Interview Svartsyn

"I rather like the images of bands in the early days who hardly took any pictures and didn't expose themselves as much as they do nowadays on social media and without corpse paint."

Svartsyn are a jewel of Swedish black metal and stand on equal footing with such illustrious names as Arckanum, Sorhin, Grafvitnir, Setherial or Ofermod. Five years after the great “Requiem” album, the band recently released a new album via Norma Evangelium Diaboli.  In the interview with Ornias, who has been living in Belgium for several years now, you can find out to what extent this work also closes a circle to the beginnings of the (predecessor) band and why there will  be no more live performances by Svartsyn (unfortunately I missed the band in Cologne on the joint tour with Behemoth and Desaster in the distant year 1997). But read for yourself...

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Hello Ornias, welcome to the interview.  The new album “Vortex of the destroyer” has been out for a few weeks now, how do you rate the album with a little distance and how have the reactions been so far?

Hello and thanks for getting in touch for the interview. I haven't read that many or seen any reviews. But it seems that people enjoy the album very much. For myself I think the album is very strong but how it stand against all the other albums its too early to say. Since everything is new and fresh I would say in about a year when the recording process and the hard work behind it all is out of the system, than I can judge it a little bit better. But ranking your own albums is hard of course, since every album is taking a piece of flesh from your soul. At least I think all the albums contain high quality material.

INTERVIEW GRAFVITNIR

GRAFVITNIR from Sweden released their fitfth album named "Keys to the Mysteries Beyond", which is a a really outstanding black metal release. So I decided to to an interview with Niantiel- we spoke about black metal, occultism and their aversion to public relation - hope you like it.

First of all, how were the reactions towards the new album ? I think most of the listeners like it a lot, right ? In my opinion  “Keys to the Mysteries Beyond“ is one of the best black metal albums within the last years and I hope in some years it will be regarded as a classic! It can be described as fast tradtional Swedish black metal in perfection, I can hear similarities to Sacramentum, Svartsyn, Sorhin, Dissection and (old) Watain. Do you agree ?

Thank you very much for your words of appreciation. The reactions have been mostly positive, but what is most important is that we ourselves are satisfied with our creation, the rest is only a bonus. 
I would say that I personally can hear the similarities with Sacramentum, Dissection and of course early Watain (which at that time was hugely inspired by Dissection). The reason for this is probably because music usually is derived from the soul and music created by swedes tend to have noticeable characteristics that are audible and well documented. 

The cover artwork from Daniele Valeriani is a really outstanding piece of art as well, how did you get in contact with him? I have seen that this artwork also was published in an art book together with other cover artworks from other artists.

In fact, our good friend Daniele contacted us and offered us cooperation. When I later saw the first sketch of what was to become the cover art for "Keys to the Mysteries Beyond" I instantly knew that this was going to be what we were looking for. Our cooperation runs smoothly and we are extremely happy to work with such a magnificent talent that he is.