"This time around we have been lucky enough to join forces with the whole cavalry and we have some of the best men from The Norwegian Broadcasting Orchestra and Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra joining us on stage at Sentrum Scene in Oslo, November 4th. Please note that we are talking about big ass horns in various shapes and forms. There will be no harps, or violins for that matter!

"Together with Øivind Westby that helped arrange brass for three of the songs on Now, Diabolical, we are arranging brass for old and new Satyricon songs trying to give the songs a dimension and feel they normally don't have. We have moved the show to Sentrum Scene to ensure it is an all ages show. We hope this will be a spectacular night for us the performing musicians, and the fans. The show will also be recorded and filmed."

The Crowgrrl recently caught up with Frost by phone. Here’s what this dynamically diabolic drummer had to say:

We’ll have to wait and see, I guess. Chances are better this time around, more so than the past few years. It’s been more than two years since I applied before – two or three years. I hope the chances are better now, yes.

I’m very eager to go over myself! I haven’t been there for a number of years.

Yes. We are going to be doing the festivals until sometime in September, then we’ll start touring.

Yeah, even to us! I hope we’re not getting seasick. I’ve heard that even those living up there have a tendency to get seasick taking 3 or 4 hours to get to this island.

I have heard nothing about this, so I guess we’re not going to film it. But I don’t know, perhaps it will happen anyway.

Probably That Darkness Shall Be Eternal. But I like all of them!

It was a pretty simple, minimalist style. We did the album that way.

We meet up in the rehearsal place and Satyr will play guitar bits for me. Sometimes he has recorded pieces with bass and programmed drums as well. I’m an opinionated man, so of course if I believe that certain changes would work better, I tell him. We will meddle then after that with the changes from my wishes.

I also know that he can more or less "see" the whole musical picture before the different songs are written, so it’s very hard for me to comment on material when I cannot hear that same wholeness that Satyr has inside his head. He knows pretty much how the songs are going to be before they are finished. I have to wait until the whole process is done. So, I’ve learned not to comment on it too much. I generally accept piece by piece of the whole pretty much 100%. I’m generally very satisfied with everything when it’s all finished.

You can say I trust Satyr’s musical genius. I do that out of experience.

Yes, I actually do write material for that band, even lyrics. That is a very different way of working musically altogether.

Yeah, definitely! I think that the whole kind-of official image that you choose for yourself should somehow reflect in what field you are working. 1349 is all about utter grimness and extremity. It’s also based on the traditional principals of Black Metal. It felt natural to follow the corpse paint tradition but do it in a very extreme way. I think that just goes together with the musical feeling of that band.

While Satyricon demands a different approach. I think traditional corpse paint wouldn’t suit Satyricon as of today. So, therefore, we don’t use it - just because somebody would feel that is expected from us. We change it according to the changes that are happening in the band.

I would say so. It would be no use to record Volcano once more. We’ve done that album. This is time to do something else. Also, you know, we learn from our experience from the albums, there are certain things we get better at – certain elements change and develop, and that should reflect in the different albums, I think. When we had done Volcano, we had reached a certain point, and we’re ready to go further.

I think that this whole process of evolution is very important for a band to be a living and breathing organism.

We have no definite plans, but I guess something will happen that will result in that. I think that on the extensive tour after the summer we are probably going to film several of those shows and then pick out the best material for a DVD later on. But there are no definite plans as of yet. Keep checking our website – we’ll keep you informed in that field.

Not really. I’m not that kind of drummer. The only thing I can say is it’s up to each and every musician to find their own style. I think the way that I’m playing is very un-musical in a way. I’ve learned by myself, and I haven’t followed any school of playing or any fixed styles. I haven’t been taught by others how to do things right. I’ve had to find out for myself. I guess that I’ve been displaying a little energy in the fact that I’ve played for so many years. And probably many drumming teachers would say that I’m doing everything wrong. But that’s just the way I’ve learned doing things.

If I were to teach others to play, I’d absolutely teach them very many bad habits that would need to get away from. I don’t know.

Yeah, that’s true, but only for visual FX. He’s not hurt or anything.

I’d say there are. We have been touring on and off – we’re doing an extensive European tour together with Gorgoroth, and quite a few one-off’s as well. I know that band will continue to do the international thing as well. But I’m occupied now with Satyricon, so the American drummer Tony Laureano is playing with them now in my absence.

I think they’re going to do tours in Europe and hopefully in the United States. Hopefully that’s going to happen. I would like to go along with them, but as of now, I’m primarily occupied with Satyricon.

Tony will be doing good drums for them anyway, he’s one of the better extreme drummers as well. You know Tony – the old Nile drummer.

Yes, that’s true.

No, that’s true. The only thing we know right now is that we’re going to play the U.S. definitely. We have to cover Europe first. The new release happened first in Europe, therefore it’s only natural and logical to get finished with the European tours first, then concentrate on the American market. That will probably happen in 2007, but things might change those plans. I think we just have to wait and see. Keep checking our website. We’ll keep you posted about those matters. We’ll come there; that’s the most important thing.

I prefer playing clubs! I think it’s a good thing to do both, but I simply prefer having sound checks and being in control of the conditions – to have our own equipment, to set the stage times ourselves, and the length of the set list ourselves and all that. I think that the band sounds better and appears much better at club shows, even if we have grown to handle festivals really well over the years.

I feel much more comfortable when we do decide for ourselves when we enter the stage and for how long we should play and how long the sound checks should be.

We try to pick the songs that make the most sense. We have rehearsed a lot of songs so we can cover the entire backlog, and we can just alter the sets right there and then, pretty spontaneously. If you are playing huge festivals and perhaps are set isn’t that long, we have to pick those songs that are most immediately attracts the most people. We don’t choose off-tracks nor very long tracks for a 40 minute set at a huge festival. That would be strange and unaffective as far as time goes.

When we are doing the club shows, we can choose ourselves; we can vary our set list from show to show. Then it happens that we can play some off-tracks that people perhaps don’t expect us to play, or throw in some cover tracks or some strange bits and pieces here and there. That’s cool. That’s something the entire band stands behind.

We choose between 7 of the tracks at this time for the club shows. For festivals, we play 3 or 4. They’re all great live tracks as well – we’re getting very much that immediate response like I remember from after the Nemesis Divina album. People are actually knowing the lyrics for the songs, even though the album has just been released. That tells us something, that songs from Now, Diabolical are perfect live songs.

I really can’t pick one of them. Different songs have different qualities that can’t be measured against each other. So, really, I think it’s impossible to give a good answer. I have a tendency to prefer more intense songs, I guess. But also I like the more brooding ones. I like playing The Pentagram Burns a lot; I enjoy playing the title track a lot.

Is there a release date for the movie yet?

Nope, it will all depend on the cash coming in and the light turning green! I don’t dare say any more, as I’m sure I’ve cursed the project by speculating about release dates in the past.

It was the other way round, actually. The short story grew out of the screenplay for the first "Urbane" movie. I was working up ideas for sequels and comic book spin-offs and the short story suddenly oozed out of my head, dripping dark red slime. I have a lot of

oozings like that.

Sure, I worked with Bob on my first short film "On Edge" – it was a lifelong ambition of mine fulfilled -shouting, "More blood Bob!" across a movie set!

I was hired by a German producer from Marloo Media Films to write the screenplay for "13 Souls" – it is based on a story by Italian master of horror, Umberto Lenzi and is an absolute blast. Think of all those creaky Vincent Price movies you love to watch on Hallowe’en and add a 21st century twist, lots of suspense, proper terrifying scares, gore – and that’s what it is. I hope it gets funded and made, it’s just the kind of movie I’d love to go see right now!

Sure – "Crowleymass" is my dream project after "Urbane", basically a bio-pic of moments in Aleister Crowley’s life. He’s such a fascinating character – mountaineer, yoga master, author/poet, not to mention his adventures in the occult, his scarlet women… I think everyone who knows about Crowley has a different take on him, slightly. He even made it on the "Top 100 Britons" list compiled by the BBC from votes made by the UK public – sadly he wasn’t number 69, that would’ve been perfect! Crowley would be fascinating to explore on screen. I’ve also been in talks about a

stage version – but as with all projects, it’s the funding to do it properly!

Ah, "Time is a Ghost" was an anthology project I developed with my friend and producing partner Joseph Alberti and German director Christian Alvart

("Antibodies", "Case 39") years ago. It’s a really cool idea, with a different director tackling a different story in a different timeframe/country as the clock counts down to Armageddon on-screen. I wrote the UK-based segment, which is about an angel visiting

a perverted mass-murderer in his jail cell intent on saving his soul before the world ends. But he has other ideas…. Don’t know if it’ll ever get made, but it was fun to write – one of my favourite pieces, so I included it in my book.

Hehe, thanks – yes, there’s been talk about that in the past and I would’ve definitely done it had I shot my planned third short with Doug Bradley - "Urbrain" (aka "10:15 Saturday Night") – but guess what? Funding fell through at the eleventh hour, so it was never realized, very frustrating. Again, quite an ambitious piece to be filmed on the London Underground, so the budget was important as it’s expensive to shoot down

there. Maybe someday….

Never say never…. I spoke with a great actress about doing "Hair of the Dog" and it would be cheaper than "Urbrain" to pull off. "Love…" was a conceptual piece for a specific call for "extreme cinema" pitches so I doubt that one will see the light of day as it was rejected. But at least the concept exists in my book – readers can make their own movie version in their heads – see, the ultimate micro-budget version!

I’d love them to! And I have as-yet-unwritten stories to share in the future. Hopefully some of them will ooze out beyond the page and onto the screen – but I’m not placing my bets just yet, as I’ve been stung, rejected, frustrated, elated and then back to square one again so many times already.

Thank you! Well, I’ve been a huge fan of the Arthur tales since I was little. The more I read and the more filmed versions I watched, the more I realized I could do a version of the legend in my own dark style. So "Pendragon…" was born – to my delight it won a

Geoffrey Ashe Prize at the Library of Avalon story contest… in Glastonbury!

That literally was taking inspiration from on the street, out the window. I used to live in a house in Highbury, London – it was the quietest street I ever lived on (apart from when the Arsenal football team were playing a match – the stadium wall was at the end of my garden!) Anyhow, I had the urge to write something modern day, and stuck for inspiration I looked out the window. Dozed off and was then rudely awoken by this huge pimp-mobile blasting the street with heavy-bass hip hop. Lots of curtains twitched as people looked outside… Whammo! There was the story!

Lots! Film-wise, I’m still hammering away with trying to get "Urbane" up-and-running – traveling to Turin in Italy again soon for meetings (we may shoot it over there in that beautiful city, pending…. Yes! Finance!) – and I’m talking up a couple of other projects with various people. Writing-wise I just finished commissioned rewrites on an action flick set in South Africa called "Three Bullets" and a superb Viking epic called "Vikings of the Northern Sea". I’m currently rewriting a comedy/drama about the legendary Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, fittingly called "Playing Ibsen" – a departure from my beloved horror genre, but all very good projects! It’s an honour for me to scratch a living doing what I love, I’ve been working for years to get to this stage.

Nope, but I just wanted to say thanx for reading, andplease drop by and see me at www.frazerlee.com and www.myspace.com/hellboy69 !!!

It’s very crazy! It’s going to be insane. It’s completely Strapping. We figured out before this how much of a sore thumb we are on this bill, and now after seeing most of the sound checks and stuff, we still are. More so than ever. There’s a lot of crazy Metal out there, but we’re about the craziest!

Indeed! Probably the video song, The Wrong Side, and hopefully The New Black if we can fit that in. Maybe U Suck if we can squeeze it in. We’ve only got maybe a 20-minute set.

But this is so unbelievably unorganized. We know nothing! We’re on site, unless they told us something and we weren’t there when they told us. We’re flying blind on this thing. It’s a lot less organized than we were led to believe.

Well, granted, this is the first day and stuff. We understand that. But we don’t really have set times together – we don’t know what time we’re going on. I don’t know if it’s going to be like a draw-straw thing in the morning: "You’re going to be playing in a half hour." But we’ll see.

I understand they’re maybe starting things a little bit later, but we don’t know yet. We heard they may be starting at noon. We were like, "Wow! That’s really late for an Ozzfest." Then we get here, and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to be happening. It seems like it’s going to be business as usual here. But we’ll see. We’re just going to wake up every morning, drink a cup of coffee, then kick people’s teeth out.

At the headlining shows it’s going to be a full set, obviously. Probably 12 to 14 songs, something like that. Lots of tunes off the new album, lots of tunes off the other ones. We just played one a couple weeks ago, and we put together a pretty savage set with a lot of our super aggressive numbers. If anybody comes out and doesn’t know what to make of Strapping, they’re definitely going to get their head handed to them.

The festivals were awesome! Every time we go over and do a festival, it just seems like each time we do one, we kind-of get slid up the bill a little bit. We got slid onto the cool stages into some pretty decent slots. We’re like a fungus, just slowly growing, crawling up your ass.

The Download Festival was awesome! We got a lot of really positive response from that. We got to see the DVD of that like 10 minutes after we got offstage. They came up and handed us a shot of the show. They really did a good job of editing it on the fly. Devin would be making comments about certain things, and all of a sudden there would be a camera on what he was commenting on. We were like, "Wow! You guys actually paid attention! Thank you!"

I’m sure there will be some sort of release on MTV over in England or something like that. I think they were nice enough to give it to us as a present. I doubt it will be released but Man! It sure looked cool! Playing in front of that many people and actually getting a response in more than just the first three rows. There’s a whole lot of people that were getting into it.

On the second stage, we’ve got our friends Full Blown Chaos. We like them a lot. I personally like Between The Buried And Me ; I think they’re pretty cool. Actually, I don’t really know who else is playing.

It seems like Sounds of the Underground . They took a lot of bands from that, chucked them over to this one. So we know a lot of the guys from a lot of the other bands.

Black Label Society – I look forward to seeing them every day. Ozzy is headlining our stage tomorrow. There are like 6 shows where he’s headlining the side stage. I’m like, "This is a really tiny little stage. This is going to be hilarious seeing Ozzy do his thing on such a small stage!"

I’m looking forward to seeing everybody: Lacuna Coil are good friends, Hatebreed are good friends.

Boy, I sure wish I drank anymore….then I’d have a blast! It’s boring on the road now because I don’t drink, so I don’t have half as much fun as I used to. I mean, for a festival like this, you get up in the morning, you play for 20 minutes, then you go party with your buddies. Me, I’m an old stick-in-the-mud now. I’m no harm.

Yeah, we did bring a lot. We’ve got our PS2 systems that we’re going to be linking up together in the bunks, battling back and forth as we travel along and stuff. Byron usually brings his very, very hot-rodded X-Box with him, but he didn’t bring it on this one. I was like, "Darn! What’s up with that?!"

But Playstation is on site every day. One of the organizers or coordinators for the whole meet & greets and such said, "Definitely come over and hang out with the Playstation guys. You might get some free stuff."

That’s been bantyed about a little bit. I’ve seen people writing about that aspect of it.

Oh. Here’s where I’m supposed to elaborate. Yeah, I suppose. When we were putting this album together, we already knew about Ozzfest. We were just kind-of wondering what sort of lyrical take do we incorporate into this from our soon-to-be experiences. We’ve never played an Ozzfest before. We’ve been to a couple, but we don’t really know the machination of how it all works.

I guess really the bottom line of what we are trying to do with this is we are "product" to our record label. We are a thing to be sold. That’s just an interesting way of looking at it, you know? We’ve got a few years under us. None of us are green little 22-year-olds or anything. It’s interesting when you take a little step outside of the whole situation and see how you fit into the whole thing.

I’ve said it before, but with the record, here’s our Product. You can buy our Product but you can’t buy Us. Our souls are not for sale. We’re trying to keep our souls in the midst of all this.

This could be a really crazy year with Ozzfest or it could do absolutely nothing for us. We don’t know. But say it does do something for us and all of a sudden we’re sucked into the upper echelons, heaven forbid. Then all of a sudden there’s this new lifestyle that could occur from this. Are we ready for that? Is that something we want? Are we ok with that?

This album is by no means a protest album. It’s just being able to examine your situation where things could change drastically for you. But then again, knowing us, they wont.

Yeah, that’s one of them. That’s like, "Tell me what to do, what we’re all about. Tell me how gorgeous we are. Tell me, ‘let’s do lunch, babe’". That sort of thing.

That was a big Canadian Rock star by name of Bif Naked. An old keyboardist of ours named Scotty plays drums for her now. We called him up and said, "Hey, man, do you think Bif would be interested in doing something like this?" He said, "Yeah, give her a shot. I’m sure she’d be totally into it."

We called her up and she was like, "Hell, Yeah! I dig Strapping. It sounds like a blast! Let’s do it." So she came on down. It didn’t take much – just rocked out a couple of lines there. She was really into it. It was pretty cool!

Almost Again sound different than what you’d expect from Strapping. It sounds more emotional – it’s got a painful, tortured beauty to it.

Well, I know that’s our ballad. It was written as sort of…we can write lullabies. We’ve written lullabies into some of our music. That one is just more like Bring On The Young from the "Chicken Feather" album. That was kind-of a lullaby. This one is a ballad with blast-beats and double bass.

But if you take the drums away from it and put in some nice, sweet little drums on it, it will be a really tasty ballad. That’s how much drums can change a song. It can be one thing with one style of drums, but throw some blast-beats on, you’re full-on into another realm. We’ve always liked cross-collateralizing our styles. It’s like you can play a really tasty, catchy, lovely riff, and if you throw some aggressive drums underneath it, it does sort of a "push-me-pull-you" kind of vibe. It’s like, "Wow! This is a really beautiful song, but Jesus, it’s just pummeling!" There can be beauty in absolute grotesqueness. I think maybe that’s what Almost Again is about.

I like the ones where we swear.

Wow! OK, I really like the song The Wrong Side. I love Hope. I love U Suck. I love The New Black – I think that one came out awesome. I love Fucker – I think that one is awesome!

When Dev brought Fucker to us, he was like, "Dudes, I’m going to show you a tune that is so fucking gay and so fucking lame. I don’t even want to show it to you because it’s so gay." He was able to make a demo of it. He was singing the lyrics as he was playing the demo.

We were like, "Dude, this is GREAT! I love this!" It harkens back to the old Strapping vibe in songs like AAA and Centipede and stuff like that. Fuck, this is ABSOLUTELY Strapping music. He was like, "I didn’t know if this was Strapping or not." Dude, this is more Strapping than you think! Byron felt the same way. "Absolutely! That’s a great song! I love this one because it’s going to piss people off."

People are going to go, "How come Strapping doesn’t put 5 more U Sucks on there?" Sorry, dudes, we write this music for us.

Prog?! I thought it sounded like stripper-pole dancing girls. But yeah, I’ve heard some Art Blakey at the last table dance I had. They were playing some Starcastle at the last tit bar I went to. (That’s a very obscure Prog Metal band).

Every album has a "moment" or two, for me especially when we’re tracking it or when I hear it for the first time completed where it just breaks you down. Have you ever laughed while you were crying? Giggling while you’re crying? I do that. Every Devin Townsend thing that he does.

For instance, in the very last chorus of Worker Drone (actually it’s called Monument. It was always Worker Drone until we changed the title at the very last minute.) Right before he went in to sing the song, he said, "Well, you know, we were talking about having one chorus for the first part, then another for the middle part. Why don’t we mash them together? Give me a minute, let me figure something out."

He took about a minute, then sang everything, pulled everything together. I was outside – I was letting Devin do his thing and I was outside the room. When it was time for me to come in and listen, I was listening to it and laughing as tears were streaming down my face at the absolute glory of it.

I love having that moment! I don’t get that with a lot of music anymore. But I’m fortunate that I can get it from our own music, no matter how asshole-ish that might sound. It’s one thing to listen to music that moves you, but when you get to make music that moves you! It’s like doing a sitcom or something. By the time you’re filming it, it’s not funny to you anymore. If you’re filming a comedy movie, the lines aren’t funny. You’ve rehearsed them so many times and heard them so many times that when you’re saying these funny lines, they’re not really funny to you.

With us it’s like when we’re putting these things together, it does become funny and tragic at the same time. It’s awesome stuff! I had a moment during Monument, when we were recording that. There’s a part in the song Hope which is the heaviest, all-balls-out things we’ve ever done. Everybody I’ve played that song fore has a little moment where everything just became so strange during that song. My entire world just turned upside down while in that target Hope because that’s such a deceptive song. It starts off with a tongue-in-cheek, slinky little groove, then all of a sudden it turned powerful.

I know we had somebody for an audience in that. Who was it?! It was somebody funny – Elton John or somebody like that. We’ve got a lot of live samples on there – live crowd sounds. Like in Decimator, there’s a bunch of little parts here and there. U Suck I think has sampled audiences. This album has a live feel anyway. We thought, "Well, even though we didn’t play in front of a big group of people, let’s make it sound like we did.

Yeah, I liked that title, too. I don’t know. Dev just liked the title Monument better. That was my title. That’s the one I gave it because it does just have this drone to it.

Exactly! I really dug that title. But I don’t know. Things change. It’s no big deal.

It really came out killer! We’re really happy with it. I am anyway, and I’m sure the rest of the band is. We filmed it in New Jersey. We thought we were filming it in New York. "Yeah, we’re bad ass! We’re going to New York City to film a video!" Nope. We’re going to Jersey.

It was a lot of fun. It was really hot – a sweltering summer day and there we were in suits. We wore suits for half the video. I thought we looked pretty sharp in suits. Me, I clean up pretty well. Dev looks great in a tux. When Dev got married, he had tux and tails. I said, "Dude, you look sharp as fuck in a tux!" So he got the tux back and was wearing the tux. We all looked pretty sharp just for little sections of the video.

It was kind-of a Heaven and Hell sort of piece. The song kind-of deals with just the rage that goes on inside your head as soon as you get up in the morning, you’ve gotta get shit done, but really you just wanna lie there for another three years. There are demons inside you telling you to get up, go out, and get your shit done or the angels. We’ve got the dancing cherubic, angelic ballerina dancers, they’re doing their thing. We’re just rocking out with our cocks out, making it all good. It was a lot of fun.

Good question. I don’t know. I doubt it because the video was just now completed this weekend. I’m sure the label will put on some sort of bullshit enhancement thingie. Like on the last record. I was like, "Wow! Crazy enhancement. You took a song off the live DVD. You guys really pushed the boundaries with that.

Within the next two or three weeks. They’re just narrowing down a release date on Headbanger’s Ball and all that what-not. As soon as it gets its first premiers on Headbanger’s Ball and on Fuse and on MuchMusic Canada, we’ll be able to fire it up on our website and on our Myspace page and the Century Media website as well.

I thought the video would have been a lot sexier if they showed me in the suit more.

We will see. We were talking in 2003, "OK we’ll put out a DVD in 2004, and maybe in 2007 put out a compendium DVD. Whip out all the bootleg videos and all the crazy stuff. Granted the last DVD was one concert film. Maybe in 2007 just do a compendium, that would be fun. Show a lot of bootleg stuff, show a lot of the wackier things that happen offstage. You can have a whole DVD of that, and that would be entertaining.

And I know that the Sounds of the Underground DVD is finally seeing the light of day. Dev has a little hand-puppet of a shark he takes onstage. The shark talks to the audience. "Hey, Dev, your audience is a bunch of lame-o’s. It’s a bunch of ugly fuckers." How can you say that?! They look nice to me. "No, they all look like a bunch of ugly fuckers. Back the fuck off and buy a t-shirt." Oh, I was pissing myself at that part! That was good. I think I was laughing so hard I couldn’t even start the songs.

Dev’s a great frontman. He’s very entertaining. He just gets up onstage and blurts out whatever comes off the top of his head. I know he doesn’t want to be known for that, but, "Hey. You should’ve thought of that before you started being a ham."

Anything you want. I definitely don’t mind going off the beaten path. I can talk about the band all day long every day. So if you have any crazy questions, feel free to fire them out.

Yeah, I threw those up. I should start doing those again. I just haven’t been "feeling the blog" lately, probably in the last few months. It’s been an epic few months. The shit’s been cool, the shit’s been really down. You’ve gotta be in a really cool mood to write a cool blog. I could write like, "We’re on the Ozzfest now. Watch for us coming to your town soon." Stuff like that all day long, but that’s no fun to read. I try to make it entertaining. Myself and Jed are on our website quite a bit. Me? I won’t take shit from our fans. If our fans start saying stupid shit, I’ll get on the website and say, "Look, you guys are being fucking idiots here. I don’t usually talk to my fans that way, but it’s a chiding from your Dad. It’s your Dad saying, "Don’t make me come back there."

I love our fans and our fans are pretty decent. But when they get out of line and start talking shit, I’ll definitely call them on it. We get that on our website a lot. When we started replying directly back to people on our message board – we’ve got a really cool forum, a really cool message board. Most people on there are really nice and polite, and they’re very accepting. I think a Strapping fan is a very open-minded fan. Granted, they’re all about Strapping, but we don’t have a lot of shit-talkers. No "Strapping rules, but this band and that band suck. Fuck them!" We don’t really do that. It’s like, "Hey, there’s room for everybody."

I think we have a great forum! It’s pretty accepting and welcoming and all that sort of stuff. I’ve been seeing a lot of posts and the fans say, "Wow! They actually reply! It’s strange. We don’t see other bands doing that." I’m like, "Well, fuck, it’s our website. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Aren’t you supposed to get on your website and talk to your fans? That’s what it’s there for, right?"

That thing on Myspace has made everything really, really easy. I’m on Myspace. The band’s on Myspace. You can get in instant contact with the band on Comcast. I do tend to get the same questions over and over, like "Can you give us tips on how to play double bass?" I should put that on my page. "How to play fast double bass. First, you eat a lot of chocolate".

That’s the intent somewhere down the road. Now YouTube is kind-of screwing up making any cash off a DVD. One person will buy a copy, rip it, then fire it onto YouTube. There goes your profit margin right there. You sink your heart and soul into something for somebody to steal it and fire it on there. I’m a YouTube watcher myself. I go onto YouTube to find really cool old vintage stuff like from Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and Black Oak Arkansas and stuff like that.

Well it took me damn long time to find the right people for the new line up, about five years or something like that.

It’s not so easy to get new band members when you just got kicked off a record deal like we did back years ago.. But now we have a perfect band and a lot of fun going on. So it was worth the fight in the end..

Some of the songs are older ones and some I just wrote right before we entered the studio. We had about 70 songs to pick from for Revenge and of course we picked the most boring ones. :) So maybe in lets say 6 albums from now we will make a less boring album:) Just kidding. Now we have the old songs out of the way and can compose new ones from now on..

It’s a little story I have fooled around with for a while - a mix between Braveheart and Mad Max or something. I really put a lot of time in writing it but in the end the record company did not like so we had to kind of scale it down promotion wise and that’s why it’s not in the booklet. But it will be out on our web site soon for those who like to get the lyrics explained a bit more..

I was thinking more like a Hollywood movie thing, that could make me some easy millions for my dream house on Hawaii.:) No the whole comic book thing has been done before by Metallium and I tell you we rip off many bands but not them:)

The whole story is inspired by the last five years of struggle to get this band back on track. Of course it’s made way more dramatic for entertainment but a lot of the story is things that I’ve been through with this band.

The music is always first when I write songs and then I fill in the lyrics after a melody I have made on my guitar, that’s about it. Pretty simple:) Then I show it to the boys in the band and when they can play it I grab the microphone and it’s rock n roll time..

It depends on what mood I’m in, sometimes I like the aggressive shit and other times I like the more slow stuff ,mostly when I’m hung over:)

We had hope to do one for Metal Messiah but I guess Napalm Records did not really want to see our ugly faces on film this time around.. But on the next album we will force them to make one and they will regret it:)

Nothing else then the story is about warriors and shit and we are from Denmark, we have always fooled around with Viking stuff in our songs so if fits pretty good for IronFire.. We got the Viking thing in our blood or maybe its just way too much beer:)

We just did a tour in Europe with Demon and Seven Witches and man we had a lot of fun drinking and partying way to much, and its not the best thing  when you have to do power metal every night, but we made it with out fucking it all up or a least without any dead band members..

We are like the first power metal band to combine Punk with warrior metal, totally chaos and a lot of fun is what you get. But if catch us on a night without hangovers we can actually play metal ‘til you cry and maybe not in the good way..

We do songs from all albums but mostly from the new album that we promote at that point.

No not really just Thanks for the interview and stay fucking Metal!

How was it?

It was really cool! I think the best shows that were played were the ones around Texas and South Florida. It was definitely a good tour. A lot of the bands were really cool. A lot of the bands are really good friends of ours. Vital Remains have been friends for a long time, it was cool to tour with them. Sin Of Angels we’ve known a long time, they’re cool guys.

It was just a lot of fun, and a good way to kind-of finish up the touring for this album Decimate Christendom.

Did you film any of the shows for a possible DVD or video?

There was some filming, but not really any professional filming at any of the shows. We tried to, but it didn’t really work out. The only show the guy got halfway decent was probably the one in South Florida in Ft. Lauderdale. But I don’t think any of these will be used for major showings or DVD’s. But we are going to Spain – hopefully we can work something out to film some of the shows over there because we want to film one or two videos for the new album. If we’re able to do more than that, we can get a DVD rolling.

It’s just because the promoter in Spain only books Spanish tours for some reason. It’s really quite odd, but it’s a good Metal scene in Spain. I guess he’s able to afford to bring us over there and do a week’s worth of shows.

Spain is one of those places we don’t hit quite as much as we do, say, Germany and Holland where most tours go through. Spain sometimes gets neglected. But the Metal scene is really cool there, so I guess it would be a killer thing. I don’t really know why, though, except the promoter’s from Spain and just anted to book Spain.

That will be the official end of it, yeah. Then we’re going to get about a month’s break in August, and in September we’re going to tour South America. Basically it will start right up again, but Spain will be the final dates for Decimate Christendom for sure.

Yeah, we finished recording it, mastering it, and we’re pretty much been working on getting the promos ready, getting a little press stuff going. We’re definitely really happy with it. We definitely feel that the recording came out top notch. Really everything about the album ended up coming out I’d say close to what we envisioned it.

With many albums that we’ve done we’ve usually gotten the basic idea of what we’re trying to accomplish musically on each album that we do. This one definitely, we feel good about it because it comes real close to what we were looking for. It’s killer!

It has definitely grown. I think it’s a heavier album. The production is a lot bigger, heavier. Besides being heavier, it’s more catchier, I guess. You hear baroque but at the same time it has the raw aggression of the Incantation style. It’s a bigger sounding production. It was more geared to shorter songs, a kick-you-in-the-ass sort of thing instead of the more drawn out epic-y type stuff that we sometimes do. We wanted to bash out a bunch of songs to do live.

We’re not sure yet. We don’t know which song we would do a video for yet. We’re going to leave that up to other people because I’m not good at picking out what song we should do, that type of stuff.

There’s really no personal favorite. I’m really not good at that kind of stuff because I’m so close to all the stuff on there that it’s just too difficult to like one more than another one. They all mean a lot to me in different ways. I’m definitely too close to pick it. I think stuff like that is for somebody else to decide, which songs they like the best and what-not.

We’re already playing two of the songs off there – we did two on the Decades tour and two others on the Spanish tour just to give people a taste of the new stuff. It’s been really cool because people really seem to enjoy the new stuff even though they really don’t know what to expect. They don’t know the songs, but they were still able to get into them, which we thought was a really good sign for sure.

Usually it’s a musical thing. Usually we try to come up with a concept of what we’re trying to do on the album, then just try to go with it. It’s a real natural thing. I’ve been writing songs for such a long time that it’s something that I don’t really over concentrate on. I just try to get an idea of what we’re trying to accomplish on the album. We look back at our old albums to see what they either had missing or find a vibe that we really liked and just go with it. There’s no brain surgery to it at all.

This one’s more varied. It’s not quite as much a concept album. It’s pretty much all different. For me, most of the stuff that I’ve done lyrically on this album, I went more for a story or historic perception kind of vibe on the album instead of the more personal anti-religious beliefs that I put on the other albums. There’s still sacriligion in the songs, but they’re more about historical events and those kinds of issues. All the songs are different. Kyle wrote some lyrics, Joey wrote some lyrics for the album. We all went in different directions. Joey was more talking about his personal beliefs on Christianity and religions in general, Kyle went a little more on the blasphemous side as far a pointing out hypocrisy. The lyrics on mine were more of a story type vibe. I guess blasphemous stories.

We’re definitely going to try to rest a little bit, but we’re trying to wait for the right thing. So many bands right now are touring. Around the time we’re releasing our album, I’m not exactly sure – we want to make sure that if we tour, it’s going to be with some other good bands that will have good turn-outs at the show without being overcrowded. Some markets will get too many shows in one week’s time, and it never works out good that way because people only have so much money to go to shows. We’ll just have to work up a strategic plan. We’re working with a good booking agent who knows what she’s doing. It’s good to not mess with her judgment.

We have to give them specs of what we want, and they take care of the gear. We definitely can’t bring it over there. It would cost a fortune to fly all of our stuff there. Plus it would get messed up in shipment. So we just basically give the specs of what we’re looking for and they come up with it. Most of the time it’s pretty close.

You learn to make alterations and make things work. I kind-of have my personal set-up as simple as possible so if a situation comes up that I don’t necessarily have to find gear that I prefer, I can still kind-of make it work.

Yeah. Another band is opening for us, a smaller Spanish band that I’m not too familiar with.

No, Spanish shit doesn’t get a lot of press usually. It’s not that there are bad bands over there, they’re just one of the more looked-over scenes in Europe, I think. You look more towards Germany and Holland and Sweden or something like that.

Yeah, they’ve already got that done. This time we didn’t go with our normal artist because she didn’t want to do blasphemous cover art anymore. So we went with this guy from Poland. He’s also done work for Vader. He did some really cool artwork, a little different direction than we were originally looking for, but we tried to make it work.

First of all, we want to thank all of our supporters that have stuck with Incantation for a long time, and also we definitely appreciate all the new people who have been getting into the band in the past couple years. We’re definitely going to do our best to give as much energy as possible with the new album.