thanks, Corinne!

Prof. Robin Staps: "Aeolian" is a brutal fucking bastard of a record: there are no embellishments, fewer calm passages than in the past, there's no room to breathe for the listener, it's the full-on assault of the senses: technical yet highly emotional, empathetic yet vile. Song-lengths range between 1.30 and 10 minutes; there are a lot of weird time-signatures and seemingly chaotic arrangements, but the overall picture is really coherent I think... you don't get lost in the record, you'll always get the feeling, although it might take a while to absorb the whole thing and to remember the songs. It's definitely not an easy-listening record... it's was a challenge for us to make this record, and it is a challenge for the listener to receive it. To us it is a very special record, and the one we're most content with, from all the records we've done so far.

Dr. Nils Lindenhayn: All our songs are composed by just one person. We never have jam sessions to write our music. A lot of us have played in jam bands and none of these bands ever really got anywhere. The Ocean has a different approach. Robin composes all the music from scratch by himself: guitars, bass, drums, lyrics and the orchestral stuff. There's not much room for the other members as for what creative self-realization is concerned, but that's not a problem for anyone in the band. We all like this approach for the results are, in our opinion, much better than they would be with jamming. You just get more in-depth that way, you're able to realize a high degree of intricacy as for what the arrangements and actual parts are concerned, a degree that you wouldn't be able to realize any other way. It was hard though to find musicians that didn't want to place their own solos in every song. But we found them: people who are into the idea of playing composed music rather than jamming around.

But that doesn't mean the rest of the band doesn't have a say. Whenever Robin comes up with a bunch of pre-recorded song drafts, we talk about them, discuss which songs we're gonna realize and which not, maybe change a few things here and there and then we start rehearsing them.. some things are fix, others might be changed when we realize they don't work the way they were intended. Most of the songs evolve over the years. They go through a process of ripening. There's songs that we've been playing live for over three years now and some of them sound a lot different now.

N. The lyrics deal with some of the nasty, hostile excrescences of a society based on commodities, wage-work, material success, individuality... and, increasingly, control. One of these implications is the necessity of leading outlined lives for the sake of career and affluence... we go to kindergarten, to school, to university, to work, and by the time we get out of the sweep through the institutions we're old and tired. In a nutshell: The Ocean is the collective voice of human beings that still have burning desire in them. The Ocean is an antidote to boredom and comfort-stable mediocrity. We're struggling for passion in world that's heading for its abolition.

Inspiration is drawn from almost everything. From the things we experience in every-day, from trips to far places (some of our songs have actually been written in Spain, Morocco or South America), or from other artists. Arthur Rimbaud, for example, is one of those. One trackon the album is named after his book 'Une Saison en Enfer'. He was an individual with a heart so passionate that in the end it turned out to be his tragic flaw. He lost his life at the age of 37 after completely turning his back on and even ridiculing his own artistic work and becoming a vagabond of sorts in Ethiopia. Before that, he was working for the dutch army, deserted, fled, got banished, lived in Cyprus, Norway and Africa. He lived life to the fullest and experienced more than most other people ever will, in 60 or 70 years of life on earth. That was a major inspiration and also represents the spirit of THE OCEAN.

R. Each one has its own meaning to me and its own special history, so it very hard to pick one. But if I had to, I would probably say... damn, I don't know. I can't pick one. I'll have to pick at least two. The first one would be the opener, "The City in the Sea". This song is our tribute to metal, in a way, it comprises a lot of different styles and aspects, all wrapped up in the OCEAN-vesture, of course: there is the classical re-de-de-de-de-de-opening, followed by a chaotic fuck-your-brains-out-part, then the mid-tempo hardcore part with these bestial vocals followed by the essential sludge/doom-part, and then the infamous final chapter... the final chapter of this song is among the most intricate and crushing music we've ever written - and strangely enough, it is one of the few arrangements our drummer Torge and me have developed jamming, more or less. We met every day for about 10 days in a row, working on the arrangements. When we played it to the other guys in the band, they were like "fuck off, you crazy bastards!!"... it reminds me a bit of old Confessor - except for the vocals, obviously.

The second one would be "Inertia". It's one of my favourite songs ever. There's this almost Wagner-esque part in the middle of the song with all these celloes playing and building up tension and a breathtaking, ever-changing drum-pattern to top it off... it just builds and builds and then it totally explodes when the vocals come back in, before terminating in this agonizing tempo-curve breakdown at the end of the song... I also really dig the contrast at the beginning of the song between Tomas Hallbom's desperate, high vocals and Meta's low-end roars... you can also hear a surf-guitar in the first part of the song if you listen carefully...

R. The most striking difference between "Fluxion" and "Aeolian" is that on "Fluxion", there were more of these epic, orchestral parts. We recorded an entire orchestra for "Fluxion", including violins, flutes, trombones. The songs were more atmospheric, some of them instrumental, whereas "Aeolian" goes back to a more classic line-up of drums/bass/guitars/vocals. The vocals are another difference: Our main vocalist Meta sung 95% of all the vocal parts on "Fluxion". With the new one, we wanted to have a larger variety of vocal styles - and this ended up in us completely turning our back to the idea of having a "main vocalist" of sorts. There are 7 different vocalists on the record, including Tomas Hallbom of Breach, Sean Ingram of Coalesce and Nate Newton of Converge. The number of contributors and the resulting wide variety of vocals styles represents the spirit of THE OCEAN COLLECTIVE.

To me, both records "Fluxion" and "Aeolian" are perfectly representative of what we are doing as a band. "Aeolian" shows a side of us that was always there, and people who have seen us live know that -- the material has simply never been released so far. Some of the songs on "aeolian" date back even before our first record, "fogdiver". All our past three records contained a blend of old and new material, so they are all perfectly representative of our sound, and we play songs from all records live. In fact, both records are not so different to me. The structures of the songs are similar, though their delivery might arouse differing feelings and associations. To me it's all one.

Breach - Venom

Neurosis - Times of Grace & Enemy of the Sun

Unbroken - Life. Love. Regret.

Meshuggah - Destroy. Erase. Improve.

Refused - The Shape of Punk to Come

R. There is some really interesting stuff going on, it seems to me that after a pretty stagnant phase, it's kind of becoming vibrant again with a lot of new bands willing to go unusual way, to seek for new ways of artistic expression. I seriously believe it's only a matter of time until noone is gonna listen to traditional metal anymore. It's a dying generation. Real art and music continuously evolve and transcend themselves, it's always been like that and will always be. Music that sticks to a set of fix rules and is not open for evolution is doomed to extinct. I wouldn't even say that it is a new phenomenon that there is a broader acceptance of experimental music these days as compared to, say, 5 or 10 years ago. Point is, back then, "experimental" was defined in different terms. When the first death metal bands came out, or later, black metal, it was a completely shocking, experimental thing. Looking back at it now, a whole new genre of music arose out of the vision of a few guys with guitars, and their will to transcend borderlines. But now it's become stagnant and stale, so it's gonna die if it's not gonna reinvent itself. This is the course of art. The genius works were always achieved by means of experimenting and fucking with expectations. And most of them weren't appreciated and recognized until many years after their death. I have a hope tough that in this age of information, as we call it, the time-span has abridged dramatically.

R. We can't tell jokes here cuz we know only sexist and racist jokes.

N. But we have a little anecdote for you: on our way from the Netherlands to Hamburg, we stopped to get gas and have a little break. That is, our bassist took care of the gas and everyone else had a break. 10 minutes later, back on the road, there were two cop cars behind us urging us to pull over. We felt totally innocent but being law-abiding punk rockers we pulled over. They accused us of stealing 10 Euros worth of gas. It turned out that at the gas station, our bassist had forgotten to pay, and gone to the bathroom instead. As a matter of fact, the situation was tricky because we were 8 people travelling in a 5-seater van. One guy was sitting on an empty box of beer between the 2 front-chairs, 2 other people were laying on a matress in the back of the car... so we all thought, OK, that's it, no way they're gonna let us go, and we saw that Hamburg gig with Keelhaul slipping away... to top it off, our bass player, who was driving, didn't even had his license with him. But in the end, he did a pretty amazing job. Lucky him, I mean he was the one who got us into all this in the first place! He told the cops that we were a very young, very unexperienced and very nervous band on its way to their very first show. In the end, he gave the cops the 10 Euros and they drove back to take the money to the gas station. And we got off... amazing.

R. Lots of touring. Lots of flying wood and broken noses. Lots of absinthe... and a new, devastating stage performance. You should really check us out live. There are certain aspects that we cannot convey on record - our MIDI-triggered light-show and the videos on stage are just two of them, it's the whole atmosphere on stage. We're trying to create a certain atmosphere on stage, by means of dim light in cold colors, video-projections and tons of moving bodies throwing around and chasing their instruments, evaporating blood, sweat and adrenaline. We try to make people get lost in our world for the duration of the show, and also whilst listening to our record. That's why there are interludes between songs, we try to link everything, we don't talk in between songs on stage, because we don't want the overall feeling tht is connected to and conveyed by the music to stop and begin again, each and everytime anew. We want people to get lost, within the music, within themselves.

Right now we just wanna tour as much as possible, on an international basis. hopefully we'll make it over to the US and japan anytime soon, "aeolian" is our first record that is being released in these territories. We're gonna be embarking on a big European tour early next year. The tour will begin on March 15th in Berlin and conclude on April 18th in Berlin, again. It will take us to Scandinavia for the first time, but also to Italy, Spain, Portugal and to France! We'll be down there in early april, supposedly.

N. Watch out France! The Ocean's gonna be kicking some major ass at the soccer world cup. We've stocked up the Collective to eleven people and Metal Blade is currently negotiating an extra slot for us in the first round.