EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THE OCEAN MASTERMIND ROBIN STAPS
Back at the end of May, Vince and Kip stormed into The Ocean’s show at New York’s Knitting Factory with an arsenal of questions for the band’s mastermind/guitarist Robin Staps (above, far right). So many questions, in fact, that combined with Staps’ incredibly verbose and articulate answers, we ended up with a fucking book instead of the normally terse interview pieces we do, which is the reason it’s taken us so long to transcribe (well, part of the reason anyway!). But for fans of The Ocean — and I know there’s a lot of you who read MS — the wait will be well worth it when you read what Staps had to say about his band, his thoughts on touring in the U.S., the writing and recording of the band’s incredible album Precambrian, and a whole assload of other shit. Enjoy!
All right, so the tour just started for a few days, how’s it going so far?
Really awesome. We really didn’t know what to expect just before coming over here because it’s our first time [touring here], and we didn’t know if people knew about us and what’s going to happen. But it was really, really cool. The turn outs were alright in the U.S. Better than in Canada, though the show in Montreal was really awesome. Boston was good and then we played in Connecticut; it was a tiny little place, it was packed and it was great. Tonight I heard it’s already 200 people so it’s probably going to be pretty cool too. Yeah, it’s been great, and a lot of surprises. We rented this RV as our touring vehicle, which is really fucking huge and actually a really awesome, comfortable way of touring but it just sucks gas like a motherfucker so it’s going to make it more expensive than we originally figured. But it’s just so nice and comfortable, you know where everybody can sleep and lay down. So much better than touring Europe in a van with 9 people sitting like this… [motions cramped sitting]. It’s great.
So do you put all your gear in the back of the RV or do you have a trailer on it?
No we don’t have a trailer, but we have all the gear we brought over in the RV in some kind of storage compartment in the back. It’s not huge but it can fit most of it in there. Then there’s this big living room in the back and we have stuff stacked up on the sides too. We’re actually using Withered’s back line so the cabinets . . . the drum kit is not in the RV. That would never work out whatsoever.
Right, so do the other bands on the bill — Withered, Kylesa, Lair of the Minotaur — have you toured with any of those bands before?
No. I knew Kylesa of course and Lair of the Minotaur; actually seen them play Berlin 2 years ago or something with the Capricorns. So I was familiar with the band. I didn’t know Withered before this tour at all so, yeah, I didn’t know what to expect from them, but I think it’s a really interesting package and really awesome people. I mean we’ve only spent like 3 days together, but it’s been really good so far and I’m looking forward to it.
Yeah, those are all American bands, right, each of them?
Yeah.
But you guys toured with other American bands overseas right?
Yeah, we’ve toured with Intronaut and actually Mouth of the Architect was supposed to be on that bill, but they broke up before that tour and then they got reunited afterwards . . .
I’d like to see them live at one point. They’re a really cool band. That tour was kind of doomed. Another band cut out of that tour too, but Intronaut made it over and we toured with them for a month. And they are actually playing with us again in California, the 5 shows there. I’m really looking forward to that because it’s one of the most amazing bands that I’ve ever seen live. They’re just really fucking awesome, and I think they’re going to get really big hopefully. So we’re really excited to play with these guys on the West Coast again, it’ll be awesome.
So first time in the U.S. for you guys as a band . . .
Mmm hmm.
Did you sort of have any . . . you sort of touched on this a moment ago . . . did you have any expectations for how it’s going to be in America? Were you unsure of necessarily how the U.S. audience will respond?
Yes of course, of course. We had no idea what it was going to be like. I mean I’ve been in the U.S. before, but you know, as a touring band . . . everybody told me it’s really shit and they treat you like… you know, not like in Europe where you get the palace every night and you don’t have to be big fucking rock stars to get the palace. Every band gets it as well as decent catering. They said “It’s going to suck over there. You’re going to get a bag of chips and no one is going to take care of you.” It’s nothing like that, but then again, it’s also that we’re just prepared for that. That’s why we rented this big vehicle so we have our destinations set out. It’s really comfortable to sleep in. We’re getting buy outs every night, which is cool because you can choose where you want to eat, so it hasn’t been that bad. The promoters are cool. There were some issues with timing, and we don’t have a tour manager on this tour which makes it a little bit difficult. We had to cut our set short the last two nights actually, which sucked because we’re not really organized in terms of changeover with all the 4 bands. It’s like changing the drum kit 3 times and stuff like that. We still have to worry about that. It doesn’t really make much sense, but yeah, apart from that it’s been awesome and we really jumped into the blue basically without expectations and we’re like “Let’s see what happens and this is what we’re doing.” It’s awesome to be given the chance to do it. It’s like a childhood dream to tour the U.S. with your band.
What you were saying before about like not having a tour manager this time around, does that relegate you to that duty? Do you find yourself taking over that role?
Actually . . . yeah, I don’t really want to do that because I think that job really sucks. It’s like you have to be a professional asshole, and I don’t want to be an asshole, even if it’s a professional asshole that everybody just kind of . . . I just picture someone else doing that. Yeah, it just sucks. I mean if we have to cut our set short then at one point you should have to speak up and try to change something so that doesn’t happen again. Right now we’re thinking of getting a sound guy to take on the road. We’re all rational human beings, we just have to talk about it and like I said, all the other bands are really awesome people. We’re getting along great; it’s just another conversation really. That always takes a couple of days to just tune in and get everything sorted and it’s just normal I guess.
You have a different lineup of guys then you’ve played with overseas. Do you find that part of the acclimating difficult due to new personalities involved?
We’ve had a lot of changing members since then, over the course of the last couple of years for a number of reasons. Some people we’ve played with just started getting kids and setting up families and they couldn’t do touring anymore. Then we had some people who were into the whole touring thing for awhile, but then realized that they don’t want to do that for the rest of their lives. So we had a lot of different guitar players and bass players, that especially. We’ve only had 2 drummers. Now, with this lineup, it is pretty new but it’s the same that we’ve been using for all the overseas tours. Like we’ve been out for 2 months . . . a good 2 months now, and we’ve got a month and a half ahead of us. It’s like a 3 1/2 month tour with all the same members for the whole tour, but the drummer has pretty much joined us just right before this tour. He’s brand new. The other guitarist has been doing one tour before this one with us. Nico, one of the singers, has been in the band for a long time together with me for at least 6-7 years. And then Mike, the other vocalist, joined us a good year ago. He actually joined us as a bass player at that time. We supported the Black Dahlia Murder in Europe and he was playing bass on that tour, and then we were recording some vocals for Precambrian and realized that he’s a really awesome vocalist, which was also what he wanted to do rather than play bass. So he kind of switched from bass to being a full-time vocalist, and then we had to look for another bass player.
The bass player we have here, he recorded the first 3 albums actually, but he’s a professional. He’s making better money with other bands than with The Ocean, you know like “band” bands. . . jazz stuff and shit like that. But he’s doing this tour with us again, which is awesome because he’s an old friend. He’s been in the band for a long time but not in the last 2 or 3 years, and now he’s doing this tour again. We try to not limit ourselves to 1 lineup all of the time, but to try and keep it open, for other people. Right now we have 2 different guitarists in the band. One of them can’t do much touring; he’s doing a lot of studio work though. He also played on Precambrian, but he’s not here on this tour. The other one is doing the touring, and there’s no competition between them; they’re both equal members of the band and whoever has time to play shows and wants to do it, does it. There’s never been any conflict between them, and apparently we have all these other people floating around us: the core of the band, like the hardcore members that are this touring lineup.
The other classical musicians that worked on Precambrian, they’re not fixed members of the band, they’re just affiliated with us . . . associated with this collective basically. They come into play whenever we need that, or sometimes live occasions in Berlin. But it’s really difficult to take more than 7 people on the road because we also have the sound guy we couldn’t bring on this tour, and then you have to have a driver usually. The biggest vans you can rent are 9 passenger vans, so you just can’t bring an unlimited amount of people on the road unless it is a 9 lineup tour where we have a coach just for ourselves. That’s hard to find. You have to cut it down a little bit, but it’s no drama in that really because what you get live is exactly what you get in the album, it’s just that not everything is played live. We play with sequencers, which also control the light show and play all the samples. It’s the studio tracks, it’s not like shit samples, not like some really bad sequencer program or something. It’s like the studio tracks. The cellos you hear are like the real cellos, and in 24 bit quality. It doesn’t really make so much of a difference sound wise.
That’s a good segue into our next group of questions which are about Precambrian which . . . I don’t know about this guy [Vince points to Kip], but it’s one of my favorite albums of last year. It’s a really, really full album, and I just wanted to ask about the writing process of that. How you sort of approach writing an album that really is a work of art from start to finish, you know, as opposed to just a collection of tracks.
The writing process kind of happened in 2 phases: the first phase I was in Australia. I was backpacking there and I was having a really hard time personally, and I just had a lot of really good ideas during that time. It’s always like that. When I’m traveling, I’m really inspired and I was just walking along endless beaches during the day and having all these ideas and melodies in my head and then trying to pin them down . . . write them down with a 4 string guitar at the backpacker’s place I was staying. And that’s the core of the songs on Proterozoic. The half of Precambrian that originated there — when I came back, I worked them out and we called it pre-productions and worked on the details and stuff.
Then the second wave of writing was the Hadean/Archaean part of it. It was written maybe 4 months later. With my songwriting, it’s always like that. It occurs in phases. I write all the songs myself for The Ocean basically. Like 97% of the music is written by myself, and the other guys basically just play the sheet music and stuff like that, like the bass player and the strings. It usually occurs in phases. It’s something that is kind of magical. I don’t really know how to control it or… you know, it just happens. Sometimes I’m in composing mode, and I just lock myself in my basement and just write forever. It just goes and after that it’s maybe like 2 or 3 months when I’m not even touching my guitar. It’s just like that.
The whole Precambrian thing came about . . . we’ve always had these 2 sides to our music: the epic side and the really heavy condensed songs that are just drums, bass, guitar, vocals. The new album we were asking ourselves “How are we going to get this together? What are we going to do?” Another album more in the vein of Aeolian, which is focusing on that heavy side or another album more in the vein of Fogdiver, our first album which was entirely instrumental and really an inspiration and a big band. Generally we decided that it’s a bigger challenge to not try to merge the two approaches but to take them apart as far as possible and make a double CD, with one CD focusing on one side and the other on the other side. And then we were looking for a concept to kind of support that and that’s how the whole Precambrian thing came into play basically.
So how do you decide… you say that as if it were some order of God that told you to write the story about the formation of the Earth. How do you actually choose that concept for the album?
I came across it like visualizing the music really. That’s what I usually do when listening to what I record, like my pre-productions, shut off the lights, put on headphones and listen to it, and try to think what it arouses in you or what you see when you hear this. I always felt like this was lava and volcanoes erupting and that’s how I came across the whole Precambrian thing. I like to stay up and study geography so I was exposed to the whole subject matter before, so this is not entirely new to me. It just struck me as really fitting after realizing the music, to try and do something like that: like geological eons and eras. But I’ve been investigating quite a bit on the subject matter and trying to make it work. It wasn’t really easy because you have to find the right… we didn’t want to make the music kind of suffer from having to fit into the concept in a way that you would have to add like 3 more songs when you think that the album is done without those 3 just because they’re a geological era. We didn’t want to do that. It took awhile to make it all work smoothly together without having to cut anything, cut out any tracks or add more stuff when there is no need for more stuff. But it did work, it’s always a challenge to get all these things together, but that’s what I really love about what I’m doing so . . . it’s great.
You mentioned that geology or geography was a continuing interest for you or studies for you . . .
Um yeah, kind of. I mean, like I said, I’ve been exposed to it in my studies. I think it’s really fascinating to make yourself aware of the fact of how old this planet really is. You know it’s older than 2,000 years. There are a lot of people in this country who believe that it’s not, but it is. To imagine what kind of place Earth was at that time, and the shape that the Earth looked, it’s always been a fascinating thing for me. And then it’s got this optimistic quality to it too, the whole Precambrian thing. It’s just like fire and sulfur and volcanoes and rocks on this Earth, and I think that really fits well to the music we write too. It has this sort of archaic quality to it that touches people at a bottom level I think. It’s misery, and all this whole Precambrian thing I think just merges with that really well.
I have another question about that actually. So it sounds like the pre-production tracks that you recorded inspired the concept, in a sense. Do the lyrics come afterwards? How closely did you try to stick to that? Do you feel like parts of your personal life ended melding to that concept or did you specifically try and only write lyrics or storylines only geared towards . . .?
No, I didn’t do that because that’s would mean taking it to a head level too much, and that means that the emotional quality of the music would suffer. You know, that’s like constructing something and Precambrian is constructed in a way that we always try to keep that core emotional essence to it, and that’s what I said earlier about trying to not cut off songs or add more songs just to make it fit the concept. We really try to avoid that, and that’s why also with the lyrics, we approached it more like a news kind of mindset. It doesn’t make sense to write an album just about rocks flying through the air and streams of lava. That’s essentially forming at one point, and so we still make reference to that whole Precambrian thing in the lyrics quite a bit but it’s more in the metaphorical sense, not in a direct sense. If music or lyrics want to be emotional, they have to address human issues. Essentially Precambrian was a time on Earth when there was no human life. No life at all on this Earth. So we had to stray from that concept a little bit.
Yeah.
But I don’t really see that being a big drawback. I think the lyrics refer to the whole Precambrian thing quite a lot. A lot of the lyrics deal with trying to get, trying to live life to the fullest in this world which we’re all born into today which is getting increasingly difficult. In that way the whole Precambrian thing is kind of a statement in itself. It’s like how much life is left in the lives that we lead today when we need to go to work to do things that we wouldn’t do unless we got paid for it. Working shit jobs just to sustain ourselves and watching our time pass by. How much life is really left in the lives that we lead? Making a record about the whole Precambrian thing, about a time when there was no time at all is kind of a statement in itself about the world we’re living today.
And also that whole just the head of . . . the geological head involves time periods. So specifically your album seems to be working up from a very different time period . . . different phases in the Earth’s history that I think everything you’re saying falls perfectly into different time periods in people’s lives, attaching human emotion schematically into that concept.
Well the whole record is like an evolution currently. It starts with the really simple songs . . . simple instrumentation, simple arrangements and it progresses into this big multilayer thing. A track like “Rhyacian” used like more than 80 tracks in the studio. There are so many strings and different instruments in there. It’s a song that builds up over 11 minutes. It’s so much more complex than any of the songs on the Hadean/Archaean disc. Of course that reflects the whole progression of . . . the whole evolution of the Earth. The Hadean/Archaean times which were basically really nothing else but rocks and volcanoes and there was like no atmosphere on Earth or even single cell organisms. Then during the Proterozoic, the atmosphere started to build and there was oxygen all of a sudden and life started to spring up. This kind of increased in complexity and this is reflected in the music as well. It’s the same thing. It increased in complexity from Hadean/Archaean to the Proterozoic disc and that’s what we tried to do.
Yeah, yeah. I agree where you’re saying with the recording as well which kind of leads me to another question I have: how do you do the recording of the vocal arrangements? I noticed in the liner notes you had 10-15 vocalists in the studio? Is that right?
Yeah something close to that.
Including some notable people we’ve heard of before.
Yeah.
Like I think you had a guy or two from that band? [pointing to Vince’s Cave In t-shirt]
Yeah, Caleb from Cave In is singing. We have a number of guest vocalists as we have had on our previous album Aeolian too. That’s just another aspect of the whole collective thing. We always try to make the vocals, which are mainly in the realm of scream vocals, as interesting as they can possibly be and that means getting the writing right. Of course you can have really good vocalists and cover it all with one person, and I think the guy we have with us now, Mike, and also Nico, they really do that. They can cover all the styles, you know, from really death metal growls like high pitched screaming to everything in between, and then have melodic but rough singing. They can do it all, but on an album it’s just really interesting to have different voices that you can tell much more when you listen to an album on headphones than in a live environment, the little kind of nuances and differences. That’s why we’ve always found that interesting — and of course it’s awesome to be able to work with the vocalists of your favorite bands. I’ve always been a huge fan of Converge and Coalesce and Cave In, and to be able to get these people to do tracks on your album is just an awesome thing. I mean, why would you say no to that? Like I said, it transfers perfectly into a live environment with the vocalists we have, but that’s not going to stop us from doing that again in the future, having a lot of people from different bands and unknown people as well. Half of the guests on the album are just people from bands that nobody outside of Germany or Europe have ever heard of, but they have awesome voices and they’re good friends of ours so we wanted them on the album as well. It’s a mix of the two really.
Do you find that the diversity of the guest vocalists, is that generally a function of the songwriting process? When you’re conceiving of all the lyrics from the arrangements do you say, “Oh this needs to be a different performer. This particular line needs to be a different performer than this line.” And the way that the cross-fade and the way that you . . . I did listen to your album on headphones, and I hear a lot going on in the vocals.
Yeah, there’s a lot of thought behind it and a lot of love for detail that you won’t maybe realize at first listen, but with every single part I write, I have a specific voice in mind. Mainly it’s a voice that I know. It’s usually like that. I listen to a part that I have written and I’m like “Okay this has got to have Caleb’s voice on it” or whatever. No matter if I know the people or not, it’s just like a natural thing that comes from listening to a riff and a beat and you think of a voice that you know whether it’s a friend of yours or a singer of a band that you like or whatever. That’s how I actually named these parts in the first place too. Like “the Caleb part.”
[Laughter] Trying to get the people to do it.
Or someone similar if you can’t get in touch with them. Sometimes it’s difficult to do the Bjork part, you know.
[Laughter]
Yeah, we’re working on it.
I guess that lends itself to the collective side of things that we talked about. I find it interesting in a way, I’ve read a little bit about the startings off with the . . .I don’t know too much about it but I’m curious about it. You definitely keep referring to the band in the 3rd person. It’s very much a band, I get that sense, but you are also aware that you’re writing so much of the music yourself. Did the whole collective start out as just your brainchild or did you feel like you had collaboration in the beginning with these particular friends?
It was my brainchild. I moved to Berlin specifically with the intention of finding people to play my music because I had been playing in jam bands for a long time in my hometown. It was fun. It’s great to meet with people in a rehearsal room and jam, and every other band does really. It’s awesome to do that, but I was at the point where that really didn’t satisfy myself anymore because the people that I would play with didn’t really understand where I was coming from and didn’t want to do the same thing. So I moved to Berlin to look for people who would really be on the same page as myself. I actually started out programming drums at that time with all manual, physical drum machines, not on the computer as you do it today, and just ended up getting really into programming and writing everything myself. The feedback I got from my friends at the time was really awesome, so I just tried to find some people who were actually willing to play that kind of stuff; and I found people, and that’s how the whole thing really started.
The whole collective thing seems like a contradiction at first because a collective means a collaboration of different individuals, but then again, I’m the one who is writing everything. It’s more that we refer to it as more of an organizational sense. We try to keep the band open to everyone who wants to have an input and that’s how a lot of people approach us actually. Mike, our main singer now, he followed the invitation we have on our website for people to join us to do whatever for us: visuals or vocals or something. He just submitted recordings of himself. We thought it was awesome and that’s why we got back to him. It really works, and it’s great that it’s like that, but in a creative stance, I’m the one who writes all the stuff. I think with so many people involved it just has to be like that; otherwise it wouldn’t turn out what it is really. It would be something different. Not necessarily worse or better, but just different. If you have 26 people playing on the album, you have to have someone who holds it all together, who organizes everything. These classical musicians from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, those are not people that you can call up and ask them to come to the studio tomorrow. It all has to be really well arranged because they’re touring themselves and with so many parts, you have to have one person who has the goals, the big scheme in his mind in order to make it all work together.
Sometimes when we started recorded, I wasn’t sure myself where this would lead to, and the guys who were recording it were really recording it without knowing much about the context, especially the classical musicians. But then in the end it all works together, and they were like “Whoa yeah, this is cool. I didn’t know what I was doing, but it works.” This only works when you have someone who’s really taking care of, holding the whole thing together basically. It’s just been… it’s always been like that with The Ocean. I tell that to new people who want to be in the band from the beginning. Some people are fine with it and some are not. Of course we’re still, you know, we’re always talking about these parts and we try it out live and we change a lot of things, not that I write something and everybody thinks it’s shit and it’s still going to stay like that. Sometimes you write a certain part, and you try it out in a live environment and realize that it’s not working out. Other people come in with some ideas, and we change the parts and stuff. That’s where it really becomes a really organic process where everybody is involved, but the general ideas are originating from my mind, and it’s not only like a guitar riff that I’m bringing to the room, but a full song with strings and guitars and different parts and vocals and drums and everything. That’s the starting point. That’s what makes us different from most other bands, I think, who come into the room where the guitarist has a riff and the drummer has a beat and then they try and put it together.
Do you end up, in terms of the recording of the strings and the classical parts, are you conducting that or . . . it sounds like you’re doing all the arrangements. Do you bring on a conductor?
No, I do all that myself. The string parts, the piano parts, which sounds really fucked up because I don’t even play the piano very well; I wrote most of the parts just on a sequencer program, and it actually worked out pretty well. But trying to print out scores for the player I recorded it turned out really difficult because I used a voice saturation function that wasn’t really working out very smoothly. Sometimes it was like I had notes on the left hand and two on the right hand. You can’t really do that. So we had to rewrite and reorganize everything, and I did that together with her, but that took quite awhile. It would have been very helpful to have a professional guy to just organize the music that I wrote in a way that is playable by a piano player. It wasted a lot of time to do that manually.
So what’s next for you guys? You have a few more weeks of the U.S. tour and then Europe, I’m assuming, for the summer.
Right we’re going back in mid of June, going straight back to Paris for Hellfest. It’s going to be awesome. It’s a really cool lineup this year. Then we’re touring with Cult of Luna for 2 weeks in Europe until the beginning of July. And then it’s the end of our 3 1/2 months tour that we’re in the middle of right now, and then we’re going to take a break. We got like 4 or 5 summer festivals coming up in August, and apart from that there’s not going to be much more in the summer. Then we’re going to take a good 3 month break because we all have loans to pay off and shit, so we need to work. Hopefully we’ll be back in the U.S. from November to December. This should be confirmed with us next week, but I can’t really say anything about it right now. It’s like a bigger tour that we’re going to be doing. [This turned out to be a European tour with Opeth and Cynic for November and December. – Ed.]
As support?
Support, yeah. So yeah that’s what’s happening, and then after that we’re doing another big European headlining tour in December and then we’ll see what happens after that. I don’t really see another Ocean album in 2009. I think there’s a lot more touring to be done for Precambrian. I think a lot of people who would be into us don’t know about us yet, so we should definitely try to play some big support tours, and that is what we’re trying to do.
We actually listened to Precambrian together for our first time. We were like “where the hell did this. . .” We were stoned out of our minds. We were like “Wow”.
Awesome. Cool, thanks man. Yeah, I think we’re going to spend the better part of next year on the road as well and then maybe the year after that record. We just released a double album that is almost 90 minutes of music. We’re not trying to stick to the typical album cycle and release the next album a year later.
Any last words you want to tell the American people?
I really suck at that.
[Laughter]
Just come watch us live.
That’s pretty good.
Nothing beyond that. If you have a chance, come check us out live on this tour. It would be awesome to do that. I think it’s a really different experience in a live environment than on record because there are certain parts that . . . everything that is there on record is also there live, but not the other way around. Like we have a light show and usually visuals which we couldn’t have on this tour because there were never any projectors which kind of sucks, but I think it adds a different quality to the music that you can’t get when you’re just listening to the albums. That’s why I think everybody who has the chance to really check it out live . . . yeah.
– VN & KW
[Precambrian is out now on Metal Blade Records. Visit The Ocean on MySpace]
