As Norwegian techno-industri-metal guru Mortiis once again defies those who said it could never be done with his latest album THE GRUDGE it becomes clear that he is not to be taken lightly. His last album, The Smell of Rain, marked his transformation from a wildly vampiric industrial venturer to an artistically creative presence who is clearly heading for something bigger than the both of us in terms of making unique music that gives one something to think about. The Grudge carries us another step beyond its predecessor in terms of production and listenability, and it is highly evident that experimentation cloned with what just plain WORKS is what makes this album a milestone in it’s genre.
Of course albums like these always invoke an endless stream of questions in people like me, both pertaining to the lyrical content and the technical aspects of it’s making. Here you will find some exquisite grooves and sordid beats all painstakingly manipulated to create feeling and depth, sort of like Marilyn Manson or NIN, only not so commercially geared.
I decided to put out some inquiries regarding an interview with the man himself, and before I knew it I was chatting on the phone with Mortiis, who called me from his home in Norway. I had an idea what this record was about from a previous interview I did with him about a year ago, but as it turns out this record went much further than I, and probably even Mortiis, could imagine.
Mortiis kindly takes us through the making of The Grudge, and in the process explains much of the ideas and many of the technical processes involved with this record.
BOB: Pretty damn good. I have been listening to your new record and am kind of excited to talk to you. This is really good stuff!
MORTIIS: You are covering two publications as well? Wow, that is like two flies in one smack!
BOB: Yeah, and possibly three flies because I also contribute to a third one in the Eastern USA.
MORTIIS: That is great. Yeah, in my history not all fans of metal appreciate what I am doing. It is cool when I can prove them wrong, you know.
BOB: Well, you seem to have broken new ground once again with this one. There is a depth and wideness to the tunes and even some experimentation seems to be involved.
MORTIIS: Well what can I say? I am the best. No, I guess I agree. I mean it’s been quite a while since the last record, and I think it would have been a massive failure if I hadn’t progressed in various ways as far as songwriting goes, and sonically which I guess you were referring to and stuff like that, so cool. I’m glad people noticed that.
BOB: This album, THE GRUDGE, seems to follow a train of thought and for all practical purposes could be called a concept album, although I hate to give it a moniker like that. But the songs do seem to flow together and I thought it might be cool to have you go through the songs and get your immediate thoughts on each one, and if there are any thoughts or memories these songs bring out, either in subject manner or in production, you could discuss them here.
MORTIIS: Sure, go ahead man.
BOB: Okay then, we will start with the opener to the record, which is called Broken Skin.
MORTIIS: You know, one thing I do when I’m done with an album is move away from it, so I’m not even sure in what fucking order the songs are. Broken Skin is one of the first songs that I wrote for this album, and I think I just got carried away with introducing new sounds into it. It kind of turned into a guinea pig in the respect that I used that song to try to figure out some things, like using loops and things like that which I hadn’t done before. That is why it has got some strange breaks in between, if you know what I mean.
BOB: Yeah, there is one spot where it quiets down and there is a dark vocal bit, which I thought sounded cool and kind of eerie.
MORTIIS: Oh, that part where it quiets down and there is a dark ambient piece with a distorted vocal piece in the background? Actually that was taped, the stuff that is being said there, and it is not very nice what I am saying there, I can tell you that. It is directed at a certain person. We did that when we were on tour, and I think it was in France and we had to cancel a date because it was a holiday, so we had the day off. They are strange over there. We were hanging around the bus and were fucking around with this walkie-talkie system the road manager had on the bus for communication, in case we are in a big building and we don’t have a cell phone to talk back and forth. So I took one of them and Levy the guitar player took the other one and we had some kind of recording device in between. I started screaming into one of them and it came out the other end, and he taped it. I started screaming out these very abusive things in English, and we are Norwegian, and we taped it. After I got home and I put it into my computer and I thought, wow, this is fucking hateful. So a lot of that stuff got used, and some is on Broken Skin. In the background there is the abusive voice saying shitty things, which was me. I think we had some screams too. I think people that were walking past the bus must have thought someone was being killed in there because I started just screaming, and it came out on his end all distorted, like someone screaming like a motherfucker over the phone, all distorted and shit, and started taping that. It has that static sort of distorted feeling to it. I think some of that was used on Desperate too. If you know which one I mean, there is a backwards scream that is looping over and over through the song. That is also from the same “session”. The famous Abusive Hate Sessions in France. Other than that, Broken Skin was the guinea pig for a lot of things, so I never stopped working on it. That’s why it is so schitzo in a way and changes all the time. It doesn’t really have a consistent pattern like the other songs. I’m not saying it is a bad thing, but rather that it is an experimental project. We ended up with two hundred tracks to mix with that song, and it was like fucking hell. The mixer we used only had sixty four, so we mixed everything down into groups until we could handle it straight from the mixer. It just got a little bit insane.
BOB: But those things become an education, the experimentation and stuff is never for naught, you know. There is always a purpose, and that is to come up with something unique and different.
MORTIIS: Absolutely. And I liked the song. I like it enough to be the opening for our upcoming European Tour.
BOB: Yes, it is a good opener for the record too! Next on the album is Way Too Wicked.
MORTIIS: Way Too Wicked is also one of the earlier songs, and it is a very personal song lyrically. There is a lot of frustration going on there. I used to call it the Motorhead Song in its earlier stages because it has some really naïve kind of riffing, very simple. But then we started dubbing a lot of guitars on top of each other, so it just became this really massive thing in certain places. We had a lot of fun in the studio doing that. We tracked the basics first, and then we just kind of started “wow, let’s do this”, and it just started becoming really creative, which was great. We also did a lot of weird vocal things, but not a lot of those really came out in the final mix. It is one of those songs that I hope to get a chance to remix, because I want to bring out some of the things in the song that you can’t really hear so good right now. We did a lot of weird kind of voice effects. I was singing the same stuff at different pitches and just kind of cut into it in places, and it gets really psycho. I guess people like Manson have done that quite a lot, and we just said fuck it. It kind of fits with the song, and he doesn’t have a fucking trademark on the technique. Besides, others have done it before him anyway. So we just went ahead and did that stuff, and a lot of that stuff was never really used, and if I get a chance I will remix it and I am pretty sure I can bring out some of that stuff that most people don’t actually realize is there. It is one of those multi-lyric songs. I mean they are all like that, but I know for a fact now that I am reminded that that song has some really weird vocal stuff.
BOB: That would be well worth the time to maybe do a mini-cd of these remixes.
MORTIIS: Absolutely. I love the idea of remixing stuff, and I actually did it on a single for The Grudge over here, which came out and sold out over here in about a week. It was one of those things to get into the charts in the UK to create more hype for the album, which it did. It came in at 42, and I think it was at 51 at the end of the week, which is what really counts. We were really happy about that. Nobody expected Mortiis to be in the fucking charts, you know. Everybody seemed to be making fun of what I do, and now we are in the charts, so fuck you! He who laughs last. That is like the big morale booster this week. So that was cool, and a slight ego boost and it’s one of those things, like my label manager said, “I just can’t wait to put this news on Blabbermouth”, because at Blabbermouth they are just a bunch of fucking pricks. Trust me, I know they fucking are because I have seen what they say about my band, and I think, “Fuck you guys”. They base everything they say on rumors and pictures that are ten years old, and that is kind of pathetic. It is those kinds of people that you really enjoy rubbing it in their faces.
BOB: Yeah, they are too quick to speak on something without having the whole story on something, and it is all just sensationalism. That puts them right about equal with The Tattler or National Enquirer.
MORTIIS: I think really we are all like that. We take the few facts we do know and work with it, and I guess basically we are all assholes in a way. It is human nature to be a prick, but some of us have the backbone to admit that, and some of us have the self discipline to not throw the shit too far. It is the big strong man behind the big safe screen, because nobody can ever get him. He doesn’t even use his real name. So there you go, that is bravery for you.
BOB: The Grudge. The title track, and a pretty big song as well.
MORTIIS: Well, The Grudge was the first song that I wrote for this album. I wrote that pretty quickly after The Smell of Rain, the previous album. Then pretty soon after that I kind of started messing around with that riff that goes on through the entire song, and I thought it would be kind of a cool riff. Then I put a little front beat over it and it started to kind of groove a little bit, and I thought, “well cool”. So that had been laying around for a long time and I didn’t actually pick it up and really start to work seriously on it until early 2003, which was when I started looking more closely at things, and I guess that was when work started on the album. Before that it was just basically nothing but collecting some musical ideas, and basically focusing on rehearsing the band and getting the band together and all that. It wasn’t so much about the new music.
BOB: Yeah, last year I had talked to you when The Smell of Rain had been released, and I had asked you if you were looking ahead to the next album, and that must have been at this point of involvement.
MORTIIS: Yeah, I’m sure when I talked with you then I had a very embryonic version of songs like The Grudge, Broken Skin perhaps, and Way Too Wicked. Those are all kind of early songs, and are what started this album off. I don’t remember when it was we spoke- no offense- but if you inquired about future stuff, then that would be these songs.
BOB: No offense taken. It was about a year and a half ago. I have to say that you are much happier now than then. I think you were in between trying to assemble a new band and working the last album and trying to get some touring going.
MORTIIS: Yeah, at that time I think I had a lot more negativity on my mind. I had a lot more at stake at that point. Well maybe not at stake, but I really didn’t have what I wanted. Now I have a lot more of what I want. I still don’t have everything that I wanted. If I did I would be living in a much bigger and nicer house! Of course that is not the big reason that I am doing this though, but if we are going to talk about what I want, then yeah, sure. But I am a lot happier of a person and more fulfilled. I feel that I have made a lot of progress over the last few years on several levels. You know, like getting the right band together and playing more live. I think that is what I was missing in the nineties because I was doing all of my weird stuff. Subconsciously I think something just clicked and wow- I am back home where I should have been a long time ago. We worked hard for it and we rehearsed a lot. It also took some guidance on my part to say “hey, these are the bands I am inspired by, so check them out and listen to them. I am not going to want to hear any Rammstien riffs really”, which is very easy for them to think that way if you tell them you want to create industrial rock. Imagine telling a new member that and having them play fucking Rammstien riffs at you. It’s not that I have a problem with Rammstien, but that is just not what I want to do. I kind of feel that it is redundant.
BOB: Besides, you have your own thing with a rather unique approach, and it’s far more creative than programmed, and I can see why the thought of confusing it with Rammstien would be kind of insulting to your own music.
MORTIIS: Well, my big theory about Rammstien actually is if it hadn’t been for Ministry and Laibach, that band probably wouldn’t sound like Rammstien today. I mean if you listen to Laibach and stuff like that, it is just a vocalist in a militaristic kind of performance. There are a lot of parallels, but you know I am not trying to say that in a bad way man because I am ripping people off too in that respect, and I am not going to pretend that I am some big holy “I made it all up on my own”- type of guy, because I am not.
BOB: Everyone gets inspiration from somewhere, and it is usually from the bands they listened to that made an impression on them and inspired them to make music. You can call it ripping the artist off or you can consider it a tribute to the artist they love. Either way, there is not a musician on the planet who didn’t do either of those things. And to deny it would be insane.
MORTIIS: Yeah, it would be a big fat lie. Shall we move on?
BOB: Yes. Decadent And Desperate.
MORTIIS: Yes, that song has an ancient lyric of mine. The original lyric for that one was actually written in...fuck…back in 1998 I think. It was originally intended for a different project that I wanted to start back in the nineties, which would have been more rock oriented, but thankfully never happened because I had no idea what the fuck I was doing at the time and it would have been a big stain on my record. But the lyrics came out at that point and it wasn’t called Decadent and Desperate. It was called something else, Crack Hotel or something like that. But it was inspired when I was in San Francisco for a couple weeks and we lived in a pretty shitty area where there were a lot of crack addicts and it was just ugly to watch. It inspired me to write a lyric like that, and maybe it makes me a little bit of a hypocrite that I never did that myself, yet I sing as if I did. To me it is really a moral kind of a lyric, like why are they doing this shit? Do you know what I mean? So that is really unlike me in a way, but at the same time it kind of rings true because I feel that way. I mean I think it is disgusting that people suck cock for five bucks or whatever so they can get another crack rock.
BOB: Yes, there is a terrible sadness within all of that.
MORTIIS: Yes, it is just fucking tragic. So I figured just fuck it, man. I am just going to go with these lyrics. And the song was kind of inspired by Mr. Selfless Destructing kind of Prodigy, if that makes sense to you. Mr. Self Destruct by Nine Inch Nails. I mean the chorus is basically to just scream the title, then back to verse. But the programming was inspired more by Prodigy, with the great beat singing that goes on there and things like that. So I liked the way they just blended together and it just started to sound sort of special. I was really happy with the way it came out. We did a lot of weird time stretching on certain vocals, and I actually took out some of the individual audio tracks because I am doing some stuff to my website with some effects from the album and stuff.
BOB: Oh, like when you click on a page it makes a “kajing” sound?
MORTIIS: Yeah, that kind of thing. I am not sure when it will be ready because every time I start something I make it a lot more of a big deal than it really should be. I just can’t stop fucking around with it I guess. I am animalistic. But I took out a lot of the sounds from Decadence, and I was just kind of surprised at how dirty and low-fi everything was, but the song really reflects that if you really listen to it.
BOB: I noticed that all through the record there are these splatters of beautiful distortion that is so dirty it is clean, like it was really worked over in programming.
MORTIIS: Oh, everything there has its purpose. It’s not like it got dirty by accident. That would have been a pretty big disaster, like trying to record a clean sounding Pink Floyd album and it comes out sounding like a fucking fifties recording, you know. We would be, like, what went wrong? No, I might confine myself, but it is all planned, especially with that song. But I think subconsciously what makes the entire album is the subtle dirtiness of the thing, and I don’t think I realized until now how much I really worked to make things sound so dirty. Almost everything went through some kind of distortion or process.
BOB: Yeah, and it is very effective, especially like on Broken Skin. At the beginning it starts with this mellow groove kind of a thing, and then it erupts with this big blast of “ksshhhht”, like a massive guitar sound.
MORTIIS: Yeah, that is guitars layered up with five or six synths, which were basically sixty percent white noise. I fucking love that. They are so powerful. They only seem to work in “stabs” because if you use it too much it is kind of irritating. But in stabs like that where you get a short burst, that is great.
BOB: Yep, that is making dynamics work for you.
MORTIIS: Exactly.
BOB: The Worst in Me comes next.
MORTIIS: The Worst in Me…that is where we sampled seventies drummers basically, and we created our own beats within the old sounds. I think on this song is where I begin to get more experimental, because this is not a song I would have ever made back in the Smell Of Rain days. It is kind of long and it just kind of grooves along on it’s own. The lyrics are kind of negative, and I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote them, but I’m glad I got that shit out of my system. It is really fucking bleak, but it is those kind of emotions that I vented on this whole album and that is probably why I sound much happier now. When you carry that kind of weight around trust me, it is not a good thing. It is really self-destroying. I still have a little bit of that in me and I don’t think it will ever go away. I still have that nagging feeling of self doubt which has always been my big nemesis anyway. I don’t know why that is.
BOB: I think everyone does to some extent and they deal with it in many different ways. I think you are lucky to have this as an outlet for those feelings.
MORTIIS: Yeah, thank god I am not a mailman! I don’t know what I would have done. But then again if I had a different profession maybe I wouldn’t have had a lot of those kinds of feelings. I think I met a lot of people who kind of fucked me around because of the industry I am in.
BOB: Well it is a tough one to be in. Here we live in a society where the Britney Spears are taking the flag to the finish line when it really shouldn’t be that way. And then the multitudes of really good bands that aren’t going anywhere due to lack of funding, support, and radio play.
MORTIIS Oh, that is really horrible. And getting radio attention can take a real long time.
BOB: Gibber.
MORTIIS: Gibber. That is a song that I half expected Al Jourgensen to call me and tell me I ripped them off. But the actual gospel truth is in the very early stages when I was writing that song I was like, okay, I know this is a total fucking rip off. This is Jesus Built My Hotrod in a different format. And it was always on purpose because I decided I want to do this. I love Ministry, and I am not going to deny that I am super inspired by this song. To me it is like a tribute more than anything else. I mean I wrote this song and I am proud of it because I think it really works. I think it is a great fucking song and I love playing it, and I think we are doing things on there that are way differently than what Ministry would have done. For example the way I sing. I have never heard Al sing in an extremely non-aggressive way since albums like Twitch, if you are familiar with that album. Like from before they started using heavy guitars anyway. Twitch was a great album but if you want to compare it with newer Ministry it doesn’t even come close. That’s natural evolution for you. The lyrics are kind of socially absurd and really remind me of Parasite God, and the way I was thinking at that time. Basically how society within society chooses to look at people differently and judge them the way they see fit, even though they preach something differently, or officially try too seem not to be intolerant when in reality they really are. Like they don’t want to face up to the fact that not everyone is like them and they can’t deal with that. I think basically that is what that song is about lyrically. In the chorus I like what I am singing. You know I am part of you and you can’t face up to it, you want me dead- you want me gone, but there is nothing you can do, and stuff like that. That is kind of great because I am here, I’m in your fucking face, you can’t stand who I fucking am and you think I am going to burn in fucking hell. But at the same time you preach all this powerless bullshit. So obviously it is directed towards religious people mainly, but not necessarily ONLY them. It also goes towards society too because society has a tendency to kind of throw you out if you are not like the rest of them.
BOB: That is so true, and it is not restricted only to religion at all.
MORTIIS: Not at all, it’s just that in religion they are really divisible and just come right out and say it. I saw this program about two weeks ago about this bishop who was gay, and he had the courage to stand up and say he was gay. So a lot of people accepted that within his Christian community but a lot of other people condemned it and were really getting aggressive about it. This is a good example because they don’t accept that you are gay for some reason, like it is god’s punishment or something. Or like, “What? It’s a birth defect, isn’t it?”. I believe medically that’s what it is. It is just something about chromosomes being too much or too little, which makes your sexual preferences abnormal, or whatever you want to call it. And you can’t come down here and say it is medically proven that the devil or god made you that way, and that would mean that you are a demon or you are a fucking sinner or whatever. Yeah, hey- good going. That is using your brain right there. God dammit, man, go and watch Bill Hicks. Have you heard about him?
BOB: No.
MORTIIS: I have seen one stand-up show he has done. He is like a comedian but he seems to be so anti-christian, and he had this great comment. I’m not even sure if it is related to what I am saying, but I am going to say it anyway. He was relaying how people keep telling him, “Hey Bill- you have to stop going off on the christians. It’s getting old, so just stop it, okay?” And he says, “I will stop it if you stop talking about Jesus Christ, because that is getting old too”. I thought that was kind of funny. And then he said something about that they don’t believe in the dinosaurs. Then explain the fucking dinosaurs. The bible doesn’t mention the dinosaurs, and that is kind of interesting, isn’t it? The Old Testament goes all the way back to day fucking one, even before day one actually, and where are the fucking dinosaurs? He has a pretty good point, doesn’t he?
BOB: Definitely. I have a friend that I am going to bring that up with.
MORTIIS: Yes, please explain the huge dipodophus skeleton that is sixty feet long that they just found out in the desert. What was that? Somebody’s fucking cat? I don’t think so, man. Explain megalodon, the biggest motherfucking shark that ever swam the seas, which is three times bigger than the great white shark today. They will say that god put them there to test our faith. Yeah, sure. Yeah, he did that for millions and millions of years, just to test us. That is some fucking patience. That doesn’t really pertain to what I was saying, but rather underlines their stupidity when it comes to what they believe in anyway.
BOB: It is gross ignorance. And the assumptions that everyone will swallow this story down the road.
MORTIIS: Gross ignorance. Absolutely, and it is fucking scary. People always need someone to hold their hands. It is uncertainty and they don’t know what they want and generation after generation and some inbreeding in some states down in the south, they are being spoon-fed the bible from day one. What can you do? You have to forgive them because it is the only thing they know, walking around with a bible in their hands since they are three years old.
BOB: I believe that there is some good in religion, especially in the old and infirm where that might be all they have to keep them going. But I draw the line when they try to cram their beliefs down the throats of those who are not into it.
MORTIIS: That’s when it stops being funny. That is when the good stuff ends and it becomes a little bit annoying.
BOB: The Loneliest Thing.
MORTIIS: Oh, I’m sorry. I tend to get off on a tangent. The Loneliest Thing is about a person that inspired me. I am going to protect the identity of this person even though she doesn’t deserve it. It was just an incident of hers a few years back that just turned out to be a massive fucking drama. I tried to get out of it, but got sucked into some pretty stupid situations. It involved AIDS and shit. I don’t have it, but for a while I thought I did. It was evil times. I should be Motley Crue. I’ve done all of that shit. No, not that bad. Have you read the book?
BOB: No.
MORTIIS: You have to man. The dirt is wild. I’ve read it twice. It made the Manson book almost nice compared to it. I was kind of inspired by the whole thing. What really happened was that I think I ran into a person that wanted to buy herself a new life through someone else and kind of get away from her own misery. Now that is kind of okay, it turned really ugly when I put my foot down and said I don’t really want to be a part of this anymore, and I want to go somewhere else now. It went from love from her side to scary fucking hatred very quickly, with spite I have never witnessed the likeness of before. It just got intense, and I was sort of surprised at how the tables turned in regard to emotions and positive becomes negative actually. So it inspired me how I apparently fell from grace because I wanted to put my own life in order and clean shit up, and it just totally blew up. That was about ninety percent of the inspiration for the song. The other ten percent would be other people that I have come across that are also kind of disillusioned, and maybe they didn’t even know it but they are being kind of parasitic, kind of leaching. Not necessarily meaning to do it, but they are doing it. That inspired the lyrics, and as for the music itself it really came from something quite simple. It was just a couple sounds I had started with and began adding sounds to it. Soon I found myself adding a lot of organic sounding sounds to it through the first half. There are some ethnical kinds of sounds as well, and sound designs where I would use a lot of different voices and morphing with other sounds. Then it just kind of goes off into this whole Miami Vice type of synth sound, if you know what I mean, in the middle of the song. I thought, Man, I love this. What is going on here? Then it goes back into the first part, only with some really heavy retro guitar riffs and different kind of drumming. It was a really funny type of song and I really enjoyed working on it because it all just seemed to work out well. Not every song I have done has been so easy to work with. I think songs like Decadent and Desperate I had more problems getting together, believe it or not, even though it sounds much simpler, than I had getting The Loneliest Thing together for some fucking reason I can’t explain.
BOB: That is the nature of the beast. Some songs can come very easily, as if the song wrote itself, and other times it takes much working of a song before it evolves into what it should be.
MORTIIS: Yes, that’s just the way it is. Sometimes you know what you want but you don’t know how to do it. That is always kind of my big problem because I attempt to discover other bands that are doing other things, and I want to incorporate that into what I am doing but I won’t know how to achieve the sound that the band got, and that always bums me out and I have to sit down and figure it out. And every time I listen to someone like Peter Gabriel I just get so frustrated because I think sonically he has an extremely interesting sound picture, so to speak. I am real impressed by that guy. And even the Chemical Brothers I have only recently started to realize that they absolutely fucking amazing, the way that they manipulate different beats. That is something I have started to get into to a certain degree, kind of lifting off sounds from other records or sample CDs, finding vintage drum sounds and combining them to make new beats and grooves and stuff. I am really new at that stuff, but I am really getting into it.
BOB: Yes, I can see in places on The Grudge that there are some manipulated beats that are very evident that you took some time to perfect.
MORTIIS: I really appreciate that. I think I can do a lot better, and obviously we will but I think it is a pretty good start. In a nutshell, the principle of just working on it basically is part of the reason this record took such a long time to make. It was three years. Not that we worked solid that whole time, but it came three years after the last record. I could have done it in two but I just said “Fuck it, I am going to do this properly”.
BOB: Okay, now the next one is Le Petit Cochon Sordide…
MORTIIS: That means dirty little pig in French. That is some useful information for you. Next time you are in a bar and you don’t like somebody, just say to them “le petit cochon sordid!” You can yell it at people all day really. You can bet somebody there deserves it.
I think on that song I kind of wanted to go for more of a soundtrack kind of feeling, you know, with the synths and the drumming and all that. You know the action sound in the movies. I like that stuff in a way, and I thought I should do something like that, and then sing on top of that, which I did, and it just worked out. The lyric there are about a person that I absolutely fucking loathe with my whole heart.
BOB: Whom shall also remain anonymous?
MORTIIS: Yeah, probably the best. This is what I have been telling journalists for about the last three weeks or so. I will tell them that this or that song, if they ask specifics instead of questions, that this song is about that person or handful of people or whatever. But I think I would be some very low or unethical person if I started dropping names of these people. It just doesn’t belong in my genre. I am here to talk about the music. I have no problem talking about what inspires me but I am not going to come across like a politician and say that this or that person is a bastard. If these are just people in other bands that are pricks, then fine, you can start name dropping. But these are just private people who are not even related to the music business. Why would I want to put Mr. or Mrs. X out in the scene like that? Even though I should. But I made a whole fucking record at their expense, so I have had my revenge. If I actually make money from this, then my revenge will be even sweeter. I slag you off, and I get paid for it.
BOB: Wow, it just doesn’t get much better than that!
MORTIIS: That song was written entirely in the studio, because the original song WAS called Dirty Little Pig. I decided to put it in French because the pig reference comes along pretty often in my records and it just begins to smell a little too much like Nine Inch thematically. I think we were going to do it in German at one point, but decided to go with French. We knew that we would be answering to it for years to come and I was right. It has begun. Don’t think you are the first. The original Dirty Little Pig was on a demo I had been carrying around and I thought it was useless shit. I thought “we can’t work with this, it is awful”. Total shite. Bollocks. Then I started messing around with it a bit and came up with this riff, like a Rob Zombie sort of thing and I thought this is pretty heavy, so let’s work with this. Everything kind of revolves around that riff and it is pretty simple but I guess it is the simpler songs that work the best. Le Petit was also one of the last songs written for the album too. It has its own feel, and in fact that one we are rehearsing for the setlist on tour. It will be the last song of the show because it is definitely one of the coolest songs to play, although we seem to play it differently every time.
BOB: The last song is Asthma.
MORTIIS: That is short for Ass Mama. (Laughs) I just made that up right now. I decided to call it that because it is an instrumental and if you listen closely there is this loop in the background that sounds like breathing with asthma. It is pretty low in the mix, but I know it is there because I put it there. I also thought it would be funny because I am an asthmatic myself. It just showed up about ten years ago and I couldn’t breathe. Weird. And it is worse in the winter, which is hard because I live in Norway.
But I put it in there because it is a moody song and finishes up the record on a note of mystery.
BOB: Well all of your preparation and planning has really paid off well for you and your fans, because this album is definitely the next step in what I imaging will become a very successful project for you, and you should be very proud of it.
MORTIIS: I am proud. Of course I wonder something, and that is why every time I make a record some Hollywood moguls decide to make a movie with the same name. It happens to me a lot, ever since Stargate. Now there is The Grudge, and I can’t figure it out.
BOB: Wow, yeah!
Anyway, thanks for taking all this time with me to go over the record, and I look forward to seeing your band tour the USA. I will make it a point to stop in and say hello when you get to Portland.
MORTIIS: Please do.
