very unique way, and how they focus on getting that swinging groove which I think is something that a lot of metal bands are not that good at. We really need to talk about the concert you played in a mountain, in a cliff-top 700 meters above ground. First question: were you thinking about cool ways to leave this world when you had this idea? [laughs] Actually, it wasn’t my idea. The idea came from a guy from that area that contacted us. He has been organizing festivals for some time and he knew about our band, and he knew that we’ve done weird stuff before, playing in weird places. So, he felt that we were the perfect band to do this, and I will tell you that as soon as I saw that email from our booking agent I thought it was a great idea. But I also knew that it was going to be really hard to pull it off, and I knew that it was going to be really dangerous... and really expensive. To be honest, I didn’t really think we would be able to do it, and to make it even harder we were confirmed for a festival show in Belgium for the day before. I didn’t think it was possible, but we figured that we could take a plain, in the evening, from Amsterdam to Bergen and there was a chance of getting there on time. We spent a lot time planning everything and making sure we brought what we needed and nothing more because we had to fly all the equipment up so we couldn’t bring backups of stuff and needed to have exactly the equipment we needed because if we had forgotten one extension cable then we wouldn’t be able to play the show. It worked out, but it was really dangerous. To tell you the truth, we didn’t even know if the cliff would able to take all that weight. We didn’t know what the loud bass frequencies could do, and stuff like that. The truth is, no one had ever tried that before. I have this question in my head for the last five years. Was King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” cover chosen simply because you love the song, who did you want it there to help people understand what you were trying to achieve with Blackjazz in general? 66
music&riots
November
We were invited to play on a radio show in Norway, where the whole idea is artists come in and talk about another artist, they play some songs from that artist, and at the end of the show they perform a cover song from that artist. “21st Century Schizoid Man” was one of the options and we had some ideas on how to adapt that song so that it could work with our band. It was really a practical kind of decision. I like their music and I love to talk about it even though it’s not something that have really defined me as a musician. I mean, I still bought their albums because it’s an important band in music history. After that time playing the song we continued playing it live because we liked the version that we’ve made and then on the album... We weren’t sure if we were going to include it but we recorded it and worked a little bit on it, to make sure it sounded less blues rock and more industrial. Basically, we managed to get it to sound like the other Blackjazz’s songs. Like you said, we felt that it would help things in historical context. It would kind of explain, like you said, what we were doing and where we come from, and link it to another band has linked these kind of elements before. Because without a doubt King Crimson has been a link between jazz music and metal music before we were that link.
could have one song that could take it all the way down because we don’t have anymore. We used to have that a long time ago, but since Blackjazz everything has just been really hard. Those two reasons – to give a variation to our live set and also to give a variation to the album. That was the initial idea and then definitely the song “Hurt”, by Nine Inch Nails. One of NIN’s biggest songs, one of my favorite. They are known for their aggressive music while still they were able to make these ballads that didn’t sound cheesy. I felt that it could be possible and I started writing with that in mind. I actually thought about the possibility of making that song using just vocals and keyboards/synths, no band really, but then I sent two versions to our producer Dag Haaland Sætran and he liked the band version the most so we decided to go with that. Another place where I took some inspiration was from Queens of the Stone Age’s “If I Had A Tail”, from their latest album …Like Clockwork. It starts with Josh Homme singing and playing piano and there’s the band comes in, in the pre-choruses... It has kind of the same thing on “House of Control”. But I know that it is probably not possible to hear the similarities now because I’ve worked a lot with it and things changed. But yeah, those were my starting points.
International Blackjazz Society. Would it be fair to say that you guys went for branding with this title? Yeah, I think we already went for a branding title when we released Blackjazz in 2010. This is like expanding it, or making it bigger. Even solidifying the whole idea. It’s a statement.
Does it feel that you’ve travelled so far musically with Shining? You know, sometimes I feel that we’ve travelled so far and mostly that we’ve been trying for so long that I might as well just give up. We’ve been at it for fifteen or sixteen years. BUT then I remind myself that actually we can split our history in two. When Blackjazz was released that’s when something special happened, I think. That’s when a lot of people discovered us and Blackjazz is also the name of the music we make now. You can think of our band as if it started in 2010, and if I think that way then I would say that we haven’t really travelled that far, we’re still making music that sounds sort of like Blackjazz, and we’ve done pretty well since 2010. [laughs] A lot of musicians
I was really impressed with “House of Control”. How that song came to be? Like I said to you in the beginning, early on I started to think the album as one big album and after a while I felt it would be cool to see if we could have, if we could write a song that was softer. When we play headline shows and we play for an hour or more, sometimes... I thought it would be cool if we