The Shining Interview

The Shining from Norway are a band that are creatively at the top of their game, blending jazz, metal and industrial, into an exciting and dynamic mix, that they have characterised as Blackjazz. Live the band delivers an intensity and musical inventiveness that is pretty much shock and awe, as Room Thirteen experienced at their Glasgow gig at the end of last year, with Marty Friedman, as part of the tour with Arch Enemy and Kreator.

The band are touring with Devin Townsend and Periphery at the end of March, visiting Bristol, Glasgow again, and Manchester, preceded by their own headlining London show on the 28th March at the Boston Music Room. You owe it to yourself to experience them live.

We interviewed main-man Jorgen Munkeby shortly before going onstage in Glasgow. With thanks to Keiran Allen for helping devise and ask the questions, and to Lewis Allen for the photograph.

R13: As a band you do a lot of metal tours, and have a lot of metal fans, even though you don’t fit the standard metal profile. You have a lot of influences like prog and jazz, and a lot of avant-garde genres. Why do you think you guys have been so well accepted in the metal world, when you have so many different musical elements?
JM: We have done a lot of metal tours. Our last tour was with Devin Townsend, although he’s not the cliched straight up metal and death. We did one with The Ocean, also in Europe. There were two other bands on that bill, a Polish band called Tides from Nebula, and they are not really metal.
R13: They are kind of Post Rock.
JM: Yeah. A mix of different stuff. In the US we did a tour with the Dillinger Escape Plan, and they are not really straight up metal either. I think you are right though; we do that more than jazz tours. The current tour is the most metal we have done. I feel our audience is a very wide audience. It makes sense to cater to all of these, both mainstream and more avant-garde. How we came into that scene…I have just made the music I wanted to make, along the way. It started out as an acoustic jazz quartet, with John Coltrane sort of stuff. Then it developed into what it is now. With the album Blackjazz we landed into something, which is similar to what we do now. We are still in that 'Blackjazz' world. That made some waves in the metal world. A lot of people in the metal world are interested to see new things come in. There are metal bands that stick to the script, staying true to what it sounded like before, but for some people that gets boring. So some people are welcoming new stuff. It felt like we did something that people perceived as a fresh and new thing. That was also the first time we released an album on a metal label. Those things have made it so that the metal world opened up to us. Our music is an interesting blend of different types of music. I know a lot of other bands have started calling their music Blackjazz. I think that’s great.

R13: You share a name with another Scandinavian band, the Swedish Shining, who are quite controversial, with themes of self-destructiveness. Has this created any interesting situations, or even a slight rivalry?
JM: When Blackjazz came out and started making waves in the metal world, it was like here comes this band from Norway that no one knows anything about, and there is this band from Sweden that everyone knows about. A lot of our fans didn’t know about the Swedish Shining. Some people got confused and I wanted to make sure that labels, promoters and stuff made sure that when they pushed our album, it said The Shining Norway. The Swedish Shining stated doing the same, and people started getting used to it. The worst that can happen is that you come across some music that you didn’t know of, and that’s not the end of the world. When it comes to rivalry, I haven’t spent any energy on it, and it seems like Niklas and his band feel the same way. It’s also made us more conscious about maybe cleaning up our visual aesthetics, removing a lot of links to the cliche depressing metal thing. So maybe it’s affected unconsciously the visual aesthetics and music a little bit. It’s been a good thing.

R13: On this tour you have Marty Friedman joining you on stage, a guy that is a legendary guitarist in the metal world. How did the collaboration start, and how does the collaboration feel?
JM: The collaboration with him started with him contacting me, and asking me if I wanted to write some music with him for his new album. He was putting together an album with artists that had inspired him. He wanted to do two tracks, but it ended up with us not having enough time to do two. So we sent the music back and forth, and I met him in the studio in LA when I was there, but at that time we just finished the sax tracks. That album was released on the same label that we have in the US. One festival in Norway heard about that album and track, and asked if we would be interested in having Marty with us, and I said that would be an option, and mentioned it to the booking agent in the UK. But that didn’t go through, but for this tour I think Arch Enemy, Kreator, and the booking agent and promoters, felt that it was a good way of getting two names. That was how it came about. I grew up with metal music but I didn’t grow up with Megadeth, I grew up with Pantera, Death and Sepultura, and stuff like that. I know he is a famous guitar player, but to me he is a musician that wants to make great music, and that was the same with me. When it came out, all my guitarist friends knew about it. Obviously the guitar players love him. He’s shaped a whole generation of guitar players, but not a generation of sax players (all laugh). It’s been great working with him. I love the track we did together, and it’s been great having him on this tour. It’s been an interesting collaboration, as we have never had a guest artist before.

R13: On your next tour in the UK you are supporting Devin Townsend who is a big pioneer in metal, and music more generally. Are you guy’s fans, and do you take any inspiration from Devin?
JM: To me Devin is a great musician, and if I like him as a person and a musician that’s an important thing. I didn’t grow up with his music either but I do like it a lot. I have come to get to know his music when I started working with him before. Touring with him is just great; we get along great with their band, with their crew. The audience match is amazing, even better than this, the perfect combination. We are doing a month with him in March, playing Glasgow again.

R13: On the live Blackjazz album, you really stretch out on a track like Fisheye, and there is some great sax soloing, with some John Coltrane influences in there. Is it important to you to retain those jazz elements in your music?
JM: Yeah, in our music I want to make sure its there, because I grew up with metal but I also started playing jazz music pretty early on and studied jazz music for ten-fifteen years. So those two things are really in my blood. That’s why it feels natural now to do both of those things. Blackjazz as an idea is meant to incorporate metal stuff and jazz stuff, but not every type of metal and not every type of jazz. John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and Pharoah Sanders, and that kind of playing, just felt like it fitted the energy of metal, and the sound of metal, very well. While the Michael Brecker type of playing and other types of playing that I also studied, didn’t fit that well. So definitely the later Coltrane stuff I think fits well, and feels an important piece of Blackjazz. I think it helps give the metal music some energy and some freer attitude, and maybe some punk kind of attitude. Some metal has become kind of strict, so I want to get the best of the jazz part and the metal part. In live settings we probably improvise a bit more than on albums, and that’s natural because an album and concert are two different things. It doesn’t have to sound like jazz to have a jazz element. If Miles Davis were alive and playing today, he would probably sound like us.

R13: The band has a distinct visual presence, whether it's how you dress on stage, album covers or logo design. Musicians like John Coltrane dressed very formally on stage, and there is a sense of that in your look. Is that something you have deliberately paid attention too?
JM: You are right, though I haven't really thought about Coltrane. He had a formal look, that's right. In my heart I like the more clean, stylish, elegant visual aesthetic, and that's really where it comes from. I have always been interested in graphical stuff; I liked drawing when I was a kid. I like being involved in that kind of stuff. Involved in logo making and things like that.

R13: Sort of linked to that - you have used some amazing locations to shoot videos, the desert in California, a demolition site, and the music is played live and in one take. What is the thinking behind that?
JM: The first time it was arranged by the Norwegian National Broadcast television station. They had a series of those. What I liked about it was the fact that we are a band that can do that, we pride ourselves in being able to do that. We don't rely on backing tracks. Sometimes I like the punkish attitude you get from not being in control of your surroundings. That gives an energy to the music, an energy to the performance. I felt there was a lot of videos on-line that were super polished, but there weren't many where you thought that human element was there. So maybe it was something that we could do that other people couldn't do that well. That's an ongoing series. It takes some planning to do; I call them live on location. That's something I would love to do more of. I love making a live video, I like that idea a lot.
R13: They’re really stunning.
JM: We might do one in the North Pole (all laugh), and the ocean.

R13: We reviewed your set at the Bloodstock Festival in August, and you got a great crowd reaction. How was playing Bloodstock for the band, and what do you feel from the stage when that connection happens with an audience?
JM: It is very different from place to place, and from country to country. Some places they go crazy, if they know what they are up to, especially if they are our fans. If they are from France or Poland, they run around like crazy. In Norway they are more reserved. Most of the places on this tour have been really good, but you never know. Bloodstock was really good. We travelled the whole night, starting at 1 am/2 am and arrived at Bloodstock at 11am and played at 12. Some of our equipment was missing on the plane. It was fun. Sometimes I like that when stuff goes wrong, just gives you ...
R13: More energy.
JM: Yeah.

R13: King Crimson's 21st Century Schizoid Man is a live set highlight, what drew you towards that track, and are you a fan of King Crimson?.
JM: King Crimson is also a band I didn't grow up with. It's an older band than the bands I listened too. The reason why we did that was that we were asked by a Norwegian radio station to be part of a radio show where every artist chose a band and then talked about the band and played from some albums. At the end of the show they played a cover. We talked through different options and our guitar player at that time suggested King Crimson. There were a few options and we tried them out and found that 21st Century Schizoid Man was a cool thing to do. We were able to make it our own. We played the main riffs, but we changed out the middle part, and we started playing that live. There is a video of that first performance on radio. We played it live on a tour with Enslaved, and on the last couple shows they joined our set on that song. We worked on it for the Blackjazz album and made it more industrial. Made it harder and updating it. Since then it has been part of our live set on 98% of our shows since that time.

R13: Thanks very much it’s been a real pleasure.
JM: Thank you.

So there you have it, Jorgen reckons if jazz great Miles Davis was still with us, he would sound like The Shining. We at Room Thirteen agree! There is no higher praise than that!