The Ocean Part II
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(Editor's note: This is a continuation of Brian Sweeney's epic chat with The Ocean's Robin Staps from earlier this week...)
Blistering.com I understand that there was a packaging snafu in the U.S. Can you tell us about that?
Robin Staps: Unfortunately yes. The packaging in the U.S. has been largely compromised. We were fighting against that until the last step almost, so we couldn’t really avoid it in the end. I understand that things are a bit difficult in the U.S. in terms of cost for certain things, and Metal Blade US is just calculating much harder than the Europeans do. My opinion of the whole thing is that if people do still go out to actually buy a record today, they do that also because they get offered something special – something that looks really unique and something that they want to have as a physical product. That’s why we came up with this really slick packaging.
The European version comes in a digipak with die-cut holes and different special printing colors and two booklets, and when you slide them out of the digipak you have different cover impressions through those die-cut holes. The two CDs are sitting on top of one another, it has a plastic frame where you can see the other one through, and it looks really, really nice and unique. The U.S. version is just a plain jewel case version and I was trying to explain my point of view to the label in the U.S., but they didn’t see the point. They just said it was too expensive to make that in the end, and the Europeans didn’t. I can only invite all Americans to order the CD through our webshop or through Metal Blade Europe and that’s probably more expensive than the U.S. version but it just looks much better. The music is the same, though. It still looks nice, though. It’s more than the average CD, but if you see the European version you won’t believe it.
Blistering.com: Yeah, I’m a sucker for packaging, actually. Have you ever seen Tool’s album, Lateralus?
Staps: Oh yeah, I love it.
Blistering.com: I bought that album before I knew too much about Tool, strictly because of the packaging, you know?
Staps: Yeah, exactly! That’s the whole thing I’m saying. We’ve gotten a lot of comments about that, too, from people just telling us “I bought your album today, I had never heard of you guys before but just because of the packaging I bought it,” and they were really surprised and liked the music, too, and that’s great that the packaging has fulfilled its cause.
Blistering.com: Have you ever thought of making an accompanying video or anything like that to go with the music?
Staps: Totally. It’s a really thrilling idea and we already do that in a live context. We have visuals for every song that are running in the back that are really cut and synchronized to the music along with our light show. I’d really like to do that on record as well. We’re planning to do a live DVD that consists both of the live visuals and video captures of us playing live. That’s in the making right now. I also think it would be a very interesting idea to write an album along with a movie, basically. I don’t really know how that would work but it’s an idea I’ve had for a while. Maybe with the next album we have to find something that will top Precambrian, you know (laughs)? We’ll try looking into that and I’d really like to try that out, making a movie and writing music to that, or maybe doing both at the same time. There are many different ways that you could approach this thing. It would take a lot more thinking and investigating but it’s something I’d definitely like to try.
Blistering.com: You mention possibly doing another album, but you said at one point that you may not write another album again. Is that true, or am I misreading what was on the website?
Staps: No, that’s actually true. That’s the state of mind I was in when the whole thing was actually finished about two months ago. I’m still in that state of mind right now, but I know it’s not going to last forever. There will probably come a time when I will feel like writing another album again. Already right now my head is full of ideas. I just kind of force myself not to start again because I don’t want to go straight back into the studio and start working. But I know that it will only take a couple of months until I feel like writing another album. If it’s going to be to the same extent as this latest album, that I don’t really know. This album has kept us busy for almost 10 months pretty much on a daily basis and that’s the reason for the state that we were in. We were just really fed up with it and at the same time really satisfied with the result. It was a long and tiring process, the whole recording of the album, so that’s what led to that statement.
Blistering.com: Was one of the most tiring aspects – I think I read that 26 musicians contributed to the recording – so was that coordinating part of the difficulty?
Staps: It was. It’s really difficult to plan all that. Especially if you have some sort of time pressure, knowing that you have to be done with this in the next four or five months. I know that’s not very soon, but still you have to plan everything very well in advance. Also, a lot of the musicians who played on the album are professional classical musicians with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. You keep calling people up asking them to come into the studio next week and they’re always busy and always on tour all over the world, so it takes a lot of organization to make the whole thing happen. Just the sheer amount of people and the sheer amount of tracks that we recorded were so much that we were in the studio eight to 14 hours a day for the last at least seven months.
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