Embracing History: A Mortiis Interview

HÅVARD ELLEFSEN of MORTIIS: Embracing History

An interview by Sarah Kidd.

Born in Skien, Telemark in Norway, Håvard Ellefsen began his musical career forged in the fires of black metal as the bass player for Emperor; while his career with them was short lived – just over a year – it ignited a fire inside him that would soon see him strike out on his own.

But it wasn’t further down the path of black metal that he would travel. Instead Ellefsen began to experiment with music that was far more ambient and atmospheric and nature while still embracing the darker aesthetic.

And so Mortiis was born.

Since 1993, Mortiis has evolved in several different ways; musically, visually and conceptually. Several albums down the track and 2016’s The Great Deceiver has been hailed as one of his best. Yet many fans still longed for him to return to his earlier work so that they may have the chance to hear it live; something that Ellefsen adamantly refused to do.

Now in 2018, New Zealand fans will not only have the chance to see Mortiis live for the first time but they will get to experience live his reinterpretation of the classic 1994 album Ånden Som Gjorde Opprør.

I spoke with Mortiis recently in an in depth and perfectly frank interview as to why he decided to embrace the past along with his decision to re-release his 2010 album Perfectly Defect…

Something that comes up quite often is that you are often classed as the creator of Dungeon Synth;

[laughs]

Now you once described that in an interview as a bit of a ‘mind fuck’ to be considered as such. Do you still look at it that way?

“It is a bit of a mind fuck for someone to say that you created a genre; I’m not sure if people feel that I single handedly created that, I hope people think that it was me and some other people otherwise you would be giving me way too much credit I think. [chuckles]

There were other people there are the same time or right after in the old days that would do fairly similar stuff, I think what set me apart the most was the visual angle I developed at the time.

Bottom line is I don’t really think too much about it I mean it’s flattering to get the credit, that people feel that I was at least part of creating something way back in the mid 90’s, even the early 90’s that seems to flourish now.

Which is kinda odd though that it took two decades to get a foothold” [chuckles]

As everyone knows you began your public musical career in Emperor, and from there you moved to as we just discussed dungeon-synth and then onto your own unique brand of industrial dance music. And it appears in many ways that Mortiis as an entity has come full circle, or would you say that with your latest album The Great Deceiver that you have created a whole new circle altogether?

“There are kinda two things happening with me at the same time right now; there was this release of Perfectly Defect just last month which in actual fact was recorded pretty much at the same time as The Great Deceiver which was released in 2016. It was many years in the coming, we thought about if for a long time and we went back and we re-did a lot of stuff and yada, yada, yada and became enemies with the entire music industry pretty much in the process [chuckles] and Perfectly Defect was actually created at the same time.

The original idea was for a number of songs to be sort of hidden on the internet and could only be unlocked using certain information that the plan was to include on The Great Deceiver album. And a lot of those songs are now the songs that are on Perfectly Defect, because we kinda abandoned that idea. For some reason…I can’t quite remember why we abandoned it? I think we just thought it was cool and then it was less and less cool for some reason.

And as time went by we realized ‘Fuck, we haven’t put anything out for a long time, and we were having problems with management and all kinds of dumb fucking music industry bullshit and stuff that bogs you down and prevents you from doing anything creative or getting stuff released and we were getting a little worried that people would think we didn’t exist anymore so we had this set of songs that were kinda this strange and experimental and a lot of them didn’t even have vocals, they were just kinda artsy-fartsy and that became Perfectly Defect.

We just decided ‘You know what, fuck the fuckin’ record industry’ all they do is offer you horrible contracts that are only good for them, horrible for the artist, we’re not going to sign that, we’ve been through that once before with a certain British record label from Nottingham, we’re never going to go back to that kind of situation; let’s just put a record out for free because I was always a big NIN fan and I know they’ve done similar a couple of years before or a year before…and that seemed to work out quite nice.

So we just went ‘Fuck everybody, let’s just turn this thing into an album, it’s like eight or nine or ten songs, it’s fucking great stuff, it’s unexpected, different; so let’s get this out there. So in 2010 which is when this happened, we put Perfectly Defect out as a free download record for anyone that wanted it. And I think like 15,000 people took it, which is quite good cause we had literally no promotion, we didn’t take out any ads or anything like that. I hired one PR person to just kinda like get the news out there and that was about it. So ever since then – and it was only available for a limited amount of time, it was only out there for a few months and then we just kinda shut it down – that record hasn’t really been available. So in a sense it is a re-issue, or it’s an album finally getting a proper release.

So that’s a really long story, but it gives you a bit of a background in the fact that it’s not a new album in that sense, but it’s a record that is finally getting a deserved release, you know it’s finally getting out there in vinyl, it’s finally getting out there as a proper CD, finally getting into all the streaming services. It’s become the album it deserves to be.

Now I have obviously completely forgotten your question because I just kept talking!”

[mutual raucous laughter]

How about we side step and go this way – yes Perfectly Defect is a re-issue but for many (because like all things in life, music too is cyclic) fans this would be like a brand new album. For some this may even be how they first discover Mortiis as an artist.

I previously asked if you feel as if Mortiis as an entity has come full circle, or created a whole new circle altogether?

“Oh right, I think to some degree Mortiis has come full circle. I started by expressing that two things were happening – and the other one is that I am out there now playing, performing with my re-interpreted version of my 1994 album Ånden Som Gjorde Opprør, which I completely re-recorded and just replaced all the sounds and I added a lot of arrangements and I made it like fifty minutes longer and added all kinds of rhythmic stuff and melodic content…so it’s kinda like an almost whole new thing but with a lot of really, really recognizable parts so people who know the album are still going to recognize it obviously.

I had a lot of like personal issues with my new stuff for a long time, it took me a long time to kind of sort of find my way out of that whole foggy, misguided idea that all my old stuff sucked, that was a mental thing and it’s not done in a heartbeat you know, you gotta really kinda overcome a lot of obstacles psychologically.”

Correct me if I am wrong, but a lot of that stemmed from the fact that you recorded straight to tape?

“That was one of the reasons, that was one of the bigger ones yeah. I was really sloppy back in those days, I didn’t really care too much if there was a little bit of a mistake here and there. But as the years went by those little things that were very minor for me at the time when it happened, started growing bit like a fucking tumor you know? You don’t notice it at first but then towards the end it’s a huge fuckin problem, and it takes over your whole life. You can’t think about anything else, it blinds you in a way.

So that was a big problem for me and I wasn’t able to see the cool things about what I had done in the past because of my hang-ups over technical bullshit really. So you know it sounds like nothing, it sounds so trivial. But in my mind it was a huge thing. And so of course that infects everything else and then all of a sudden I wasn’t sure if the mask was stupid, is it ridiculous. So I was getting into all these stupid ways of thinking, and it takes a long time to get out of it. And finally I did and so the last couple of years I was looking at old photos and I’m thinking ‘Fuck man that mask looks really cool’ and so I just started doing that again, because it is a huge part of my identity. Mental healing I suppose you could say; and so once I got to that good place again I was ready to start looking into this and that’s about a year ago now I think when I relented and accepted the offer to play at a festival and that kinda of just kick started everything, I just decided like ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna stop saying no to all these things’ because people through the years have been approaching me about Era 1 stuff and I always just shut em down with ‘It’s not what I do, I don’t want to talk about it’ you know blah, blah, blah…

But I reached the point where I just went ‘Fuck it man, just say yes and dive into it, just do it’ and that’s how it got started pretty much. So I think you could say it’s come full circle as such.”

So when you decided to say ‘Fuck It’, how did you feel after that first performance?

“Pretty good, relieved mostly, because I hadn’t really done a performance like that in – I think I counted – we’re talking like eighteen years you know when I toured The Stargate [1999] which in itself was a bit of a different experience as opposed to doing some of this older stuff. By the time of the Stargate I actually had more people on stage and prior to that it was pretty much just me and I was now back to being just me.

So it was weird, I can’t say that I enjoyed it that much as I was very nervous. But I pulled it off, it was one of those things where I knew that this is just the ripping off of the world’s biggest band-aid you know, it’s going to hurt for a second but then everything else is going to be great after that and that’s kinda the way it’s been. I mean I’ve done a bunch of shows since then and it feels better every time, but of course when you haven’t done something in eighteen years – I don’t know what people are expecting, I don’t know how I’m going to be on stage.

So I think I was very, very focused on the the fact that I was on stage, which is something as an artist – you should always know where you are obviously – but that shouldn’t be your whole world, that shouldn’t be your whole reality for the whole show ‘Oh god, I’m on stage, I’m on stage, I’m on stage, I’m on stage…’ [chuckles]

Thank god I have been on stage many, many times, I mean it worked out, it was ok, but I was really self-concious I think. I think that’s the word for it. But when I came off I mean a couple of guys from other bands came up to me and said ‘That was fucking great’ and that meant a lot to me to get a little bit of recognition because I wasn’t sure if I had done a good or a bad job because I wasn’t able to tell, but I think I did a good job. I haven’t seen any shit press about it!

[mutual laughter]

There might be some out there I don’t really go looking that hard to be honest. I do know one kind of fucked up thing happened; I kinda have a one man crew, because there is really no need for more and this was his first job too with me and I had these high-drops [banners] on each side of the stage and he somehow managed to put one of them upside down!

[mutual laughter]

And I didn’t realise until I was up there, I was probably twenty minutes into the show when I decided to have a sneak peek at the banners to see how they looked and as I looked to the side – it was this old shield type of symbol that I had with an ‘M’ in the middle of it – and one of them had what had turned into a ‘W’ in the middle of it.

[laughs] And you were like ‘huh…?’

“I was thinking ‘That can’t be right’ so I had to look at it one more time; and I know some press people caught that; there was this one really humoristic live review where, basically I was getting a good grade I think but they did say the best thing was when Mortiis looked really confused for about five seconds [laughs] and that was when I realized that my front banner was upside down and that was like [whispers] ‘What the fuck?’ [laughs] it’s a running joke with me now and my crew guy ‘Don’t forget to put it the right way up’. Literally it’s kinda a good thing because that made me more aware of it; sometimes I do travel alone as kinda like a one man army and I rely on local crew and they don’t know which way to put these banners up so I keep telling them ‘Make sure it say ‘M’ not ‘W’ you know? Because if it hadn’t happened then, it would definitely have happened later, someone is going to fuck it up, it’s inevitable.”

[laughs] I would have loved to have seen that – I can imagine your face…

“Yup that was a weird moment – we had a ‘chat’ about that after the show, let me put it to you that way…”

Oh….I can imagine!

“I didn’t yell at him, I just pointed it out that next time to pay more attention please.”

Over twenty-five years down the track into your musical career – and looking at it from the prospective of an outsider – how do you view Mortiis as an entity now? From the birth to where Mortiis is now?

“I see it as something that kinda continuously evolves it always has been. Even back in the old days I mean no record that I ever made really kinda sounds the same; there might be like two records that were made – my second and third album – the Anden som Gjorde Oppror and the Keiser Av En Dimensjon Ukjent, they were rather similar because they were more or less made in the same year, and I was pretty much in the exact same mindset with both of them.

But apart from that there have always been fairly major changes from album to album, and there has always been this desire to try stuff out and you always look back at what you did last time and think ‘What can I do better?’ so it keeps evolving.

I’m sure a lot of bands are like ‘Well we’ve found our formula, we’re not going to change a fuckin thing because we know it’s going to sell half a million copies’ or whatever. ‘We’re going to do our Viking shit every goddamn time or whatever the fuck you wanna do, so in that sense I’ve always thought that – or hoped – I think hoped is a much better word that people find Mortiis to be a fascinating thing; an interesting thing in terms of evolving and not really standing still so much between records and now that I’ve in a sense come full circle to some degree it’s still a bit fresh, I don’t really know what people think about that.

I know that people are excited that I am embracing my past again, I think that is what people are the most excited about, that I am not this sort of grumpy fucker that keeps slagging off my old shit which I tended to do back in the old days. In fact I think people are relieved over that [chuckles] but you know I don’t really know how they look at me beyond that, I think that is kinda like an unwritten chapter. I mean I do have some interesting ideas for the music that I have currently made that I am playing live, you know this whole Era 1 style of music and I want to keep working on that stuff for a little while longer, maybe get at least one record out with this type of music, so I think it remains to be seen as to how people perceive that. I just hope people find Mortiis interesting and kinda fascinating, because I think that’s I would have done standing outside and looking inwards you know.”

I understand that when you first started out on your musical journey your parents were not too happy about the situation?

“My parents were not too happy about what was I was doing, they were fine with me being into music and stuff like that, but when shit started hitting the fan and it started to get a little bit more serious and to some degree it started affecting school and shit like that that’s when they started putting their foot down and that was when probably my ten year war with my father started at that point. I mean me and my Dad are totally fine now and we have been for many, many years but in the 90’s things were not that good. They were just trying to do their job you know, they didn’t drag me to church thank god for that because my parents weren’t really religious but one day I cam home and my father had taken everything down from my walls – I used to have tons of like records and posters and all kinds of stuff on my walls and I think my school had something about Havard – which is my name – is a good student but gets a little too caught up in this music thing and my Dad took it so literally and just fuckin pretty much outlawed music in the house more or less. And that’s not the way to fucking fix things let me put it that way, I mean I hated him for a while. But it’s teenager shit you know?”

For many of us growing up in New Zealand bands like Emperor and so forth were just other-worldly. Something to aspire to and live experiences that we could only dream of as back then bands like that did not travel to places like New Zealand!

“But we felt the same way though, because we over here in Norway in terms of Australia – sorry I wasn’t too familiar with New Zealand and what was going on over there – you know you had bands like Sadistik Execution that had been around for like a long time, they were like a mystery to us, we thought they were fucking awesome. They had been around since like the mid 80’s, they had like this really cool hard to find vinyl 12 inch and they were doing the whole corpse paint thing really early and there were all these myths surrounding the lead singer Rok that he had gone into the forest for like six months – probably not true – but all that stuff right? So we had our little fascinations with bands and the people that were half a globe away.

So I know what you mean, we sat around here feeling the same way about bands from other countries. Bands from Eastern Block countries back in the 90’s were way more obscure than they are now, you know? From Hungary and the Czech Republic; at the time Eastern Europe was kinda a shitty place because there were wars going on back in those days, So you know there was all this fog and in that fog there were all these bands that we were fascinated by.

Now everything is more open with social media, I can get hold of anybody within two hours probably, so it’s not the same anymore. It doesn’t have that mystery anymore which is kinda sad you know – it loses some of the magic.”

That’s very true – when we were teens we used to imagine that all the bands in Norway were just surrounded by these creepy forests and castles that they could just basically run around in and be inspired to make all this cool music!

[raucous laughter]

“You’re thinking about Scotland! [laughs] We don’t have a lot of castles, Sweden has a couple of them, I’m sure we have a couple too but I mean not that many that I know of; maybe a couple of fortresses here and there…”

The aesthetic of Mortiis has always been important and is rather a signature point with you, your masks, your prosthetics and so forth. Do you still see that as a huge part of Mortiis moving forward?

“Visually yeah, when I work on music then I am focused on the music; I don’t really think about the visual aspect, that comes later you know if there’s a photo shoot coming up or if I’m going out to do a show or try to plan something. You have to consider that I have only been back in this end of things for about a year if we are talking about the ERA 1 kind of stuff and then of course even all along the visual part of it has been huge; but the mask has been missing for a long, long time, it has only come back in the past year or so. But when I am doing this type of music and tying it in with the whole sort of Mortiis mythology so to speak with everything that is happening in the book that I made and all that stuff, then yeah you can’t do it without the mask.

It’s kinda like Star Wars without the Storm Troopers [laughs] It’s just like I would expect that [as a fan] and I want it to be there, and I think everybody, including myself wants that mask to be there, it’s just part of the DNA of Mortiis.”

You once stated that when you first set out on your solo journey it was more about the atmosphere and the concept rather than the musicianship. Would it be safe to say now that it is more the other way around?

“I still think that the atmosphere, the vibes, the feeling that I can evoke lasts longer I think with human emotion than how well I played something I feel. I think to a degree of course if you play something in a really horrible way and then decide ‘Well that’s going on the record’ you’re probably ruining your whole atmosphere, you are ruining the whole experience so of course musicianship has to be important but I think what I mean by that statement is that something doesn’t have to be technical fucking Dream Theatre type of stuff in order to invoke a good atmosphere and a nice experience.

That’s my personal feeling on that; I loved old Hellhammer and they couldn’t play, but they had a hell of an atmosphere with what they put out. Any old heavy metal, start-up band usually had this really magical, hungry vibe around them that I connect with a lot, because I’m not really into super technical kind of music.

I mean I love Rush, but somehow they made really good songs so I think they’re different…”

Going back to what I was saying before about how the digital age has changed the face of music – I would like to address the re-release of Perfectly Defect. Looking at some of the individual tracks it would be absolutely remiss of me not to say that opening track ‘Closer To The End’ doesn’t remind me of another great band, Nine Inch Nails.

“I get that. There was a time in my life – and that time is probably going to come again too once I start working on some stuff that is not to do with Era 1 – where I was very inspired and impressed with a lot of the stuff that Trent did. I mean me and millions of other people of course, I mean the guy is probably a genius [chuckles] I am a huge fan of the Downward Spiral and Fragile albums.

So in some of the ways I guess I started programming stuff, especially with some of the beats that I really like that Nine Inch Nails were doing and certain sounds. I don’t know if I subconsciously picked up any of the arrangements styles but I might have done that too.

But bottom line, Nine Inch Nails along with a handful of other bands were massively influential for me. So when people mention Trent or Nine Inch Nails when talking in terms of my music to me it’s a huge compliment, it means that I managed to do something because it is no secret that I spent a long time analyzing Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Enigma, Skinny Puppy and then you know Rob Zombie all the ones that I think are doing the best job in this type of music. If people wanna mention that while talking about my music in a positive way not as in a ‘You goddamn wannabe’ [mutual laughter] then I’m thinking I must have done something right!”

When I listen to the album I hear all sorts of things that could be related to other artists such as Gary Numan, Attrition, Front 242 – it’s a wonderful thing!

“Yeah Gary Numan, I had a period where I was listening to like a bunch of his albums. I’m not sure what he was doing in the 80’s, it seemed to be a bit weird!”

The Track ‘Sensation of Guilt’ is funnily enough where I hear the most influence from Numan…

“That’s one of those accidental songs, I had this strange plug-in and what it did was you could run any kind of sound through this plug-in and control it with your keyboard and make chords and what came out the end sounded almost like carnival music. So what I did I took a drum beat, a quite simple drum beat and ran it through the processor and I created chords via my keyboard, so everything is built around that happy accident, and then we just kinda put all these other sounds, guitars and vocals on top of it.”

As a listener do you believe that the album should be consumed in a linear fashion?

“It’s not a concept record or anything like that. When I sequence songs together on an album I do try to pay as much attention as possible to get it flowing as smoothly as possible, make the next song fit as naturally as possible with the previous one.

With this record it was a bit more difficult because each song is rather individual, they are all kinda weird in their own way, so it was a bit more difficult to sequence that up naturally.”

Mortiis is in the middle of his Australasian tour where he is performing a reinterpretation of his classic 1994 sophomore album Ånden Som Gjorde Opprør, which translates to ‘The Spirit Who Rebelled’. He plays Wellington’s Valhalla TONIGHT (Wednesday 1st August 2018) and will be hitting Auckland’s Whammy! Bar tomorrow (Thursday 2nd August 2018). Tickets to both shows are available from Under The Radar but get in quick as these shows are selling fast!

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