Exclusive Interview: The Ocean’s Robin Staps Delves Into the Depths of Pelagial

If you’re not wise to The Ocean’s upcoming release Pelagial, you’re seriously out of the loop. The album, which details the journey from the ocean’s surface to its depths, is the Ocean’s most ambitious work to date, and is a shoe-in for album of the year. But you don’t have to take my word on the album’s intricacies: Robin Staps Skyped me to discuss what went into making a continuously shifting hour of music, including his fascination with Russian culture and The Ocean’s newly realized coherence.

Pelagial is meant to be one track, both on record and live. How did you begin the writing process for that? Did you start with an individual instrument, or was it more fleshed out on paper before?

I always start with an individual instrument when it comes to writing, whether it’s a song or an entire album. It’s not always the same instrument. There are some songs that I’ve started writing bass or guitar for before going to drums, and other songs that start with a drum pattern. But it’s always one instrument in the beginning.

This album was the first time I started writing with a master plan in mind. I really knew what I wanted to do musically. Every riff I was coming up with, I already knew at the time when it would fit in along the timeline of the record. Whether it was a surface riff, so to speak, or a deep-sea riff. That’s what makes it different than most previous albums. Like the centric records, where both were basically collections of songs that were all written individually on their own. Of course we broke the tension of how to draw them together, but still, they were written as songs. This album was basically written as one piece of music, more or less logically from the beginning to the end. That’s where it’s pretty different from all our previous albums.

At what point in the writing process did you decide to make the track divisions? Even though it is one song, there are still distinct divisions. With the addition of Loic’s vocal sections and the lyrics, the “songs” start to feel more like songs even within the whole.

The divisions you’re referring to are actually something that happened during the writing process. They don’t always comply with the track marks. Track marks are something that came in very late, just a day before the mastering. For a long time I wanted to just release it as one track but in the end I stepped away from that decision because I wanted to have certain sections of the record a little more convenient than having to be forced to listen to the whole thing. What you’re referring to is the fact that there’s certain aspects or sections of the album that function as individual songs. That’s just the way they were written. Even if you write a 16-minute piece of music, of course you’ll have repetition. Or certain parts or sections that are verse/chorus, which happens a few times.

But with this album it’s not really happening the way it usually happens when you write songs (verse/chorus – verse/chorus). Here we have some riffs that appear in the beginning of the record and then those same riffs come in again twenty minutes later. For example, the first riff in “Benthic,” the last song, was something that already appeared earlier as part of the eighth track. It wasn’t all written with this kind of big picture in mind, but still they were written as songs.

As first I wanted to make a step with aggression, I wanted the tempo to go gradually slower from the beginning to the end of the record. I tried having the tuning to go gradually lower but essentially failed because it wasn’t as interesting. It wasn’t working out. I realized I still wanted to write an album that rocks and not just an album that’s a strange piece of avant-garde music. So I had to make some compromises. Music is interesting when it’s unexpected or when there are things happening that are not foreseeable. That’s something I learned when I was writing this album and something where I really had to step away from my original notion of it, the original approach to it. That’s the beauty in experimenting. You always have these moments where it just falls into place. “The last three days were just wasted; it’s not going to work.” Get over it and start something new. At one point it does work and that’s the moment of relief and gratification. I really enjoy it, actually.

I think it worked out. It makes sense as a piece with recursive elements. In the ocean, the real one, it’s not like it’s just layer layer layer anyway.

Yeah, you have vertical currents, vertical movements.

You’re on Summer Slaughter this year and won’t be able to play all of Pelagial – are you just going to play a few songs or save the material for a time when you can play it all?

No, we won’t want to do that. We will definitely play parts of it. But it is a massive compromise. Honestly, I’m not really sure right now what we’re going to do. We’ve been playing the album live now for 4-5 nights in a row since we started our tour in Europe. We’ve always just been playing it from beginning to end. It’s the way it’s meant to be delivered and everything else is going to be a huge compromise. Obviously we won’t be able to play the album there in full. So we’ll have to figure something out which is probably going to be along the lines of having to play the first half of the record and then an old track, or playing an old track and then the second half of the record. Or we’ll leave out some of the middle sections. I think we can play the record with leaving out a track like “Disequillibrated.” Not that I don’t like the song or anything. It’s a really cool live song but it’s something that stands on its own in the middle of the record. It’s possible to skip that track or to go from the previous track to the one after that. It’ll be one of those solutions, but it will suck either way. There’s nothing I can do about it. Of course when you have a festival with eleven bands on the bill you can’t expect every band to be able to play an hour or 55 minutes. You have to work with what you get. We’ll make it happen eventually. Right now I’m not really thinking of it; we’re going on tour with Cult of Luna in Europe. We will play the album in its entirety every night of that tour.

I’m jealous. But I’m sure Summer Slaughter will still be awesome.

I’m really looking forward to that. Some fans on Facebook are asking why we’re doing that tour. Just look at the lineup! It’s DEP headlining. We toured with them in Europe, which was the most awesome choice we’ve ever made. The guys in that band are awesome. They’re one of those bands that I really respect musically and probably are the only band where I watched every single show when I was on tour with them. Didn’t miss one show. Every night was something different and every night was mental. I’m looking forward to seeing that again. Not just DEP, but the whole lineup. I understand that a lot of people associate a plain death metal tour with the name Summer Slaughter but that’s not what it is this year and that’s why we agreed to do that. I feel like The Ocean fits in with the rest of this lineup.

You’ve touched on Russian literature and films in previous works –Fogdiver sampled Stalker, and there were obviously the Karamazov references in the –centric albums – Do you have a general fascination for Russian stuff or is it more just the ideas of a few specific artists?

I have a general fascination for Russian girls, haha! That’s a good question. I don’t really know. For a long time I wasn’t really interested in that part of the world very much. I’d never traveled to Russia until last year when we did our first tour with The Ocean. For some reason I’ve still been really fascinated with the culture, and especially the arts and literature. There’s no one that compares to Dostoevsky, and Tarkovsky is a movie-maker who’s unrivaled too; I can’t think of anyone doing anything similar. Both those guys have come out of Russia and I happen to be into them. That’s about all there is to it.

I don’t speak any Russian myself. Like I said, last year was the first time I ever went there. It’s not a country that I find pleasant or attractive when it comes to travel. It’s a grim and cold place. But there is something to the culture that is coming out of that country that speaks to me somehow. Even in its translated version, which I understand must be compromised, because it always is. When you read something in its original language, it’s always more precise than a translation. Still, it works in the case of Dostoevsky, and even the subtitled version of Stalker or other Tarkovsky movies have always worked for me very well. That’s why some make their way into the realm of The Ocean.

Still, I learned to appreciate the country when I was touring there last year. Although the landscapes are grim and most of it is flat and boring, it’s snowing and cold, I still met some amazing people there. People really seem to be the opposite of the cliché notions about the country. So full of passion and energy. That’s something you don’t find anywhere else in the world. It’s been awesome communicating with people there, going out to restaurants; it’s been a cool experience. I’m fond of that part of the world now.

There’s some funky tempo stuff on this album, was that consciously influenced by anything or did it just fall into place?

More upbeat?

For example, in the early Bathyalpelagic tracks there’s a 4/4 groove that breaks a lot. Some weird rhythms that hold in 4/4; Meshuggah-ish in terms of the timing.

It’s interesting you mention that because the album is actually for me much more straight-forward than most of our previous albums. For the most part it’s all 4/4 or 6/8 all the way through. Obviously on Aeolian the music was at its peak of intricate timing, and we’ve stepped away from that. Precambrian was fairly straight forward. Even on Anthropocentric, the quiet songs like “For He That Wavereth” or “The Almightiness Contradiction” are really strange stuff rhythmically. This album just has a steady groove — there’s tempo changes, even sudden tempo changes — but it has this very steady groove from the beginning to the end. Most of the timings are actually pretty straight, either in 4/4 or a 6/8. If you listen to the last three tracks, it’s all 4/4 actually.

There’s nothing else, probably because I considered it to be a big challenge to write incredibly intricate, complex music for a long time. But that has now become a bit boring to me. I don’t want to write music that is just efficient, or seeks to be impressive by enjoying very off-time signatures. That is a challenge that I have pursued for a while but which is now over. I write music that is following different maxims or paradigms, and being complex and having weird time signatures is not important to me anymore at all. I want to write music that is captivating, that is emotionally deep and densely woven somehow. That doesn’t always mean you have to come up with all different kinds of intricacies. Sometimes a very simple riff — like the main riff in “Benthic” for example — it’s the stupidest riff I’ve ever written, but it works. That’s a new challenge for me – to understand that it doesn’t always have to be complex. The right things have to appear at the right time and then they can be super simple and just blow your mind. My paradigms have shifted.

Before the -centric albums, your instrumental lineup was changing from album to album. It’s been consistent for the last three records. How has that made the writing process differ?

I wrote this album on my own. We had moved towards a setup where everyone was getting more involved with the writing, with Anthropocentric especially, where Jona wrote four tracks and Loïc wrote a track. But this album goes back to the origins where I wrote everything. This is only true for the actual writing of the entire album, not the individual instruments. Luc wrote his drum parts on this album and Louis wrote his bass parts. So in that way, a lot has changed. In the past I used to program every single drum hit and make our previous drummer play like that, while now I just keep it loose and Luc will hopefully understand my ideas and offer something better. He’s the drummer, not me.

It’s very comfortable for me to know that I work with those kinds of people now. It’s really that cliché of chemistry. I don’t have to sing drum parts to Luc or ask him to play like this or that. He does it and a lot of time he plays it differently than what I have in mind, but it’s still awesome. He comes up with stuff I couldn’t come up with myself. That has really transformed some of the parts and that is awesome. It feels right. Working with people that get my point somehow and have something to add to it instead of just executing it. This album had to be approached that way. If you wrote a one-track album and everything was going through a motion or movement or progression from one point to another point, it wouldn’t work if one individual had written one song or section of the album. If you have too many cooks adding ingredients to the meal, it wouldn’t work out.

Good to hear that that you’re meshing together. I’m sure it makes a difference live.

It does, it really does. We understand each other musically and as people. Both in the bus and on stage. It makes a huge difference to me. Comparing previous lineups of this band, it’s now at a point where everyone trusts everyone else in the band, entirely. It’s that certainty which sets good bands apart somehow. You watch Mastodon play, you know everyone in the band always knows what the other person is doing that very moment. That’s something you can’t explain, but you feel it when you watch. They don’t move around much, but you know there’s this confidence and self-assurance. I don’t want to compare my band to them, but I feel like we’re approaching a similar point. We can play blind and it’ll work out. We can rely on the other people to do what we’re expecting them to do.

Awesome. I’m looking forward to seeing you guys this summer. Thanks!

Pelagial comes out in the US on April 30 on Metal Blade. Preorders are available here, and you can stream tracks from the album here, here and here.