Paganizer – 12-08-2009

Interview with: Pagaziner (email)
By: Sabine van Gameren

Recently, we asked some questions to Pagaziner by email. See here what answers were given!

On your latest release “Scandinavian Warmachine”, what do you consider the highlights?
“The title track is my personal favourite, but I also like the more ominous brutality of “Cold Seed Burning The World”. All in all, I like the album a lot, but those two songs are my personal faves at least.”

In what way had it progressed compared to “Carnage Junkie”?
“To be correct this material at first wasn’t really intended to be Paganizer material, that’s why the new album is more diverse than anything Paganizer has done before. But if you compare it to previous albums or “Carnage junkie” I would say this new album has less primitive brutality and maybe more refined songs. And also the album benefits greatly from the drumming of Brynjar Helgetun who was the session drummer on this album. He has a style we have never used in Paganizer before.”

Are you satisfied with the results or are there things you want to do totally different next time?
“I am really satisfied actually, but for next time I would prefer to go back to the more harsh and ugly sound production wise. This time the album sounds a bit too professional due to the excellent drumming and the very modern mix and master. Its great but maybe Paganizer should be a bit dirtier, at least if you ask me.”

The album cover of “Scandinavian Warmachine seems like a print screen of a computer game, not really a stereotype cover for this genre isn’t it?
“We thought it would be cool to have something very different, especially as the album turned out so different from previous albums. So we asked a friend to make it happen and I think he did a killer job, the artwork is like a World of Warcraft monster set on making some ugly death metal mayhem.
Is the sound of “Scandinavian Warmachine” close to what we can expect from Paganizer live?
No haha, it’s not actually. Live we are much more like our older albums, basic and dirty. As I mentioned earlier this new album was more like an experiment that turned out really good. In the future we will for sure try to mix both our styles up.”

You have had quite some different labels since the start of the band, what is it that made the band change that often?
“Smaller labels often have no money or not much distribution, so from time to time we liked to try other labels when we got offers. Simple as that, we havent really become enemies with any label from before, most of them have been really good to us.”

I have heard that your old label got into problems once, when you were about to release an album, can you tell us anything about that?
“Ahhh, I don’t really remember what that might have been. Maybe it was the time when an album got cancelled because of censorship troubles in the country of the label, which was an Asian label I think. I guess in some countries still it’s hard to play music that’s not fucken religious.”

Swedish metal has quite a name, to your opinion what are the major differences between the American metal and the Swedish metal?
“I would say that Swedish death metal is either more harsh and punk influences like Entombed and God Macabre on one hand and more melodic too if you consider the Gothenburg sound. American metal is often more intricate and technical I guess.”

In 2005 Paganizer called its quits, what made you decide to go on?
“The release of the new album really, as it at first wasn’t a Paganizer album but then turned into one we thought it would cool to recreate the band. Also to be offered to play Party San was a cool thing that we wanted to do, and then we had to get back together again.”

Various Death metal bands keep on releasing their albums on vinyl, what is your point of view in this, would you rather keep on to vinyl or see more future in mp3 releases?
“I would love to release more stuff on vinyl but I guess we are not good enough or known enough to be offered that haha. Vinyl is not cheap to make I guess so its mostly for the better bands, but I´d love to do more vinyl’s myself too.”

What can we expect in future from Paganizer? Will there be a new record soon, or is the focus going to be on other projects?
“As for a new album I think we will wait until 2011 before we release anything, we have so much stuff out already haha. But we have also talked about trying to keep the live gigs coming, we want to play more gigs and festivals this and next year.”

Links:
Paganizer MySpace
Paganizer Official