This Gift Is A Curse : l'interview

Chez Thrashocore, nous n’aimons pas qu’écrire des textes opportunistes bourrés de blagues de mauvais goût. Nous aimons aussi revenir vers les artistes qui ont marqué les années précédentes pour leur poser quelques questions. Car on est comme ça, prétentieux et à la bourre, mais toujours prêt à faire amende honorable d’une flemme plus que passagère à l’époque de la sortie d’un album qui, pourtant, méritait une meilleure exposition. C’est le cas pour This Gift Is A Curse et son premier longue-durée qui fut et reste une œuvre majeure pour le petit monde des musiques extrêmes. A l’occasion de la sortie de l’édition CD de I, Guilt Bearer, nous avons pu profiter d’une proposition de Black Wave Promotion pour poser quelques questions à la formation suédoise et se rendre compte que les membres la constituant sont au moins aussi intéressants que ce qu’ils posent sur disque. La preuve : plus bas !

Hello guys! This Gift Is A Curse is a well-known band on this webzine (I, Guilt Bearer was reviewed in these pages, it was my album of the year and already a personal reference), so let’s skip the usual “who are you?” question to enter the heart of the matter! First, I want to return to the origins of the band. According to the press page on the website of Discouraged Records, This Gift Is A Curse was born of an encounter between Jonas A. Holmberg (lead singer) and Johan Nordlund (drummer) who quickly led to the creation of the band... How did you meet each other? What encouraged the decision to create a band together? How did the joining of Lars Gunnarsson and Patrik Andersson happen, respectively for the positions of bassist and guitarist?

Jonas: It´s kind of funny when you look back on it now. I and Johan moved to Stockholm at the same time but didn´t know each other or anything. We also worked at the same job but I’ve never remembered seeing Johan at work. Then one evening we both were at the same venue watching the same band, but not together of course. Johan then saw me after the show and thought I was one of the guitarists in one of the bands which played that evening because we wore the same kind of shirt. So he basically came up to me and said “good show” or something like that, but realized pretty quick I was someone else. And then we started to talk and really found out that we had a lot in common – both personal and music wise. Both also had bands in our old hometowns, me Grizzlytwister (synth hardcore mayhem) and Johan Seven Nautical Miles (Northern Sweden sounding post-metal) … and now wanted something to pass the time with in Stockholm.
I knew Lazy (bass) since before and he was playing in a couple of “metal projects” around town so I asked him if he wanted to try to do something “different”. He knew in turn this guitarist who liked to play loud and fast and asked him the same thing I had asked him. This guitarist was Patrik, he also was involved in various thrash/death metal bands. So now we were four guys who really didn´t know each other that well, that were going to play something we really hadn´t done before. Good times. We were aiming for some kind of fast and obnoxious d-beat hardcore punk. Sound wise something like a stripped down Converge meets Breach kills Discharge. It really didn´t go that way. I think we really found out what we wanted to do when we started to play some of the riffs/beats in half tempo. It all kind of all fell into place.

It is also said on this press page that before your EP, a five-song demo was recorded but never issued because you did not find it satisfactory. For what reasons? Are there any chances to see it emerge one day on the web or on record?

Jonas: It was just a demo that we recorded ourselves with whatever equipment we could muscle at that time. It sounded pretty crappy. It was more of a “sound check” for us at the time. A guy in France wrote us an e-mail and asked if we could bring it to him on a CD-R on the tour. So we did, I think he has the only copy of it. It will never be anything more than that.

The EP already contains the basic formula of the album. However, everything sounds rawer and straighter, without being close to the “Sunlight Studio sound” where you recorded these four tracks (studio known for having hosted bands like Entombed, Dismember, Disfear, Katatonia...). How was the meeting with Tomas Skogsberg? Did you have a precise idea of how you wanted your music to sound before entering the studio or did you leave room for improvisation?

Jonas: Tomas was a super nice and laidback kind of guy. Sunlight studios nowadays reside in an old 1800’s barn north of Stockholm. It´s part of Tomas’ property where he lives with his family. It´s kind of in the middle of the forest and a lot of wolves roam the area. It´s really suiting to what he does. When we were about to record our first EP Lazy mailed him an asked if he was interested in working with us. He wrote back pretty quickly and said he really was into what we were doing. So we booked a session for 3 songs. It was really snowy those weeks I remember and our car with our equipment got stuck on the narrow forest roads on more than one occasion. Some of his recording devices even broke the days before we came, probably due to the cold weather. But he fixed up some kind of backup and we could get on with recording. It all went pretty fast when we finally started to record so we even had room for one more song which became “The Big Sleep”. It was an interesting experience but we will probably not do it again because of the time pressure connected to the money aspect. It costs to be in a studio like that and when you are a “small” band like us you can´t afford to be there as long as you need. It all became a bit too “forced” in the end with the mixing and all.

How do you compose your songs in general? I read in an interview you gave for Idioteq that your musical tastes are very different from each others in the band... Not too much fights when it comes to creating music?

Patrik: I write most of the basic stuff. It could be anything from a riff for bass or guitar to a drumbeat, even just a structure/concept. Then from that, I “build” whatever I feel is necessary for the specific idea.
After this I show it to the other guys and they basically say yay or nay. Sometimes they like a specific riff so I just go back to the drawing board. If they don’t like it I throw it away... simple as that. When we settle for the foundation of a song, we get into details. In my demo recording that I've presented, maybe I put a d-beat on the drums, for example. But when I give it to Johan (drums) I want him to do his own thing. Each member contributes in his own way based on the basic idea. This is how it mostly goes.

About your first album: your sound and your style have evolved from the EP. Everything is still raw and cold but seems more mastered yet very chaotic. Even people who listened to your first release would say “Wow, but what happened to them?” after the first listening of I, Guilt Bearer… So, what happened to you, ahah?

Patrik: What happened? We had a more precise idea of what we wanted to do sound wise. If to compare to the EP recording session. We wanted to have rawer and more hostile vibe to our sound. The EP recording was our first step so maybe now in hindsight, it was a tad cautious sounding to our taste. So for the album release we wanted to really capture the essence of what we are capable of doing live. The song writing process was, and still is pretty much the same but our musical approach depended more on a vicious atmosphere.

The artwork for this album was made by F. Lindblå (whom you had already collaborated with for the EP), and your singer, J.A. Holmberg. How was the creation process? Did you clearly know what you wanted as an illustration?

Jonas: I had a clear idea like a year before it was made. It grew stronger while we were recording I, Guilt Bearer. I talked to F. Lindblå who is a busy man about doing some kind of staged photo-shoot and about my ideas. He was really into it. So we “hired” a friend of Lindblå who works as a “model” of some kind and took him to this forest I know pretty well just north of Stockholm. We didn´t tell him what we were going to do because we thought it would make him turn down the “job”. And we also wanted him to have as many confused, awkward, offensive and disgusting feelings as possible while shooting the pictures - so it could transcend into the visuals. We never heard from him afterwards. But I know he works in L.A (U.S) since a couple of months with a big sports brand. The deal between us was that we could do whatever we wanted as long as we never mentioned his name. His payment was 3 bottles of red wine.
The cover is supposed to illustrate the themes of I, Guilt Bearer - basically the clash between our behavior connected to the friction between human nature and human culture.

One of our readers also asked about the meaning of the many symbols appearing in your artworks. He made mention of recurring numbers (III, VII and XI) and small symbols like those drawn on the vials you prepared for your tour. Can you enlighten him on their origin?

Jonas: “Enlighten him”? These are the numbers and their meanings to us: the number VII (seven) is connected to the seven deadly sins, but foremost the seventh - sloth. Which in Latin is Acedia which in its turn comes from the Greek Akedia which translates into « the absence of caring ». For us it goes well with the somewhat nihilistic-doctrines we imposed in our music and art. The number XI (eleven) is Aleister Crowley most sacred number and also the number of words that lies in his mantra “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law”.

“Upon the Number Eleven. This seems to have been the type of number with a evil reputation among all peoples. The Kabbalists contrasted it with the perfection of the Decad, (10) and just as the Sephirotic number is the form of all good things, so eleven is the essence of all that is sinful, harmful and imperfect; with the Ten Sephiroth they contrasted the Eleven Averse Sephiroth, symbols of destruction, violence, defeat, and death.” - A.C

The last number III (three) and its meaning for us and our art I cannot/will not reveal until after next album.

This artwork appears to be strongly influenced by occultism / Satanism. This is also true concerning your lyrics, which are linking guilt and oppression of religions for example. These texts seem very personal, like an inner pondering but transposed to a higher and wider level such as religions and men's deviance in general (“Head And Arms”). Is there a story behind them? In which context, which state of mind were they written?

Jonas: It´s true. It´s somewhat a “chaotic” questioning of human conduct connected to different viewpoints and social phenomenon so to say. I think I was trying to dissect human behavior with tools from different fields of occultism, Gnosticism, social psychology and sociology. I guess the lyrics both transcend personal stuff as well as some kind of “storytelling” where I try to put myself in the psychological “mindset” of different “characters”. The song “Inferno Ad. O” is really about the Swedish author Strindberg who “fled” to Paris in 1890 to conduct quasi-chemical experiments and search for the truth in the “Dark”. To be able to do this he had to stop being a writer and renounce his christian faith, because he thought it was blocking him from the “truth”. I found his “journey” to be very fascinating. He basically became mad and almost died a few times. He let all his boundaries and morals go in the quest to find what he considered the “real truth”.
“Head And Arms” is about a murder that happened in a small town in Sweden some years ago when three adolescents killed a forth in a drug related intermezzo where there were “50 euros” missing and someone had to take the blame. The murder itself was very gross and parts of it were filmed. The aftermath was really interesting to me because the adolescents came from really good homes and a lot of people couldn´t believe they have done it although they admitted it and they filmed the dismemberment of the victim and put it up on YouTube. They later said in the trials that they killed him because he was a “low life and not even a human being”. They were all friends that went to the same parties, took the same drugs but the victim was from a less fortuned home /social background and was not born in the same small town as them. Then he didn´t have the same value as them. This mentality is to me very exotic and depressing. I, Guilt Bearer lyric wise is me trying to come to terms with the thoughts and feelings I have surrounding these human and social phenomena. Except for « Deceiver » that Patrik wrote himself, but it is in the same theme more or less.

The themes of guilt/Satanism/occultism which are very present in your music and what surrounds it, make wondering if you have any extra-musical elements that influence you. Do you read occult texts, for example? Do you feel close to a current or an artist out of music? Some personal references to share with us (movies, books...)?

Jonas: First of all I have to say once and for all that we are NOT Satanists. I just use some of the same antagonistic viewpoints/tools as those which can be found in chaos-gnostic Satanism ideology. I use them just as you can read about-/apply-/understand psychological viewpoints without being a psychologist yourself. I just use bits here and there to get my “point” across in lyrics and art wise. I study sociology and behavioral science at university and work at the national psychiatric department in Sweden. In my years there I´ve come to realize that sometimes “reality” is best explained with what can´t be explained. Sometimes I see more truth in fantasies, dreams and even “lies” than the discourse of truth we in this society have created as our own collective “truth”.
“… any extra-musical elements that influence you” – yes, tar.

I'm not a tech-geek myself, but I'm sure some people will be interested to know the gear you used to get this guitar sound so unusual, cold and punitive without being the heaviest ever.

Patrik: I’ve got five amplifiers, they all broke during that recording. So I had to settle for a Peavey 6505 through a regular Marshall cab. And I gotta tell you, I hated that damn thing. I still hate it to this day! Someday I'm gonna burn that amplifier. Seriously. So I cranked that shit to its limit and pretty much violated it. And the bastard still works! Well, in the end it came to some use. Cause it’s the only one that didn't break. I also used a Digiverb for my reverbsound which sounded really dirty. And I would have still used it if it didn't break even though I put it in the hardcase every gig. As for guitars I used a Gibson SG standard with SD JB p/u in bridge position and a Rickenbacker 650D. Lars used a Music Man Stingray 4 through a Sunn 300T with matching cab. Johan played on a Mapex 3003 thingy with some Rogers toms and a Neil Peart snare. For cymbals he used Paiste 2002 24" crash, Paiste Giant beat 20" crash and Zildjan new beat hi-hat, I don’t remember the size.

Your album is released on CD format this year after a vinyl release. Was this process of putting it on CD of your will? What do you think of the growing importance given to vinyl (which goes up to replace an output on CD format in some cases)? What format do you personally prefer and why?

Jonas : We didn´t care about CD, none in our band ever buy CD’s. So when the labels asked in which format we wanted to release the choice wasn´t that hard. All music sound better in wax. Now some of the old labels and a couple of new labels have gone in together to release it on CD which makes us really happy and hopefully the people who prefer CD before vinyl too. In France it´s Black Wave Promotion who is releasing it! They seem to be really good and hard working people! Check them out!

I was impressed by the live performance you gave in Strasbourg a few days ago. You had the energy of hardcore, but also something menacing, close to black metal. There was also a part of ritual in your performance, right? Especially with the use of sheets soiled with... With what? Cement, sulphur, tar? The smell was strong, but I could not recognize it...

Jonas: We soak some of our equipment in tar. As well as some rags of sheet that we bring with us. Sometimes I also pour some of it on me as well as a sort of black paint mixed with dirt. If it´s a ritual or not what we do just before the show? I don´t know. If it feels that way to you maybe it is?

How do you see your live experience? Like a communion or rather a hostile confrontation with the public? Your singer was particularly impressive that night, very aggressive (at least that was my feeling), the sound was heavier than on your records, was it done on purpose? Do you try to provoke your audience with such violence?

Jonas: The live experience and recording the songs for an album are for us two completely different art forms. When you play the songs live you can “attack” all the senses – hearing, smell, visuals, feelings etc. While on album you have to make do with just “hearing”. When we record we always want to be as close as possible to what we do live. We always try to push our sound to the limit both live and in the studio. I´m glad that you thought “the sound was heavier than on your records” – I hate to go and see a band that sounds “just like the records”. Maybe it also felt more “heavier” because you stood there and got everything we do thrown in your face instead of just hearing us coming out of a record speaker or YouTube?
“Do you try to provoke your audience with such violence?” … No, I´m/we are not trying to provoke anyone. I want the people that like what we do to come to the shows and see us play and have, in their opinion – a good time. But if you get “provoked” maybe This Gift Is A Curse is not for you? We use certain elements maybe to “attack your senses”; like the smell of burnt wood, damp light, dirt, darkness etc. - but that´s just to grab your attention and get you into the mood for what we do… We never want to send any message with our music or art, we just do what we do and if you get any specific feelings/emotions awoken by it – that is your own gift or curse. You can interpret whatever you want, it´s your “problem” or “journey”.

A lot of new bands who mix (black) metal and hardcore come out today, but this is not a new thing - especially in Sweden (one can think of Martyrdöd or Skitsystem). However, in my opinion This Gift Is A Curse has its own way of doing it. Do you feel apart from this “scene” trapped between hardcore and black metal or, on the contrary, do you feel as being part of a current? Is there any recent bands to whom you feel close to in particular (Hexis for example, who toured with you in 2012)?

Jonas: We in the band both love Martyrdöd and Skitsystem. But we mainly see them as d-beat punk or crust bands rather than bands that “who mix (black) metal and hardcore”. But I guess people see it in different lights as time passes and new bands who mix this kind of music come along. We really don´t feel part of any “scene” music wise – but we mostly get booked at hardcore/punk shows which suits us fine. We like the friendly climate and open atmosphere (most of the time anyway). But we also get booked to other kinds of shows. Punk, metal, hardcore, drone, doom are not that important to us. It is more about what you do and who you are. And no, we don´t see us as a part of a “current”. We don´t think that much on what is happening around us, we just try to focus on what we do... We love Hexis, they are super good guys, but I don´t think we feel close to them music wise. All respect to them and what they do. We both play heavy music, but that´s all about it. That´s the way we see it anyway. Lazy our bass player was standing in bass a couple of shows with them earlier this year, I think that he is the closest in our band someone has been to them music wise. We respect all these bands you may refer to with this “current” – but I think this kind of questions is really hard for us to answer because we don´t look at this/us/them from the “outside”.

Do you play in other bands than This Gift Is A Curse? If so, can you introduce them?

Jonas: There are always many “secret” projects in the making. Lazy (bass) and Toby the guitarist from Hexis and Bjorn the drummer from Agrimonia/Miasmal have some kind of “supersonic sleeper cell heavy gore grind” project in the making since about a year back. We are all hoping for their songs to see daylight soon. Johan (drums) have about a million shoegaze/blackgaze bands in the making with members from Suis La Lune and Dating. There are also talks about a black metal project between members of This Gift Is A Curse, Suis La Lune, Sore Eyelids and Meleeh. More on this as it progresses.

This interview is coming to its end. One last question though: you are currently on tour with No Omega but do you already think about the follow-up to I, Guilt Bearer? What can we expect from you in the future?

Jonas: We will not try to book any bigger tours in the coming months because we are trying to finish writing what will hopefully be our next full-length. Just these last couple of days we have done some real progress so I feel really excited right now. Hopefully we will hit the studio late this summer or early this fall…



Here are three songs from one of the shows (Örebro, Sweden) from last tour and the last song is a new song that will be featured on the next album. It´s called “Hanging Feet”.

Thank you for your answers. If you ever want to add something, this space is yours!

Jonas: Thanks you at Thrashocore for giving us this attention and thanks for the support! It means a lot to us. We all love internet ‘zines and the DIY-communities around them. Thanks a million for this.
Also; we sold-out our first press of the I, Guilt Bearer LP on the last tour and are now waiting on the 2nd press which should be here any day! It is a 300 unit pressing with a “black and white haze” effect on the vinyl, it will look really nice. There are also other merch here like t-shirts etc. The CD version of I, Guilt Bearer will be out now in France by Black Wave Promotion – please check them out to get our CD or LP: http://www.blackwave-promotion.com! Or directly from us at http://thisgiftisacurse.bigcartel.com/!