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Dunno who Jussi Lehtisalo might be, but I've
never liked statements about how "X is the
new Y". Experimental is the new mundane.
Silent is the new loud. Nerd is the new black.
Bread is the new cookie. Old is the new new.
Obesity is the new plague. And so on. Fucking
trendspotters. Obviously, if you're interested
in exploring new ground, you'll know
that as soon as someone identifies whatever
it is you're doing as the "new cool thing", it's
time to move on to something else. Otherwise
you'll risk being run over by all the
clowns who have just jumped on the band
wagon. Not a pretty sight, I can assure you.
So well, as I was talking
about earlier: At the moment
Fleurety works in an entirely
different way than it did ten
years ago. These days
Fleurety is more or less a
time portal that opens once
every year when Alex comes
back from England or India or
Canada or Rumania or wherever
he might be working at
the time. That means we
have to work quickly. We
don't have any time to hesitate,
no time for discussions.
We would typically have one
day to record a song, that's it.
So if there's anything we
planned to do, that we didn't
get time to do, and that
would usually mean that you'll have to wait
another year until the time portal opens once
more. So how do you solve this? We make
the kind of music we know best: Simple
primitive black metal. It's a question of survival.
If we had insisted on being "experimental",
"avant-garde" or "sophisticated",
we'd be dead.
But I don't think we'll ever enter a "onedimensional,
sordid black void world of
sounds". I just put on our first recording of
new material since 1998, a song called The
Animal Of The City, and yes, it is in fact recorded
on a Tascam Portastudio, the same
type of equipment that we used for recording
our first demo way back in 1993. But it is in
fact also an electro-acoustic experiment with
old school recording equipment, rather than
just two thirty year old guys trying to be
teenagers again. So in some sense I'm contradicting
myself here. Or to be precise: I'm
demonstrating why this new Fleurety material
is not one-dimensional. Because what might
be correct along one axis, is not correct along
some other axis. Thus our music is at least
two-dimensional.
Oh yeah, I can clearly hear that this stuff
has got a multiple personality symptom
35
going on. You guys are now less messing
with tricky progressive riffing and more
playing with layers and layers of white
noise through what sounds like a static
but massive wall of guitars. You mentioned
Stephen O’Malley earlier on, and I
would like to know your opinion about
what he and his label mates are doing
with (black) metal in general. Is that the
genre’s future gateway?
Hm. As a person who used to study digital
signal processing at the university, I always
end up feeling somewhat uncomfortable
when people use the term "white
noise" about signals that aren't
white noise. White noise is energy
distributed evenly all over
the frequency spectrum, and is
quite possibly the least interesting
kind of noise there is. It
sounds very much like the sound
you get when you turn on your
TV without it being tuned in to
any specific channel. The noise
you'll hear on that song comes
from computer processing, from
sending the song through a portastudio
several times and some
of it is differences in signal phase
that turns into noise when it's
layered a certain number of
times. So that was today's lecture.
You'll not gonna hear me talking about who is
"the future of the genre", I don't like that
kind of speculations. But I know for sure that
bands that work hard get somewhere.
SunnO))) have been working hard, therefore
they've come somewhere. Fleurety, by contrast,
never really used to work that hard.
That is, we took our music very seriously, but
none of us really had any serious ambition of
becoming "rock stars". So we hardly ever
used to play live, we never toured, but we
seized the opportunity to get our music out to
people on CDs. And I guess that's as far as
our ambitions went.
My experience with SunnO))) is through their
live performances, which I think are very
good. They played here in Oslo a couple of
years ago, and I got the feeling that their
tour was a black mass on wheels. Most black
metal bands would die to do a concert as
powerful as that, but they're stuck with the
rock concert format, not being able to think
outside of the box. I have some records with
them too, but I never really came to the
point where I would listen to them more than
once or twice. But I like the way these people
make the music more physical, in the sense
that it appeals not only to the ears, but to
your gut as well. But I guess I'm more inter-