Interview – Solefald

One thing that was rather a big surprise was to find out that Solefald were not only going to play their first dates since 1998 but also they were going to kick off the ‘Fire Walks With Me’ Tour alongside Vreid and In Vain in London. This was one band that I had on my tick list to see but never expected to, so when the chance came to chat with Cornelius Jakhelln about his career and the music of the beguiling Solefald, naturally I jumped at it. Here is what he had to say.

AN: Firstly and no doubt the question everyone is asking you is why now? You have only done the one previous tour in 1998 so why has it taken so long to follow it up and why did you consider that the time was right to do so.

Cornelius: It was more about circumstance rather than choice although we chose to react to the circumstance, which more precisely was Johnar of In Vain who said, go on tour before you get too old. He made it easier for us as he proposed In Vain as the backing band. That meant I would not have to organise rehearsals with six people. It was me that had disbanded live activities in 1999 when I moved to Paris to study and Laz joined Borknagar at the same time. Since then we haven’t had a live band and Lazare has decided he doesn’t want to play live. After a few years I thought, you know the time was right to get on stage again, so here we are. I think also that all our colleagues and studio musicians have made their live debuts and been back on the stage in the last couple of years. Ulver, Arcturus, etc you name it. So that’s it part of the second coming.

AN: This is the first date of the tour really, I know you have a lot of interviews keeping you busy but what are your expectations of things?

Cornelius: I don’t expect much really I try and focus on my work as professionally as I can. I have no expectations as to the outcome of one single tour. Scenes vary and there are many factors involved in this and I just hope that everybody within the apparatus also try their best and to be professional. Sadly we hear about a lot of bands coming over on tour and being treated in a really unsatisfactory manner but the most important thing of course is the music.

AN: Prior to this you did play Inferno Festival, how was that and what was the reaction like. I would imagine a gig of that size home in Norway after all this time would have gone down a storm?

Cornelius: Yes it was a great experience. We opened with Wagner Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde. We had a patron who did a live painting during the show on canvas 1.5 x 3 meters, painting an alpine landscape in shades of dark green and grey and black. It was in darkness at the back of the stage and at the end of the gig we carried it to the front of the stage. He did something more interesting during the concert and it worked well for us as we have always been a band trying to reach the summit somehow. I’m not talking about sales but extremity and intensity. There was even something about this in the manifesto accompanying the first album, in terms of intensity, cruelty and barbarity. That’s saying the same thing twice but there was a will to push the expression as far as we could and make it as intense as possible. Also using harmony and melody instead of this necro form of black metal, which was never our intention, so we always had a feel for the sublime and not just the brutal.

AN: Of course you visited just down the road at the Underworld to play with your other band Sturmgeist supporting Carpathian Forest in 2005. I found a review of it that I wrote and remember the Jagermeister being shared out. What are your memories that inspired you to verse “I am London King of Cum Drink my sperm you filthy bum?”

Cornelius: Yes I think it must have been after the show. I had the lyrics on that tour but I do believe I wrote that afterwards. For me there was always something Gothic, barbaric, frightening, dark and grimy about London. It’s a big machine, it’s inhuman it swallows you up and eats you and chews you up, it doesn’t give a fuck whether you live or die. That’s my impression of London but at the same time people are nice and you can have mulled wine and sit in pubs and drink beer. I have on several occasions since I was a teenager been to London and it had a strong impression on me. That particular poem can be seen like a Bosch painting and of course there is a trait of humour in it, an exaggeration as I love the English way that I know. It’s a very frank and a very funny way and it has a violent undercurrent. When I face London and come from abroad, when I am in a receptive state that’s how I see it. I never lived here but I lived in Brighton, it’s a much quieter place.

AN: I read that Lazare is unable to play all but a couple of these dates, which is he joining in on and how is this likely to affect things?

Cornelius: Well we have the rare chance of having his younger brother [Sindre] in the band. He looks like Lazare, he has a voice that is similar and he plays the keys. So this makes everything easier and he will step in and take Lazare’s part. If we had not had the brother and had to recruit another vocalist it would have been a lot more difficult. It may be a little odd for some people but not for me as I have known Sindre since he was 11. His mother interrupted our Solefald rehearsals as it was time for him to play the piano. He was 11 years old and was having lessons, so he has been with us since the start, so that makes me feel quite confident. Lazare will be performing in Vienna and Travagliato in Italy. For me playing live is inevitably something else in every respect to recording music, sometimes the leads need to be replaced, it happens in opera etc.

AN: Also you have In Vain pretty much playing their own set and then as musicians with you. There are around 14 dates on the tour so how do you think they are going to cope with the challenge of doubling up?

Cornelius: Well they have done a good job of doing it before unless someone falls over and breaks a leg I think they will do fine. They are all young fit men!

AN: Anyway enough of the live action, looking forward to tonight. Popping back in time to 1997 and The Linear Scaffold, although the likes of Fleurety, In The Woods and Ved Buens Ende had already warped my mind this album gave it another big spasm when I picked it up. There is a lot of talk about Norwegians throwing off the restrictive shackles of Black metal and going down the avant-garde route. What was it that set you on this path and would you ever have considered Solefald as part of the black metal scene?

Cornelius: Interesting question. We wanted that description ‘red music with black’ in it that really summed it up so we didn’t call ourselves black metal but we acknowledged our blackened heritage without being trapped within a cage so to speak. Or trapped in a cage looking at a small cage within the cage if you like! I think it is a fair way of saying we were a counter revolution within the revolution. We were inspired by philosophy, poetry, painting “classic bourgeois culture” really, in the spirit of 1968. It’s inevitable, it has to do with our education, our upbringing This has been a direct topic in the band for a long time very few people have addressed it. In Norway which is very egalitarian now I think it can be addressed more easily. Mainly the fact is that much of the Norwegian black metal scene stems from a working class background. Solefald do not stem from a working class background, which is evident. None of us come from rich families. It is more like the middle class, the bourgeoisie, very normal Scandinavian homes. I think that really defines the music that you find on our albums. We were 17-18 at the time and we had very much what we were given, if you listen to Darkthrone its something completely different. There is another spirit of do it yourself of being proud of who you are, fighting on and blind hate against authorities, which you never find within Solefald. These differences I find them interesting although I don’t think either one is worse or better. It’s just a difference in background, and that is where I think the experimentation comes from, we are part of a modernist project. I realised this more when I saw a museum in New York. At the Museum Of Modern Art there’s an exhibition called the invention of abstraction 1910-1925 when Kandinsky and Clay and all the rest of them left behind figuration and just started painting in an abstract fashion. The Futurists too, that pretty much sums it up.

AN: I wondered about your musical background prior to this as you can hear everything from Jazz to Classical in the diverse eclectic arrangements. Were you self-taught or schooled?

Cornelius: Yes privileged. Lazare had piano lessons and our parents, especially his were from musical backgrounds. Lazare’s father was a radio journalist and had his own show. That house was always full of African, Eastern European, sounds of all sorts of nation’s music and in my house it was more classical music and Jazz, so we grew up with all sorts. We had a festival in Kristiansand called The Quart Festival which was quite ahead of its time and Blur played just before they were big and Massive Attack, The Orb, Orbital, lots of UK talents so we were exposed to the UK music scene at a very young age.

AN: How did you and Lazare meet, was it early on at school and what led to you deciding to form Solefald?

Cornelius: We went to Paris with our school in the Easter of 1995 and the others just got pissed and stoned and we didn’t, we went to Pigalle and we ate snails together. We had marvellous conversations and he joined the band we had just formed Ginnungagap which was the original name before Solefald. He played the synth and after a while we discovered the other members were more interested in illegal substances than the music so we decided to go solo.

AN: Your vocals have never been one dimensional either, at times you come across as deranged at others barking mad. Lazare sometimes strikes me as the sanity and you the madness in the musical voice. How would you interpret that and again where did you develop such a schizophrenic style?

Cornelius: Another interesting question I don’t feel as a studied person I have many different sides. I like riding my boat in the Norwegian Sea in summer, wearing my suits, going to the opera and I enjoy playing heavy metal dressed in a uniform. I enjoy attending a lecture at the university and I can enjoy attending a sports event. There is no one side. I think talking about humanity that’s really the issue and the diversity of the individual, that’s my best answer.

AN: It was probably Neonism the second album that really stood out for me with its cultural stabs at fashion and a psychedelic and progressive vibe that on the reissue had me mentioning bands as diverse as Zappa, The Cardiacs and even Julian Cope taking it far beyond the realms of metal. What are your memories of this and what were the ideas narratively that had you putting this together. I read on Wiki that you even received a death threat for it?

Cornelius: That was on the first album The Linear Scaffold, it was on the press release for Neonism.  Neonism was conceived in Oslo, we had just moved everyone to Oslo and had that as a backdrop. Also I learned all the concepts and lyrics for Neonism whilst travelling in India. First I did a trip through Europe; Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey and then I flew back to London and stayed here for 10 days- two weeks and hung out with Nick Terry who was editor of Terrorizer back in the day. Then I went to India and spent three months there and wrote the lyrics on the beach like Backpacka Baba. Then I flew back also via London so in my mind it sounds very English to me, I connected somehow with the UK.

AN: I wish we had time to talk through all your work but skipping onto your two part Icelandic Odyssey, what was it that led you on this road trip to the country and what drew you to the history and folklore of the place? Was it a big task putting together all these ideas into a musical form, obviously they were too big for just one album?

Cornelius: We got off the plane, plugged in the equipment and the music poured! It was like a geyser, it was marvellous. We just kept on writing for ten days and everything flowed easily and without resistance. Also as it had been a long time since we had written music, the first time we went to Iceland the year before in the autumn of 2002 I saw this huge music in the landscape. I knew there was something to be taken away. We had so much material that we made two albums.

AN: I think it is fair to say that musically you are more than a little high-brow. Solefald do not make anything simple in either the music itself or the ideas behind it. What inspires you to bring characters like Philosopher Fuck and Pornographer Cain to life?

Cornelius: That was a very cinematic concept and I wrote it before I read Glamorama by Brett Easton Ellis but I can understand someone saying you must have been inspired by it. ‘Neonism’ and ‘The Pills Against The Ageless Ills’ are post-modern albums featuring a strong lyrical hip-hop influence, a strong cross-cultural influence and a strong post- modern influence that’s indisputable and makes those albums special to me. They are very expressive and after we went more in a lyrical direction that never really returned to this polemic style.

AN: You are also a writer which I think you would look on as your main vocation. I have not read any of your books and am not sure if they are even available in English, can you tell us a bit about them and what are you currently working on in this field?

Cornelius: It’s beyond my understanding why nobody ever wants to see my work, I’ve published ten books and they are a recasting of the old Norse and Germanic myths in a contemporary and even fantasy context. I have tried to make the old mythical and historical figures crash into our contemporary worldview to open up and put it in perspective. I won a huge prize with ‘The Fall Of The Gods’ and it was translated into Finnish and Swedish back in 2007. I am working on the continuation of The Fall Of The Gods, this will be part of a cycle of eight novels. They are in Norwegian but there is no reason why they should not be translated into English.

AN: I was really surprised to realise that Norron Livskunst came out way back in 2010, it seems like just yesterday. Listening to it again I was struck by the staying power of some of the sublime harmonies and the great song-craft behind it even if it is equally deranged in places. It took you quite some time to put together after the prior album. Did you have a firm idea on how you wanted it to sound or did things keep changing during its development?

Cornelius: We never have any definite plans but we have a very strong will and vision about where we are going. When it comes to the detail and sound, things fall into place. That said I am very happy with the album it is a synthesis between The Icelandic Saga and the experimentation of the first albums.

AN: I was totally blown away by the completely unhinged vocal parts of Agnete Kjolsrud. It was as though you had met your vocal counterpart in female form. She acts like she is throwing a massive tantrum and smashing everything to pieces with her voice. Was this what was intended,  were you even taken aback by her performance and can we expect her to return with Solefald in the future?

Cornelius: I don’t really know, being compared to her is a big compliment because I think she’s a huge vocal talent, far exceeding mine anyway. She may come back to us?

AN: Speaking of which it has been a while, are their firm ideas in place for your next album or are you even fully involved in its development. What can we expect both musically and narratively and are there any guests appearing that you can tell us about?

Cornelius: I’m not going to tell you anything about the album! I can give you the title, ‘Kosmopolis’ with a K. We will try to get it out in Spring 2014.

AN: What are your plans for after the tour and do you expect to get on the road in the future or is it a one off. I am sure there are places outside of Europe that would love to see you?

Cornelius: We hope to do an American tour for 2014. We are going to play some festivals and as for touring Europe, I hope to do it again if it’s a pleasant experience.

https://www.facebook.com/Solefald

Interviewed By Pete Woods

Photos © Pete Woods Barfly show 4/4/13. Banner Design Luci Herbert.