Interviews

I wanted to start off by talking about the latest album Chaosborn. What sort of significance or meaning does the title have?
The meaning of Chaosborn is like the whole concept of the album because all of the lyrics are concerned about chaos from different views...from the mind view and from the real life view. We handle this chaos globally but don’t get me wrong; we are not political by any means. A good example is how the world is now with the US striking Iraq, so everything is full of chaos. I think that was quite a good concept to start because earlier we had a 4-album contract and now we have renewed our contract with Massacre records so we started kind of a new concept for the next three albums. And it all starts with the chaos and how the chaos was born.

Have you gotten a good response so far?
The response has been really great. Every review and interview has been just great. An example is how the previous album has gotten really good reviews but now the reviews are much better. This is quite funny because in Europe there is not really a lot of interviews and reviews at the moment but there are actually a lot from South America, Middle East and Ukraine, which has been really great.

What about America?
Only about three people but they have really liked the album.

This is the first album in some time for Catamenia to have a full Finnish track on it. I was wondering what the translation of the song title was and some of the meaning of the lyrics?
Kuolon Tansi is like a dance of death and this is the song that starts the whole chaos….as you can see it starts with the dance of death. I think that the lyrics of this song carries on throughout the whole album till the very end of Chaosborn.... it is like a summoning for the chaos to come.

What is the reasoning behind writing the lyrics in Finnish?
First we tried to write all of the lyrics in English on the song but it did not quite fit...to be honest it was actually quite funny (both of us laugh). We translated the Finnish lyrics straight to English, it did not work and the pronunciation and rhymes were much better in Finnish. Of course we had a lot of requests asking for Finnish lyrics so we said OK, why not? We had a song on the Morning Crimson album with Finnish lyrics so this is not the first one.

I believe this also your first album back with a six-piece line-up. Is it harder to write material with more members or does it not make a difference?
I would say that it is not harder with 4 or 6 members because I write every song and together on the rehearsal we fine-tune everything. I think it is easier at times with more members because we can realize what is wrong with the songs because there is many opinions on each song. So it is kind of easier with more members and at the same time there is too many people talking at once and that kind of sucks but we can manage with 6 members.

Is there a lot of head butting when it comes to writing material?
It goes very smoothly. We have had a few fights but it has not been during rehearsals, it has been before going to the bar or when we have had too much to drink (Both of us laugh). But not in the rehearsals or during the songwriting-there has not been any fights.

There were two guest vocalists on Chaosborn. Did Wartechs sing any of the clean vocals on this album?
No, he didn’t because from touring to recording he had so many things to do. He visited a lot in Sweden and came to recordings and just played guitar and he did not have time to sing. At that time of course he had a really bad case of the flu and his voice was just awful (laughs). I knew that one of the producers (Kakke Vähäkuopus) had a really great voice and I just said to him that it was his time to go to the singing booth and you will be on this disc. The female vocals were done by Essi and she is an old friend and we tried her on my second band and I knew that she could sing really well. So why not have her on this album?

Definitely, what is the name of your other band?
It is called Unwrap and our drummer Veikko ‘Moottorisaha’ Jumisko and guitarist Ari ‘WarTechs’ Nissilä are also on it.

I will have to check that out, I have not heard of the band yet.
Well we have just recorded the album but it is not out yet.

When is it going to be released?
I think it will be postponed a little bit because we have to record it again because we have really great ideas so we thought it would be better to record the whole album again.

That makes sense, are you just not happy with the way it sounded?
Yes, I am happy with it but we will be happier with it when the album is recorded again! (Both of us laugh) We have a few samples on the net and they are from the four-song promo that we made a year and a half ago but the music is quite the same.