The Ocean Part I
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The Ocean is an altogether unique German band that boasts so many members they call themselves a “collective.” In case you’re unaware, their newest record, Precambrian, came out in late November, and blows much of 2007’s “Top Ten” contenders out of the water, so to speak. The album combines elements of heavy hardcore, death metal, prog, atmospheric metal and so many other genres that convenient tags are plainly inadequate. On Precambrian, The Ocean take the term “concept album” to new heights, and with any justice, will be the next big thing. Blistering recently got the chance to chat with sole songwriter/guitarist and The Ocean mainman Robin Staps across the Atlantic.
Blistering.com: What are you up to right now?
Robin Staps: Well, I’m in Berlin right now – my hometown – in my flat just chilling out and trying to recover from the tour that we just finished last week. There’s not much happening now, just promotion for the album, a couple of interviews and apart from that I’m just trying to sleep long because I didn’t get much sleep over the course of the last four or five weeks.
Blistering.com: It sounds like you’ve been busy. How did the tour go?
Staps: The tour was really good. We toured with an American band called Intronaut. Really great band and we got along really well with those guys both personally and we could connect to them on a musical level as well. The tour was very successful – all over Europe we got pretty good turnouts. It was fun but the routing was kind of crazy, really long drives. We had a couple of night drives where we had to leave right after the show to get to the next one in time so it was very tiring but overall it was a successful tour.
Blistering.com: Is it difficult to set up your shows? I understand you have pretty extensive visual elements that many other bands don’t use.
Staps: It’s hard to find the perfect venue for us, and a lot of times we have to compromise. But that’s part of the challenge and that’s what keeps it interesting. It differs largely between the different countries in Europe, though. German venues are usually pretty shit, whereas Dutch, Swedish and French venues are usually really, really good. The UK venues are an entirely different story (laughs). So it depends. Sometimes we have space problems, but right now we’re only six people on stage. We used to be eight or nine so it was more difficult. With six people it normally works out fine to fit everyone on stage. With the light show it usually works out that we’ll have to come down on it a little bit. Right now we have two different systems – one for smaller venues that doesn’t use that much power and one for bigger venues that uses all the power. We adapt to that according to the circumstances that we run into.
Blistering.com: Do you have any tours on the docket or are you going to take some time off?
Staps: We’re going to take a little bit off right now for the next two months with weekend shows every now and then. And then we’re going to be on the road again in March with Rotten Sound in Europe. They release a new album January 25th. I’m really excited about this tour because they’re so different from what we do and I’m really looking forward to that. I think the audience doesn’t want to see the same metal quartet four times a night. So that’s going to be the next thing, and there are going to be a bunch of headliner shows in France, Italy and Eastern Europe, also to Greece, Russia, and then hopefully in May and June we’ll be touring the U.S. but that’s still in the making and nothing’s concrete yet.
Blistering.com: In light of the release of Precambrian a record that has a bit of a chronological significance, how will this affect your set lists?
Staps: I would love to play the whole album in its entirety once, but I don’t see that happening right now for many reasons. There are two or three songs on the album that are very difficult to translate into a live environment. We would have to compromise a little bit in order to make it work. Right now we play quite a lot of songs from the album, it’s 14 songs in total and we can play eight of those 14, and we could rehearse another three or four, so we could pretty much play almost the entire album. We play a lot of them in the order as they appear on the album, but not the whole album. That’s also because the album has a playing time of 85 minutes, I think, and when we play here a lot of people want to hear the older songs. If we played the whole album that would already be one and a half hours and if we then still have to play older songs we’d have to play for like two and a half hours, so that’s just not feasible, really.
We play a lot of songs off the new album, and the way we did it on the last tour was we played a set that was divided into two parts. The first set consisted of heavy songs, mainly the Hadean/Archaean disc and Aeolian songs. Then we had a break where we changed the colors in the lights and stuff, and the whole aesthetic of the visuals as well, and then the second half consisted of more of the Proterozoic songs and some Fluxion and Fogdiver songs from those two records. Musically it was a big division between the heavy, simple songs with typical instrumentation and the long, epic orchestral songs at the second part of the set. That worked out really well, I think.
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