Interviews : “Concept albums can be mind-blowing, but also confining” – an interview with The Ocean’s Robin Staps

Two years after the release of Pelagial, their concept album about travelling deeper into the depth of the ocean, Germany’s The Ocean have arrived in Australia on a tour where they’ll be performing the album from start to finish. With one show already out of the way, we had a chat with guitarist Robin Staps about how the album came to be.

Metal Obsession: Your latest album Pelagial is a concept album about moving deeper into the depth of the ocean, which obviously fits well with your name, how did the idea come about in the first place?

Robin Staps: It’s an idea that I’ve had for quite a long time actually, since 2009… making an album that is a musical journey from the surface to the bottom of the sea is kind of an obvious thing that’s gotta come to mind at one point when you’re playing in a band called “The Ocean”, right? I just didn’t know how to approach it for a long time. It’s an entirely different challenge writing a song that is like 5-10 minutes long, and writing an album that is basically just one 60-minutes long song.

MO: It works brilliantly with the music complimenting the concept, how did you go around planning the album?

RS: I had a pretty clear idea of the starting and the ending point of the album, but everything in between evolved and took shape along the way. I originally wanted to make an album that was going to be a continuous, ideally step-less progression: from light to dark, from mellow to heavy, from fast to slow, from hope to despair, from clean to distortion, from a dry sound to an large, open, ambient kind of sound, from higher tuning to lower tuning… all these gradually changing attributes of songwriting and sound were meant to visualize, or better, to “audiolize” the descent from the surface into the depths of the sea…

But I soon came to realize that this was not possible just like that; that this progression could not be entirely linear. It would have simply been too boring. What makes music (and life) exciting is unexpected, unforeseeable events – things that flush you out of your comfort zone and take you elsewhere, or musically speaking, the sudden change of tempo, harmony, key, dissonance… the swirls so to speak, that violently take you out of your state of inertia and put you in another place, and then you have to deal with that. And so there are some vertical currents on this album, there had to be… but I think the general feeling is there when you listen to the album: you feel it’s going down, you can feel it’s getting darker and colder around you, and you know that the next song is not gonna be a piano ballad.

MO: Were there any musical compromises, or ideas you had to drop, to fit with the concept?

RS: Yep, when I started writing, all the time… but then I got into a mode where I kind of knew where a riff would belong, on the timeline of the record, the moment that i wrote it… whether it would be a surface riff, or a deep-sea riff, so to speak.

MO: Considering the album is actually one long song, was it difficult choosing where the different “tracks” would start and finish? I think the individual tracks still stand up on their own, as much as they did on the -centric albums.

RS: The track marks have been set arbitrarily, more or less… they do not necessarily represent individual songs, they are just separating different sections of the record. The first 15 minutes of the album, the first 4 tracks, were written in one piece and and to me they still feel like one song. Then Disequilibrated is like a song of it’s own… in the next track, Boundless Vasts, the opening riff of the record reappears… so it could be considered as still part of the same song. We wanted to make an album, that is really an album – that you listen through from the beginning to the end, in one go. I regret the fact that we set track marks a bit… we should have made it a one-track album. But back then I was thinking we should make certain sections of the record accessible separately, just for convenience… Also, iTunes fuck you for money when you have less than 10 tracks on a record, no matter how long these tracks are…

MO: You released a full length film to go along with the album, was that planned along with the writing or something that came afterwards? How was the process for that?

RS: That was planned from the beginning. It’s been a bit of a ridiculous project, really. Neither Craig Murray nor me knew which extents this project would eventually assume when we started working on it more than a year ago… but yeah it’s kind of obvious that making a 50 minute music video takes more time than a 5 minutes music video… Craig was pretty much living in his sleeping bag on his studio floor the whole time..

The movie obviously has lots of underwater imagery, but there is also a female protagonist, who ironically goes by the name Arielle in real life. She is going through different stages of emotions throughout the movie; joy, fear, pain, anger, terror, while she is sinking into the abysses of the deep, and into the abysses of her own mind… the movie is pretty abstract at times, which was an intentional choice, as we did not want to have a plot. We wanted to keep the spectrum of possible interpretations as wide as possible, so that the viewers can fill it with meaning that has relevance to their own lives.

The Pelagial movie comes on a separate DVD, including a 5:1 dolly surround mix of the album, and is available with the ltd. CD box set edition of the album from Pelagic Records.

MO: Is a concept album something you’d like to do again or would you prefer to go back to having more freedom now that you’ve had the experience?

RS: I’ve always been attracted to a holistic approach to art and music, and to albums that are more than the sum of their tracks. Our last 4 albums are concept albums, so it’s likely that the next one will be as well… but on the other hand, I’d also be keen to do a good simple rock n roll album next. Concept albums can be mind-blowing, but also confining. We have been tied to playing Pelagial as it is is for almost 300 shows now, every night in the same order… and it’s great, it works – but we’re getting a bit tired now, which is normal at the end of such a long touring cycle. Looking forward to something new.

Photo by Mark Hoffman

MO: A lot of bands after releasing so many albums get sick of playing their older material, or just doesn’t think it doesn’t work with the current sound of the band. With how much your sound has changed over time, what are you feelings on playing the older instrumental-era tracks live?

RS: Some of the Fogdiver tracks would fit surprisingly well with the newer material… we have wanted to revisit some of these older tracks for a while now, but that would basically mean rehearsing and learning those songs from scratch again, as noone of the current lineup except myself was in the band at that time and even i would need to relearn those tracks from scratch… and if it’s like that, in the end its always more exciting to play new stuff

MO: Your last tour plans fell through and you publicly asked for somebody to pick it up, which thankfully Wild Things Presents did, what happened with the original tour?

RS: It was a guy in a band who wanted to book the tour for us, but ended up not having the finances to do so – which wouldn’t have been such a big deal, had we not been really far into the planning already. So it was a bummer and a big waste of time, but I’m glad with how things turned out in the end, this tour has been promoted and organized much more solidly than the initial tour would have been…

MO: Well we’re just glad you’re coming to Australia and looking forward to seeing you live. Thanks for taking the time to answer the questions.

You can catch The Ocean and Caligula’s Horse at the following shows;

April 10 @ Factory Floor, Sydney w/ Lo!
April 11 @ Brightside, Brisbane w/ Balloons Kill Babies
April 12 @ The Northern, Byron Bay
April 16 @ Jive, Adelaide w/ Dyssidia
April 18 @ Evelyn Hotel, Melbourne w/ Orsome Welles
April 19 @ Amplifier Bar, Perth w/ Chaos Divine and Xenobiotic (no Caligula’s Horse)

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