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Interview with Eternal Emperor
JesusMetal: Hello there ! I hope you are doing great ?
Schadrach: Well… I catched a cold last week and my throat and nostrils are burning like hell, but it looks like I will survive.
JesusMetal: Could you give a short introduction to the people behind the band ? (occupations, other projects, fav ice cream flavour ;) ).
Schadrach: Currently our line-up and the whole band project has a very vague status: Right now I’m managing all the stuff for the band since there is no complete and stable line-up.
Our session drummer who participated in the recording of our debut E.P. is studying weird biology / computer science – very time-consuming (He is like me and Meshach in his mid-twenties.). That’s one of the reasons why he left his other band and will not be able to support us any further. He is a huge black metal fan and not a christian – so I guess his favorite ice cream flavour would be “Virgin’s Blood”. ;-)
Meshach has his own “business”: He is doing handcraft stuff here and there – his lifestyle is very “punkrock”. He is normally more into Hardcore and honestly he doesn’t really care if he’s playing in a punk, metal or pop band. Ice cream flavour ? “Cheap Beer”.
I’m out of work and I will try to arrange something new for my vocational future this year. I use all those sparetime for writing and working on music. Not only for Eternal Emperor but I will NOT tell you what other projects. Ice cream for me: the taste of pure sugar with a good portion of honey and saccharine !
JesusMetal: And could you give us a brief history of how Eternal Emperor started, maybe you could also tell how you all met?
Schadrach: I started messing around with black metal riffs years ago and recorded some demo tracks. Very awkward stuff ! I improved a bit on my abilities to handle the bizarre instrument called “e-guitar” and my songwriting skills. That gave me the urge to start writing some songs again. Meshach was an old band mate from another project and Sadoth was rehearsing next door to our rehearsal room. So we came together to try out those songs. It was like: “I have some songs and somebody needs to play them”. And some days later: “Well…looks like we are something like a band…we need a name !”
JesusMetal: On the Jesusmetal forum we give the members a chance to contribute questions for the interviews, the question we got for your band came from Nora, and was one you probably saw coming, and you probably heard a 1000 times before. How did you come up with the band name, and was it actually influenced by Crimson Moonlight ?
Schadrach: Crimson Moonlight ? I’m not really into modern emocore… Our name is just a cheap rip-off of another black metal band called “Emperor”. They are totally “underground” and I believe nobody knows them except for ME. We just wanted to be the “more triumphant Emperor” so we decided to call us “Eternal Emperor”…
To put some seriousness back into this conversation: “Eternal Emperor” is my all time favorite from Crimson Moonlight. A catchy tune with cool lyrics.
There where some people who did’t like our choice but I love such “tribute band names”.
JesusMetal: On to the music, In the Beginning was recently released on Soundmass, it is your debut release. First it was planned to be released independently. How come it was released on Soundmass ? Are you happy with how Soundmass released it ?
Schadrach: When I finished writing some arrangements we decided to record them as demo material. At first we had no idea for which purpose and if there was a purpose for doing this at all. When we heard the first rough mixes we were pretty convinced that this is going to be more than a useless demo. So we came up with the idea to copy a small run of CDs and sending them out for some bucks with a professionally printed cover card.
The cover cards were printed and Whirlwind Records and Nordic Mission asked for copies before we started to look for distribution. This encouraged us to seek for more distribution options so we got in contact with Adam (Soundmass). He was also willing to take some copies but remarked that burned CDs are not very popular and a lot of music fans avoid such releases.
He liked what he heard and started to think about a professional CD release.
JesusMetal: Musically looking back at it, are you happy with the final result ? Any things you would've liked to see different ?
Schadrach: Since the whole thing was not supposed to be released that way we are more than happy with the final result. We received some very positive feedback and nobody came up to us saying “This sounds like a crappy demo E.P. !”.
Most details of the songs were written while we recorded our music. “Psalm 91” was actually more an accident and at first we thought it’s just to “primitive” to include it on the E.P.
Honestly I’m not a guitar hero, Meshach is not a bass virtuoso and we did A LOT of sampling and triggering stuff to enhance the drums. All those circumstances led to very low expectations. Compared with that it’s something like a surprise that “In The Beginning” has 24 minutes of “bearable” sonic impressions.
I’m a very critical guy and the production lacks in a lot of points. But measured against the fact that it was recorded somewhere between our rehearsal room and a home studio with NO budget at all it’s pure gold.
JesusMetal: What are some of your favourite bands ? Do these bands also influence you as a musician ?
Schadrach: I’m personally not a 24/7-metalhead. I enjoy tons of different music. The realm of metal alone is extremely huge and has billions of facettes. That makes it not very easy to pick some names. Even though I will try to name some important (and well known) bands: Tourniquet, Opeth, Meshuggah, Necrophagist.
All those bands are great bands and are also very inspiring. And that’s maybe the point: For me it’s easy to speak about inspiration but not about influences. Of course I’m also listening to black metal, but I’m not able to tell you if there are influences from other black metal bands that formed our black metal sound at all !
I draw my inspiration from more than only similar bands. Maybe I got all my inspiration from Kraftwerk or Michael Jackson to write black / death metal riffs ?!
JesusMetal: Already working on new music ? Any other things we can expect from Eternal Emperor in the near future ?
Schadrach: Shirts ! There will be t-shirts ! And a Best Of album with remixes and Surround 5.1 sound.
I already talked about our line-up problem: Currently this all is shrinked to a one-man-project.
To find people who are sharing my believes, are able to contribute to this band with a solid talent and are not moving every year for the sake of studying cryptic scientific stuff – that’s a tough task !
Eternal Emperor will continue, regardless if there will be a full line-up or not. I hate to think about the option to continue as a one-man-project and recording / programming all instruments on my own, cause I’m dreaming of a stable line-up and the ability to play some decent live shows. This would just be a huge step away from that goal !
On the other hand it would guarantee all the freedom to have control over every detail of every song.
I only know that I will not put it into practice the way we did it with “In The Beginning”. I’m very thankful for the support of Meshach and Sadoth, but next time there will be only the two options: full and experienced line-up or one-man-project.
I’m currently collecting riffs and reading some interesting literature. I have something like an idea for a concept album but as far as I’m not sure about the whole thing I will not share my thoughts…
I could only promise those things: It will be better than “In The Beginning” (cause it simply has to !), it will be an album, I will include a lot of keys and other stuff for a more symphonic sound (some will like it, some will hate it…), it will be very diverse material and again you will find death, black, thrash and doom metal elements.
JesusMetal: What lyrical approach do you guys take, could you tell something about them ?
Schadrach: Normally I’m not a huge fan of plain and stereotypical christian lyrics but I included a huge “cliché factor” when I wrote the lyrics for “In The Beginning”.
I spoke about the idea of a concept album and maybe it will include only small references to my personal faith. That means that there is no dogma for the Eternal Emperor lyrics.
There are a lot of bands with a whole discography filled with christian themes. But only some of them are able to present those on every release in an intelligent and fresh way. Tourniquet is maybe the best example !
I will never be able to write such clever and profound lyrics like Ted Kirkpatrick does and I will go where my heart leads me: there will be “religious” stuff again but also a lot of other topics. Much more historical things for instance…
JesusMetal: Eternal Emperor is a fairly young band, if we look back at the past, did you ever think that this all would have happened in such a short time ?
Schadrach: Definitely not. It took us by surprise to end up with a licence agreement with Soundmass for our debut release after only 4 or 5 months of our “band history”.
I guess this sounds very arrogant and cruel, but honestly there is tons of crap in the christian metal scene that gets released only because it’s christian and people are buying it regardless of it’s poor quality. All this grind and “unblack” stuff with horrible distorted and pitched vocals and unbelieveable trashy programmed drums only recorded to sound brutal…
It seems to be easy to get a record deal somewhere and to put out your material regardless if it deserves to be presented to human ears or not.
That’s why I felt not very comfortable at first when I started to promote our stuff cause we didn’t want to be pigeonholed into the same category of such obscure low-fi projects.
But it seems like we did a good job on our debut to avoid this problem and Soundmass wouldn’t take on the risk to invest into a formerly unknown band like us if there wouldn’t be any potential. That’s also a very new step for Soundmass so it was definitely a surprise that Adam started to work with us that fast.
JesusMetal: If there are 2 things you seriously would like to accomplish with Eternal Emperor, what would it be ?
Schadrach: First: Getting a full and stable line-up and playing shows.
JesusMetal: Thanks for the time, are there any final things you'd like to tell the readers ?
Schadrach: For all the european guys: Please, never sign licence agreements with Australian labels if you have to work and get up early ! If you are out of work – no problem. All those nights of instand messaging…
We would like to thank all the people out there for massive support so far, especially Adam for doing all this stuff for us and being a cool guy.
For any further questions please feel free to write an e-mail to our band address (check out www. eternalemperor. net) or add us at myspace.
God bless you all !
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