AMORAL – Interview with Juhana

Hello Juhana. I am Andrew. Please tell us a few words about the history of Amoral.

Hello everybody! The history of Amoral dates back to 1997, when me and Ben (our guitarist) started jamming some covers (stuff like Metallica, Pantera and Sepultura) in our school's band-room. We were like 13-14 years old and just wanted to have fun. After a while we got more people together to have all the main instruments in the band (and that's when Silver came in, too). So time passed, we were jamming and partying about once a week, basically playing the same cover songs over and over again. It took some time before me, Ben and Silver became quite bored with the situation, and decided to take a more professional approach to the band. So we just dropped the other two guys (who were not taking the band as seriously) out, and started making our own music. Our bassist Ville and the new vocalist Niko came to the band this year, so the lineup on Desolation is kind of “obsolete”. But we feel very confident with the lineup now, especially because we have received some nice feedback from our gigs.

What is the feedback you have received about “Desolation” until now? Has any label been interested?

The feedback has been very good, the reviews have all been positive. We haven't actually approached any labels with Desolation, because we aren't fully satisfied with it ourselves. So we are mainly using it for booking gigs and selling it after playing live to anyone who is interested. But we definitely want to make a more professional sounding demo next time so that we can send it to labels and really get going…

Your music style has death metal influences, mostly like Dark Tranquillity, but every single riff is progressive. Are you trying to combine progressive music with death metal parts?

Yeah, absolutely. And if we get some atmospheric parts in the mix too, then it's just about perfect. We all are more or less fans of progressive music, so it's definitely a big influence when writing songs. It's also more satisfying for us to play technical and complicated material. Speaking of myself, I get bored pretty fast if I play just some basic beat for a long time, so I want to keep a technical and progressive approach to my drumming. Basically what we try to archieve in our songs is to have a good balance between technicality and atmosphere. Of course we try to do everything “in terms of the music” and not for the sake of technicality! The elements of death metal and progressive music are very natural for us, and we sound even more “death metal” now, because Niko's voice is lower and more “death-like” than what Matti's was

Someting else I also noticed is that both of your songs are long in time. That happens on purpose or you had planned long time songs?

No, we hadn't planned to make long tracks, it “just happened”. Not all our songs are that long, but if we think that a song needs to have certain parts in it, we are going to put those parts in there no matter how long the song turns out in the end. But I don't even consider a, say 7 min. track to be especially long, I think that it's a good length for a song. Of course shorter songs work better when playing live so that everybody can breathe between playing, but basically I don't like idea of writing “short” or “long” tracks on purpose.

What are your future plans? A new demo perhaps? What about live shows?

At the moment we are concentrating on playing live shows and writing new material. We have played a couple of gigs now, and are eagerly arranging more. Playing live is still a new and exciting thing for us, and every gig makes us more experienced in what we do. We are also planning to record a new demo this year. It has to sound as professional as possible (we are going to send it to labels this time), so we are definitely going to use a better studio and more studio-time than on Desolation.

I would like you to tell me some words about the bands: Dream Theater, Opeth, Dark Tranquility and In Flames.

Dream Theater and Opeth are truly excellent bands, and they are a big influence for all of us. I don't care that much about Dark Tranquility or In Flames, but then again I've only heard a couple of songs so who am I to say… but since we're talking of metal, I'm really into black metal, bands like Emperor, Nokturnal Mortum and Limbonic Art… they have made a strong impact on me. Especially the technical drumming in the new wave of black metal has been a huge influence for me.

So, kiitos paljon Juhana! Thanks for your time and good luck. Support the underground! Last words are yours…

Thank you very much! Keep it metal and let the music do the talking! And check out our website at http://amoral.cjb.net/