Gothminister - Interview

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Published on Saturday, 01 April 2023 21:20

One of the most iconic gothic/industrial metal acts is - most definitely - the Norwegian band Gothminister. Founded in 1999 by Bjørn Alexander Brem, released seven albums to date. The debut album, Gothic Electronic Anthems, came out in 2003 and unexpectedly or not excited a good interest in the goth underground, thus launching Gothminister in the realms of dark music. Gothminister, already in the early stages, unleashed a thunder of pitch-black magic and horror, creating powerful atmospheric yet pounding cinematic goth music. We had to wait five years for a new album - the aptly titled Pandemonium, released by AFM Records in October 2022. Pandemonium got many positive reviews and won the title for a dark album of 2022 in Terra Relicta's annual competition Dark Music Awards. Leaving behind huge names like Lord Of The Lost, Placebo, Rammstein and The Cult, to name a few, this only showed how extended and devoted fan base Gothminister has. Bjørn Alexander Brem and his fellow musicians are already working on a new album which will continue the Pandemonium saga. Later this year, the band is scheduled to play some summer festivals and is embarking on a two-leg European Tour. If interested in more about Gothminister, then continue reading.

Interview with: Bjørn Alexander Brem
Conducted by: Tomaz
Edited by: Jerneja

Tomaz: Hello Bjørn! First of all, congratulations on the title "dark album of the year 2022" in the Terra Relicta Dark Music Awards. Our readers voted, and Pandemonium is on the top. Any comment?
Bjørn: Thank you. If I'm not mistaken, it was our first nomination. There were some big names in the competition, as well, especially Lord Of The Lost, who are good friends of ours and are having a big success right now. I was sure they would win it, but in the end, we had some more votes, and that's great. You also had Rammstein, Placebo... and it was really surprising. It's good for us because it was a little bit tough for us to come back after the Covid pandemic, and it was five years since our last release. There's still a delay in getting some live shows, and this was a very nice surprise in the middle of it all.

Tomaz: Thank you also for the great promotion you did to the whole thing. Nevertheless, last year in October, you released your seventh studio album, Pandemonium. What are your thoughts about it some months later?
Bjørn: We are feeling great about it. The Terra Relicta Dark Music Awards is not the only award we won. We won 19 more awards but mostly with our music videos. So in total, we won 20 awards for the album and music videos. It has never happened before, which is great. It means a lot, but in the end, it must mean something to yourself. You need to be happy with your own album, or it doesn't matter how many awards you win or how many records you sell. In my opinion, you have to create something you love, and I love this album. When we were making the album, and after we finished it, we couldn't have any live shows because of the pandemic, so we immediately started to work on Pandemonium number two.

Tomaz: So, there will be the next chapter of Pandemonium, if I understood correctly?
Bjørn: Yes. We didn't reveal the title yet, but I can do it now - it will be Pandemonium pt.2 - The Battle Of The Underworlds.

Tomaz: Is the album's title Pandemonium connected with the Covid-19 pandemic?
Bjørn: Not directly, although I wrote the songs during the pandemic while stuck in our summer house. We have some heating there, and we moved away from town. We stayed there for 16 months, in the woods, close to the sea. It was very inspiring to be out in nature, but I didn't think much about the pandemic. To be honest, I was inspired by the Celtic Frost album, Into The Pandemonium. That was a huge, not that much musical, but more like a visual inspiration. In my youth, I never listened to the album, just saw the cover art. Ten years ago, our guitarist bought that CD and gave it to me for Christmas, and he said, "we were talking about this album for so many years, now hear it", haha. Ok, the cover of this album is an old painting from 1504 by Hieronymus Bosch; it's a detail of a bigger painting (The Garden of Earthly Delights), and the right corner of that painting describes a kind of hell.

Tomaz: I guess we all are familiar with that album and its cover, or at least every fan of dark and metal music should be. Now, talking about Pandemonium, is there a lyrical concept behind it?
Bjørn: Yes, it is. My fountain of inspiration was to build something around that image. The music is different, of course; I didn't listen that much to the album. I just got inspired by the picture, so I was thinking about how to build a concept around the city. Many years ago, I had a dream of a city of Gothminister, but we never managed to do it. We wanted to do some miniatures back then, and now we finally managed to do it. It's Gothminister's city, and he's acting as an evil, gruesome king. The basic story is that people are, sooner or later, going to make an uproar against him and his kingdom, which turns into pandemonium. The leader of the uproar will kill the king and be infected by the evilness himself. He then becomes a new king and continues the same way. The king is dead, long live the king; this story continues for eternity.

Tomaz: This story is enacted in the videos you've made for four songs from the Pandemonium album...
Bjørn: The main story is in the video for the title track. The king is attacked, and they kill him. One of the people becomes a new evil king because he gets too much power. You can also see in the video the monster, which some fans might recognize all the way back from the Utopia album. Also, in the video for "Ich will alles", from the album The Other Side, there's a monster sitting on the table with ouija in the end, and it's the same monster who's controlling the universe. It might be a little bit similar to Hellraiser and its box. It is the idea that this monster controls the whole Gothminister's universe. It's a connection all the way back to the Utopia album, released in 2013.

Tomaz: It seems like a good story for a movie too. Have you ever considered making it?
Bjørn: Not now, but our Utopia album had an intro plus outro film and a live concert in between. I don't know if you're familiar with the Utopia film. The Utopia album was released as a CD and as a DVD with the film. It's long more than one hour. Not many people saw it. The film costs five times more than the album. Nevertheless, it's there, it exists, and we are planning to do more, but it's very expensive, and it takes some time to do it.

Tomaz: How come it took five years to do a new album? Usually, you've released a new album every two or three years.
Bjørn: My mother died from cancer in late 2016, and I had to deal with bureaucratic things. I had to sell her house and other things. After that, my stepmother and also my father died. So, I had three deaths in the family in a row. Then the pandemic came on top of that. It was quite tough for us as a family, and then also our dog died. I also had a lot of work at my job because I work as a lawyer in the film industry. Netflix was a new player in the scene, and I represent the weaker side with directors, photographers, and editors, and we had to fight a lot to get a good agreement with Netflix. That took a lot of time. So, work and private life prevented me from making new music. Now, according to the plans, our next album will come out this October. There will be six music videos! This is the plan, but I can't promise 100 percent. We have to wait for the snow to disappear because we need to film the battles between witches and werewolves. Later we can make the Pandemonium live tour with two albums. There's a big delay in the live market right now, since so many bands are waiting for so much time to play live, and everybody wants to tour now.

Tomaz: So, a European tour is on the way? Last year you played only a couple of festivals...
Bjørn: Yes, we actually got two offers. One was to do a support slot for a bigger band for 50 dates, and the other was for 45 dates. Unfortunately, we had to decline both because, for 50 shows, you have to be away for nine or ten weeks. We are not 100 percent Gothminister; we all have jobs, families and all that comes along. Many years ago, I was asked by a booking agency to move to Germany, and they would make Gothminister big. I said no. I made some choices that were maybe not very professional. In a way, that was bad for my music career, but I have a job and a family. It's not easy, but we are looking forward to a shorter tour. We have plans, but I can't say with which bands since it's nothing yet confirmed. I guess, there will be one tour through Germany and one across non-German countries. We are working hard on that, but for now, the only confirmed show is at the main stage of the M'era Luna festival in August. We will most certainly play some more festivals. That's why I'm in a hurry to make a new album so that we can tour with the entire "Pandemonium universe".

Tomaz: I read some reviews about your albums. One thing is certain, many can't believe that Gothminister comes from Norway and think it's a German band. On one hand, it's understandable since Norway is best known for its black metal and some avant-garde music scene. What's your opinion about this?
Bjørn: In the beginning, Gothminister was, kind of, a humoristic project. I started it only with a synth. In the old days, I had only a microphone, the outfit, and that big video screen. I actually played all the music with the digital video camera. It was a start, haha. Even before that, I was playing in a lot of metal bands. Soon after I formed Gothminister, I wanted to have a guitar player, a drummer, and a real live band, because I like real live music and not so much pre-recorded live music. Everything started more or less as a joke, and it became serious once we got offers for live concerts and record deals. It became a serious project, something that I'd never experienced before. We designed our music a little bit more for the German audience because I liked it. I like this kind of club environment that is alive in Germany. My former keyboard player Tom Kalstad - Halfface, who is playing live with us sometimes even these days, and I travelled through Germany for two summers in a row. We got so very ill; we got a kind of throat infection because we were driving during the days and were in the clubs through the nights to give out our demo recordings.

Tomaz: Old school ways of promoting music...
Bjørn: Yeah, exactly. It was a lot of hard work doing such actions, and we spent two years like that. Even if the club wasn't open anymore, we just put some demos behind the door and hoped somebody would grab them and notice us. We went to many DJs asking to play our music. All this happened in the early 2000s. It was unhealthy for us, but somehow we thought it would pay off someday. Once, our guitar player got a very serious ear infection and needed to get the first flight back home. I remember when we were on a second such journey, we went without Tom's wife because they started to fight, and later they divorced. It was really a lot of commotion, but in the end, it was worth doing it. Tom Halfface helped me so much in the beginning, and I said him that whenever he wanted to be with us, he could be. He's probably coming back to play with us at the M'era Luna festival, and the two of us will also be DJs at the hangar the day before our show on the main stage.

Tomaz: So, you must have a good relationship with the promoters of the M'era Luna festival...
Bjørn: Yes, you are right. I was also on the jury with one of them at one festival in Denmark. And also, I don't know if you've seen it, but on our Utopia tour, we had, among many other tools, this huge animatronic demon, which I needed to get rid of because its weight was 350 kg, and it was six meters tall, it also had six meters of wings. When we had big shows, this demon was on the stage; it was movable by electricity. It was a cool scenography with zombies, and a demon; they were all roaring, and there was a lot of smoke. This thing costs us a lot of money, and it was difficult to drive it around. We needed to rent some heavy trucks, and after the Utopia tour was over, I noticed that I needed to get rid of them or sell them somehow. On the next M'era Luna festival, this demon was greeting everyone at the entrance.

Tomaz: How would you compare Pandemonium with your past albums? Where do you see the main difference?
Bjørn: When it comes to the sound, there's a difference because this is the first album where I took care of the guitar and bass sound. I used a lot of new plug-ins and such stuff. I always had a challenge with the guitar sound, because sometimes it's too distorted that you can't hear the tone, and sometimes it's the way around. I was searching a lot on the guitar sound, and I got a lot of help from Rico, the guy who mixed our second studio album, Empire Of Dark Salvation. He didn't do anything for the album, only teaching me how to think. He's very clever, but he's in the film industry now. So, I studied a lot about guitar sounds. Many years ago, I got in control of orchestral samples by myself, so because in the early days, somebody else did that, now I got in control of the guitar sound also. I was experimenting a lot and finally found, in my opinion, the best guitar sound that we had so far. It has both - tone and aggression; we also used a lot more down-tuned guitars than before. In a way, it worked better, but all this is just technical stuff because a song needs to be good. In my opinion, it doesn't matter how many down-tuned guitars you have if the song doesn't work. We had a very clear idea with our first single on the new album, "Pandemonium". We did a very heavy and long first single, which is the opposite of what we did on our previous album, where we had only three minutes long songs. I'm now quite often making longer songs than before.

Tomaz: This time, you released four singles and videos before the album came out. Did this kind of promotion prove better for Gothminister?
Bjørn: The record company is obviously the one insisting on such album's promotion, to release two, three or maybe even five singles before the album comes out. This way everybody has already heard almost the album before its release. I mean, look at Lord Of The Lost, who, with Blood & Glitter, did the opposite. They released only one song a couple of days before the album's release, and everybody wanted to buy the album because they didn't hear the other things. I guess the record companies only copy each other and don't do anything differently until somebody tries it. It was very interesting to see Lord Of The Lost do the exact opposite and still have huge success on the charts. So, it is always a record company's withstand, and artists need to listen to what they recommend until you have a better idea, and obviously, these guys (Lord Of The Lost) had a better idea, and it worked. I can't judge that by myself, but how interesting is an album if you've already revealed half or even more of it, and most of the time, the songs left are b-sides? Also, for example, Rammstein released some videos after the album came out.

Tomaz: I guess, we should leave this to record companies and people who get paid for market research, haha... You played at many big festivals across Europe, and I wonder whether you have a story to tell that you'll remember for a lifetime.
Bjørn: I have one, but it's not from the festival. It's from the UK tour we had with Mortiis - our friend also. Ok, so, we went on tour together many years ago, and we were together in the night liner bus. We had a support band driving a car behind the bus for the whole tour. I think that when we were on our way to London, it was a lot of traffic, and the bus driver said that we needed to empty the toilet on the bus. There was a misunderstanding, and one of the guys suddenly pulled that handle. The bus driver screamed: "no, no!!!", but it was too late. It was a mistake, and we didn't do much drama but just went to the next venue. The support band came a little bit later, and they were all grey and green in their faces. It was hot, and they had the ventilation turned on. They knew what that was and were suffocating from the toilet's smell; they were puking in the bags. In the middle of that, their drummer had to shit, but they had nowhere to stop since being caught in traffic, so he did it in the bag inside the car. Can you imagine the smell, haha? They went to wash the car three or four times after that. I'll never forget their looks when they came to the venue, haha. It's really horrible, and we felt sorry for them because they were nice people, but as I said, it was a mistake.

Tomaz: That's one super smelly story - difficult, if not impossible, to forget, haha... What about live gigs; do you prefer to play live in small clubs or at big festivals?
Bjørn: I don't know, I guess both. These two things are pretty different. In a way, it's good to play for as many people as possible because it's cool to reach many people. On the other hand, when you play on a big stage of the festivals like M'era Luna or Dark Storm festival, there's a big distance between you and the audience, which is not the case on the small club shows. I can't favour one, it's just a different approach and feeling, and I like both equally.

Tomaz: Gothminister signed with quite big and respected labels almost since its beginning. Right now, you are with AFM Records; how are satisfied with it?
Bjørn: Let me tell you a story. At first, we didn't have any contract, and then we signed with a very small label in Norway, Angel Productions, where we released our first EP. Then it was Tatra Records, the same label that released Apoptygma Berzerk's stuff. Also, this one is a small label from Norway, and we released with it our first album, Gothic Electronic Anthems. Then the album got re-released by Drakkar/BMG. We worked hard to get such a deal; it didn't happen overnight. We joined the Eurovision Song Contest and came to the Norwegian finals. Because of that, I guess, we had a chance to get a better deal with AFM Records than it was the one with BMG. Actually, I got two offers, and I chose the one with AFM. It seemed a better one. We were quite lucky; we only had one album owned by Drakkar, and then AFM Records actually bought Drakkar. We have all the rights now, but back then, I was a little bit stupid because I signed a contract and gave away all my rights. I did it because I thought I would quit Gothminister after the first album. All the other albums are owned by myself because I licensed them.

Tomaz: As you already said, you competed in the Norwegian Eurovision Song Contest. I see that quite some heavy bands try it. Just look at Lord Of The Lost, who actually made it this year. I wonder if such a move helps a band to gain more audience and recognition.
Bjørn: Hm, I don't know. It happened in 2013. We had a lot of blood, and the TV audience liked that very much because we did it our way. We got a lot of attention outside of Norway, but it didn't work well in Norway. Our Utopia album - the only one so far, made it to several charts because of that. We got quite a lot of attention. The Eurovision helps a bit, but you still need to do more. I don't know if it's good or not. What do you think?

Tomaz: A difficult one. I guess it's good to promote the name in the mainstream also, but on the other hand, fans of underground music tend to think that you've sold out. But personally, I don't see anything bad in it.
Bjørn: If you think about the underground scene, metal or gothic, you have very loyal fans. In the mainstream, I don't think there are any loyal fans. They maybe buy your music or go to see a concert when you are hot, but they turn their back on you the very next minute. We in the underground scene have loyal fans who show up year after year at concerts and really love the band. I don't like much the way the mainstream audience reacts.

Tomaz: I agree with you. When not on the front page, you're soon forgotten. Ok, you've mentioned and revealed some things about your new album, Pandemonium II, which will be out quite soon, but musical-wise, will it be in the same orientation as last year's released Pandemonium? Can we expect some surprises?
Bjørn: There will always be some surprises, but I think it will follow a little bit the first Pandemonium album. I made a lot of songs, and they are just coming to me. When we played at a festival last November in Finland, I suddenly got a melody in my head. I was mumbling it, and I recorded it with my mobile phone. That's how it started. It's difficult to say if it's the same or not; it's probably similar. We didn't plan to reinvent the Gothminister sound. I guess that if you have part number two, you follow a little bit the first part. Nevertheless, the guitar player said to me that these songs were much better than the ones on Pandemonium. I can't judge myself, but he was really enthusiastic. I think the songs are interesting and good, a little bit different, but you can still recognize the Gothminister sound. It will be exciting to see what people think about it.

Tomaz: Before we finish the interview, I want to ask you how did you, back then, come up with the name Gothminister?
Bjørn: It was more or less a joke. I was with a good friend of mine, and he used to go to these goth clubs in Norway. I was from the metal scene, not paying much attention to them. One night we went together to a gothic club in Oslo, I think it was in 1999. We were looking at the people, and he said that this scene should have a leader, a more masculine character. The goth scene tends to be quite feminine... We talked about a masculine minister who is really tall and has a deep voice. It was basically a joke. After that, we went to another party. It was very cold that night, around minus 25 degrees, and I forgot my jacket there. I got a severe throat infection, it was really crucial, and after a while, I got surgery. I was on antibiotics for 130 days in a row. Everything went wrong, and during this illness, I started producing the Gothminister's songs, just on my synth, and started recording some stuff which turned out to become the Gothic Electronic Anthems album. It is how it started - as a kind of joke. I have a lot of other details about my illness, but it's not so important. It was crucial, but I survived, and believe me that it's not a story I invented to make it interesting. I was actually crying a lot before I got the surgery, and during that time, Gothminister was born. So, it started as a joke, but then some evil forces told me not to joke that much about it, and I got very ill. We still have a little bit of humour; just look at some stuff we have. It's supposed to be a bit of fun and not only serious. Don't get me wrong, music and everything it's very serious, but you need to have some humour when you do these dark things, at least when it fits. In the early days, we were dead serious on the stage but were laughing and having fun behind it. After a while, I thought, why not bring this fun on the stage also and invite the audience to have some fun too? If you look at two other bands, I think it's quite crucial to look at Marilyn Manson compared to Rammstein, for example. When Rammstein started to show some fun, they took it even more over the top. On the other side, Marilyn Manson was still really serious. Something happened with these two bands, they were both really big. I think that a bit of self-irony doesn't hurt.

Tomaz: I could ask you many more questions, but eventually, everything comes to an end. Thank you for your time and all the interesting answers. Once again, congratulations on the victory in our annual Dark Music Awards. Is there something you would like to say at the end of this interview?
Bjørn: Thank you! I think people should start getting their noses out of their phones a little bit. They should go out more and experience live shows. So many bands are playing live, and why not give them a chance instead of sitting on social media? I'm off social media already, and I hope that all those bands out there, especially the new ones who are in need of people coming to their shows, will get some people. Go out and discover new bands instead of just being on the internet. Of course, you need to discover on the internet, but you need to go out physically also. You need to start going to concerts again and not be afraid after Covid. Get out there and live your life not only on the internet. This is my main message.

Gothminister discography:
- Gothic Electronic Anthems (2003)
- Empire Of Dark Salvation (2005)
- Happiness In Darkness (2008)
- Anima Inferna (2011)
- Utopia (2013)
- The Other Side (2017)
- Pandemonium (2022)

Gothminister links: Official website, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram

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