Gazpacho: Music That Reaches Where No Words Can
“Caved in myself, paper tower, star ask… Light born, lifeboat sailor,” Jan-Henrik Ohme of Norwegian atmospheric rock six-piece GAZPACHO kicks off what is the group’s eleventh studio album in seventeen years. Fireworker arrived on September 18th via Kscope, and it feels like the most personal GAZPACHO album by far, serving as a tribute to band members’ personalities while capturing their journey as a very prolific outfit over the last two decades.
“It is definitely the most personal album as we decided to dive right into the material and stop worrying what anyone would think of us and it,” keyboardist Thomas Andersen admits. “We have been doing that all along but in the beginning, there was always a sense of ‘is this too complicated’ or ‘will people get this’, but in the end, we just started letting the songs and the subject dictate what they wanted and the rest came naturally. As musicians, we develop all the time and as we have been GAZPACHO-ing for so long we have a natural way of knowing what kind of instrumental work a GAZPACHO song needs. It flows very naturally these days.”
Fireworker was born from the idea that at the deepest level we are all controlled by the life-force that has reproduced successfully since the origin of life and resides in us for the short duration of our lives. Andersen goes on saying, “as it has survived and made it all the way up to the present we believe that this probably is something stronger and harder than we like to think and that our belief in our control of our actions and our free will is an illusion.”
GAZPACHO’s idea was to make an album where the listener could enter into his or her own mind and try to confront the idea of this thing and see how much hold it has over their daily actions and strongly held beliefs. “Also an exploration of what you think is important versus what it thinks is important is an interesting exercise and probably a very healthy one,” Andersen says. “As it probably (who really knows?) is more ‘animal-like’ than what we think of as human, maybe music is a way to reach the parts of the mind that words can not and make this a safer way of exploring this very dangerous entity.”
The creative process for Fireworker hasn’t changed a lot comparing with GAZPACHO‘s previous albums, but it certainly differed from the rest of the group’s large body of work. As Thomas says, “all our albums have been written the same way as we start with the music and let the concept form itself during the year or two of writing the album. Once the concept is clear we usually rewrite and rearrange the music to create the finished album. With Fireworker the process was somewhat different as we originally started out trying to write about Henrik Ibsen’s play Little Eyolf but abandoned that idea once we realised that we weren’t adding anything to it that Ibsen hadn’t already done a thousand times better! The raw force of the sexuality and hatred in the parents of Eyolf – which I encourage everyone to read as it is a masterpiece – got us thinking about the force of sexuality and aggression, and how it makes us do things that go against our wishes and interest. This was the first time the idea of the thing that chemically controls our brain was born and it grew from there into the monster it became.”
On Fireworker GAZPACHO tackle themes that most of us can relate to just by letting life does its thing. Andersen comments, “Space Cowboy is about exploring the mind and setting off into the darkness. The mind is visualised as a cave system so vast that it can not be mapped, and somewhere in there the ‘animal/fireworker’ lives like a dragon in its lair. The choirs are the collected voices of the consciousness trying to warn the main character not to go any further into the cave as it is a dangerous place. It was very much inspired by long time nuclear waste warning messages as they were written to be understandable for later and maybe more primitive people and seem to mirror the way our legends, folk stories, fairy tales, and religious texts work. All of these seem to communicate to deeper parts of the mind.”
About songs that come after the opening monster, Andersen follows up by saying, “Hourglass is the song of the ghosts of the billions of creatures who contributed to the DNA inside us and how they were all used by the Fireworker through natural selection to better itself. Fireworker, the song, is a nod to how it seems that older cultures and religions knew about this creature and in this case, he is portrayed as Papa Legba, a Haitian Vodoo intermediary between God and humanity or in our case here, the Fireworker and the consciousness. It is also meant to be a bit of fun and we must not forget that the Fireworker within us is part of what makes us exciting as people. How boring would we be without our crazy sex schemes and power games and general stupidity?
“Antique is about the total loss involved in accepting that we do not have any control over ourselves and our actions. We are only floating downstream in the river that doesn’t end, pawns in the self-improvement scheme of something else. It hints that our lives are wasted serving this ‘something else.’ Sapien is the final meeting with the Fireworker itself and is a discussion on how it is impossible to live without it. In the song, it mentions how it was the Fireworker who provided the strength, the character needed at key moments in his life. It also finishes saying that what we see as our identity means nothing to the Fireworker who has no concept of shame or even a name.”
Fireworker is GAZPACHO’s 11th studio album since 2003 what certainly speaks a lot about how creative you are. What is the most important thing for you as musicians and as a collective when it comes to creative renewal between the records?
Thomas Andersen: As long as the songs are allowed to be what they want to be, creativity takes care of itself. I am always scared to think too deeply about where it comes from as it might go away like a shy animal. I must say however that since 2003 with the advent of streaming platforms, such as Spotify, access to interesting music from all over the world has exploded and it is a boost to the system to hear it all.
I used to trawl Napster for albums like “Nomadic tribal chanting of Canadian tribes” but as I am sure you can imagine it was slim pickings! Now it is a different world. Also, as my daughter is 13, I hear a lot of newer music that I would never seek out and listen to such as Kpop (horrible) and similar generic pop. All is good meat for the pot.
What evolution do you feel Fireworker represents comparing with your previous works?
Thomas: It is a more mature work. It has the confidence that we now know what we are doing and why and we don’t really care how it is received. At least not when we are making it. Only after the master is out of the house do we start to worry. Fireworker is also, maybe, the best incarnation of the original idea for the music of GAZPACHO which was to see how MARILLION would sound if they took a more eclectic road and added a KATE BUSH-ian feeling to it.
What were the biggest challenges you faced when working on Fireworker? How did you go about overcoming them?
Thomas: The biggest challenge is always to keep the full picture of the album in mind while working on the thousands of small details in the sound landscapes. I have found that the key to doing this is listening to the songs in their entirety while heavily drunk on small speakers. That sounds like a joke but isn’t as you tend to go a little crazy while mixing. I remember hearing BILLIE JEAN during the mixing phase and feeling that the shaker on the song was unbearably loud and unpleasant. Now when I am back to normal I don’t think about it anymore and fully admit that it is mixed by one of the greats. [laughs]
The European tour in support of the new album has been rescheduled for October next year. With the conditions surrounding this global pandemic in mind, what are your plans when it comes to promoting the new album?
Thomas: We will do a livestream playing the album in its entirety, plus a couple of golden oldies, sometime in November. The tour next year might be a better idea as the audience will have had the time to get to know this rather complicated album.
GAZPACHO’s music is far from being predictable, and it surely requires a lot of effort in order to make it work out. Given the difficult economics of the world of music today, how do you make such ambitious projects a reality?
Thomas: We all make our money elsewhere so we have no need to benefit financially from the GAZPACHO music. We never have and as a consequence have always enjoyed total artistic freedom. It’s the only way to do this stuff.
Fireworker is out now via Kscope.
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