Interview conducted by Peregrin in spring 2006, for alphadrone.de exclusively. Many thanks for the questions!
 

What bands have been the biggest influences upon the different incarnations of Black Tribe/Alpha Drone?

Those who think "outside the box". Take Burzum. All other "Black Metal" bands were still basically following the basic clichés of Death Metal around that time, thrashing this or that with powerchords around which might have been drums a tad bit faster than the rest, but out of nowhere came Varg offering his idea of the whole thing, with the picking on alternate strings and the dual harmonies, offering a whole new vision for Black Metal as an aesthetic. Take Thorns. Snorre Ruch's take on guitar distortion was a direct slap in the face of the senescent Rock'n'roll tradition prevalent in Metal to that time, that a guitar tone has to, well, "rock", and twisted the Black Metal guitar into something that would entrance and set an ambience. There are basically two kinds of musicians around these days, one type looks at how others do it, and then looks to imitate the methods, then adding the "unique" personal touch to it, the other type is the self-proclaimed non-conformists that look at how others do it, and then try as hard as possible to do it differently. My biggest influences, or, to choose a very unlucky (in lack of a better) term, "role-models", are those that don't look at how others do it, but think about how they want to do it instead. For me, this is the best way to approach recording music, I'm not trying to expand on the works of others, or trying to be different, I just record the music the way it feels fitting to the conceptual content of the song, and this of course varies from song to song.

One of the things which make Alpha Drone unusual is the lyrics dealing with ancient astronauts, the Hollow Earth and other such things. When and how did you became convinced of the existence of these things?

I can't say I remember ever not being convinced of the existence of these things. I have tried to figure it out for myself, and the only possible explanation I can think of is that this "instinct" is triggered by idle memories carried along in the subconscious from the experiences of previous lives. Ever since I can think back I have had this awareness that there is some deeper meaning to the workings of the universe, and that there is an omnipresent cosmic harmony of intertwined cycles guiding the fates and destinies of what our little-minded selves can comprehend of the whole. I have researched the old religions of the pre-christian/pre-roman civilizations, the meanings of astronomy and astrology and the intricacies of cyclic temporal movement since I was a little child, and my spiritual and philosophical beliefs on these matters are a huge part of the person I am. In a sense - a very overexaggerated one - Alpha Drone is no different from these cheap Goth Punk bands that spread like wildfire these days, and that only sing personal lyrics about things that matter to them in their lives - just that I am a different kind of person, and that different things matter to me. But essentially, my approach to my music is no more unusual than that of any other musician who tries to express himself through his music.

On a related note, it appears that fantasy or horror lyrics are far more common than science-fiction lyrics in Metal. One could attribute this to the genre's Romanticist trappings, but there is also some neo-Romantic influences in much of SF. (a good example is Frank Herbert's Dune, which even has "noble savages" in the form of the Fremen) In fact, SF lyrics are so rare that bands with them often get attention just for that (eg. Nocturnus, Oxiplegatz, Scanner). What is your personal explanation of this rather lopsided distribution of fantastic genres in Metal lyrics?

Or Klingons the way they were displayed from Star Trek: The Next Generation onwards, with their messy long hair, their warrior cuirasses that almost resemble spiked leather jackets, their honour code, their affinity for the booze, the direct way of social interacting, and their axe-swining, its almost like they are a direct copy of the Metalhead stereotype... But lets face it, apart of those exceptions, Science Fiction generally has this slick, metallic and clinical ambience to it that one would associate perhaps with Industrial or Synth Pop music, but certainly not Metal. Spaceships all grey, in perfect geometrical forms, filled with people all dressed and made-up the same, walking through monotonous grey corridors, past functional and lifeless computer panels... not exactly the kind of thing you'd all too easily imagine in relation with the lifestyle surrounding Heavy Metal and its subgenres, is it? Of course some bands make it their big goal to mix the absurdest possible concepts into Metal, but the examples of failure are overwhelmingly abundant, and I too think that Metal as a culture should be taken for what it is, and enjoyed for what it is.

As I said before, I don't see Alpha Drone in any of this. Not in Metal, not in Science-Fiction, not in anything but a platform to elaborate on my personal philosophies and let those who are interested listen to them. Any resemblences to any contemporary cultures are purely coincidental.

Speaking of lyrics, the Alpha Drone selftitled debut's booklet has none of the lyrics. What is the reason for this?

Everything that needs to be said in the booklet is being said in the booklet. The lyrics are nothing more than the same thing that is said in the booklet, only in a more crude and verse-shaped form. I really don't see the need to say what I'm saying twice.

Is the song V8: Saucers over Antarctica inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness? I mean, first there is the title and THEN there is that speech at the end about the possibility of extinct advanced pre-human civilizations...

No. To be honest I'm not the biggest Lovecraft fan, I can enjoy him here and there, and I can see the appeal, but its not really my cup of tea.

Exactly what is the deal with your sideproject The Silence? I have read that they supposedly were an alias of The Continuum, but the BT/TS split is not listed on The Continuum's page...

The Hermetic Order of The Silence is not to be discussed with outsiders.

Was the Black Tribe album Inferno partially intended as an experiment in the effect of the relationship between instrumentation and composition, being an Electronica album played with Metal instrumentation and having a Mayhem cover played with Electronica instrumentation?

Partially, haha. The whole thing was intended as an experiment consisting of too many experiments at once, I tell you that, but let me save the details for the following question.

You have disowned most of Black Tribe's material... well, "disowned" may be an malapropism, but you are definitely not proud of it. Is this the reason for the name change to Alpha Drone?

No, its not, and I still use the name Black Tribe. As indicated above, I have had severe difficulties keeping the entirety of my ideas bottles up in a single band. Yes, I did wish to keep it all simple, and easily managable, and not end up like Mortiis or the Black Legions, with myriads of different side-bands that all sound the same, so I forced myself to keeping it all under one name, but at some point I just realized it wasn't going to work, so I decided to make a cut and sort it out a little. And yes, I am not proud of most older material exactly for that reason, too much chaos, too many shifts in direction, too little order. I would like to go into a little more detail on this one so that people may understand once and for all how exactly I ended up with two different names for two different bands that both basically are me, so let me dive a little into the history of the bands - and myself, at that.

I grew up on traditional Heavy Metal and Thrash Metal thanks to my elder brothers, I think I've known bands like Iron Maiden, Helloween, Running Wild, Slayer, Sodom, Metallica etc. for as long as I can think back. So, when the early teen age hormone rush came in, choosing Metal as a means for rebellion obviously wasn't an option, so in my youthful obliviousness I started to be fascinated by Goth themes, and the music related to it, first the more superficial popular bands like Nine Inch Nails, Suicide Commando, Goethes Erben and Aphex Twin, until through bands like Einstürzende Neubauten and MZ.412 had me starting to become infinitely more interested into the music's more experimental and less audially pleasant abysses. In the mid-90s I then enthusiastically started tinkering on my own career, experimenting around with anything I could possibly think of that would be as far away from what I was spoon-fed by radio and music television as possible - which culminated in 1997's bizarre "Cyber Punk" demotape, and 1998's peak of that phase of my musical experimentations, the "Torture" demo tape, on which I basically did with the tape medium what experimental noise pioneers like Boyd Rice did with vinyl back in the 1970s, first recording a variety of strange noises with my old 1530 C2N datassette and then messing around with the tape itself, centimeter by centimeter, crumbling up the tape, exposing parts of it to magnets for a short while, cutting out parts of the tape and re-attaching the fragments in a different order with sellotape, stuff like that, and finally putting some whispered vocals over it. But around that same time, somewhere between 1997 and 1998 this curious new thing called "Black Metal" started to enter into my life and I couldn't help but being fascinated by its nihilism towards musical conventions, the use of repitition, odd harmonies and unusual (or non-existent) production techniques... while Industrial harnessed the audial inhumanity of the machine, Black Metal seemed to harness the audial inhumanity of a world before all this we today call "civilization" existed. I had listened to some Death Metal like Obituary or Unleashed before that in the mid 90s, but it was a whole different world, because in Death Metal there wasn't much difference to traditional Heavy Metal in its approach to the music, it was just a bit heavier overall, while Black Metal seemed more like a force of nature than merely an extension of traditional Metal ideas. I quickly grew obsessive over this new force, and began working on integrating this new influence into my music. I thought up the name Black Tribe and designed the logo in 1998, wrote up some lyrics (two of which made it onto 1999's "War" demotape) and tried writing up some stuff on the cheap accoustic guitar and the keyboard I had back then, but quickly came to realize that I couldn't possible play this kind of music on my own. After a while of searching, I hooked up with Lord Mayhammer, whose interests in music were sufficiently compatible to mine, though at the time he mostly listened to bands like Dimmu Borgir, but I made him listen to a few classics to make the general direction clear, and on an unbearably hot summer day, and under horrible recording conditions (for example, the microphone cable was so short I had to lie on my belly on the floor recording the vocals) we completed the first official Black Tribe rehearsal demo. Considering we didn't know anyone in the local scene, the internet was still so expensive that you could only afford to use it like once a week to look something up, and keeping in touch with people via snail-mail (or just "mail", as we used to call it back then) was quite a hassle, the success of said demo was negligable, but it was an important experience psychologically anyway because it truly marked the beginning of Black Tribe. Unfortunately, later that summer, Lord Mayhammer left Germany for a year to study in Norway, so I had to find a way to make due, and began experimenting with what I could achieve on the computer, first with simple dark ambient recordings, then mixing in my experiences from my old industrial/noise "career", then starting to work on my guitar skills. It turned out that I liked that mixture so much that rather than taking it into the kind of raw Black Metal regions "War" was settled in - as I had originally intended - I decided to expand on what resulted from the experimentations, and so the path to "Inferno" was set. Unfortunately, in the two years that passed from my first experiments to the actual recording sessions to "Inferno", my ambition would swell up to an unhealthy juggernaut of self-importance, and I was certain to record a masterpiece that would set a new direction for extreme music altogether, and that would be the final word on apocalyptic and misanthropic atmosphere, but as people say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and this road was an eight-line highway. Crushed by the less than enthusiastic - private and public - reviews, I pulled back from recording music for a time and only here and there spent a little while dabbling with military marches and war documentary samples, which was what I first used the name "Alpha Drone" for, and I put one of these things on a promo-CD and sent it to a few people I knew, but didn't have any ambitions about that little side project. It wasn't before late 2004 - two years after the release of "Inferno", and with a little help from my now ex-girlfriend - that I set my mind to working on Black Tribe again, and I was stuck with two choices of direction, either going back to the old days and finally playing raw old school Black Metal again, or continuing in a toned-down, less "overloaded" direction taken from "Inferno", and I made started making recordings in both directions so I could make up my mind. Two old school Black Metal recordings called "Nordic Storm" (2004) and "The Return" (2005) - the former of which is still sitting on my ex-girlfriend's computer, I have to talk to her about sending it to me sometimes - and one ambitious atmospheric ambient and noise influenced track called "Shambala Serrano" (2005), which would first appear on the Black Tribe/The Silence split. Excited with the breathtakingly esoteric charm of "Shambala Serrano", I quickly wanted to record more music of this kind, but I realized that for it to have its full effect on the listener the whole image of the band behind it would have to be reworked from scratch, and so the Alpha Drone name was dug up from tombs, and a whole new entity constructed around it. But, somehow, the liberating effect of pure Black Metal had once again captivated me, and so Black Tribe continued as an opposite to Alpha Drone, its simple, direct and anything but subtle in-the-face counterpart.

There difference between Alpha Drone and Black Tribe the way they are now, and Black Tribe the way it was before the split, is that now there are clear directions for everything, no more messing around aimlessly, and yes, that is the reason why I am so often so critical about my older material. But I would never say I'm not proud of it. Every step I took in the development towards where I am now was a necessary step, and when keeping in mind when and how this earlier material was recorded, all of it certainly was a big achievement at its time, even though someone not involved might find it poor. But those are demos after all, and I don't ask for a barrel full of diamonds and gold for someone to listen to them.

Speaking of Alpha Drone's name, it was allegedly derived from a SF short story you wrote which you decided to not publish after seeing the film Gattaca and discovering too many similarities.. when was that story written? Have you perchance considered publishing that story for free on internet? Do you think that the similarities between your story and Gattaca may have been a function of C. G. Jung's "collective human unconscious mind"?

I have no plans on ever releasing said story, however, many parts of it live on in other creations of mine, much of the symbolism and the terminology I developed for it. The story itself is pretty simple, and probably rather generic. Mankind has evolved into a set of genetically engineered toolset, kind of similar to a bee-hive. For each purpose, there is a specific kind of perfect man bred, strong and agile people for hard work, highly intelligent people for science, and so on, each one fine-tuned to its job to the furthest extreme of perfection, and not very capable of doing anything else. This went so far that instead of names, people were labelled pretty much as tools, so if you were bred for mining, you'd just be called "[insertnameofresourcehere]-miner", if you were bred for scientific advancement you'd just be called "[insertnameofscientificfieldhere]-scholar", and so forth.

Now, as the story unfolds, there is an alien culture attacking mankind. In the story I've taken a lot of time developing their culture, and created a language for them which is somewhat of a mixture of Scandinavian and Mediterranean languages to represent their culture developing on a planet with a higher tilt of the polar axis, be it all too linguistically feasible or not. I needed that little bit of background for the story, because the higher axial tilt meant a more diverse development of that planet's nightsky's stars, and thus a more detailed astrology. Anyway, this was a highly spiritual culture, again much in the fashion of a hybrid between Nordic mythology and the astrology-based beliefs of the ancient pyramid-building cultures on Earth. This of course was completely alien to the technocratic bee-hive society dominating Earth, and all its leading bodies could figure out is that these aliens were drawing an immense, almost supernatural strength from their spirituality, and finally came to the conclusion that the only way to defend against this invasion would be to develop equivalent countermeasures, so, as a prototype, a single drone with the tool designation "searchlight" was bred with the sole purpose to explore the depths of humanity's past spirituality. To make a long story short, said drone would later determine by its gained knowledge that the lifestyle of humanity as it was was fundamentally wrong, and would use its gained spiritual force to rebel against the status quo, and finally crush the system that was, earning the title "Alpha Drone" from the other drones it has liberated from the slumber of their technocratic single-mindedness. The aliens in the end were just a means to an end to get the story where I wanted it to go, and that sub-plot was kind of rushed into a rather clumsy ending, which is part of the reason why I will never publish the story.

Anyway, I was never really happy with how the story turned out, but I liked a lot of the imagery and concepts I thought up for it, including many catchphrases and of course the language and mythology of the alien culture, so I keep much of it around for Alpha Drone.

As for the last question about the "collective human unconscious mind", I could dive into this topic very deeply for hours and hours (which would translate to pages and pages for this interview), but this isn't the time, and lets just say that in the future of Alpha Drone there will be more on this topic.

Alpha Drone's emblem is some sort of hybrid between a swastika and an eight-pointed star which allegedly was originally used by the French Army's searchlight divisions during WW2. Why did you choose this as your band's emblem? What does the emblem represent?

I think I answered that question sufficiently in the reply to the previous question, but I'll have to add that it is the original badge of the French Army's electric searchlight divisions during WW1, with no swastika mixed into it. Though of course the similarity to the swastika as an ancient symbol of light and hope is no coincidence in light of the meaning behind the "searchlight"-idea that I explained above. Neither is it a coincidence that I chose an emblem of the WW1-era French Army, one of the most anti-German institutions ever to exist in Europe, be it simply to poke fun at those who try to place Alpha Drone into the wrong (or any) political corner. There are many more meanings to the symbol, and the countless symbols hidden behind the symbol, and the entirety of these meanings would be too long to explain here.

Finally, to throw in a somewhat cliché closing question - what are your main advice to up-and-coming Metal bands?

Simple. If you have no intention of devoting your whole existence to it, don't start playing music. I'm sick of half-hearted "projects" flooding this world.