In the run up to its most recent release, Holocene, song writer, The Ocean guitarist and band mainstay Robin Staps dived back in time to discuss the early days of Fogdiver, the steady growth of the band, the present and the future.
E&D: The Ocean has been a band for over 21 years and one of my favourite albums Fogdiver is going to be 20 this year. Are there any plans to do anything special for that?
Robin: You know, you’re actually the first person to ask that and you’re the first person to make me aware that it’s actually true, it’s the 20th anniversary of Fogdiver. Ironically we have been discussing a 10th anniversary show for Pelagial this year but nobody has even mentioned Fogdiver so far, but no you’re absolutely right. I guess I already answered your question, we don’t really have plans to do that, mostly because that material is so far away from the current line-up that it would basically be like completely learning new songs and rather than doing that we’d rather focus on actually new songs.
We have a new album that we’re going to release soon (Holocene), as you’re probably aware. We have a second album that is already written and not recorded yet but also like a bunch of new stuff that’s ready. It’s just always more exciting to look into the future than into the past, so if it means just reanimating songs that you’ve already played before then that is usually possible with relatively little effort, you just have to relearn certain tracks. In the case of Fogdiver it’s actually quite complicated and it would take quite some time to just learn that, so that’s probably why the rest of my bandmates wouldn’t be super keen to do that but I’ll put it on the table. I’d be happy to do it.
E&D: In the liner notes for Fogdiver it asked for people to send in any vocal adaptations that they’ve done to accompany the instrumental album. Did anyone actually ever send you anything?
Robin: I think there were a couple people who replied back then but nothing that was really mind-blowing that we would have decided to release. It was just a fun thing that we put in there. We basically wanted people to know when we released that record that we’re not an instrumental band.
The reason why that record came out as instrumental, well there were actually two reasons, one was that those tracks were quite experimental and we didn’t really know how to approach those vocally and felt they worked really well instrumentally, although we already had two vocalists at that time. The other reason was that the guy who released it, Jörg from Make My Day Records, he really loved those instrumentals and he hated our vocalists, he wasn’t really into metal back then and he was always very honest about that and he was like “I really love you guys but I hate those vocals”. In the beginning we were just joking about it but then we decided to do it and our vocalists at that time were cool with it. Then with Fluxion we totally destroyed the notion of The Ocean as an instrumental band soon afterwards. So it was a fun project.
E&D: On the first demo it said “give us your money or your studio and we’ll be able to realise many more of our visions of where the music can be taken”. The next release, Fogdiver was recorded in Oceanland studio. I assume no one turned up to give you money so you just started doing it yourself?
Robin: Yeah that was the situation back then. We had this very cool underground space where we rehearsed and some of us also lived there during that time. It was warm in the winter and it was a free space to use. We didn’t have a record label at that time, we didn’t have recording budgets so I basically tracked Fogdiver myself. I mixed it and Aeolian and that was simply born out of the necessity of not having the budget and not being able to hire professionals to do that. It was also good to learn a little bit of audio engineering myself but I also realised that this is not what I want to do.
I think it’s very important to have someone external come in, not only someone with expertise and experience but also someone who’s not too involved, someone who’s listening to these tracks with fresh ears can always give very valuable input. As an artist after months of working on writing these tracks, rehearsing them and then recording them you’re just too deep in the bubble, you don’t see certain things. This is why it’s very important for the mix, at least, to have someone come in who you trust, who has not really been involved with the album so far who’s totally starting from scratch. I learned that with these records, by making the mistake of not doing that and not realising certain things that I only became aware of much later and then it’s too late to change it. I mean everyone has to find their right approach, for me it’s been quite a journey and I realised quite early that I want to write and record music but I don’t want to mix or master my own music.
E&D: Is Oceanland 2.0 just an upgrade of the original or a different location?
Robin: It’s new but actually quite a similar space, it’s even in the same part of town. They kicked us out of the old Oceanland around 2009 or 2010 or something like that. For quite some time we didn’t really have a rehearsal space because back then we had the Swiss people in the band so I was going mostly to Switzerland to rehearse with them there. We were already touring quite heavily so we would only rehearse before a tour or before going into the studio so we didn’t need this permanent space. Two years ago we found a new space and we established ourselves there. Loïc and I built a little stage into it where we can rehearse with lighting production as well. We built a little studio room and a vocal booth as well where we can track basically everything but drums. So we recorded Holocene there entirely except the drums which were recorded at Peter’s (Voigtmann, keys/percussion) place.
We have this split setup between his place and Oceanland 2.0 in Berlin which is great because Peter has the perfect drum room. He has a big studio in an old mill in the countryside in the north of Germany and it’s always nice for us to go there and kind of get out of the city and it’s fully residential so we can all stay there and just spend a week tracking drums. Then everything else we do in Berlin and this is a very comfortable setup now and I’m happy that we have this space again which you can get to at any time during the day and night to record, to be creative, to work, to escape from wherever you’re escaping from. It’s something I always needed to have somehow.
E&D: In the 21+ years that you’ve been a band there’s been quite a lot of organic growth, each tour has been in a bigger venue, each album has been a bit grander and things like that. Do you feel there has been one point in time, be that an album or tour, that increased that trajectory at all?
Robin: I don’t think so because I don’t think the growth of this band has been particularly quick. I think it’s been, like you said, we’ve been around for over 20 years now and yeah there’s more people coming to our shows now than 20 years ago, otherwise we probably wouldn’t be doing this anymore, so that’s good. It’s also not that we exploded popularity wise at one point. I think it’s just been like relentless touring, I mean we’ve been going out a lot because we love it and it’s not work for us, it’s something we love doing and I think that’s what’s paying off now that just having the stamina to carry on and to keep doing what you love doing and eventually people will notice, in our case it took quite long.
E&D: Do you have an Ocean album that you would consider your favourite or as you said you are always in the current and looking forward?
Robin: It’s always the latest album because it’s the least worn out. Like right now we just got home from six months of touring, we played over 150 shows in the last year and by the end of that we were so tired of the Phanerozoic II material because we played those tracks literally every night. It’s ironic because we only started playing it a year before but if you play 150 shows per year you’ll get drained. Now we’re all taking a bit of a break and we’re looking forward to working on the Holocene material which is going to be relearning these tracks from scratch more or less. They were already recorded, like they were written in 2020 so three years ago and then recorded in 2021 so two years ago and we always work that way. We write a record and then we forget the first time, then we have to relearn it to record it, then we forget it a second time and then we have to relearn it to play it live and this is like the stage we’re in right now so it’s a lot of forgetting and re-learning that’s part of the artistic process I guess.
E&D: You mentioned the 10th anniversary of Pelagial. What sort of things do you have in mind to celebrate that?
Robin: We’re likely just going to do one single show where we play the album in its entirety. It’s going to be a special show that we will hopefully announce very soon. It’s going to be part of a Pelagic Fest that we’re doing, which this time is not going to happen in Berlin. We really want to keep it at the one special show to give people a bit of an incentive to come to that specific event and we’ll be touring again in the fall with the new album so we will be playing all over Europe in October anyways but we won’t be playing Pelagial then and maybe like one track of the record but not more than that. On the other hand at that Pelagic Fest we’re only going to do that, we’re not going to play the new album or any of the tour sets you can get that separate so that’s the plan for now but it’s not entirely confirmed yet, I just have to say that the the whole thing might or might not happen but it’s looking pretty good right now.
E&D: You have said that every Ocean song started with you coming up with a riff, or a drum beat or vocal loop. The basis of Holocene was the music Peter was sending you. How did you find that difference in the process of working from a base someone else had introduced you to?
Robin: Very interesting, new for me and it worked out surprisingly well to not start a song with a blank page but with something that was already there. I think what helped was also the total no pressure situation, we weren’t sitting down like “hey we’re gonna make an Ocean record now and then this time we want to try something different”. We just started exchanging ideas and Peter just sent me stuff that clicked with me and I started fooling around with my guitar and adding parts and adding other instruments over it. Then I started writing other parts and at the end of it we very quickly had a collection of songs that was somehow different but still had that Ocean vibe to it and so the decision was made relatively quickly that we want this to be an Ocean record.
Creatively it was very cool for me to not start with a blank page but with something that somebody else had written, somebody I know and I trust and something that resonated with me. Peter is very good in his world of synths he does pre-productions to a great level of detail. In that way he’s very different from me, for me it’s all about the musical idea so I can record a sh*tty guitar riff demo and I can imagine how it’s gonna sound in the end. Peter is the guy who will just sit down and tweak and the demos will sound so perfect that you don’t need to do anything with them anymore.
E&D: You mentioned pressure from a writing perspective, have there been times for the Ocean that you felt pressure? Is that pressure you put on yourself or is that pressure coming from external expectations?
Robin: I don’t think there is much of that that would affect us, I’ve never had a hard time writing music. Luckily I’ve never been in a creative crisis moment where I felt like I don’t have ideas or I don’t know what I want to do. Artistically when I’m in writing zone I write very quickly and what takes time is the recording process, mixing and coming up with artwork and packaging. That all takes forever but the actual writing of music for me is usually pretty quick.
At the same time I think we’ve never been the band that is searching for a formula for their sound and then trying to reproduce that formula with every record. It’s always like we’ve been in constant motion and things have been changing so many times over our band history, in terms of members and in terms of just personal growth and different directions of what we were into musically.
That change has become something that is almost institutionalised in this band and I think in the early years people were having a bit of a problem with that. I remember when we released Heliocentric there was lots of voices on Last.fm or something saying this isn’t metal and this is not heavy and I was following that back then and it bothered me because people were talking but in the end a lot of those people who complained ended up buying the record which I thought was funny. We’ve been trying to do something different with every record and the band has constantly evolved and I think by now this is what our fans and the people who listen to us appreciate. In the band the fact that you never know exactly what you’re gonna get with the next record, there is a certain Oceanic vibe that has been there for a long time and that is also on this new record but at the same time there’s always something new and a bit of a different direction and a different uh emphasis on certain instruments. On this record it’s brass and analogue synths, more than guitars and that doesn’t mean that this is like the direction for the future. The next record might be a record entirely without synths and brass and it’s still going to be an Ocean record and I think this is what hopefully most people appreciate about this band that this level of not being able to forecast what we’re going to deliver with the next record and that element of surprise.
E&D: For The Ocean writing process, lyrics and vocals are always the last piece of the puzzle. With the musical writing being slightly different on Holocene was that process the same? How does the process work between you and Loïc?
Robin: I still wrote the lyrics for this album and they were still the last part of the process, not just the lyrics, the vocals too. The way we work is quite weird, the music gets written first so this album was basically 100% finished in its instrumental form before we started working on vocals. By then I had certain ideas for certain parts and Loïc had certain ideas for certain parts and then we just started working on it and started developing these ideas and that is usually entirely without lyrics.
Loïc goes into the vocal booth and I put on a loop and he starts singing and then at one point either I press stop or he comes out of the room and we say “this is it let’s try this”. Then we record sketches in ‘dada language’ it’s really just completely detached syllables and words, there’s bits of French, bits of English, bits of non-existing languages of the future in it and once we have that basically the melodies and the rhythmical phrasing, that’s when I start writing lyrics. For me that’s the most challenging process because there’s so many aspects that have to fall into place. You have to write something that is obviously striking content-wise and be impactful and emotionally strong and charged. There are aspects of rhythm, rhyme and melody and voicing to take into account so it’s a very tough and tedious process, and when I initially said that writing music for me is very easy and I never have a shortage of ideas for lyrics it’s the opposite. Sometimes I really struggle with that and I have to force myself to get things to come out of me somehow, it’s not always like that but it can be quite a struggle actually.
For this record that was no different but Loïc and I are at a very good place and I think we divide up the work pretty well. I do write the lyrics but he writes a lot of the vocal ideas and a lot of the melodies are his creation, so it’s a partially improvised process where he tries something and I take more of a producer role saying this is great let’s pursue this pathand then sometimes it leads somewhere and sometimes it doesn’t and then I come in and not writing the lyrics but he comes up with a lot of the hook lines and the phrasing as well.
E&D: Were there any particular songs or parts of the vocal and lyric process on Holocene that you quite enjoyed and were any that came easier than others?
Robin: I think one of the relatively straightforward tracks to write was ‘Preboreal’ the opening track. We just had a good flow with this one that came together very quickly and it was all based on an already existing text, Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’, a book I revisited during the pandemic when I wrote this record basically. That was very present in my mind so I knew I wanted to do something with that and a lot of times it’s like that when you have a text to work with already, it’s a lot easier. If you already have something laying in front of you then it’s easier to get inspiration, so this one came about pretty smoothly.
‘Sea of Reeds’ was the complete opposite of that but that was already carried by some vocal ideas and hook lines that I had in my mind when I was writing the song. The whole end part of that track, for example, was something where one line was already there and I built the whole rest of the track around that. It’s also sometimes a very different process, it’s very architectural that you really build a skeleton of words that you have in your mind which are already tied to certain melodies and then you build everything else around it. You really start in the beginning and you go from one verse to the next and you know move forwards chronologically.
There can be very different approaches between the individual tracks actually, for ‘Unconformities’ for example it was all Karen’s work and I just explained the idea of the record to her and she approached it completely freely and yeah I guess every artist has its own ways of doing that.
E&D: Holocene was somewhat of a departure from the band’s sound and you mentioned that you have another new album written. Is there any link in style and themes between Holocene and the next album or is it going to be a clean break?
Robin: It’s going to be a clean cut for sure. I think we’ve exploited this paleontological concept album idea now really to the max. Like I said Holocene wasn’t even meant to happen, it was just something that happened and we felt it kind of relates to both Phanerozoic records so let’s do it one more time but now it’s really time for something new. I already have an idea of what I want to do with the next record but it’s still its infancy and it’s a bit too early to talk about that but I can tell you that it’s going to be something completely detached from Precambrian and the Phanerozoic albums it’s going to be a bit of a new start conceptually and musically. It’s a different album from Holocene for sure, it’s more guitar focused and it’s more of a rock album in a way and probably more what people would expect after the first half of Phanerozoic II, while Holocene was a record that connected better with the second half of Phanerozoic II so that’s the the rough outlook.
E&D: What are the plans for the rest of the year and touring the Holocene?
Robin: We’re going to be touring Europe and the UK starting in late September and all through October. Then we’re planning to return to the States and possibly South America again in November/December but we’re still starting to discuss options there. I also really want to go back to Australia, we haven’t been since 2019 and we have a good following there so it’s always been fun to tour over. So now we’re all just taking a nice break for a couple of months in order to be able to enjoy this again and I’m already getting to that point, I don’t need too much recovery. I’m already itching to go out again.
