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I) Hail dude ! How are you guy doing right now ? Things are looking pretty good. We are in process of booking an European tour to Jan 2006 (which should also come to France, if things go as planned) and we are also writing some new material to one EP and 1-2 Split-EPs to be recorded in February 2006. Finnish summer fests were also great aswell as the May US-tour with our 2nd visit to Maryland Deathfest. Murderworks is going to be re-released by Relapse records in upcoming October, which means that this album becomes available again... It's been sold out from Necropolis and Century Media for some time already after we bought the rights bact ourselves, when Necropolis stopped existing. II) Man, ROTTEN SOUND is, for me, the best Death / Grind band in the world, far beyond the average mediocrity of the gore scene and so on. And Exit is one of the most brutal & barbaric assaults I've ever heard. What was the impact of this album in the press and on your fan-base ? Thanks for your praising words... We are very happy with the reception and the sales numbers are already above Murderworks, which wasn't doing that bad either. Let's see than how Spinefarm is able to compete with Relapse distribution - somehow we feel that MW deserved to be released once again and it will be also more available to underground distros trhough Relapse than it ever was through Century Media. Back to "Exit"... The biggest impact it made was to ourselves: we had learned to play together after Murdeworks (due to excessive touring), but in "Exit" we were able to push that one step further again with lots of rehearsals and hard work & make our tightest recording to date. There are still couple of things we can improve, but the overall expression of Exit wouldn't be as aggressive without our excessive rehearsal period before the studio, which really took this band one step further again. III) Can you tell me what is the fundamental difference between Murderworks and Exit ? Exit is tighter than MW is even when we don't really hate MW. And the overall feeling of Exit is a bit darker, but Murderworks is then just a premeditated assault towards the listener. Exit does not have any mercy (or maybe few heavy parts), but MW was just plain straight-forward grind. IV) Man, I saw you on stage at the Fellini when I was living in Uppsala in 2004, it was during the insane Grind Declaration of War Tour with SOTAJUMALA and DEFLESHED ! And it was fucking amazing !!! Simply the best Death / Grind gig I've ever attended ! What do you recall about this date ? Uppsala was the last show on that tour and all I can say is that it was one of the best too. We made 3-4 times bigger shows in Finland on the same tour, but the overall feeling and audience response in Uppsala was just simply amazing. We are always getting better in playing together during a tour and Uppsala wasn't an exception: I recall that we used 5-10 minutes less time to play the same amount of songs (of our originally 35minute set) than on the 1st show in Lahti, Finland and the funniest thing is that we don't even notice the difference on stage, but then after the show, we just can check how much faster it went than the day before... V) Excellent transition with
this Grind Declaration of War as your latest DVD deals with this tour
! You chose to include some live performances from this tour, but only
dealing with Finnish dates. Why didn't you include some parts from Uppsala
(eh eh), or from Stockholm ? The "real" material on the DVD was shows from Tuska Metalfest and from one show in our home town, Vaasa. Those bonus-tracks (Kai's drum-solos) were the only thing we used from GDOW and he only made them in Finland, where we were headlining the shows (Defleshed headlined in Sweden). So, no other reason to exclude the Swedish shows. VI) Man, I guess I won't be back to Uppsala very soon, so can you please tell me that you will be destroying France in a near future ? Can I fucking hope to see you again, grinding our country this time ? Please don't tell me "no" !! As said, we are booking now an European tour (name is not known yet, but it can be Grind Declaration of War vol. 2) with Sayyadina (SWE) and there are 2-3 dates planned for France. Those dates are 22nd of Jan, 23rd of Jan and if we get a good offer, we can do also 24th of Jan in Franc. There may be one more band playing through France and Benelux, but we can't say yet who it is. Everyone able to book bands should write to rottensound@hotmail.com. VII) Every ROTTEN SOUND maniac knows that your drummer is simply the best fucking blaster in the world !!! More seriously, the solo parts on the DVD are simply amazing (the one from the Turku date is killer). What kind of formation does he have ? How long has he been playing the drums? Kai has been playing for about 25 years (he's 31 now, he started when he was 6...) and he has blown me away from the 1st day I saw him playing with Cartilage (R.I.P.). He learned by himself until some point, but then he started to take some music theory and drumming lessons. He has also taken some lessons from one old Jazz-drummer (Fred Gruber, or something like that) and is also playing a lot of Jazz on his spare time. VIII) There is a kind of particularity with your songs titles : they almost all deal with one single word. Is it a voluntary attitude ? Do you think one explicit word is stronger than one implicit sentence ? How important are lyrics in ROTTEN SOUND ? I picked-up that style for Murderworks and continued it mostly on exit. My way to invent titles has always gone so, that I'm 1st writing the lyrics and then I'm looking for the best expression to match the message (usually from the lyrics). Simplicity is beautiful and it's also very easy for all of us to memorize the new songs, when we do them, when you have to remember just one or at most two words. And you're right: one word is much stronger than some 50 letter sentence about rotting corpses in medical terms. Gore-grind is also very interesting and there are a lot of good bands out there doing it, but I never was too comfortable with those topics. Lyrics are really important to me (probably not as important, but still important to the others), because I need to have a real topic to perform in studio and on stage. IX) "Someone could say that RS has become "commercial" now when we are successful" - here is a sentence I got from one of your interviews. I need your comments about it. Have you really become commercial ? Do you earn your living from your musical activities ? "Commercial" = driven by money. The next sentence in that interview you have picked must have said something like this: Rotten Sound was never built as a profitable organisation or to provide living / profession to all members in the band. All musical decisions we have made over the years have been made to express ourselves and to create something we want to create musically. Then, when we want to use "major" metal-labels to finance our studio and to provide proper distribution, we just are looking for as wide audience as possible to be able to play live in wider area around the world. It really helps a lot to sell some CDs (and as a side effect, we may earn some money from our hard work we've done) before we come to some country to play. So, as said, we may get some income during our tours and CDs and merch, but on the another hand, that's the only possiblity to be able to take 2-3 months of holiday from work to do Rotten Sound as much as we do it currently. And this is the way we want to keep it because it keeps RS as voluntary activity instead of work that may suck at times (all work sucks at times). This way we are also keeping ourselves open-minded and no label is able to tell us what kind of music we should record. X) Let's go back to the beginning of the 90's with your former band, VOMITURITION ! I never understood why this killer & so excellent album never worked. According to you, what was missing to attract more peopleto this cult album called Leftover ? We never were promoting the band properly and we also weren't that focused to develop the band as we are with Rotten Sound. It's funny how so many people talk about Vomiturition nowadays after almost 10 years of killing the band. XI) Do you still have some unreleased material from VOMITURITION ? And if so, do you intend to release it ? Nope. We made some demos after left-over, which had some Gothenburg-DM influences (recorded back in 1995 and 1996), but they never got really released. XII) Finland is a real "talents breeder", isn't it ?? I'm always surprised to see so many excellent bands stemming from mighty Suomi Finland, in every Metal style ! Are there bands that you particularly recommend me ? You should check out at least Total Devastation, Deathbound, Deathchain, Amoral, To Separate the Flesh from the Bones, Reverend Bizarre and Sear. Oh, I almost forgot our friends, cause for effect. XIII) According to you, what is the reason why Metal has become so popular in Finland ? And secondly, what do you think about the Swedish and Norwegian scenes ? Finnish people are just living in darkness for the 1/2 of the year and Metal music matches that pretty well. Norwegian scene was never that interesting to me, but our opinion is that many of our favourite bands come from Sweden. It's amazing how good quality even the starting bands in Sweden have. XIV) "Music is not destroying us, but the drinking we do after the show in sometimes way more lethal" : here is another statement of yours, that I read in an interview. Can you comment it ? Don't you fear you might be very sick for you are now existing since 1993... How do you bear 12 years of alcoholocaust, sex & rock n' roll ? We are able to remain in rather good shape when we don't drink that much at home (anymore) than we used to before we started to tour. So, when that's at least 3/4 of time, we are able to survive many many years still. I also think that the drinking holocaust isn't that destructive as it was few years ago because we are always thinking the day after every show & we have to be able to play well (or even better) the next day too. XV) How affected were you when you got the sad piece of news about NASUM's frontman ? It must be hard to accept, all the more that you were used to working with Miezsko... I guess we have accepted that as a fact we can't meet Mieszko, play with Nasum or record in Soundlab anymore. He was hell of a grind-core producer and we are having damn hard time in selecting our next recording studio. Actually the EPs we're doing are done in one alternative we have and we really hope that it works well for us. XVI) Do you listen to some other kinds of music ? We all listen to different styles of exteme music and all of us have also some other, own favourite style. Mika and Toni are into Hardcore, Kai listens to very technical stuff and also lots of Jazz and I'mlistening to loads of Death-Metal oriented music. XVII) If you had to tell me your
5 Grindcore favorite references, what Napalm Death XVIII) Man, I won't bother you
any longer, it's time to conclude now !! Thanks for the interview! We hope to see many of you on our upcoming tour! Contact : |