A Conversation with Sykofant (Part 2 of 2)

Continued from Part One…

Did you find it difficult to take all these different styles and make them work together seamlessly without there being rough edits or jarring changes? Because everything makes sense the way that it goes in sequence.

Melvin Treider: One of the things that we’ve spent quite some time on was managing those transitions. Taking the spaghetti western part as an example, we had been jamming on the “Strangers” main theme for quite a while. And I remember a few times we just started jamming into this kind of surf rock kind of thing that we thought sounded cool. I know that especially for you, Emil, it’s been important for you to get this sense that we’re not just switching [styles], but that there’s the thought behind the transition. You and Per spent quite some time making those transitions make sense.

Emil Moen: Yeah. We have a huge library of terrible attempts as well that no one is allowed to hear!

When the album was provided digitally, there was one version that had the individual songs and another which was a single edit of the whole thing, start to finish. That sort of reinforces the idea that’s how it’s to be experienced. All that said, watching the lyric video for “Forgotten Paths,” I was struck by how successful you were at being able to boil part of the music down to a pop song length, and for it still to work. It didn’t feel like an excerpt. When you were putting the album together, were you thinking about things like that?

Emil: Funny that you mentioned it, because “Forgotten Paths” – we call it the pop rock section – is actually the only section on the album that is solely written by me. Because that. And it was actually written before all the other stuff because that’s a song I wrote many years ago. It’s pretty dear to me, to be honest. When we decided that it was going to be the last song, there was some discussion, because some of us that are more into making everything weird and experimental all the time. We convinced him; we had a vote, three against one.

You had a release concert on June 8. How did that go?

Melvin: Well, I’m very happy. I think we’re all very satisfied. So a lot of friends, family, and even friends of friends and people we hadn’t met before showed up, and randoms as well. Random people. And we sold out, which was very surprising to us as a first release concert. The atmosphere in that basement – the venue is called Revolver – the kind of gritty, dark basement venue is really cool.

Emil: A true rock club.

Did you perform the work start to finish?

Emil: Start to finish.

Melvin: It sounds very close to what you heard on the album in terms of the construction. Maybe some parts we played for maybe a bar or two longer.

Emil: Yeah, we played a bit round with it and there’s some transitions as well that are a bit improvised. We like to have fun with it.

Very few groups start out by making a concept album. Where do you go from here?

Emil: To be honest, I don’t know. We have a couple of EPs planned. Probably the first one will build upon the same concept; an expansion of the story, if you will. And we’ll see about the other one. We’re not completely sure yet, but we have some ideas now to kind of weave that in as well. But no promises as of yet. After that, we have been joking around a lot: What do we do? Do we make like an album just of like one one song? Do we make a jazz album? Do we make some fusion?

Melvin: We have talked about going complete fusion, trying to go do some kind of late Herbie Hancock kind of thing! But we’ll see.

Emil: We’ll see where the jamming takes us.

The debut album from Sykofant is available on vinyl and on most streaming services. Learn more about the band by visiting sykofant.com.