The Ocean interview

"I did not want to have lyrics about sperm whales fighting with giant squids"

30/04/2013 @ 11:40
On the occasion of their latest album, "Pelagial", we had a talk with The Ocean's mastermind, Robin Staps. He was communicative, as always, and talked to us about the double concept of the album which begins from the surface of the sea and ends with Tarkovsky, about the difficulties of being a full-time musician and about his interests in the depths of the ocean and in philosophy. Here's what he's got to say.

The OceanLet’s talk about your latest album, "Pelagial". Each song submerges deeper and deeper into the abyss... Would you like to talk to us about the concept, the Tarkovsky influence and the analogies that occur in the lyrics of the album?
Of course. Well, the album is kind of like a dichotomy of two concepts or two approaches to the same thing. The first approach is a journey from the surface to the bottom of the sea coming through different depth zones and this is pretty much what we've tried to visualize or audiolize, musically... We wanted to make an album that reflects the change in diminishing light for example that you experience when you're progressing from the surface to the depth of the sea. We wanted to write an album that starts pretty lightly musically and then gets progressively darker and heavier with a more claustrophobic element coming in. The second side is analoged to that journey. I did not want to have lyrics singing about sperm whales fighting with giant squids (laughs) or any other oceanic creatures... That would have been a bit boring. That's why we decided to take a metaphorical approach to this whole journey there with the lyrics. Originally, the lyrics were entirely based on Andrei Tarkovsky's movie, "Stalker", which also is a journey through zones, or a zone, much like this album is a journey through pelagic depth zones. It's basically about three people travelling towards the heart of the zone where their wishes turn to come true. The closer they get the more frightened they actually get... This place seems very enticing and exciting in the first place but in the end they don't even know what they should wish for anymore. That’s because they also find out that the subconscious wishes, which also come true, are the wishes they don’t like to have... It's a very dark movie. I originally based the lyrics of the entire album on the subtitles of that movie. I basically extracted the subtitles' files, which was the translation of the original movie, and took out certain lines that worked as lyrics to this album... That was working out great, we already started recording it that way and then our publisher came to us and said: 'guys you can’t do that, you have to get permission for that'. Basically, I was a bit stupid. I thought you could do it because we had done it before; we had used a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, "The City In The Sea" for example and that's ok, because Poe is dead for more than 70 years. But Tarkovsky is not, so we had to get permission. I wrote to the Russian movie studio but they never wrote back so in the end I realized I had to paraphrase all the lyrics and start from scratch again. That's when I started writing my own lyrics, still based on the same thing, the same questions about the origins of our wishes and desires, where they come from and how much of a chance we have changing them. Actually and that's where this album is orbiting around. It's very introspective inward psychological journey lyrically.

The Ocean - PelagialBut, as you have revealed, the album was initially conceptualized as instrumental and then you decided to add vocals. Why did you come up with this decision, what changed in the process and made you decide to add vocals?
Well, originally the album was written to be instrumental because I didn’t really know how to approach it lyrically. That was the main reason. I don’t wanna sing about ocean creatures so maybe this album should just not have vocals or not have lyrics. But also there was the fact that Loic, the singer, was suffering from problems with his vocal chords and for a long time it was not clear if he would continue to be part of our live band and so at one point we just thought: 'well, maybe it's the right moment in time to release an instrumental album'. That's how the album was originally written. This album really stands on its own instrumentally and works great instrumentally. In 2012, after our Australian tour, we didn’t really tour much anymore which was great. Loic recovered and his voice was getting much better and he really wanted to be in the album... He plays a really important role when it comes down to sharing the energy released from the stage into the crowd. We both came to the same conclusion and then decided to add vocals just to the last two tracks of the album. That was quickly recorded, and then we just started fooling around a bit, for the fun of it, and then we happened to get this amazing crooked session… Loic had some great vocal ideas for the other parts and I had some other ideas and by the end of the week we had basically vocals for the whole album. We decided to have two versions that fully stand on their own. The instrumental version is not just like an added bonus, it's the original version of the album, and I do think that the vocals do add another level of depth, so I am personally very fond of both of them.

The OceanCompared to your previous albums, what would you say that you did different this time?
The main difference is that this album was written as one piece of music from the beginning to the end. That's something we had never done before with any of the previous albums that were always like a collection of loose songs like, "Heliocentric" and "Anthropocentric". Those were isolated songs that I'd written on their own and in the end I put them in order and the whole concept would tie them together. But this album is really written from the beginning to the end chronologically and always with the big picture in mind, so whenever I was writing a riff I always knew whether it would be more like a surface riff or if it was gonna be more like a riff for the end of the album, for the depth zones. That's why the whole thing feels more cohesive and coherent to me than the previous albums

The OceanNow, after all those years, which of the records you have released so far do you think is closer to your musical vision? Are there any regrets for any choices you've made throughout your career?
Not really. I am fairly fond of what we've done with this band. Of course I have regrets about certain decisions… How to approach touring for example... You know, we've got ourselves in some very difficult situations in the US where we got scumed by a bus company and stuff like that so it's kind of like more technical or logistical stuff. As for our albums, for our music, no, I still like them all. Some are better than others, some songs are better than others, but all of this stands on its own and reflects a certain time of my life and of this band. We still play quite a lot of our old songs usually, but not right now because we want to play the new album in its entirety live so we have to compromise a bit especially when we’ re not headlining. But generally we are still fond of playing earlier songs live. We haven’t played "Fluxion" songs in a long time but I really want to play some of those tracks again, I feel they are very much up-to-date.

The OceanThis is your fifth album with Metal Blade... How important is the support of a label like metal blade for a band like The Ocean in the music industry of 2013?
It is important. It is very important actually because they take care of all the logistics that I don’t really have the resources to take care of myself. That said, I run my own record label "Pelagic Records" and I release a lot of vinyls and I release a lot of other bands too, but it's a small label that doesn't have the same kind of widespread network they've got for promotion and distribution. I could technically release all my albums on my own but we consciously decide to continue working with Metal Blade because they just have much more resources than we do and they are very experienced, they have done that for years. They also have this US branch which helps us a lot because with Pelagic Records I am only centered in Europe basically. My distribution channels are only European and we would have never made it, as successfully as we have, in the US especially, if it wasn't for Metal Blade. They really kept the credit for building up this band, for helping us get in good tours. That's really important, because it's a massive market, you know.

The OceanYou've got a certain line in "Hadopelagic"... You say that 'what they call passion is just a turmoil caused by repression of their ambitions'. It's a line that made me think and make an analogy with music passion. Is music passion the same thing? A struggle to overcome repression in its every day form?
That's an interesting analogy actually. The line from the movie is not really referring to music, but it could be. That's the beauty in writing lyrics that are not entirely direct but have a certain degree of abstraction in them that allows you to associate them to things that have meaning  to you own personal life. That's a perfect example for that... This line is not really talking about music, but of course you can apply to that as well.

How is your life when you’re not on the road or in the studio? When you’re not busy writing new music do you have other jobs you go back to? What do you do?
Right now, this band is a full time job for me and the record label is the second full time job for me, so I have two full time jobs and that doesn't work (laughs), so basically, yeah, I don’t really do anything else. I used to work as a translator for a while but I've given up all hired jobs. I also play in another band called The Old Wind with three members of Breach and we are starting to tour now and play as well so I have to coordinate that with The Ocean and the label and that's more than enough to keep me busy really.

Robin Staps (The Ocean)It's quite a blessing, being able to be a full-time musician, I think...
It is. It's beautiful and I have no complaints. I mean it's rough sometimes when you’re sleepless for weeks and you're touring. It's very hard, to work this out with family and relationships and this kind of stuff when you 're constantly gone. There are moments in my life when I started questioning it, but overall I don’t wanna complain. I like my life a lot. I don’t have to work for anyone else , I can keep all my energy into it… It's ok if you work until 3 o'clock in the morning  because it's for your own things and for your own projects and that's so much more rewarding than going to an office job. I just can't imagine myself going to anything like that anymore, it would be impossible.

The OceanIt is pretty obvious from your albums that you are very interested in nature and the nature's history, the planet's history in general... Where does this interest derive from?
I don’t know... I'm just like generally very much interested in these things. Of course the lyrics are related to the ocean at first and that's not just because I play in this band... I also wrote my diploma thesis on coral reef monitoring and scuba divers so, you know, it applies to a lot of different aspects of my life this fascination for example... Then I studied philosophy and have been exposed to lots of the things that I discuss in the lyrics or albums, like the whole "Heliocentric" and "Anthropocentric" thing, that is basically a critic on religion.

What are your plans for the future? What are you up to?
We will be on the road until end of September basically. Then we're gonna do a headlining tour from October into November. So our plans are pretty much full for the whole year. We are touring a lot on this album which will be released very soon and of course now there's lots of press, lots of preparations... But yeah, we are pretty much occupied now until the end of the year.

The OceanFor our last question I would like you to tell us which albums you've been listening to lately...
Difficult question because I have not -believe it or not- been listening to much music lately. I've been so busy working on this album… When you work in the studio for 8 or 9 hours, then you usually don’t wanna listen to more music when you’re coming home. I have a lot of albums on my i-pod that I'm very much looking forward to checking out over the next 3 weeks when I’ll have my bump in the sleeper bus and I can listen to music on my headphones and smoke a joint and just pass out... It's gonna be awesome. So, I'm very much looking forward to that. I listened to Intronaut's latest record, "Habitual Levitations" which is just blowing my mind. Absolutely awesome. Also, we were on tour in Europe with this band called The Atlas Moth and I really enjoyed their latest album too. I’ve been listening to that in the van today and yesterday. We played a couple of shows with them and Intronaut and they gave us the record and I wasn't really aware of the band before. I really like it, it's very different, very strange kind of like stoner metal but done in a very cool way. So those were the last two albums I’ve listened to, over the last couple of days.

The OceanThat's all Ι suppose. It was very nice talking to you. The last words to refer to your fans in Greece are yours to say whatever you like...
Well, I hope we'll make it back to Greece eventually this year. We have had some awesome shows, unfortunately always only in Athens. I hope we get to play some other cities in Greece as well, but Athens has always been great for us and we’re very much looking forward to getting back there. Hopefully with the headlining tour like in October, November we'll make it happen...
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