Intervista In Flames

01 Agosto 2003

English: Suddenly, in W:O:A's backstage area.....a vision! Jesper S. guitar player from In Flames!!!!
Excited we asked him to take a picture, and from there theres a short way to the interview. Very kind with us he answered every question we made.........and he spoken with us for more time than the 10 minutes we asked, until our discussion was completely finished.
Here to you all what one of the most svedish active metal guitar players EXCLUSIVELY (untill three years he doesn't release any interview) told to us:

Italiano:Improvvisamente nell'area riservata agli artisti ed alla stampa del W:O:A una visione.....Jesper S., chitarrista degli In flames!!!!
Da li subito un po' ecitati e frastornati gli chiediamo di fare una foto,e poi il passo per l'intervista è stato davvero breve. Gentilissimo e dispponibile ha risposto ad ogni nostra domanda....anzi, rispetto ai 10' che avevamo contrattato si è fermato con noi sino a che i discorsi non si erano esauriti.
Ecco cosa ci racconta - per ora solo in lingua originale - IN ESCLUSIVA (da tre anni non rilasciava interviste) uno dei più attivi personaggi del Metal svedese:

Jesper: Take it as an exclusive, I haven't done an interview in three years!

Albi: What?!?

Jesper: I don't do interviews.    

Albi: Ohhh! Thank you very much! (Laughs)

Jesper: Just for Italy!    

Albi: I can say I really enjoyed your concert in Milan. Believe me, during the first three songs I was crying for the emotion, you have that hard rock spirit when you play and that's really enjoyable.

Jesper: Well, it's easy when you play in Italy because it's so great to play there. The audience are crazy!    

Albi: When you played "Trigger" the whole Alcatraz was singing with you and it has been a great emotion.
What about DIMENSION ZERO?

Jesper: We recorded a new album in February and it's gonna be out in September.    

Albi: Again with Regain Records?

Jesper: Yeah. So, it's finished and the title is "THIS IS HELL" but we are not gonna do any touring because I don¹t have any time. We might do an headlining tour in Japan in November but that's it.    

Albi: But I think you didn't play a lot with Dimension Zero.

Jesper: No, we just did a short Japan tour, we played in South Corea and we actually have a festival next week-end in Germany, Marduk it's headlining,
it's like a black/death festival, it's gonna be cool. It's wonderful to play
live with them.    

Albi: We would really like to see Dimension Zero live.

Jesper: We tried to do a tour but there's always something coming up with IN FLAMES. Too busy.

Albi: Ok, however it¹s great you have a lot of work to do with a great band as In Flames are. What about them? You said before we started the interview that you have 13 songs ready, and what about the title of the album?

Jesper: The title is not confirmed yet, we just have like a working title.    

Albi: Did you record it at Studio Fredman?

Jesper: No, we haven't recorded it yet. We will do like this, we will start doing the drums on monday in the Dagh House Studio in Upsala and then we rented a big house like a castel, not a castel but a huge house in Denmark, so we will take everything there and record the guitars, the vocals and everything else in that big house.    

Albi: Are you going to work again with Fredrick Nordstrom? (Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me n.d.r.)

Jesper: No, it's a guy called Daniel (Bergstrand n.d.r.) he's the guy who produced the last record.

Albi: Do you want to change the producer (Same mistake, come on Albi! Ok, he's Jesper from In Flames but you can take it easy anyway n.d.r.) as a way to change your sound or to experiment new things?

Jesper: No, not this time because this time we will use the same producer as the previous album. We want it because we recorded five or six albums in Fredman and we wanted to do something different. We didn't want the next album to sound exactly "Clayman".

Albi: Are you going to keep on in that really melodic way you had with REROUTE TO REMAIN or is it going to be a bit more rough?

Jesper: In some ways no, in some ways yes, we have some blast beat riffs and also soft parts. It's not a big difference, we just continue to write good songs.

Albi: A normal evolution.

Jesper: Yeah, exactely. It's gonna be super melodic and very very heavy. It as things that like fans of the older records will enjoy and still it reminds of the latest album. Just an evolution.

Webmurder: What about your show this evening? How did you prepare it?

Jesper: Ahh! Just hangin'around, drinking beer. It's gonna be a great show tonight. We have spent like a lot of money in pyros, the stage show is gonna be really cool. We are gonna have some really cool surprises. It's so great because we get such a good spot. We play like at 10:30 tonight, the sun is down, everyone will be there so we are really looking forward to this show.

Webmurder: Night shows are really exciting.

Jesper: Yeah, it's cool that it's dark. We can use all the lights, all the pyros so. We are really looking forward to it!    

Albi: Even if you are already a great and preatty well known band I think that playing at W:O:A it's a wonderful feeling.

Jesper: Yeah, for us is cool. This is the fourth time we play here, we played in '97 in the small stage during the day and now we play like the best time like headliners.    

Webmurder: (Not comprensible...."too much alcohol was runing thtough my veins, but Jesper undestands however wat I sayed .....so......this is his answere:")

Jesper: Yeah, we will play but now we get the best spot on the festival like 10:30 in the night so that's really cool. It's so bad we couldn't longer, we will play for one hour.

Albi: Maybe longer would be better for us too.

Jesper: I wold love it to be like 90 minutes.    

Albi: Which advice would you like to give to a young band that wants to emerge from the underground scene?

Jesper: We have been really lucky also. We got a deal from our demo like ten years ago and then luckely, NUCLEAR BLAST heard it and they wanted to sign us. So we didn't struggle that hard, like, we didn't tour like we do now so I don't really know I mean. We where lucky, just lucky that they picked us up. So, if the music is good enough just continue to send it to labels.    

Albi: So it's not true that Nuclear Blast dosen't sign bands that haven't had a debut album yet?

Jesper: No, no. If they like you, they sign you. And maybe try to support the bands that come near your town and get into the rooster of as many shows and festivals as possible.    

Albi: You know, in Italy it's a bit more difficoult, we don't ave such a great Metal scene and it's not easy to find a promoter for your live shows.

Jesper: One of my favourite bands from Italy actually is SADIST. I love that band. They are sick!    

Albi: And what about your favourite band at W:O:A 2003?

Jesper: SLAYER! And I'm also gonna see SENTENCED in ten minutes. They are good friends and a really good band.    

Albi: They toured with LACUNA COIL last year.

Jesper: Yeah, we toured with them also a couple of years ago.    

Albi: Do you like them?

Jesper: Oh, I love! Lacuna Coil is great! Lovely singer (Laughs) Cristina Scabbia!    

Webmurder: This is what we would like to ask you: Cristina or theyr music?

Jesper: No, no, no! I love the music, they're great guys and she is so lovely, she is great to see on stage.    

Albi: You where the first HAMMERFALL drummer, am I right?

Jesper: Yes, that's right.    

Albi: What about that experience?

Jesper: It was funny. We just started out with a local talent show in Goteborg and we just wanted to play a show once a year because at that time Metal was totally dead in Sweden and no one could immagine what happened. We recorded the debut "GLORY TO THE BRAVE" album that was supposed to be on a small, small label but Nuclear Blast picked it up and they got it huge. I was never intended to be like. I was just a session man. Like to play the drums with them, help them writing songs so I did that until the last record.    

Albi: So not a definitive thing.

Jesper: No, no, because at that time we started to get busy with In Flames, touring a lot. It was funny!    

Albi: When is the new In Flames album supposed to be out?

Jesper: It's definetively gonna be out before next summer, maybe April.    

Albi: You got a lot of succes from "Reroute To Remain" and maybe you want to work on that before issueing with an another album.

Jesper: Yeah but now we are not touring with that album, we just want to go in the studio because we are really inspired, we have a lot of songs, we just wanna put out one another album, do an album tour again, come to Italy!    

Albi: I know the next one will be a strange and maybe funny question but how hold are you?

Jesper: I'm 30.    

Albi: Fuck! And you have been playing with In Flames for ten years! You were really young if compared with the average of musicians in Italy. Recently I got "CLANDESTINE" from ENTOMBED and I was astonished when I red that at that time the older member was 20! Do you grow up with metal in Sweden?

Jesper: Yeah, we had a good scene since Entombed and DISMEMBER started out so when we started the band those bands where huge. GRAVE, UNLEASHED, Dismember, Entombed. That was cool. And then we started to get a scene in Goteborg with bands like DARK TRANQUILLITY, AT THE GATES and now THE HAUNTED, Hammerfall. It's cool!    

Albi: But do they teach you music at school? Something like guitar courses.

Jesper: No. When we where kids if you wanted you could have learned an instrument for free so all the kids they were playing guitar, flute, piano. I played the violin since I was five. I think that's why there are a lot of good musicians in Sweden. We started to get into it when we were really small, so.    

Webmurder: Maybe you have got schools were you can learn everything and play what you want.

Jesper: Yeah, more or less, not anymore but when I was growing up I started playing violin when I was five years old and we had schools for free.    

Webmurder: Did you start with classic music?

Jesper: I played Swedish folk music, three or four hundred years old songs. Very cool.    

Albi: Does also the government give support to the bands? Do you get paid or something like that?

Jesper: Yes, like scholarships! You apply for scholarships and you can get money to buy equipment and the stuff you need. When we started out In Flames all our equipment was handed by the government, for free.

Albi: But did every member apply for his own equipment?

Jesper: No, it was like "We have a band, we need the equipment!". So we got a certain amount of money so we could get guitars, amps and drum kits.    

Albi: Not in Italy, you have to work in a firm if you want to buy all the stuff you need. (Laughs)

Jesper: What they do is cool because they are really supporting the culture and the music and that's very good.

Albi: Of course! since you have a great music market and the government supports it I think this is a way to make your country richer, also!

Jesper: Yeah, I mean: if I haven't done that I would be like in jail right now! I would be out killing people or whatever. When I was young I had somewhere to go, we could go and rehearse, play music, instead of going out and do bad things, that's good.    

Webmurder: In the end music is culture and it's the right thing to do for a government to support it.

Jesper: It's not like that anymore, it was better when we where younger.    

Tommy: Did you use triggers to record the drums on the Dimension Zero album?

Jesper: Yes!    

Tommy: It sounds very good!

Jesper: We mix it: it's both trigger and acoustic, then we mix it.

Tommy: Do you remember wich kind of equipment you used to record the guitar in the album?

Jesper: I think we played trhough a Peavy 5150 and we had ESP guitars, EMG active pick-ups and really heavy strings like 65 to 13 to get a really thick and heavy sound.    

Albi: Have you downtuned the guitars in the new album?

Jesper: Yeah! (Lauhs) And another thing when you record, you shouldn't have as much gain as you think, you know. You should have less gain and play in the best way you can. It's maybe hard to play but when you take down the gain and you dub the guitars it's gonna sound much better. That's what we do, we don't use that much gain when we record.    

Albi: What's your favorite record at the moment? What are you listening to?

Jesper: Actually the latest Lacuna Coil and I like EVANESCENCE also! But we don't listen to that much music at the moment because we have been on tour and..........    

Albi: Do you like PASSENGER? The new Anders project.

Jesper: I haven't heard it actually. I had one song from it and it's cool! It's cool that he also has a way.    

Albi: To express himself!

Jesper: Yeah, exactly! His lyrics, personal things and to try out his voice.

Jesper: Ok guys! Now for me it' time to go! I must play in a couple of hoursso.....
See you soon!!!

The Murder Inn Staff: Bye bye!! Thanks a lot again!