Eluveitie – Chrigel Glanzmann

Eluveitie are one of the biggest names in the metal world today, and with just 6 albums have successfully carved a niche of their own, dominating with their brand of metal. On behalf of Metal Obsession, I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with the legendary Chrigel Glanzmann who is the brain behind the whole Eluveitie project. I’ve idolized this man from the very moment I listened to ‘Slania’ and I made no mistake in assuming that he is one of the sweetest, most charismatic people ever, so needless to say I was beyond excited! Speaking to me from his hometown in Switzerland, after a few hellos, giggles, and introductions, Chrigel said that the band are currently just busy with shows in Europe, “Right now, we’re actually pretty busy. In fact, it’s not that long anymore till our new album is out. There’s a lot of work to do related to that, doing a lot of interviews, etc. But right now, it’s still summer festival season in Europe and at the moment we’re just playing a lot of Open Air shows.”

And speaking of the new album, I couldn’t help but jump straight into the origin of ‘Origins’. This is the sixth album by Eluveitie and having listened to it countless times, we talked about how ‘Origins’ began, what the story behind the whole album is, and take it from me, it’s beautiful!  “Well, lyrically, it’s deeply rooted in Celtic tradition and deals with Celtic mythology, and etiological tales from Ancient Gaulia, origin myths, legends and stuff like that. But literally, it actually began in a little, sweet cafe in Paris. It was around early last year, we were just on tour of Europe, and at that time we started thinking about a new album and everything, and during this tour one day we had a show in Paris, and we had arrived quite early in the morning so we had a couple of spare hours, and I decided to go for a little walk. I was wandering around, at some point I sat down in this very sweet cafe, had an espresso and a crossaint, haha, that’s actually where the idea for Origins came up and thats where I wrote the concept for Origins down!”

The predecessor to this release, ‘Helvetios’, is a concept album and I was really curious whether it was the same with ‘Origins’. “Mythologically, it covers the whole Gaulia, actually: everything about Gauls and the Helvetians. It has one main topic which is ancient origin myths and all that but it isn’t a concept album, as such.”

But what really makes ‘Origins’ stand out? From what I’ve heard, there’s a lot more ‘heavy’ on this album, so to speak, and I asked him whether it was largely different, lyrically, musically, production wise, etc., from previous albums. Chrigel had quite an interesting answer, “Well, of course, that’s hugely a matter of perception and taste. It’s actually quite surprising because, to me, how everyone hears music in general, and how everybody hears this album, because right now, we’ve been getting the first couple of reviews and many people have said something like, ‘it’s nice and everything but it’s not really new’. But to me, I was almost afraid in the studio that it was too different, and that people would think, ‘Oh, my God, what happened to them. It’s not the same anymore’. But, personally, it’s quite a lot different. There’s a lot of new things we did try out on ‘Origins’ but apparently it’s not that blatant in a way. But yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of things that we tried out, and of course, we’ve developed musically.

“Technically, playing-wise, it’s on a much higher level than anything we’ve done before and got a little more complex. Production-wise, we actually changed a couple of things. I mean, this is not something new in that sense, but these days, producing a metal album basically means surgery; it means clinical work, and usually, these days, everything gets recorded part by part, and then it’s completely edited and every note – every single hit done on the drum – is cut and placed in the right place until everything is perfect. We kept very natural but on ‘Origins’ we just said ‘we want to go a radical way’. Of course, [with] this modern kind of production it sounds massive, [and] of course, sounds impressive. We think after all, ‘come on, this is not what it’s about, it’s about fucking rock and roll and its about the band’. You wanna hear the band, you don’t wanna hear the best metal production ever. You know, the guitars, it’s not supposed to be the fattest metal guitars in the world, it’s supposed to be the guitars of your hands. So yeah, we followed this radical path to keep everything raw. It began with the recording, press record, lets play the whole song, it was also doing the post-production mix. All the instruments were left pretty raw which means that there are imperfections on the album; there are parts where it’s not perfectly in tune. Of course, this raises a dilemma because in the studio, it can’t be completely off; you have to perform pretty perfectly. That’s what we tried and today we believe we can also because we’ve really grown as musicians!”

It took me a while to recover from that insightful reply as we went on to talk about the writing process and how Eluveitie composes all their masterpieces: whether there’s a particular formula that they always follow, or whether it’s spontaneous; not to forget that this is a band with 8 members, each of whom contribute very significantly. “Of course, there is a specific way of writing songs, I mean, usually, it’s me who writes the music for Eluveite, and usually these days along with Ivo (Henzi), one of the guitar players, we basically write the songs and once the song is finished, we hand it over to the band and each musican just works out lines with his or her instrument. That’s basically what we do and how we always work and how we seem to work.” That, ladies and djentleman, is teamwork!

‘Origins’ out worldwide August 1st via Nuclear Blast Records

Personally, ‘Origins’ is a strong reminder of ‘Slania’ for me and is now probably my favourite Eluveitie album, so I asked Chrigel whether the reception has been the same as with their other albums or different. “Well, I would say that they have been very well received so far, which is really nice to see, but after all, I think and feel it’s the same with other releases. There’s always people who are really excited and really looking forward to it but then there’s also people who always think the opposite. I think it’s totally normal; feels the same, honestly.”

Content with learning so much about their new album, I brought up Eluveitie’s line up which is pretty solid now. The lovely Nicole Ansperger replaced Meri Tadic earlier this year and Rafael Salzmann joined the band early on in 2012 also. The two seem to be completely at home with Eluveite and I asked Chrigel whether they found it challenging, adapting to the classic Eluveite sound. “Well, I don’t think it was difficult for them but it was just a hell of a lot of work and practice for both of them. But they’ve  definitely really done a great job and we’re super happy with both of them. They’re doing really well!”

But what inspired this whole project by the Swiss mastermind? I’m sure every Eluveite fan is curious as to how this man brought two vastly different forms of music together and made it sound so perfect. “Yeah, I mean the main thing that inspired me to form Eluveitie was music. I formed my first death metal band in 1991, so I’ve been playing that for a very long time. But I also love traditional Celtic folk music which I’ve also been playing for many years and I’ve always wanted to combine those two kinds of music which I love most personally and that’s actually why I formed Eluveite. But the whole Celtic thing, it’s something that’s always been there in my life. The Celtic culture was important when I was a little boy, but then again, I think in a way it’s quite natural. I grew up here in Switzerland and this is our own ancient culture and you hear all these stories and ancient tales in school so it’s quite natural to deal with it.

Now I couldn’t just leave it there, because this man is more than just the vocalist of one of the biggest bands in the world. He can play the harp, flute, mandola, bodhran, guitar, bagpipes..no that’s not the end of the list. Talk about multi-talented! “[laughs] Yeah, well, I mean, I’ve been playing music for a really long time. I started my education in classical guitar a long time ago – 33 years ago-  and if you play classical guitar, learning the mandolin or harp is quite easy. Over the years, I picked up this and that.”

Having already given me a little extra time I saved the best question for last. Given that this band has been touring like crazy, doing show after show, I asked whether Australia would be lucky enough to see Eluveitie again after a succcessful Aussie tour last year. “Of course! Yeah! We don’t know when. You know in August, ‘Origins’ world tour cycle will start. All in all, it will take around 2, up to 3 years, for the whole touring cycle and it’s still being planned. Right now it’s only the first two legs which cover North America and Central Europe which are confirmed and fixed. We actually don’t know. Of course, Australia will be a part of it and we want to go back as soon as possible!”

But given that I’m based in India at the moment, I also sneakily asked whether India had a chance of seeing this massive folk metal outfit. Chrigel’s answer literally made me want to scream in sheer elation! “Oh really, you’re from India? Wow! [laughs] That’s funny you should ask that because I just spoke to a guy from India and of course we want to come back, and we’re trying to come back as soon as we can. There’s honestly quite a good possibility and opportunity that we will come back next year. Nothing’s confirmed at the moment. We’re trying and we hope to come back!” WIN.

The last couple of minutes were spent laughing at my reaction to that news and with that came the end of the interview. Chrigel Glanzmann is just brilliance, humour, and humility personified and I’m so happy I had the chance to speak with him on so many awesome things. Eluveitie’s new album ‘Origins’ is out on August 1st. Be sure to check it out, because I guarantee, you will not be disappointed. It’s a beaut!

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