INTERVIEW ANDREAS PETTERSON (DE ARMA / NORDVIS / ARMAGEDDA)

"There are powers beyond this mortal life which are stronger than one’s own will – therefore, certain events will come to pass whether you want them to or not."

With their latest EP "Nightcall", Swedish gothic rock band De Arma has got rid of the last remnants that point to the metal background of their two protagonists. I spoke to Andreas Petterson, probably best known for black metal band Armagedda and his work as label owner of Nordvis Produktion, about De Arma's new release, Armaggeda and closeness to nature.

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Hello Andreas, how are you doing at the moment? De Arma's new EP "Nightcall" will be released soon. Tell me something about it, what I immediately notice is the emphasis on gothic rock, the metal parts have disappeared completely. Was that a natural process or were the metal parts supposed to disappear deliberately?

Hi – all good here, thanks. I'd say that "Nightcall" is the result of a natural process, during which we manifested music of a kind we've wanted to play for many years now. After our 2013 debut album "Lost, Alien & Forlorn" we started toying with the idea of writing songs which were more synth-driven, thereby making metal a smaller part of the totality. I think I can say with some confidence that the "Nightcall" EP reflects this approach. Since both of our albums were written in close succession, it feels great to now release music which is fully representative of De Arma of today.   

ROMANIAN SCENE REPORT

To be honest, I don't know much about the (extreme) metal scene of Romania. Like most people involved in extreme metal I have listened to Negura Bunget and Dordeduh and of course I know (very metal related) the story of Dracula (Vlad III Draculea), that lyrically inspired countless metal bands. But after that I have reached the end of my knowledge concerning Romanian metal. Mihai ”Coro” Caraveţeanu of Axa Valahă Productions wrote a really interesting scene report and I can't express how grateful I am for these deep insights !

ROMANIAN SCENE REPORT

A dark letter from the land of Dracula

Hi! First of all I’d like to say I’m honored that someone invited me over to write about the Romanian metal scene, I did that several times before in this life, but my last attempt happened more than a decade ago, when I thought there was still hope that something will change here for good. As most of you most probably know already, Romania is a country in the Eastern Europe, with a tragic past, including more than fifty years of different totalitarian regimes, the longest being the harshest communist regime behind the Iron Curtain, a dictatorship built on fear and a spiral of silence that affected and still affects the nation as a whole even three decades after it was supposedly finished. It happened in the final days of 1989 when the dictatorship was over, the dictator executed, with his execution broadcasted on the national television and with more than 1000 collateral victims of the single bloody revolution from all the social and political movements which happened in the East around the same time.