Borknagar: Approaching True North
Interview by Ken Morton
Borknagar has just unleashed the almighty True North - their 11th studio masterwork of dark progressive metal. At press time, an announcement was made that Borknagar would be playing in the States again at long last, in direct support of Rotting Christ on the Devastation On The Nation tour! Highwire Daze recently interviewed Borknagar founder and guitarist Øystein G. Brun to find out more about True North and other topics of intrigue... True North is your 11th studio album. Did you ever think that Borknagar would wind up doing 11 studio album and last for 25 years and counting? No I didn’t - never. You know, back in the day when I started out the whole thing. I had always been a fan of atmospheric music. My father had a huge collection of imported LP’s from the UK, everything from Black Sabbath to Uriah Heep. Old school prog rock kind of music. I was brought up on this music in that sense. I’ve always had a love for melodic atmospheric music. The first step in my career was a quite brutal death metal band called Molested. We were young kids playing and we basically couldn’t play at all (laughs). We did have quite a fan base for 3-4 years. And then I got kind of fed up – I had to do something more musically speaking from where I come from. I had just started playing around with ideas of making my own music ideas or persona. I had no ideas of earning money on this or making it a career – there was just a sheer interest in making music. And well, it became a little more than what I expected, but it has been an awesome ride in many ways. And that’s the beauty of life – the smallest idea might be a huge thing at the end of the day. Is there any overall story or concept behind the title True North? There is no real concept I would say, but if there is any – True North is a term coming from navigation. True North is if everything fails when you get lost at sea, and you don’t have a map - in the old days with the Vikings, when travelling they navigated with the polar star North – not really True North though. In navigation, True North is the constant all of directions in a sense. True North is kind of cherishing the constant in life – the rock in your life – the mountain in your life. Everything is moving these days – everything goes so fast. I have kids myself – and kids nowadays live in a completely different world than I lived in when I was a kid. There are all sorts of troubles, problems, conflicts, challenges, and ever drifting things. And in all this, it’s nice to have something that’s constant that will always be there no matter 24
what happens. And that why we found this True North title interesting. Why is Vintersorg not involved with the album this time around? To be honest, we saw that coming for quite a long time. He had been a band member for many years now and had done a lot of albums with us. I still regard him as one of my very best friends in this world. I would say, my kind of musical brother in a sense. He had a quite bad accident back when we did the Winter Thrice album. We had to delay the whole production for half a year. He had a really bad fracture through his skull that had some hemorrhage in the brain. He lost quite some hearing on one of his ears and that kind of made the whole thing of being a musician a little bit more not that attractive. And other things, like he has a quite high-end job these days, which is kind of very involved in traveling and being locked in Sweden. We came to a point where we had basically me, Simon and Lars - we wanted to take a step up, both in terms of doing the album and live shows. So we basically openly had a discussion about this. We have to move on. I had an option to move on with the album, finish the album, do all the things we wanted to do - or I could just sit down and wait. And that was really not my option. It was a clean nice cut, no bad feelings, no bad blood or anything. You know, I think (Vintersorg) was relieved a little bit too. What do you think has kept you so passionate about Borknagar for 25 years and counting? Yeah, good question. I’m asking myself almost every day. I love doing music, but I don’t necessarily love doing all the paperwork that comes with it - and all the stress with it. I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager. I think also because it’s a part of my life, my lifestyle. My wife always tells me I’m a bit grumpy. “Hey, get your ass out to the studio, make some music” and I then I come back kind of sane. So for me, it’s not like eating and drinking of course. I mean that’s essential to live, but it’s my way of bringing life in a sense. I think the whole thing derives in the fact I just love making music. It gives me a feeling of maybe like religious people when they go into their churches. I just feel when I hear a good riff or good song, it gives me a rush like nothing else can give me. Maybe I’m a music addict in a sense. I mean, I’m not a drug addict, but maybe it is the same thing with making music. I just need to get my shot...
http://www.borknagar.com/ Jan/Feb 2020
HIGHWIRE DAZE