us does not agree, it is not done; you have no real democracy. “

Limbonic Art was formed in 1993 by frontman Daemon; after a try with other members the Limbonic Art as we all know it came to life (or death, whatever you like) when Morfeus entered the band’s line up. In a scene dominated by an aversion towards anything that is electronic this band can be seen as the pioneers in Black Metal for using the computer for the drum, bass and other sonic effects.

In September this year the band came up with their fifth album (and fourth if you don’t take ‘Epitome of Illusions’ as a true, full length album), ‘The Ultimate Death Worship’. Again an intense album in the typical, yet evolving Limbonic Art style. After several tries throughout the promotion (Khaoz) and almost virtually stalking Morfeus, VM finally got a chance to talk with Morfeus about the latest developments around Limbonic Art and the album…

Hi Morfeus; this is Neithan from VM speaking…
Ah, finally
How’s life in Norway?
Ehm, cold…
Of course
Yeah, and snowy, and life and shit, a fucking lot of people everywhere…
And Christmas is coming, Jinglehell all the way…
Yeah, haha
Okay, let’s get it started then… A wait of almost three years (and side project Zyklon for Daemon and Dimension 3FH for you); you must be all charged up by now!
No! Not really… At the moment it’s like that we spent almost a whole year doing the album. It would be an exaggeration to say that we worked on it night and day, as a day has 24 hours and we too sleep, but most of the time went into this new album, we worked a lot. So at the moment we are kind of showing out and having a break, doing shitty interviews and so on, haha
Okay, I will try not to ask too dumb questions…
Just don’t ask me whether I lock the door when I go to the toilet…
Hahaha; have people seriously asked that?
Yes
My god.. What did you say? “Here in Norway we go out and shit in the woods”?
Yeah, yeah, I go outside and I have like 15 people standing around me, stuff like that
Sorry, I have way different questions…

If I compare your three official albums it strikes me that you have become less ‘organic & atmospheric’ (which ‘Moon in the Scorpio’ is in my opinion) and that little more influences of Thrash have sneaked into your music; it started on ‘Ad Noctum’ and goes further on ‘The Ultimate Death Worship’… Correct me if I am wrong, but I have never heard the band play so aggressive!
No, that’s right. I think that basically it is due to the fact that we have always liked real extreme music. ‘Moon in the Scorpio’ was extreme in its time, you know. Nobody at the time used electronics in keyboards and drums like we did. And also it was at that time that all the hard bands started to get softer, they started to mature, more adult orientated, that kind of shit.  And so we thought that we should become only harder. Then that is what became our aim.
And then, at the times of ‘Ad Noctum’ the hard bands got harder again, you know, that went softer at first, bands like Testament for instance. And then that was where we said that we should become even harder.
So it has nothing to do that Black Metal in Norway is going downhill a bit and a return to the roots by Limbonic Art?
Well, of course a little bit of that is in the back of our heads you know, that kind of roots is still within our heart, but basically it is all about doing the music in a way that we feel as being right, just whether we think it is cool or not. It is certainly not like ‘this is a Black Metal thing and that is a Death Metal thing’, that is not important to us.
So you don’t give a shit which genre people would like to hear or call it?
Yeah, basically.

The intro of second song (‘Suicide Commando’); what kind of sound fragment is it? It is hard to be understood, yet it has the sound as if it is from an old NASA-fragment… In an interview from August this year I saw that it was about an execution? You could have fooled me… Why did you use it?
I believe the idea came from me. Basically because it fits well to the song, and it belongs to the track ‘Suicide Commando’ (Neithan: on the album it is in between those two songs).
That is what I wanted to talk about; a being a part of an execution, it would be the! fragment fitting to the title track (death penalty as the ultimate death worship)…
Yeah, in that way it could also be seen as both outro/ending and intro.

I saw Attila from Mayhem participates on track six : ‘From The Shades of Hatred’. I would have thought that the timbre on the track before (‘Interstellar Overdrive’, the ‘humming’) was by his throat…
Hehehe, no it isn’t, yet you are close. Daemon has always a fan of Attila’s voice ever since ‘De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas’, so that’s how. I think he is able of doing that kind of voice now. Sometimes he uses it; Attila is an inspiration to him.
Attila and Daemon are indeed on ‘Shades of Hatred’, I believe somewhere in the middle where he and Daemon have some kind of duet, singing along each other. It is Attila and Daemon doing some kind of vocal overlapping.
Thanks for clearing that one out.

When I saw the title ‘Suicide Commando’ I first feared that Limbonic Art would break with the tradition of dark poetry and write about something that is very actual worldwide (terrorism)… Done on purpose or coincidence (the title)?
First of all, I have nothing to do with the lyrics, yet knowing Daemon it is definitely a sheer coincidence. I think it is probably more personal, yet Daemon will stay within his style of dark poetry. I never saw Daemon write anything political you know.

Now from previous interviews I feel that you don’t care much about the lyrics and that is where you often refer to Daemon – like you just did once more. Do you have any input at all or do you have go’s and no-go’s about the lyrics somehow (what if Daemon came up with a hippie love song?)
I probably wouldn’t kill him, but I would direct him to some mental institution. I would say ‘Hey Daemon, something really happened to you now and you must check it out’… No, I don’t care about the lyrics that much, I think I was more concerned and involved at the time of the ‘Moon in Scorpio’ album, it was our first album. Yet we always have gotten a good response on our lyrics, so it is something that I just enjoy in a relaxed way, I know Daemon will come up with good lyrics.
Of course sometimes I see a line or something, but that is hardly ever necessary.
Yet about the question go or no-go…
I would tell him when things would be totally fucked up, yet that doesn’t happen!’

Has Daemon also been writing poetry apart from Limbonic Art?
Well; he writes…. You know these songs without any guitars, like ‘Purgatorial Agony’…
As a matter of fact I had a question about that one and ‘Last Rite For the Silent Darkstar’, yet do talk on…
These songs emerged from lyrics he had written. He came to me and said ‘hey, I have some lyrics and I want to do something with it’. That is how it went.
Good, now I understand these tracks and why they are on the album… After all 46 minutes in six songs would have been enough too, so the reason can’t be that you wanted to lengthen the album…
No, we never had fill-ins! It was a really cool idea to do. Normally we will start with the music first, and then vocals after. And there is where we added the screams and chains to it. Coincidentally I had been recording those chains in a forest just a few weeks before, and these came in just right for ‘Purgatorial Agony’, as we wanted to express that very feeling in the atmosphere.

In that same interview I saw you were planning to tour as a trio, where the third person is not a musician, yet more some kind of sound roadie, running around to operate the electronic equipment…
So it will be two metal dudes; any special sound or art effects (like computerized arts)
Well, I think you probably misunderstood… Basically there is not coming a tour at all; due to financial reasons. We have things we want to do on stage, and that is not possible. The money is the bottleneck…
So it has nothing to do with Limbonic Art being tired of touring?
Well, at the moment it is so, yet basically it is the money. We’ve got our own expenses too, you know. And I can not get used to that new currency, the euro. We are used to the Deutschmark. And a funny thing there is what we get paid. For instance, when we were doing our first tour as support of Emperor we got paid 500 Deutschmarks… Fine with us, yet after a while, when we got bigger and also got the ability of drawing people to venues because of our own name, and we still get paid that very same amount. That was on our last tour.
And then the inflation of course throughout the years…
What?
Well, Norway is not cheap and certainly has not become cheaper lately; just think about the beer prices…
Yeah, just bring your own beer, haha
I understand, same as what I hear from other bands, like Forlorn who had to cancel the European performances (Belgium and Holland) in December and other bands looking at too high the costs… No matter how much they love to play, they can’t bear all the costs!

So does this mean that Limbonic Art will become or already is a studio-band?
At the moment we are, yet if things change in the future regarding possibilities and so on…

How difficult is it to play live when the basics are laid down by electronics (no bass & drums); it seems very hard to me to adjust those in case you fuck up or feel like improvising?
Well, it is really easy because we’ve been doing it for ten years, so… that is how things go. Like when we played at the Metal Fest, we had like only two rehearsals. The songs are kind of in our blood.
Improvising for us is playing a riff differently. Also I would say that 99,5% in the metal scene does not improvise (that much). Hardly ever a metal band improvises.
It was more for the hard rock bands in for instance the seventies…
Yeah, and you have bands like for instance Dream Theater, doing kind of improvising only… But I don’t believe that much in the improvise-thing; it even kinds of confuses the audience, so why bother…

Do you have any profit of using drums and bass in a programmed way concerning the studio-costs? In other words; you have less need for money from the record company and therefore less pressure as if the album will yield its costs; a benefit for the position of the band compared to many others…
Yeah, basically it is just us doing guitars and vocals that takes the time in the studio, as the rest is already finished. It just takes us two hours for the drums, where as a drummer would need one or two weeks.

Samoth’s label Nocturnal Art Promotions; what about it… 4 bands, Apotheosis, UK Void, Red Harvest and of course Limbonic Art… As Emperor no longer exists, does this mean he will put more time into his label activities and therefore for these bands?
No, not much really… I do think that he has a steady focus all the time, even in the last days of Emperor, so it did not change that much. Now that Emperor is over he is sort of kickstarting Zyklon. Personally I would say he focuses more on Zyklon than he did on Emperor, also because he knew it was gonna end with Emperor eventually. But he is very focussed on Nocturnal Art Productions all the time. That goes eitherway..
How much of advantage is it to have a label boss that knows the scene and your music so well?
He never ever told us what to do; sometimes he said ‘maybe you should do this or that’, but he never puts his finger down on saying things like ‘no, you have to do it like this’ or whatever… We have a lot of freedom. Not even when like you said, that he would urge to do another album after three years. We can do it pretty much the way we like it to..

You said in an interview that the chance that Limbonic Art will ever be again more than 2 members (like 4 in the past) is very very small…Does that have to do with the aspect that it is hard to come into a well trained duo or are there other reasons that maintain the band at two…
That chance has even become smaller… even less possible. We tried a drummer a while ago and I could kind of see that it was going nowhere, it did not feel right. So I think that Limbonic Art is just the two of us. The whole feeling of it was ehm… ehm…  Well, it would be lost somehow. It would be very different.

In many questions there is being asked about the band name… I won’t ask it again, yet there is some addition of mine. The word Art!
About the name, you said: Limbo, to me anyway, is kind of a waking place between life and death, on the borderline.  Limbonic Art is the art being made in such a state of mind.
Does that art perhaps also refer to your love for artistic activities (cover design) I never saw that being mentioned in combination with the band’s name…
No, the name was already there when I entered the band. But it is suitable, haha!

Which side of L.A. is more satisfying to you; the musical or the artistical side?
Of course the music. The artwork is something cool to do for me, another personal input into the band.

To put it simply: Daemon is the lyrical artist and you are the visual artist; do you have to take into account on what the other one is working to remain within the Limbonic Art concept?
I think that is a kind of on it’s own you know. We’ve been working together so long now… Usually I know most of the lyrics and so on, so I start doing the artwork.

It seems like your completely crazy with computers; you design your art with it (I’ve read), write and record your music with it… Do you also use it for information about metal on the web?
No, not much! How do I say that… I am not fed up with metal or so, yet I am not that much into looking for new bands or so… More when it concerns my life on a daily basis. I don’t need to know every little detail within the scene or about a band so to say. Sometimes I search Google to see what I can find on Limbonic Art, shit like that.

The Emperor has died; do you believe this will get you out of the Emperor-like band corner or not and in what respect?
No I don’t think so. No that they are gone and the Emperor is dead, everybody starts looking for the new one! You know, who will overtake the Emperor’s throne, shit like that. Like we go back in time, when we were compared to Emperor, as we strated with them on tour.  After a while that silenced a bit, but now again.
Well, there are similarities; both being very technical Black bands from Norway, becoming more and more riff and technique orientated. I don’t take the label link with Samoth into account.
I have not made you mad yet?
No no, go on…

In the news we published on March 24th this year it stated that “‘The Ultimate Death Worship’ has been eagerly anticipated since Limbonic Art made their live debut at the 2001 Milwaukee Metal Festival. Fans from around the country witnessed the band’s dominating yet unique performance for which the duo selected material from their three previous albums. Moon in the Scorpio, In Abhorence Dementia and Ad Noctum/Dynasty of Death have since been made domestically available in the U.S. via the license between Nocturnal Art Productions and Candlelight Records.” A wrong news statement we had received or does this mean that you wish to stay away from third album ‘Epitome of Illusions’, which is a reflection of your demo-era (old material)?
No, that was basically because of the time issue. And apart from that, we were supposed to play five songs there, yet we had only time to play four, hardly a real show, that’s nothing.
I still look back on that one (‘Epitome…’) with pleasure, we had some really killer tracks.

You also have an interesting opinion on the war- or corpsepaint; in short, you said only few had the capabilities of doing it right. What is the right way and what does the paint stand for in your opinion?
When I am speaking of that I mean that there are few that made it look good.  I see a lot of pictures like that and usually, they just look funny…
Like Bozo the Clown on LSD?
Yeah. It’s like I ask myself whether how come they don’t see it when they would paint their faces in this way it would look much better or frightening.
We sometimes get an idea of panda’s…
Huh? Oh, you mean like those bears… Gheghe, cool!

How tough is it having an argument in a 2-piece band; it’s always 50-50%. And I don’t believe you settle them by throwing up a coin, or am I bringing you to an idea now?
Well, if one us does not agree, it is not done; you have no real democracy. If one guy says no, and then you just have to cope with it.
About the coin, haha! I never thought of that actually. Maybe we should introduce that one. ‘Listen up here, we’ve that crazy idea from a Dutch guy who said we should throw a coin up and play heads or tales, maybe that works…

Anything about the album we did not ask yet you want us to know, apart from the fact that we all have to buy it?
Nope, that is the most important issue; BUY THE ALBUM!
Thanks for calling me and having that much patience with me..
No problem, I will just spam you back
Good luck, I have cable and a large mailbox!
Me too, haha