CHRIGEL GLANZMANN of ELUVEITIE: Musical Coincidences
An interview by Sarah Kidd.
From the land of Switzerland – Zurich to be precise – Eluveitie will ride the winds forth across vast oceans, bringing with them a two-hour musical set featuring tales of both Celtic mythology and history. For New Zealand fans of the nine-piece outfit, this will be a once in a lifetime opportunity to witness Eluveitie weave their magic through elements of both folk and melodic death metal live.
Formed in 2002 by Chrigel Glanzmann, Eluvietie has just recently released their eighth studio album entitled Ategnatos which explores the idea of rebirth in all its shapes and forms. Featuring some of their biggest production yet and guest vocals from the likes of Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe, this is one of Eluvietie’s greatest recordings yet.
I recently sat down with Eluvietie’s founder Chrigel Glanzmann to discuss the making of the album, his personal ideologies around rebirth and just how Randy Blythe came to sing on their latest album Ategnatos;
This is going to be both yours and the rest of the band’s first time in New Zealand I believe? Or have any of you visited New Zealand before on holiday?
“I haven’t, and I think none of us ever have ever except for our sound engineer. But none of the band have ever been to New Zealand, so we are extremely excited to finally go there and play a show for you guys!”
The new album Ategnatos was released just last month, were you looking forward to its reception?
“Sure, I was curious.”
I suppose there is always an element of trepidation when releasing a new album; how existing fans will perceive it and whether the album will draw any new followers…
“Yeah, we’ll see about that; of course, it’s interesting to see and it’s something we’re very curious about… But to be honest you know there is never any kind of pressure, expectations or something like that and I think there shouldn’t be cause if you’re creating art – and it doesn’t even matter if it’s music, or if you’re writing novels, or painting pictures – I think you should always do it for yourself in the first place and that’s what we do.
If other people enjoy what you’ve created, it’s good and if not then it’s also good because you did this for yourself; in that sense there is never expectations.”
Your music is steeped in Celtic mythology, history etc. in many ways it is reverent to your beliefs. When you created the band in 2002, was this always the direction that you wanted to choose?
“Yeah absolutely. That was always the clear plan and the vision for this band. And it’s hardly ever changed actually over the last fifteen or seventeen years.”
Did that come about from your own personal upbringing, or is it something that developed as you did?
“I honestly don’t even know where this passion for the Celtic culture comes from but it’s just always kinda been a part of my life. But I mean it’s not that far-fetched; I grew up in Switzerland which is ensconced with Celtic roots, so if you’re in school, in the first history lessons you learn about all these stories, about the ancient allegiants and stuff like that so it’s not that far-fetched.
It’s always just been a part of my life and it’s always been something really important to me and thus once I started creating music – which I also did at a rather early stage of my life – it was also something that I wanted to write music about.”
Well I think it’s quite beautiful, as it means that not only are you creating music, but you are placing a little piece of both yourself and your ancestry into it as well.
“Well if I do, then I’m happy!”
The album’s title refers to ‘Rebirth’ – what are your personal ideologies on the subject?
“Yeah it’s true, Ategnatos is the Celtic word for ‘Reborn’ and this is kinda the core of the whole album. I need to say that the album is basically the result of what we did when writing the lyrics.
The album is dealing with Celtic mythology, but I mean we did this before on the Origins [2014] album for instance, but back then we were re-creating and re-telling ancient myths and mythological tales and so on, on a very historical and scientific level. And this time we took it to a much more personal place which obviously doesn’t mean that it’s not historical, I mean everything is of course scientifically founded and historically correct and so on, that’s just the way we work.
But what the album does is to contemplate ancient images, parables, allegories and the architects of Celtic mythology from our mother and our everyday lives; what we did you know is not just to deal with these everyday topics to get lyrics, we actually contemplated these ancient writings for ourselves, for our lives and this turned out to be a very intense experience actually. It was almost just like a spiritual one.
The result of that journey is the album and there’s like this core theme in all these images that is in one way or another connected to the thought of rebirth and getting reborn. But, it’s not always in the, let’s say, Hindu’s way, thinking of an afterlife or something like that, but more in an allegorical way, telling about the experiences that you go through during your life. The striking thing is that basic core thought in that there always must be death and there always must be dying before there can be rebirth – which is kinda obvious – the striking thing is that you know you are offered the chance to choose quite often.
Life brings you to a certain place where you actually would die in a certain way and that’s often a choice; it also comes down to a question of bravery and also of fear, it’s the question of ‘Do you dare to jump off the cliff?’ like metaphorically speaking. ‘Do you dare to go that direction and all the way through and actually die? If you do, a certain part of yourself or your personality or established life or whatever will certainly fall apart and die off and if you do dare to go there, all the way through, you get the chance to actually be born.
For some reason a lot of us quite often don’t dare, we rather prefer to stay where we are, out of fear of losing and letting go. And these are the core thoughts in the whole thing.”
When you look at the planet, countries, politics, social media, technology, everything that the world is currently facing do you think the earth as we know it is due to be reborn? And if so, how do you believe it will come about?
“I’m not sure you can speak generally. If I look at blackbirds on the rooftop of my neighbour’s house, they seem to do pretty fine to me, so I don’t see that much need to get reborn for them.
But then again if I look at our human societies then I see a lot of need [chuckles] for renewal.
So, I don’t think you can be generally speaking but there is certainly a lot of aspects especially amongst us humans, all the things we do, where some kind of renewal would definitely be overdue in my opinion.
If this will come about, and how I have no idea, I would not know, I don’t know the future; and if you do know the future then I will have some questions for you…
[laughs]
…all I can do is to basically look at myself and that’s pretty much what everybody just can do, your radius of actions mostly ends not that far away from you. But you can look at yourself and see what’s wrong there and try to go through it and actually get that rebirth wherever it is needed and that might affect everything else.”
I certainly don’t know the future, but I do believe that if the end of the world does come about, it will be Mother Earth herself who brings down the final hand.
“This actually is one of the songs off the album, exactly that thought. But yeah, this is something I personally believe as well but we shall see if it happens and when it happens!”
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Back to the album, it features a string quartet which is a premiere for Eluveitie; with already numerous instrumentation due to the size of the band, what prompted this additional inclusion?
“We always had orchestrations on our albums and we always used to work with hybrid strings which means some strings are recorded live with real instruments and some are programmed with libraries.
Why we ended up with a string quartet doing all the orchestration parts this time is one of the many spontaneous developments this album production brought to us. Actually, in the end it was all Fabiennes’ [Erni] fault…
[laughs]
Due to the fact that the studio that we usually record in was booked out pretty well already when we started working on the album, we really had not much time to actually record the album. I mean we would have had the chance to just go to a different studio and work with an engineer we don’t know, but we didn’t want to!
So, the only chance we had was to do it in the time that the studio did have free and that was only four weeks, which is very, very little for us.
Including the mix for the last album we spent three and a half months in the studio, so four weeks for recording is definitely not much for us and all the instruments. So yeah we had been working really hard and it was pretty stressful and I remember Fabienne was recording vocals and I was hanging in the kitchen of the studio and I was just working on the orchestra part, you know like writing the lines for all the instruments of the orchestra and then she came to the kitchen to have lunch or something and I just started complaining to her and I was like ‘Oh my gosh Fabienne, I have no idea, how will I manage this in so little time? Like I don’t know. What the fuck’…blah, blah, blah’
And then she was like ‘Yeah, maybe I know someone. A friend of mine, she works at the Zurich University of Arts and she actually teaches film music and composing. Maybe I can ask her for some help’
That was a pretty cool development because two days later that girl named Miriam, she came to the studio and she was happy to join in. What we all didn’t know was that she was a fan of our music and I was a fan of her music. I just didn’t know that it was her. So that was a pretty cool coincidence.
So I started working together with Miriam who helped me quite a lot with creating all the orchestrations and you know at some point she just called me and she said ‘You know what, tomorrow my students have a day off and quite a few of them don’t have that much to do tomorrow so why don’t we give them so homework?’
[chuckles] So she actually made the orchestra parts of our upcoming album kind of like a lesson or a homework thing for her students which was cool – and also pretty funny. But it was cool for her students, good for us. So yeah that’s how that happened. It was again one of those very spontaneous and lucky coincidences and developments that occurred during that album production.”
That’s fantastic, what a brilliant story of collaboration between musicians! Speaking of collaborations, you also have Randy Blythe of Lamb of God featuring on the track ‘Worship’. Now I have to know how that came about!
“That’s like exactly the same! One of those spontaneous developments during that album production. You know one day it was late night or early in the morning already, after recording we were just sitting – again in that bloody kitchen of the studio – Jonas [Wolf] and myself and we were discussing the intro of the song ‘Worship’.
It has this rather long, modern cinematic kind of end-timey, apocalyptic intro to it. We do have this voiceover artist, a narration artist who we are working with, a Scottish actor actually named Alexander Morton and we have been working together with him for at least the last three albums, and he was also recording with us for Ategnatos. He is amazing, I love his voice and he is a great artist and also a great person.
But we [Jonas] discussed about this intro and we both agreed that we thought his voice and this Scottish highlander accent and all that, doesn’t fit that kinda dark, apocalyptic intro of the song ‘Worship’. We came to the conclusion that actually an American accent would fit best to that intro due to that cinematic kind of character and we just started thinking of who we could ask and at some point Jonas suggested Randy and we both thought that he would actually have the perfect voice.
I mean we have been good friends with Lamb of God for so many years, so I just wrote a message on the phone asking if he would have time to do that. But I didn’t know where they were at or what they were doing…I had no idea. But then the cool thing, he replied and said ‘Sure’ and ‘Actually that’s quite convenient because we are currently touring Europe and we will be playing in Zurich!’. So that was a very handy coincidence.
So a few days later our bass player [Kay Brem] just drove to the venue that they were to play at and quickly picked him up, drove him to the studio and he recorded this intro – actually he really liked the song and he spontaneously improvised some vocals in the chorus – and so on and then we drove him back and he played the show in Zurich!
So, as I said before there have been a lot of these spontaneous things happening during production of this album, which I think was pretty cool!”
Randy is a fairly frequent visitor to our country, he loves New Zealand!
“Cool…”
Now of course the album was created at the Zurich University of Arts which sounds absolutely fascinating…
[chuckles]
As you were just saying it sounds like everything just fell into place, the whole recording of the album, the creation etc. it was all very organic?
“It kinda was, it was also extremely stressful due to the fact that there really was not that much time to do it, and the last two weeks in the studio we even started working twenty-four hours a day. We brought in some extra engineers, so our main engineer recorded during the day with one member and then during the night another engineer would record with some other band member and so on.
So, it was all pretty special, but yeah all in all it was a very organic and creative process where actually a lot of things did fall in place as you said. But this Zurich University of Arts thing – I have to say the way we developed as a band last few years, the atmosphere in the band was very familiar, and we started working together as a band, as people and as musicians much more than we ever did over the last few years. When we started to write Ategnatos and to work on the particular songs we just really felt that we really wanted to be together, not just everybody works at home and we send ideas around and stuff like that.
We also wanted to actually be together geographically. So, we had just been looking around for opportunities to do so and then Jonas came up with that idea [recording at The Zurich University of Arts] because when he is not touring with us he has a part time job at the university where he teaches music and guitars and stuff. So he has access to all the rooms and at that time they had a couple of free rooms so yeah, that’s how we ended up there actually. We just locked ourselves in for two or three months and just worked on the album. But yeah it was a good environment to create music actually.”
I can imagine! As soon as you say anything like the University of Arts – the inspiration within that environment would be just so wonderful for creating music!
“It actually was, yeah!”
Eluveitie has nine members! That, on the scale of average band numbers, is quite large. Do you find that sometimes it can be a hindrance?
“Actually, I don’t, no. We enjoy being nine members very much. The only thing it makes it much more expensive. You know if you fly nine people over to Australia instead of just four that makes a pretty big difference if you are coming from Europe.
You know like if we’re touring we need bigger tour buses, we need extra trucks for the equipment and everything because the band itself fills a whole bus [chuckles] and salaries; it makes a difference if you need to feed nine people rather than just four!
So, all that, yeah it just makes it more expensive. But other than that, no, it never really was a hindrance or made things more complicated or something. I think it is all a matter of the mindset and the commitment anyway. No matter if you’re three or nine people.”
This is always a hard question for most artists but if you could only pick one track from the new album to represent Eluveitie, what would you pick and why?
“I think I would pick the title track and first single that we put out ‘Ategnatos’, probably for the same reason that we decided to make it the first single and the opening track to the album. Lyrically it just opens the gates to that whole universe of this mythological and allegorical thoughts around rebirth and musically as well it brings you to that elevated place on a musical level, so I think I will choose that one.”
Finally Chrigel, what can your New Zealand fans expect from this upcoming show? How would you describe the live experience for anyone who has not seen you before?
“To be fair unfortunately I have never been to an Eluveitie show as a guest, so I have never seen us on stage…
[mutual laughter]
…so I can hardly say anything about it. But according to what I read in magazines and people who write about our shows, apparently our shows are always pretty energetic and for sure there’s always a lot to look at because there are nine bloody members on stage!
[laughs]
But yeah most of all New Zealand can expect from us a rather extended set because you know it’s like our first time and we are incredibly much looking forward to playing in this wonderful country.
There’s a lot to catch up, we have had so many albums in the past and we have been around since seventeen years and we have never played there so yep there are quite a lot of songs that we want to show you and so we will also play like a two hour set and that’s what you can expect from it.
So, come to our show and let’s have a huge fucking party together!”
Eluvietie will perform two special shows in New Zealand this weekend (Auckland, 11th May 2019 & Wellington, 12th May 2019) – Tickets (including VIP & exclusive acoustic performances) are still available from: www.drwe.com.au/tours/eluveitie2019 but get in quick as they’re selling FAST!
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