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Ahhh!
Sweden… Home to impossibly tall, blonde beautiful women and home
of some of the best bands in the world. What will it be of us
metalheads without Sweden. Would extreme music be the same? I
doubt it. Hailing from the Southern province of Smaland comes
the trio Kongh, whose jaw-dropping full-length debut Counting
Heartbeats is a serious lesson in about five extreme music
subgenres. So, this sparrow got in touch with guitarist vocalist
David Johansson to get the skinny on their history. Read on and
spread the word.
- You guys are from
Sweden. So much music being created in your country. A lot of it
is high quality. What is it about Sweden that is the home to so
many good artists?
Thanks for the kind words about our country and our music. We
get that all the time. People overall seem very impressed by our
musical climate. It's hard for me to analyze it though, since I
always lived here which makes it hard to compare it to other
countries, ya know? There are lots of good bands here, but lots
of crappy bands too. And people seem to think there's a really
big scene, but I don't know. The doom/sludge community is
extremely limited. I don't even know if I can count to 5 good
bands within that genre. At least where we live, which is in
Småland, a province filled with smaller towns. There are almost
no venues here, and almost no bands either.
- I understand the
government/system offers a lot of support to musicians.
Regarding the government/system offering musicians support, I
have no idea. As a musician, we don't get any support that I can
think of. We still pay our own instruments, our rehearsal room
bills and guitar strings. Maybe you can get some free money if
you're running a venue/club or a company, but I wouldn't know.
- Going back to before
the band, what are your first musical memories?
My first musical memory would probably be when my dad played me
the "Batman" theme on his guitar when I was 2 or 3. That was a
blast. My second (big) musical memory would probably be when I
was 7 years old, and my older brother brought home a cassette
that he had bought for me. ‘This band is called Metallica,
they play heavy metal.’ It was Ride the Lightning,
and from that day on, I was the kid in my class with the badass
scary t-shirts.
- Kongh started in
1994, what was the first idea you had in mind about Kongh?
I was 9 years old in 1994; (ed.-, where the hell did I read
that?) I do actually think I had a band together with some
friends at that time, but it sure as hell didn't have a lot in
common with Kongh, hehe. Kongh was formed in 2004. More or less.
That's when I met Tomas (our drummer) and we started to jam
together. I wouldn't call that Kongh though. It was more like a
young, undeveloped cocoon that would give birth to Kongh after
lots and lots of jamming and drinking.
- What was the sound in
your heads and how close is that to how the band sounds now?
Our vision when we first started playing together was pretty
much the same as it is now, it's just that we've grown tighter
as a band and we've got a more clear image of what we want to do
and what we're capable of. Back in 2004 it was just ‘yeah, let's
buy a load of beers and play some heavy fucked up shit for a
couple of hours’. We had other bands at the time which we
considered more serious, so Kongh (although we hadn't come up
with that name at the time) was just an excuse for us to have
fun. We didn't really intend for people to hear the music so the
compositions were kinda loose and chaotic. We have a different,
more serious mindset today, resulting in better and more well
crafted pieces of music. Ever since the beginning of this band,
we've been in a constant state of development. Nothing about
that is conscious; we just get new inspiration from different
music, movies, experiences, places and people. We want to
explore new grounds while maintaining the basic vision.
- How do you decide to
make Kongh more serious?
As I mentioned above, when we began to play together, both of us
were already in active bands. But both of us are huge fans of
heavy, extreme and experimental music, and the bands we were in
had absolutely nothing to do with that. So the early stage of
Kongh was just an excuse to crank out some extreme heaviness for
the fun of it. As time went on, we realized that we had
something going and that we should try to make things more
serious.
- David and Thomas, you
spent close to a year rehearsing before deciding to go for a
bass player. What took so long?
I think we began to discuss bringing a bass player into the band
after a couple of months, but you have no idea how hard it is to
find musicians around here with a similar vision as ours. It's a
little mystery how we managed to bring this band together now
that I think about it. In the summer of 2005, after a year of
jamming (and after the writing of four actual songs - "Zihuatanejo",
"Turn into dust" and two nameless weirdos) we brought in our
first bass player named Stefan. He remained in the band for
almost a year, but in the spring of 2006, he was replaced by
Oskar Rydén, our current knight of the 4-stringed doom axe.
- Why the name Kongh?
We had been going through a bunch of more or less crappy and
pointless band names, and we were just about to make our first
recording and get the word out there. I'm a huge fan of the
motion picture King Kong from 1933. So when we got the idea to
name the band after him (we just spelled it "Kong" at first), me
and the other guys knew that the search for a band name was
over. This guy is heavy, huge, frightening and dangerous, but if
you look beyond that he's also a goodhearted fellow looking for
peace and love, yet a misunderstood creature who appears
horrible and evil for those who know nothing about him. That
says so much about the world we're living in, and we also
thought it fit very good with the music we're playing. So there
you go. After a while we learned that there had been a band who
used the name Kong like 20 years ago so we added an H at the end
to make things straight. Felt strange at first, but we've
learned to love the H.
- Your songs are very
long and seem to contain several passages where the melody and
the tempo is changed. Could you give us some insight into the
songwriting process?
Yes, the writing process can be difficult and normally it's
quite long as well. I will try to describe it. Writing music
like this requires lots of thinking and reflecting, at least in
our case. Starting to write a new song from scratch and
finishing it like the same day has never happened. Not even
close to. That's not what we're about. We have like a huge
library of ideas - riffs and melodies - that some band member
have come up with at a time or another. Since the songs are so
long and contains many different passages, the writing process
is a bit complicated. Let's say we're about to write a new song.
Then I might ask the guys ‘hey, remember this riff?’ and I play
them the riff. They remember it and we jam it for a while. Then
maybe we get instant ideas on how to take things further, like
trying to pair it together with some other idea we've tried some
time, or maybe we don't talk about it for another 6 months. We
just try to match different ideas together until we see a
pattern. This doesn't often happen while the whole band is
present.
A large part of the creative process happens when we're not
seeing each other. We think about the songs all the time, and
when a good idea strikes, we call each other, discuss it and
then we try it out in the rehearsal room. This way the song
slowly progresses and for each rehearsal session we usually
manage to get a bit further than last time. We're very certain
about not letting through anything that we don't think is 100%
appropriate for the song. Everything must feel perfect and
everything must have a purpose. Lets say we start to work on a
new song today. Then we might look at the finished song in a
couple of months from now. But, most ideas behind the song might
have been written between a 1-2 year period - or in some cases,
a 3 month period. It differs from song to song.
- In 2006 you recorded
a demo with four songs, how did you promote it and what as the
response?
Yes, that was our first and only public demo. We promoted it by
putting all four songs for free download on our website and
signed up for a MySpace account. We also sent out about 20 promo
copies for magazines. The response was great, way better than we
expected back then. People here and there from different corners
of the world started to get in touch and told us they liked our
stuff. It was cool. Things went pretty fast. We released the
demo in May 2006, and no later than July we had more or less
made an album deal with Trust No One Recordings.
- Is there a way to get
a hold of it?
No, I'm afraid there's no way to get a hold of it. We only made
like 30 or 50 and they sold pretty fast. I'm not even sure if I
still have any of the original copies. But I still have the
master of course. Maybe one day there'll be a limited re-run,
who knows? But since it was out for free download etc, I think
it's pretty widely circulated as mp3 and should be easy to find
online.
- Counting
Heartbeats contains five songs two of which were included in
the demo. What happened to the other three songs?
We got our album deal pretty fast after the demo was released,
and the original plan was to keep all 4 songs from the demo on
the album. But as time went by we wrote a couple of new songs
that we wanted to include as well, and we didn't want to release
a debut album that was 80 minutes long. So two songs had to go.
We still like those songs, but you'll always be more psyched
about your newest works. And yeah, the reason we kept "Zihuatanejo"
and "Adapt the void" is probably because we liked them the most.
"Turn into dust" can be heard on the split 7" released a while
ago, so the only unreleased one is "Thunders collide".
- Counting
Heartbeats was recorded with Peter Lundin? Who is he? Has he
done other heavy albums? How long was the recording?
Peter is a good friend of ours who lives in Vetlanda, the town
where we rehearse. So we hang at his apartment every now and
then, drinking wine and listening to weird old rock albums. He's
done lots of recordings over the years, studio recordings and
lots of high quality live recordings for national radio and
stuff. Probably nothing that would sound familiar here, but
since he's our friend and we know he's a great engineer, we
first approached him to record our demo. We liked the result, so
we worked with him on the album as well. Most likely he'll
record our next release too. The album recording was a couple of
months long, from January to April 2007. But due to a busy
schedule we only worked on weekends here and there, so I don't
think it was that long after all. Maybe 10 full days in total.
- How happy are you
with the results?
We're pretty happy with the results, but not 100% happy
sound-wise. There's some things that we should've done
different, and will do different next time.
- You have two new
splits with Witch-Lord and Ocean Chief coming out through Land O
Smiles, how did this come about? Is the song from the Witch-Lord
split the same recording from the demo?
Yeah, Land O Smiles got in touch with us back in 2006 when our
demo was out. They liked it a lot and wanted to release it on
vinyl. We didn't really want to put out the demo on vinyl since
some of the songs were going to be included on the Counting
Heartbeats album which we were working on then, so Land O
Smiles asked us if we wanted to do a split LP with Ocean Chief
instead. We love the Ocean Chief. They're one of the better
Swedish bands out there, so there was no question about it. The
result turned out really nice. One 25 minute song from each
band. Available at www.landosmiles.com
And regarding the "Turn into dust" tune on the 7". Yes, it's the
same recording as the demo, the one from 2006. But it was too
long for the noble 7" format so we cut off about 60 seconds of
the intro. It was nice to finally get that song release... it's
a nice little tune.
- Please list your
favorite albums.
If I should list all my favorite albums, the list would become
too long. But I'll give you a list of the 5 albums that I
consider have had the largest impact on me during the years, in
chronological order.
Metallica - Ride the Lightning - Made me realize at a
very young age that heavy and loud rock'n'roll music is fucking
awesome.
Nirvana - Nevermind - Got this during Christmas 1995 when
I was 10. Had already heard some Nirvana in my brother’s room
but didn't really get it until I got this album. Made me want to
play guitar myself. So my old man gave me my first Epiphone Les
Paul shortly after.
Black Sabbath - Paranoid - Made me worship the riff.
Enough said.
Melvins – Houdini - How can you not worship these
gentlemen? They learned me to look different at songwriting. Who
cares what the listener thinks?
Mastodon - Remission - I was totally blown away when I
heard this back in 2003. Ultra heavy riffing, complex structures
and very thoughtful melodies. Made me look at music with new
eyes.
- Please list a few
Swedish artists you’d recommend that might be under the
radar/not very well-known at the time or underrated. From any
genre.
Ok, here's some friends of ours definitely worth checking out:
Abandon - http://www.myspace.com/inrealitywesuffer
Circle Six - http://www.myspace.com/circlesixband
Horns Of Anguish - http://www.myspace.com/hornsofanguish
Prowess - http://www.myspace.com/prowessmetal
Sanctuary in Blasphemy - http://www.myspace.com/sanctuaryinblasphemy
St. Erik - http://www.myspace.com/sterik
Vaka - http://www.myspace.com/vakamusic
Vanhelgd - http://www.myspace.com/vanhelgd
- What’s next for the
band? Any plans to tour the States….
Right now we're working very hard on new material. The plan is
to enter the studio with Peter Lundin later in 2008 to record
the next album, which will be entitled Shadows of the
Shapeless. Hopefully this will see the light of day sometime
in early 2009. The near future also holds a European tour
together with Switchblade. Check our website for the dates. No
current plans to tour the States. But we'd gladly do so one day.
Hopefully soon!
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