The following questions have been answered by Sven.

P.W: Firstly congratulations on the new album, I believe you didn’t have the easiest times getting it released. From what I gather you were signed by Karmaggedon Media but it finally came out on Shiver Records who under their LSP moniker had released your debut. What happened here it must have been really frustrating?

Sven: We were getting used to having delays, so we took it as it came hehe. We were signed with KMM indeed, but with all the aforementioned delays, the contract passed its deadline. We were told not to worry by KMM and he proposed a new contract at another label, but those terms and ways of communication weren’t really satisfying to us. When one day we went to the LSP store for some shopping, Carl asked us why we didn’t join Shiver and after some thoughts and talks, we made the decision.

P.W: The obvious thing that struck me on listening to Ever-Arch-][-Tech-Ture as a complete work (a few tracks had been previewed on 2004 Incognation release) is what a vast leap you had made musically and stylistically. I enjoyed the first album immensely but the songwriting and playing capabilities of the band had been sharply perfected. How stable has the line up been since 2002 and what factors would you say had contributed to this evolvement?

Sven: We have had a few line-up changes since 2002 (rhythm guitarist and bass player have been replaced) and obviously that influences the sound and ‘level’ of your writing. Different people bring different influences of course. And with Yves leaving Axamenta (and taking his synth with him), most of the songwriting went to Ian, who replaced the synth by genuine orchestra samples. That was a major shift in our sound.

P.W: It is not just the skill of playing that has evolved but also your musical range. Axamenta essentially started playing a form of blackened doom but now mix a myriad of ideas. Symphonic black metal with hints of death, a dash of carnival fuelled fantasy film score and sweeping progressive melodies flow through your music. What made you decide to expand your sound and experiment by adding clean vocals and more progressive segments?

Sven: Well, with a few people coming and going, influences and perspectives come and go too. We listen to a lot of different kinds of music, and so you’re getting a clearer view on what makes “good music”. And we tried to incorporate that into Axamenta as much as possible.

P.W:Speaking of clean vocals Threnody For an Ending sees Daniel Gildenlow from Pain Of Salvation singing. How did this collaboration come about and was the resulting song what you envisaged?

Sven: We know Daniel from his work with PoS of course; 3/5 of the band is a big fan. Ian was writing a ballad-ish song for the cd, and while he was writing it, he got more and more convinced that only Daniel’s voice would réally fit the song. Again, we tried to reach top-stuff in every aspect of the album. And here we certainly managed to do so :) We made a little pre-production of the song, and mailed it to Daniel with some extra info about the band, the album etc. After some doubts (he had a busy tour schedule back then), he finally gave in and said he’d do it. He wrote all the vocal patterns and melodies, and even adapted our lyric a bit to fit the song better. He recorded it all by himself at his home studio, so unfortunately we didn’t see him at work. The result really surpassed everything we expected. He put loads and loads of work into it, no doubt about that.

P.W:Ever-Arch-][-Tech-Ture is no mere musical work. It is an album with a very interesting concept about it. Concept albums are somewhat tricky beasts, as many will concur they are easy to screw up and get wrong. You need a good idea and an original one behind them to be successful. You started writing the ideas behind this several years ago and expanded it into a 40 page document dealing with a simple concept of Evil through the ages. It sounds quite enthralling please give us a basic plot overview.

Sven: That's just a very small part of the story actually :-) The story is about a man, called William Blake (no link intended to the one that existed btw!), who is found one night screaming and running mad in the streets of London. He claims to have discovered the true architecture behind the universe (how he did that would take us too far), and is proclaiming doom-theories, which no one believes. He is then arrested and brought to a mental institution, where his sister Audrey visits him. He tells her his story, and after months of doubt, she starts her search for the truth. The things she collects and keeps in her room, made the artwork for the booklet.

The story has lots of stuff going on. Ian juggled with philosophical theories, an adventure story throughout time, an epic battle between good and evil, psychology, technology, mysteries and plot twists. But most importantly the story is interwoven with the duality between reality and fiction: everything is based on real facts, so just as Audrey the reader/listener can ask himself what he’ll consider possible, plausible or even real.

P.W: Does the rather odd album title Ever-Arch-][-Tech-Ture have some significance in the story, please explain this play on words?

Sven: It links to the architecture behind “The All” in the first place. The “ever” part implies that a certain chain of incarnations (the base of the architecture William Blake discovered), is everlasting, repeating perpetually. And the “I” is also taken out separately, so it would be the central character in the title and also in the tracklist, since Ever-Arch-I-Tech-Ture is also the central song of the album. Plus, in the course of the story, it is revealed that everything actually evolves around one and the same person. So you see, if we had written “everarchitechture” in 1 word, it would loose a lot of meaning, winks, easter eggs and layers. Yes, we love layers :-)

P.W: Some of the places in the story are real. For instance there is a somewhat sinister sanatorium at Woodford Bridge, not a million miles from me. I was rather tempted to go and jump on a train and try and track it down. A quick Google results in a Barnardo’s home for boys and sanatorium having existed in the area. How did you choose such locations for the story and research them to give it such a degree of authenticity.

As mentioned before, we wanted to have an authentic atmosphere in the story. Just to make it more convincing. We went very far into that, making sure everything we said was true, or at least COULD have been true. We didn’t want the story to contain impossible things, like, when William was taken in by the police, I wanted to write that he heard the sirens. But were there already sirens in 1879? I tried to look it up, but didn’t find it, so I left it out to play safe. We looked up a lot of different things, like when Polaroid was invented, which fire brigades were closest to Westminster Bridge where during the story an incident is reported.

Sven: In the booklet, we let Audrey leave some kind of a puzzle for the readers, so they could find her entire log. That puzzle is now revealed on our website, and it leads to a secret website, where you can find all kinds of maps etc of the locations used in the booklet.

P.W: Another interesting thing is the name of the main character of your story being William Blake. Now I am sure I read that this was a pure coincidence and prior to writing this you had never heard of the famous painter and poet. This strikes me as really rather bizarre. I take it you decided not to change the name once you realised that he had existed, perhaps voices from beyond put that name into your writing, what do you think?

Sven: Haha, yeah, that was a bit of a sour discovery for us. We just wanted a typically English name… We gave him a second given name to avoid anymore links, but still… It is rather strange indeed. During “Incognation” we wrote he was a controversial poet and painter, which later on seemed to be correct. Of course, this was pure coincidentally and we didn’t want to link our story to him, because that obviously would limit us in developing the storyline, since it would certainly not genuinely match the life of the real William Blake.

P.W: The instrumental passages are at times certainly reminiscent of film scores and add to the magic. The wandering piano on Demons Shelter Within really reminds me of Fabrio Frizzi’s dog attack theme from Fulci’s The Beyond, The title track has some zealous Danny Elfman signatures. Where do you take inspiration from for this side of your music?

Sven: This is really Ian’s corner. He pays a lot of attention to scores while watching a movie, or even bought a couple of soundtracks. The atmosphere of such music is always brilliant, and we wanted that in our music.

P.W: Taking the whole concept, story and the music into account together, I am struck overall by a sort of H.P. Lovecraft story interpreted by John Carpenter. Every time I play the album I feel the urge to go and watch In The Mouth Of Madness for some reason. Would you ever consider taking the filmic side of things further and perhaps scoring a movie yourselves; if so what type of film would you like to have a stab at?

Sven: That would be awesome to do yes! We have been playing with idea for a while though, but all in due time. The kind of movie we’d stab at, would probably be some kind of modern “Sleepy Hollow”, so we don’t have to leave our guitars and drums at home ;-)

P.W:Not content with all these ideas you added further puzzles in the main booklet itself. The promo copy meant I couldn’t embarrass myself trying hopelessly to solve things but I did realize there were some clues in the song characters after loading the album on my MP3 player. You have kindly saved me trying to work things out by explaining all on your website following the winners working things out. How quickly was the puzzle solved?

Sven: We got the first winner about 2 weeks after the release. In the meanwhile we got A LOT of questions and possible solutions from different people. Some even discovered some things in the album we hadn’t even considered :-) Like, when you re-arrange the highlighted letters, you get this rude form of Latin which says “in the end I will face my opponent and attack” or something. That was quite a revelation :-)

P.W:How has the general reaction been to the album? Personally I see it appealing to a wide variety of discerning listeners, taking in fans of movie scores and horror writing, Dimmu Borgir lovers and fans of the likes of Pain Of Salvation, Evergrey etc. Do you think this may propel you to bigger and better things?

Sven: We certainly hope so. The reactions have been very good up till now. We even made it to “CD of the month” in Aardschok (very big metal magazine in the Netherlands) and “Underground topper” in Oor (one of the biggest music magazines in the Netherlands). Reactions keep coming in from around the world that is of course a nice payment for the work we did.

P.W: You recently played Graspop in Belgium what was that like for you and how do you think your music interprets in the live environment?

Sven: It was a great experience of course! It had quite some rock ‘n’ roll, since our guitar player Ian was measuring 40° of fever up until 5 minutes before the show… In the very end, he decided he would do the show and all in all we did good.

Live, our music really needs a good soundguy to give every layer its place and recently we’ve been working a lot on that. Cutting frequencies in the orchestra, restyling the guitarsound etc. There’s always work to do ;-)

P.W: I only see a few home dates listed on your website (one with the cream of Belgium bands Aborted, LengTche, Panchrysia and a load of others looking very tempting), any plans on taking the show on the road and doing more in Europe and needless to say England?

Sven: We sure hope some bigger bands comes on tour this fall or winter, so we can take a shot at hooking up with them. Going on a tour ourselves is a bit of a long shot still I reckon.

P.W: The music on Ever-Arch-][-Tech-Ture was I believe at least a year old before it got released, where do you go from here? Is there new material being worked on and how the hell do you top such a storming album?

Sven: New ideas are taking form as we speak. I think we will pick a certain part of the “fan” we presented with EAITT for our next album. Also soundwise, we have a few new ideas, and of course, we’ll be pulling some tricks as on EAITT, that none (or at least: few) have seen before :-)

Interviewed by Pete Woods

"Ever-Arch-][-Tech-Ture is out now on LSP/Shiver Records. Visit Axamenta online at www.axamenta.com