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Voice: ADRIAN WESTIN
"…a Will Haven intensity and darkened atmosphere, with Meshuggah style spiky structure, pace and bruising heaviness, but wrapped into a blistering sound which is definitely theirs… ...shaped from a brutal precision, a ruthless efficiency that wastes no opportunity to powder your cranium into dust, it’s technical and progressive, it’s the sound of migraine put to music..." 8/10 Rigsby (www.iwillbeheard.co.uk)
An INTERVIEW with ADRIAN
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| By Night are from Falkenberg, Sweden and are currently signed to LifeForce Records. Formed in 1999, they originally played a more typical Swedish death metal style but have developed considerably into an extremely aggressive, technical and brutal kind of metal, which they have worked hard to refine with many lengthy periods of touring and early recordings. With their debut album "Burn The Flags" receiving critical acclaim in 2005 and the much anticipated follow-up "A New Shape Of Desperation" just released in Europe (25 Sept 06), it seemed like a good time to talk with the band and see what makes them tick.
Hi there Adrian, lets get straight into things. What got you into the music scene, what was your inspiration and is Sweden a good place to be when starting out in a band? Hi there. I think Sweden is a very good place to start a band, there are so many good influences and there are many places you can play as a unsigned band. I have always been into music in general and have grown up with music like Twister Sister, REM and a lot of Swedish pop and rock bands like Roxette and Eddie Medusa. I founded the real heavy music though Pantera and that day it made me realise that this kind of music, with so much balls and attitude in it, is something I was here for. So me and some friends started the band that is today playing under the name Trendkill. After a while we learned to play our instruments and started to write some songs that at the time we thought were the new "Kill 'Em All" hahaa... but when we listen to it today, it just makes us laugh!
What factors do you think By Night possess, which can make you stand apart from the many others in the metal scene? People always tell us that they appreciate the fact that you can hear the feeling of honesty in our music and that we don't try to fool ourselves and I feel that it is the best thing you can hear as a band. Also, I feel the same with this band, we are not trying to fool the listeners or us with using elements in the music that would make us sell some more records and that would allow us to play in front of a bigger audience. We do this 100% for ourselves and the fact that people like it makes us more than happy, so we can tour more, meet all of those people and have a great time together. Too many bands today are all the same, both in the way they look and also the way they build up a song and play it. The more I here new metal music, I just grow tired of it and put on my older stuff like old Sepultura and Pantera albums and that makes me want to create music again.
Are you all fully professional musicians or do you also hold down ‘day’ jobs? And what kind of things do you guys do when you aren’t involved in By Night? No, we are working all of us at day jobs. It would be great if we could live off of this but that will happen if the future wants it to, lets us see. But beside that we got different things as hobbies and all of us are also playing in other bands, but By Night is the number one band that we put most focus on.
There seems to be a lasting relationship with Christian Silver the producer on your new album “A New Shape Of Desperation”? What is this down to and do you ever consider changing that aspect, or is he now part of the BY NIGHT sound? Christian is a really great person and a good friend of mine. I have been there many, many times and recorded albums and demos over several years, so we have learned to work with each other well and have come to a point where he also knows in which direction we want to take the music, so he is very important to us. We will also record our next album there and after that we might go to a new studio if we feel that we have stopped in the process, we will see.
Do you love living in Sweden and do you think it has any bearing on the way you sound? And what do you like the most about your country and what do you like the least? Sweden is a great country to live in and a country with great opportunities to live a very good life. I don't think it has so much to do with our sound, but we have got many great bands here and it can be positive for a new band to see people around you have success, so you work even harder for your goals and you have to perform well as a band. The thing I find hard to understand about Swedish people is that we sometimes complain about things that people from other countries would have killed for, to have the same "problems" like us. Like we complain about the food we get in front of us, while we have people starving not so far from us. That makes me really disappointed and angry.
What things really get to you - makes you angry - makes you want to do something about it? |
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Like the thing I just said, there are millions of things around me every day that makes me want to fight harder for what I believe in. I have also realised that no one might be perfect, but if we all try to change a little bit for the better it would make a big difference in the world. If we realise that we just can't buy happiness, in a bigger perspective we might be on the right way and learn to respect one and other and we could have a better time here on earth and not just destroy the planet we live on. We must think in a bigger perspective so my children's kids will also have clean air to breath. People who are just living there lives without reflecting over things like this are dangerous and we must talk about the things we all see in front of us everyday,
What motivates a band to write music these days or to even become a band - when just about everything has been done before - it must be so difficult to create something fresh and worthwhile? I think it is too easy today to get signed and there are too many bands sounding all the same. But to find inspiration to create music is very simple, because I think we have something new to put out there and I also believe that people who buy our albums are people who are into the same way of thinking that we are about, which I have been talking about here. We are not telling people how to live there lives, just that we have to stop our lives sometimes and think of what has to be changed, so we all will have a better life. That is something that we all can reflect about. |
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Where do you see BY NIGHT going from here? Is commercial success important? No, it has never been one of our goals to be successful, but it is always fun when you have worked up a bigger fan base and can travel around all over Europe and meet the fans and having a great time on stage and afterwards with a beer in your hand. But, we have chosen the wrong way in the music business if we would have been here for the money. We could put in some clean vocals on every chorus and some keyboards on the records and we would have been played 100 times more on the radio. But we will never change ourselves just to be successful, we do what we love to do and if success will grow with us, we will handle it right.
I see that you have 10/11 dates in mainland Europe planned for October, presumably to promote the new album. Have you ever played any gigs in the UK? Yeah, we where over in UK last year (2005) with the "Monster Mosh Down Tour" together with Ektomorf, Betzefer and Disbelief. We did 3 shows and had a really great time, and the show in London was really amazing.
Are there any future touring plans that include the UK and are you looking to tour outside of Europe? Not for the moment but we are working on it very hard. The UK is really fun to play, has treated us very good and also a country that is really fun to be in.
Is there anywhere that you would really like to play and why? And, is there a band or individual, with which it would be an honour to share the stage with? It would be cool to tour US or Asia and maybe together with Haunted or Meshuggah, because they are great bands and we could speak Swedish on the bus ...haha.. It would be perfect, the tour would have to be called "the Swedish bulldozers" and would be one of the heaviest tours ever.
Well, that’s everything we have to ask you this time around. Thanks so much for your time and we wish you well. Is there anything else you wish to add to finish the interview? Thanks. Please listen to our new album “A New Shape Of Desperation” for free at this location: www.lifeforcerecords.com and feel free to visit our site at www.myspace.com/bynight for the latest news. www.bynightonline.com --- by_night@hotmail.comby Rigsby (12th October, 2006)
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