:: EMAIL FROM THERION ::

Some thoughts and clearification on the recent events

It may seem hard for many to grasp how this could happen. As for my self, if you would have asked me a year ago, I'd say we had the ultimate line-up and that this would be the one for a long, long time to come, maybe for ever. But life change and so does people, including my self. And for this case most importantly, so does Therion. Something you fans seldomly or never have reason to reflect on is HOW we do things and not only how the final result appears on stage or sounds to your ears. Many bands may have internal discussions on how the sound is gonna be, but I think one of the biggest issues for Therion is HOW we do things when we record and tour. How the next album will sound musically is not necessarily the biggest issue when our visions took different directions, even though I think I can say at least one person didn't feel entierly comfortable also with the musical direction the way I interpreted his signals.

To make one thing clear before there's a lot of speculations. Absolutely no one was fired. I noticed a lack of enthusiasm and it became obvious that we had different views on how to do certain things. The worst thing that can happen to Therion is to loose the dynamic and become just a "job" for the people involved, so I asked them straight out to consider their future with Therion anno 2009 and onwards. They had a meeting and came to the conclusion that it wouldn't feel honest towards me, them selves or the fans to make another round with yet and album and World Tour. It's not a small project to be involved with. I estimate one year of recording and one year of touring. So it's not something small one signs up to and I want to have peple that are 100% motivated and not just do it for the sake of making a buck and do it in lack of something they would rather do musically. The spark and the hunger is definatly gone for this line-up. Hats off to the guys for being so true to the art and not pretending and fooling them selves and others just for the sake of "fame and money" (not that you get disgustingly rich from playing in Therion, but at least it's decent money and you get to see the world and shouting fans).

As for the future of Therion, there is absolutely nothing to be alarmed of. Therion has always been more of a musical organism rather than a regular band. How many bands do you know of that don't have a permanent singer in the band for a start? The majority of our fan base that was born with the release of Theli in 1996
is still the base of today. They have been able to follow a musical journey incomparable to any other band and with a variety of members being the performers. Be sure of that it will sound different on the next album, but at the same time, be also assured of that if there would have been an internet forum like this back in 1996-97, then you would have had an equal shock; "What, no Piotr? Dan Swanö is not gonna sing on the next album?? So sad that Jonas won't continue! ´" etc. You are all hooking up to the musical current of Therion at different stages and therefore you will always have nostalgia to different records, tours line-ups etc. It's natural.

My philosophy regarding members has always been that "everybody is very important, but no one is irreplacable". It is not something easy to replace three so increadibly talanted musicians at the same time as is the case now, but at least for the festival in September, it's no problem at all, so no need to feel alarmed of that. Finding gifted instrumentalists has never been a problem for a successful band. The true challenge lies within finding equally (or better) musicians with a musical personality and original style, as most of those are already engaged in successful bands already. But on the other hand, none of the Niemanns nor Petter had ever recorded an album, played a show outside Sweden or had any considerable musical success at all (with the exception of Johan, who had a moderate success in the proggressive undergound with the cool band Minds Eye). Yet they were all extremely talanted and strong personality musicians, excellent song writers and very dedicated to the art. It may appear as a mystery that they were not already world famous before they joined Therion. But that's how the world is. And it also shows that there's probably plenty of other diamonds hiding, waiting to be digged out and allowed to shine upon the world. There's also many excellent musicians that used to be successful with other bands in the passed, but didn't manage to continue a career, even though they are very talanted. Forgotten jewels that could shine even brighter than in he old days if given the opportunity.

For sure I will miss all three of them a lot in the future on tour. It will especially be strange to play without the Niemanns that has been in the band for 8 years, longer than any other members. But I'm glad we parted before the flame was totally burned out. I hope their time with Therion have given them (and of course Petter) the experience, contacts and platform they need to successfully continue their careers and create cool music. I'm very curious of what they will be putting out. They are all very interesting song writers and for sure the next Demonoid album will kick some serius ass. Johan also have something interesting of his own that I'm very curious to hear! And Petter will for sure have his hands full with probably more than one project with cool progressive stuff. I'm really looking forward to hear all of it. I also hope I will get the chance to see Demonoid live, that would be cool. =)

/ Christofer



PS

I've seen some reaction like "now I'm never gonna see them live" refering to these guys not gonna play with Therion next time around. Well, that's the thing with Therion, you can NEVER take anything for granted. If you want to be sure to see what we have to offer at the moment and if you live in a country we play in - go to the show or loose the chance (or in best case watch the DVD some year later if there is one). We're not like Motorhead and that kind of bands that will be back doing more or less the same thing every year. Therion live is an art form comparable to a flower. You can only watch it and smell it in real life. A DVD will give you a clue of the beauty of it, but you'll never be able to smell it.
So Therion is a band that needs to be rediscovered for each tour, just like each new album is a challange to the perceptio of what is Therion and what is not (refering to the discussion that always massively occour with each new release).

Christofer Johnsson

Clearification on Russia

As it has been told to me that some of the stuff I have written has been missunderstood in Russia, I hereby make a short clearification.

There is absolutely no need for russian fans to argue with each other and take sides Therion vs Blind Guardian. We have different attitudes in our bands and I've clearly lost my respect for them, but there's no "war" going on and for what I am concerend there's no value in "crying over spilled milk" as we say in Sweden. What happened has happened and I've told the story as I experienced it. If this mean others also loose repect for Blind Guardian too is nothing I care about, repect is something you earn and in my eyes that don't. But their music is not bad (though I see them as a good power metal band with a sound of their own and not the kind of higher for of art music they gave me the impression they think they play) and I see no reason why fans should be arguing, we can't change now what already happened then anyway. Everybody is entitled to their opinion, but if you are angry at Blind Guardian, rather send them a mail about about it than arguing with other fans. Or simply just forget about the whole thing and look forward to the future instead.

be assured we love the russian fans and are very sorry that we couldn't give you the Therion concert we planned and that you all deserved. That is why I was even prepared to cancel and pay for many costs from my own pocket, because it was such an unforgettable experience the last two times and we wanted to aim even higher this time.
In 2009 we will make a new record and 2010 we will be making a new World Tour and then we'll come back to Russia again and show you not only what it SHOULD have been like this time, we will do even BETTER! That is a promise.

I also like to mention that the russian promoter has mailed me and apologuised for the event. It's an honest apology and it seems this sort of event with many bands is simply over their heads and too complicated for them to organize. As I wrote in the last post, they did a good job the two times before, so therefore we expected it to be at least on the same level this time, and our dissapointment was therefore extra big when things turned out to be such a total disaster. Not everything was their fault (like the previous people who rented the hall and didn't remove the cars from the day before), but nevertheless they are the promoter and they are the ones responsible for enabling a hall for the concert. They meant well, but this event was simply totally over their heads to organize and hopefully they stick to events they can handle better in the future (for the sake of them selves, the bands and the fans).

Christofer Johnsson

Russian misery 2007

As there has been a lot of talks and also statements from the promoter about this, I feel the duty to explain what really happened.
I wish there would be a short way of saying this, but to fully get people grasp the picture, I'm posting this detailed story of what really happened in Russia and the background of it.

When you make a total fuck up show, loose loads of money on it (2500 showed up in Moscow, they expected 4000) and have thousands of angry people looking your way, it is of course convenient with a scapegoat. Especially when you can write in russian and this person don't speak that language and you don't expect him to be able to defend him self. And everybody of course "knows" that musicians are demaning stars that are causing all sorts of problems and delays for the poor hard working promoters. Like Axl Rose, if he's in a bad mood the concert gets some hours delayed, or those alcoholic musicians that are too drunk to get their shit together and go on stage in time. Well, believe it or not, but quite a lot of us are in fact the opposite. We often put up with things that you would never believe a big band would accept and I've heard so many times from people I've met that they are surprised that we are just totally "normal people". We fly tourist class or even low budget airlines like Ryan Air to shows, eat normal food and dress normally (in case someone though we have a private jet, eat russian caviar for breakfast and use the same tailor as Elton John). I'm the only one in the band who owns a car and we all live in normal appartments in boring suburbs. Just thought it might be good to know in case you happen to stand outside a concert hall waiting for 4 hours and wonder if the delay is because of:

A- the band finnishing their champagne & caviar session at the pool and that might take some time - it's a damn good champagne! =)

or

B - if it maybe could be due to technical problems and that the bands crew are the heroes of the day making a show happen at all.


I remember the ONLY time when WE ever cancelled a show (shows being cancelled by the fact that our tour bus broke down or similar that made us unable to get to the show in time, or shows that were cancelled by the promoter by some reason is another thing). That was in Livorno in Italy, back in 1998 promoting the Vovin album. The stage was around 15 cm high and so small that when the drums was on it, there was no space for the band. The promoter had intended the band to stand on the floor (!) and play in front of the audience! The PA was of the same type as any average demo band would have in their rehearsal room and was good for nothing except maybe vocals - for ONE singer (Therion had 4 on that tour). The catering (for 28 people including crew and drivers) were 2 six packs of coca cola and one plate with golden toast sandwhiches. Not even one drink and a pice to put in the mough for each person in the traveling party.
The promoter had broken every term imaginable in the contract and it would be a terrible embarressment of a show if we attempted to play, so we (Therion and Moonspell who also was on that tour) decided to not do the show and leave. After we had left, the promoter was talking to fans who had traveled far to see the show and explained to them how big rock stars we were and that he had given us "everything imaginable", but nothing was good enough for us and we canceled. He said he had worked with Deep Purple and they were happy, but Therion and Moonspell had too special demands...
Today I had a deja-vu when reading a translation of what the russian promoter was writing about the show in Moscow last weekend. I was thinking about Livorno in Italy. Of course, things were not as bad as in Livorno and after all, we managed to do the show. And even though it (as usual) was more complicated to provide a normal vegetarian meal than to make a pig fly, I can not complain about the catering for the people who were not vegetarians, they were fed well. But the principle to blame the band (and management) for having "bad behaviour" in an attempt to cover up for them selves not having fulfilled much of the agreed terms and making a total mess of everything is the same.

So why was the show delayed then?

Delay reason no 1: When our road crew and sound engineer arrived to the venue in the morning, there were CARS (!) standing on the stage. They had an exhibition the day before and no one had moved them. Obviously they can't start setting up our stuff when the stage is filled with cars. Or maybe we should put the drum kit in one of the the back seats and the singer can stand on the roof of the cars?

Delay reason no 2: As the case is in many countries with poor economy, much of the equipment did not work at all, or had several malfunctions. Getting new stuff in or making special solutions to get things working takes time. That is not what our crew is paid to do (fix broken stuff), but that is still what they must do every time we end up in countries where the promoters do not live up to what they have formally agreed to when signing the contract and accepting the technical rider. The only way we can avoid that is to either become so big that the promotors that book U2, Ozzy, Metallica and those kind of bands get interested, or to simply avoid playing in those countries where we know these things happen. We want to play, so this is the reality we have to deal with also in the future.

The discussions regarding if Therion should cancel or not did not even cause a 5 min delay. We had discussions while the crew were working with their stuff and nothing was ever stopped because of that. Either the promoter is lying or he simply have no clue of what was going on at all (I suspect the latter).

Then what was this talk about cancelling about then?

I was originally asked if we wanted to play Moscow again and I accepted that offer of course, it always RULED to play there. More or less at the same time it was suggested that we could have both Blind Guardian and Therion playing on the same stage. We would get paid the same and do our show, but it would mean a bigger concert hall and more people. Why not, sounded like a good idea.
One month before the show, I get to hear that Pain is also playing. Not from our booking agent (but this was their fault though, not the promoters), but from Kristian who had met Peter from Pain. This was worrying me, as I know there's often technical issues in Russia. And I was later told by our agent we would have a playing time of 1,5 hours as "it was a festival". I could have made a problem out of that too, as what I agreed to was to make a full Therion show on stage before Blind Guardian, not to participate in a festival. But I accepted that as I thought it would be an amazing show in a huge venue where we could put on a show to blow everyone away (now it turned out we played a SMALLER venue with the same amount of people as when headlining last time).
We applied for the VISA to Russia and after a lot of trouble and mess (as the promoters partner of course sent us the wrong papers!) and time went and we got no more info from the promoter, our tour manager said one week before the show that "the only thing that is totally confirmed the the flights you booked your self and the name of the hotel were we're staying". Then the depost didn't arrive (the promoters must pay a far of the fee as a deposit to our bank in advance as a security to cover our flights in case he choose to cancel the show) and this in combination with not getting any info from the promoter about the technical things would have been enough for most booking agents to cancel the show. They still decided to go on and it was agreed to get the cash for the show paid in advance on the day of arrival (day before the show) to avoid cancellation. 3 days before the show we got the technical info with the stage dimensions and our sound engineers and tour manager made it clear to me that with all these bands and Blind Guardians idea of that their drum kit should be set up and then not moved, we would have to put our drums in front of theirs. Principally I disagreed with that, we pulled 2500 people on our last headline perfomance in Moscow, Blind Guardian pulled 2800. We're not their support act even if they're a bit bigger and we have a lot of stage scenery that would looks very strange if their drum kit would be in the back of ours. And when it became clear to me that the stage was of a size suitable fro a club concert and not a festival stage and that we would have between 1-1,5 meters (that's about 3-5 feets) left in front of the drums if we did our set up in front of them (and that would have to fit monitors as well!), I simply decied to cancel. We would then announce it some days ahead, so those who wanted could cancel travels and return tickets.
I was then persuaded by the booking agent to still do the show on the basis that the stage would be extended with 2 meters and that we would be able to solve most of the issues.

We were then flying and I spent 200 SEK (equals 22 euro or 30 USD) per kilo (1 kilo = 2,2 pounds) in excess luggage/overweight for each flight. Only the backdrop (the background hanging behind a band) weights over 25 kg. One guitar in a flight case weights 18 kg. A box containing cables, pedal boards and other small things needed for the show, weight 35-40 kg. Go figue what the value of the backdrop, stage fence and all other scenery costs to bring over. Remember this when reading the rest.

The promoter had promised to pay both bands on the vening of arrival, as he hadn't payed the despoits as agreed earlier, but this he didn't. Many bands would have cancelled after the promoter breaking two agreed schedules of payments. We still decided to go for it and trust in the promoter, as we had worked with him 2 times before without promblems.

When the crew got to the venue, it became clear that the PA was attached to the wall and could not be moved forward and there was no room to build the stage deeper in the back. If we would have extended it more to the front and the PA stays where it is, it would have been impossible to use the extra space for the singers, as you get only feedback ("beeeep") from the microphones if they are in front on the PA. So we were back to the 10 x 6 meter stage situation. I was then making it clear (this was in the morning) that I'm not gonna do the show during these circumstances. We wouldn't be able to use our stage scenery at all, the singers would have no podiums to stand on and would instead have to stand on the floor behind us (and barely be seen by the audience for the parts when they didn't sing solo stuff and went to the front).
Therion anno 2007 is not just a band performing music, we are making a complete show, it's more like an opera metal music performance. Compare how Therion looked like in Moscow with this photo from Holland:

http://www.llukygallery.nl/albums/therion/013/t01317.jpg.

This photo shows how the show was SUPPOSED to look like also in Moscow when I originally agreed to do the show. From my point of view, it was better to cancel and then come back at some later point and do the show in a proper manner instead of doing a crap show (well, maybe some of you liked it anyway, but then imagine how incredibly much better it would have been with the real show).

I had a meeting with Hansi from Blind Guardian and the booking agent we both use. I suggested we could save the day by taking down Blind Guardians drums after sound check, put ours up there and then in the change over we'd put their back again. This is how we did it on the tour we did with Grave Digger and it worked fine. Hansi had some doubts being afraid it "may change the sound of the drums in their in ear monitors". I also use in ear monitors (like most other in Therion) and given the fact that Blind Guardian had their own drum microphones (like we also did on the tour with Grave Digger), I could testify that the risk of a notable change is increadibly small, basically non existing. As a matter of fact the sound anyway change a bit when you go on stage with a crowd on the hall, as they absorb much of the reflections coming back from the hall when soundchecking in an empty venue.
We called the crew and asked about it and Peter (the best damn tech on the planet) said it could be done, but admitted it could make some minor changes to the sound. Hansi agreed to do it when it was clear the option would be Therion cancelling. However making this happen would require a much longer change over, which would mean much more work for the crew (which we agreed should be paid double for that sake) and it would therefore be very unlikely that there would be time also for any of the other bands to perform, as the technical difficulties reported from the crew at the venue seemed to be enormous (there was for example several power losses where the entire PA went dead).

We waited at the hotel for some hours while Blind Guardian soundchecked. When we finally were brought to the venue Hansi told me that "there was no space" to put away their drums. There was space for it behind stage and when I mentioned that, he told me the sound would change, so it became clear to me that he just simply changed his mind and didn't care about what he promised earlier. Or there was some other guy in the band not happy with what Hansi promised and made him take it back.
I then went down on the stage, checked how it would look like and it became totally clear that we wouldn't be able to use any scenery and that absolutely everything was totally fucked, we were to appear on stage like some fucking support act and all the scenery I payed to fly over would be lying behind stage. I went back backstage and said that I wanted to cancel if this was the circumstances for us and Hansi made clear that it was more important that Blind Guardian don't risk* having a different* sound in the in ear monitor than Therion performing (which is quite notable, as if they din't see any point with us playing and pulling people, then why did they agree to the arrangement with both bands playing in the first place?).

* Notice "risk" and "different". it is in no way sure it would be different and also "different" doesn't automatically mean worse either.

I then told Hansi I would cancel and he made clear he valued the Blind Guardians drum sound in the monitor more than Therion performing.
I was about to go outside the venue and tell people we're cancelling and tell them why. But I thought I'd speak with the band first. I realized I was maybe too fucking angry to take good decisions, so I told Kristian that lay down my own vote and let the band decide. They decided we play.

Please note that if Therion would have cancelled, I would have had to pay the flight tickets, overweight, russian VISA costs and another number of expenses from my own pocket. It's not something I would do unless I had very good reasons obviously.

Everyone was in a bad mood (especially me who also couldn't get a proper meal, they "forgot" to order also a vegetarian pizza and the regular meal was consisting of 4 pieces of boiled peppers + some decoration with 2 broccoli, so I had to watch everybody else eat really nice meals + extra pizza if they needed more - only some minutes before I had to get on stage there was some delivery of boiled rice with some vegetables in a paper box) and we didn't play too well because of that. There was no motivation at all, just do it and get the hell out of there asap. We have a very detailed corriography which is tied to the show we do nowadays and it was just plain chaos, no one knew where or how to move in the mess on stage and on the top on everything the promoter had not given the back-up guitar to our crew, so for the odd tunings, I had to wait while the guitar tech re-tuned the guitar, very professional. As if that wasn't enough, just to have that extra spice of annoying, there was no strap for Mats guitar, it was a rope (!) there instead and to make the worst show on World Tour 2007 a totally unbeatable status at the bottom, my guitar tech did the worst mistake I ever had from a tech, he managed to tune the B sting in C# (this may not mean much to you who don't play instruments, but imagine that some of the keys on your computer keyboard would get rewired, so that for example every "E" became an "X" and every "O" became a "B", then typing "hello" would result in writing "hxllb", imagine that on a guitar and how it sounds). I had to do some improvising to cover that up it crowned the bitterness of seeing a show that normally should have been on the Top 5 best shows on the tour the worst.

From now on, when we play in these "problematic" type of countries, we will always play alone with no other band playing (before or after). You guys pay for your tickets which in relation to your incomes is as much or even more than what someone in western Europe pays. So you deserve to have the same good concert experience for your money, not some kind of low budget B- or C-version. I feel responsible to give you a high class performance and that is why I was prepared to take a huge economic hit to cancel and come back alone at some later time. Now we did this crap and the market for another show (with another promoter) is full for the rest of the year, then I plan to take one year off and the year after that we'll be recording a new album, so next chance to do a proper show in Russsia again will be 2010.

Anybody unhappy with the show and need to loose some frustration can send their complaints to the promoter who fucked it up.
If you on the other hand like to hail some great musicians, completely without ego problems and with a totally non-pretentious self image, also send some roses and greetings to Blind Guardian, congratulating them for their outstandingly remarkable generosity and comeradeship, not to mention the great honesty shown. They're bigger than Metallica, have more complex music than Dream Theather and Meshuggah and a more delicate sound than Pink Floyd - yet they did SO many great sacrifices to help our little band warming up the stage for them, the only band people wanted to see that night. Sometimes the word "thank you" is simply not enough...

Christofer Johnsson

Line-up change

From Wacken Open Air and onwards, Mats Levén will no longer be singing with the band. It was a decision taken by the whole band in discussion with Mats. This change of line-up is on friendly terms and the remaining shows before Wacken will be performed with the same energy and passion as if nothing had happened. There are no bad feelings. Therion will continue to delevop even further into the direction we set on the last tour and Mats will focus on his new projects.

The background to this change is that on the last tour we all noticed that Mats lacked a bit of the energy and motivation we used to see in him. Not in a way that the actual performance on stage suffered from it, he has always been extremely professional and would never let down an audience. It was rather us noticing behind the scenes that some of his previous fire was missing. It seemed the new concept with 4 lead singers and a somewhat more musical type of set up didn't suit him as well as the concept we had before where his rock n' roll style contrasting to Karin Fjellanders traditional classsical appearance was a huge part of the idea. So we started to think and talk about the possibility of finding someone else who would have the right motivation and vocal skills to develp this new live concept even further.
A while after the tour we had discussions with Mats that in the end led to the decision to free him from his duties and search for a replacement.

Every time there was a change in the Therion line-up, it caused a lot of discussions. Some will always prefer the previous line-up because for some reason or another. Those who was with us back then probably remember the discussions after Martina, Anders "the bald guy" Engberg etc. Some fans fell in love with the high-energy vitamin injection that Mats gave to the band, while others thought he was too much rock n' roll for Therion (which btw was totally our intention when engaging him for the Lemuria/Sirius B tour). Without a doubt though, it is clear that a majority will think back of the period with Mats on stage with a huge smile. Each stage in Therion's development has had it's own unique charm and strenghts and it is therefore a good thing when people are missed, but the good part is that it does not mean one has to be disappointed with the next step.

And the part you all have been waiting for... The new guy will be Thomas Vikström, a singer who has been singing both opera, operettas and musicals as well as rock, metal and loads of other stuff. He is probably most known in the metal world for singing on a Candlemass album (which is actually far from his best effort). Here in Sweden he is also know for the melodic hard rock band Talk Of The Town. His great vocal abilities will for sure be more known at least among the Therion fans after the tour.

Christofer Johnsson

Testing new tuning system + new stage concept

When Therion play live, we need to change the guitars very often because we have so many different sort of tunings. Recently there was a new invention that is helping out a lot in making this smoother. A german company called Tronical have now invented a tuning mechanism that tunes the guitars automatically - and is even programmable for different types of tunings! For a band like Therion who have songs tuned in C, C#, Eb, E and on the new album also E with drop D, this is a perticulary nice invention.
I will be borrowing a prototype for the tour and will be playing E, Eb and E drop D on it and to my knowledge I'm the first artist to go on tour with this system. So look out for a silver coloured Gibson Les Paul guitar on stage and remember who you saw this miracle system with first (if it works well - else just have another beer and forget all about it, ha ha).
Check out the system at:

http://www.tronical.com


Therion has been around for almost 20 years now and made who knows how many tours. We have always changed a bit here and there and developed our stage performance. This tour we hope to bring it all up to not one, but two or three steps higher at once. When rehearsing it sounds better than ever (especially the 4 vocalists sounds outstanding together) and we have a cool stage scenery built for a lot of money this time.
The whole performance will be quite different and be performed more like a show than a regular rock concert, so expect less talking about beer with the audience and more action on stage. We have prepared some special surprices for you as well. So BE THERE or you'll BE SORRY afterwards that you missed it...

Yours faithfully,

Christofer Johnsson

Christofer Johnsson

The Gothic Kabbalah album and the Quadralogy

Back in 1999 I started to write music for a follow up album to Deggial. Lets call it Album-X. I wrote 7-8 songs for it before I one day played 2 songs (later named "Secret of the runes" and "Asgard") to Kristian that I had written for a project (which in the end never took place) and he said "Hey, those songs should not be used for some project, they belong in Therion!" I didn't know how they would fit in with the album I was writing on and didn't bother much about it until I woke up one day and had felt "Gee, I really want to make a nordic concept album" and those two songs was perfect for it. So Album-X had to be put on ice and instead the Secret of the Runes album was written in about 2-3 months and we started the recordings of that album instead. 
2003 we wanted to record that Album-X, but meanwhile the amount of songs (see beginning of the text) had grown a lot - we had songs enough for 3 albums! Let's call them X, Y and Z.  They formed a trilogy and we decided to record two of them and release at the same time and save the third one for the future. So we recorded Sirius B (Album-X) and Lemuria (Album-Y) and Z was saved. 
2005 I got the idea for a completely different kind of album AGAIN due to some songs I had written and the decision was made to make the album we recorded 2006 - Gothic Kabbalah and let Album-Z rest for some years more. However, we took 2 songs from Album-Z and put on the Gothic Kabbalah record. Those were "Der Mitternachtslöwe" (which I didn't feel suited totally with the other songs on Album-Z) and "Adulruna Rediviva", which was reworked and prolonged with several new written parts (yet this is a song that can tell you a bit of the musical direction of Album-Z). And because of those 2 songs Gothic Kabbalah gets connected musically with the trilogy and it all of a sudden becomes a quadralogy. 

Christofer Johnsson

My vocals + Metal Mania and ProgPower UK festivals

As was announced on the Metal Mania festivals, I am going to retire from vocals. The reasons for this are two. One is that I feel it's not fun to sing anymore (even though I have enjoyed playing the old songs on guitar), the voice is getting weaker over the years and I experienced problems at the end of the US/Canada tour. The problem isn't only getting older, but rather that we basically never rehearse as a band and therefore I don't keep my throat "warm". It simply doesn't work to not sing for half a year and then go on tour for 2 months and shout every evening. It used to work when I was younger, but now I feel it's not comfortable anymore and when it doesn't feel right, it's definatly time to stop.
The second reason is that we anyway would like to stop playing old songs. By old I mean Lepaca Klifffoth and older. We are now working on our 13:th studio album and it is getting harder and harder to choose which songs to play live. The number of "classics" - songs that we more or less must play - is growing all the time and we don't want to end up like one of those bands where you know beforehand 95% for sure what songs that are going to be played. We want to be able to have space to play a couple of unexpected songs each new tour.
We of course realize that many fans will miss those brutal songs, but we are convinced that those fans also will prefer to hear something new each time from the Theli album and onwards.
Besides old songs, this will have an effect on the choice on some newer songs. For example, I'd normally sing in To Mega Therion, Invocation of Naamah, In The Desert Of Set and Typhon. I guess I in normal cases seldomly have to sing in To Mega Therion anyway - good crowds tends to do that for me! :)
Typhon would anyway not be on the set list on the next tour, there's so many songs we haven't played from that album. Personally I would rather do An Arrow From The Sun and the title track Lemuria next time.
As for Desert Of Set I guess we're not gonna play it and regarding Invocation Of Naamah, we might not play it or we could experiment with Mats doing some harsher type of voice on my parts, he's a pretty flexible singer as you might know by now (and he has said he don't have any principles against doing some growling type of vocals as long as it's just some few parts). So time shall tell what happens around that.

The ProgPower festival in England will be the final show where I do vocals on stage!

The Metal Mania Festivals was a total different Therion on stage. We are working with pre-production for the new album, so we didn't have the time to do festivals. We said no to do them 3 times, the fourth time they got in touch, the conditions was so good that we simply had to agree. Plus that Tommy who organize them is a guy that havs been organizing shows for Therion in Poland since 1992, so we felt we could do it as a favour.
Nevertheless. Karin was busy in this time period for an audition for the opera academy in Gothenburg and Mats was already booked for singing backing vocals for a hard rock band called The Poodles that took part of the swedish outtake to the Eurovision Song Contest (they actually made it to the final!). So if we were to do it, we had to do it as some sort of special event. First thing I did was to call Sarah Jezebel Deva (from Cradle of Filth), who as most of you know have worked with us on several tours before and who also is a good friend of the band. We thought it could be fun for the audience to see her with Therion again for 3 shows. As for replecing Mats, it would have been bad to replace him with some other lead vocalist, I think most people would have felt dissapointed with that. So we thought of making something really special, something that will never be seen again. Petter is not only a very talented drummer, he is also an excellent lead voclist. So we bought him a head set microphone and tried the idea of him singing Mats lead parts in the rehearsal room and it sounded totally fine, even though Petter never singed while playing drums like this before.
Another thing was the choice of songs. We decided to focus pretty much around the Vovin album and barely didn't play any new songs at all. And as I'm going to stop singing, we played 3 really old songs as we know the fans in the east perticulary, are fond of the old material.

The festivals went fine (though I broke a string on stage for the first time since 1996 and had to play half of Wine of Aluqah on Gibson Flying-V!) and we hope that the fans appreciated to have the opportunity to see this different kind of Therion event.

On the ProgPower festival, we will do a regular set again though, with both new and old songs (and Mats and Karin is with us again). This will be our 106:th and final show supporting Lemuria/Sirius B. We will not be on stage again until 2007. I have planned a special surprise for this festival (not even the other band members know it), so don't miss this festival if you live in the UK! :)

Christofer Johnsson

Finally going to USA/Canada

So, after 18 years of playing with Therion, I'm finally making it to you guys in USA and Canada. It's been some extremely stressy days preparing everything before this trip, but now there's just one more day before we fly.

This tour is very important for the future of Therion's touring in these countries. If this tour do well, we will of course make USA and Canada permanenet territories on the future Therion World Tours. That would be a really great thing really, so I hope to see you guys in enough numbers that we will see each other every time we have a new album and not wait another 18 years again! : )

No matter what, we will have great fun going there and we're gonna rock your asses off even at the smaller venues! So start practising drinking beer already at this point (to be well prepared) and see you all very soon!!!


PS

It's gonna be very cool ending it all with some shows in Mexico as well. We never played a festival there before, that's gonna be really cool!
My brother also just moved to Mexico (I'm not joking), so it will be fun meeting him there as well.

Christofer Johnsson

Rage at Zadar Festival

The Rage management mailed me telling that they were factually flying there to the festival (to Zagreb), but nobody picked them up at the airport!!!

Christofer Johnsson

Cancelled festival in Zadar, Croatia

As some of you already knows, our performance and the entire festival in Zadar was cancelled and even though the reason for that should have been announced, I thought I'll make a post about that just so that there are no missunderstanding of what happened and why it wa slike that. And to ensure thaat no one needs to worry that we think bad of Croatia and will never return and stuff like that we hear people talk about. In every country there lives people - some can and should organize festivals, others shouldn't. We will for sure play in Croatia in the future, but this time it will all be organized by the national promoter who is a cool guy and a trustable business partner.

Background facts:

We got half the money as a deposit weeks ago, so we had money for the travel paid. But the other half is due to the contract supposed to be paid put before we enter stage - tp prevent promoters to runn off while we play or to say "sorry I have no money" after we are done.
Amon Amarth and Rage didn't get a deposit as we did, but was supposed to get their tickets paid by the organizer.

- Rage didn't get their plane tickets confirmed in agreed time before the show, so they cancelled a few days vefore the festival.

- Amon Amarth had their plane tickets confirmed only 5 HOURS (!) before their flight was leaving!

We went up 02:30 in the morning, loaded our equipment from our studio, went to the airport and took the 06:40 planer over London to Trieste and had a 6 hour bus ride from there. From our starting point when we left with the equpment for the airport (04:00) we had a 17 hour trip to get there. We had went through quite a lot to get there (and would face sililar on the way back to Sweden), so were prepared to play under conditions we'd never accept normally and therefore waited at the festival site in hope that things would be solved long after Soulfly had left ans cancelled when realizing they would never get paid even if the problems at the festival were solved (not meant to be bad against Soulfly - that's how any professional band would do it normally).


Our version (based on the facts we got to know) of what happened that day is this:

1. The start of the problems. At the time when both stages should have been ready long ago, the main stage was not finished and the second stage they had not even begun with. As there was a very strict curew (time when all loud noise must be ended, else the police stop the show), this meant that things were so delayed that the local promoter/organizer had the choice between cancelling all bands on the second stage, or it would be a very big risk of the entire thing being cancelled. Quite clearly this is a very impopular decision to take as those bands have travelled there with their own money in order to play on this festival and promote their bands by playing in front of a big audience. But if the festival don't happen, then it's no good ffor them to be there anyway, so it was the only rational decision to take. However (laate rin the day when many other problems had turned up) I actually requested that someone would be announcing in croatian to the crowd why those bands got cancelled and by WHO it got cancelled in order to not have anyone getting wrong or stupid ideas of why things turned out that way.
We had decided we wouldd play some extra songs for the crowd to lighten them up a bit for missing Rage and all those bands that should have beeen on the second stage.

2. Getting worse. Things where not by far ready when we got there, so we waited for some hour in the heat, talked to people, walked to a store and bought an ice creame... Then our tour manager told us it's pointless with us hanging around there as some of the equipmeent didn't even arrive yet and we were driven back to the hotel meanwhile. After a while I get a call to the hotel telling me the stuff has arrived - but it's not the stuff that was agreed upon. It had been agreed long time in advance and the local promoter had agreed to supply it as a part of the deal. Now all of a sudden the organizer say that he wrote in a mail that he did NOT have the stuff we requested. That is a lie and there is email correnspondance saved to prove that. This in it self is a legal reason to cancel the show and still get fully paid. Many tourmanagers would have done that to teach unserious organizers a lession. I spoke with our tour manager and I told him that if he (as he is also our sound engineer) can live with the sound we'll get out of what was available ,we'll play on it for the sake of getting the festival happening.

The really stupid thing with this entire thing is that if the organizer just would have played with open card and said "sorry I can not get those things you request", the national promoter in Zagreb (the guy who contracted us for the organizer - we never booked the show directly with the local organizer) said he could have fixed it easily and brought iy with him! So this was a problem that existed purely because of the local organizer not being honest and open. All problems can be solved if they're just brought up in good time and not some hours before the show the same day.

3. Total fuck up. Some hours later we got brought back there again. At this point the festival should have started long ago according to the original schedule and we were just about to start the soundcheck! So we did and after having some problems we got to something that was possible to live with during the special circumstances. After all, the whole point in us insisting on special equipment is because of the sake of the fans that we think deserve a good sound, so if you order a Mesa Boogie 2:90 power amp for your stuff (read: Ferrari) and get a Marshal 2000 top (read: Fiat) it's still better to "drive your fans in that Fiat than letting them walk".
Just as we had decided that we'd have to live with it and try something out all together the power got cut! Very soon after that we got informed that the guy who rents out the diesel generator that creates the power for the festival didn't get paid as promised and until he got paid, he'd deliver no power anymore!
As this is not a huge expense (for a promoter - for any ordinary person it would be a lot) it was very bad news and I realized that maybe the whole thing was fucked then. Ivo (yes, our old Webmaster) had told me that the organizer is know for owing everybody money and a simple 1 + 1 calculation make me realize that the guy don't have any money. Shortly after that we were told that Soulfly had given up the thought of playing, cancelled and went to the beach to swim instead. And the national promoter had told me the evening before when we arrived that he was pissed off at the local organizer because that guy didn't work properly for the festival.

The power generator guy was of course right from a legal point of view, but I have to say he was dumb fuck - a total fucking imbecill to be honest. You can not just pull the plug when you have expensive equipment plugged into the power. If he would have got any sort of brains he would have said "I never got my money, in five minutes the power is cut". Besides the stuff on stage that can break if we'd be unlucky, there is a much bigger risk that the PA or the mixing desk gets damaged if you just pull the plug. You must first turn down the volume, put it in stand by and then switch it off. And as it was a brand new and damn good PA, the company who had supplied it (who also not got paid in advance - but that would be normal I guess) all of a sudden said they don't know if there would be a short or long term damage to the PA because of this and that they now wanted to have money on the table before they'd let us use it (if the power got paid of course, esle we'd have no use of the PA). So from a situation where it was hard to get the money, now it seemed impossible. PLUS the fact that if the organizer could not pay even for the electricity, how could he pay for the bands? This is what Soulfly had realized and instead of wasting the resty of the day waiting at the festival site they went swimming so that they'd at least get SOMETHING out of their visit in Croatia. I don't blame them.


4. The end. The organizer had the chance to come up with the money and get the electricity back on. Time went and nothing happened, so when time was up the tour manager and the management said the show as cancelled (after talking it through with the national promoter who was the one liable for the actual contracting of the bands) and our crew was ordered to start packing the stuff. While packing it still nothing changed. It got rumoured that the electricity would be on again soon, but that was the national promoter who wanted to make sure that none of the bands got shit from what happened, so he went out and bought 30 liters of diesel for his private money for the power generator and started broadcasting a recorded message. Apparantely he must have persuaded the guy owning the power generator to use it for this purpose if he used his own diesel.


5. We had travelled for 17 hours after a night of 2 hours sleep the day before, we had waited all day and we had hoped even though we at he end knew that the chance was getting very very small. We had been talking to local acts that was of course very sad and dissapointed after travelling with their own money to get there for nothing and Ivo and his friends had (like so many fans) travelled far too. The whole scenario was just so dissapointing and depresssive and we just felt very depressed about the whole situation and wanted to get out of there as quick as possible, so we helped the crew load out the stuff and got on the bus out of there.
Our management was very keen on not having us staying in the same city for security reasons (we didn't see any upset fan trying to take it out on any of the bands, but after the small riot in Sucre in Bolivia in 2001 (there organizer had to cancel our headline show due to rain the entire stage risked to be electric!) where the hotel was attacked and windows were broken until the police came to clear the streets, they take no risk and move the band out - even if fans seems to react totally reasonable like the case was in Zadar - just to be 100% on the safe side. We also have a bit of responsability to avoid trouble for the hotel and the bus company.
This also meant we were driving up near the border to Slovenia and by that got much ccloser to the airport. By doing that we got 5 hour sleep instead of 2-3, which was at least making the journey home a bit easier.

6. When we got to the hotel we heard from the hotel that they were not paid eithr. I have to say they were very cool with us. You have to leave your passport in the reception when you check in and I know that most hotels would have said we don't get them back before the hotel is paid. So a big thanx tp the hotel for being so increadibly nice people!

7. When picking up our stuff at the hotel we talked to Amon Amarth who explained that they had nowhere to go as they were leaving on the monday and had no transportation to Split (they fly from there) and nowhere to go as the hotel was not paid. They said they'd wait and see if they could play anyway (there was this talking of playing at a small club with a capacity off 300 people or that there still would be a chance to get the festival stage going). They knew they wouldn't get paid, but then they thought at least the organizer would make sure they got somewhere to stay and get transported to Spit.
I also had a meeting with the national promoter that had contracted us and who is the one responsible for our future headline show in Zagreb. He was very upset with the local organizer and explained us a lot of things. For instance I get the correct figure of the pre-ales. The night before Iwas told 2000, at the festival I was told 1300. The national promoter said the correct figure was 1500 and to my question where the money from the pre-sales had gone (20 euro x 1500 tickets is 30.000 euro, there should have been plenty of money to pay for the electricity), he said that the local organizer had many debts from the year before and that he must have taken the money to pay for that instead of the costs to run this years festival.


8. Seems like the local promoter used what was left of the 30 liters of diesel to put one croatian band and Amon Amarth on stage and somehow persuaded the power supply guy to go along with it as long as it was not his diesel. In any case it would not have been enough to put Soulfly or Therion on stage as well. And even if more diesel would have been bought,the national promoter who contracted us had said the festival was officially cancelled (so it was actually an Amon Amarth headline show on the same stage as the festical would have happened), we had our equipment packed down in the bus and we were on our way home when Amon Amarth played. To have turned back and played would not have been possible technically at this late point (we would have needed a minimum of 3 hour set up time) and also it was 100% clear that we would not have got paid by the organizer for it - I can obviously not tell our hired singers and our crew that they must sing or work for free.
In any case, you can be sure of that the hotel, the PA company, the guy with the power supply, the local crew that worked on stage etc never will get paid for this day, all money from the pre-sales were spent and no new tickets were sold as the gates was opened to everyone when Amon Amarth played. The organizer still have debts left from last year.

Finally I'd like to say one thing. The organizer approached me when we were leaving saying he "was sorry for everyting and that he was a bad organizer, just a big fan". I'm sure he had good intentions with everything, but that is really no excuse for being extremely irresponsible and cause economic damage to bands, the national promoter (who is a cool guy and has to try clean upp the mess aftwerwards and save his own good name) the PA-company, hotel, power supply company, festival workers and at last but not least the fans who most of them had travelled to see the show. Everybody was waiting in the sun all day hoping things would be fine in the end and everybody involved just got dissapointment after dissapointent as the day went by. It's because of risks of having events like this that the managements, tour agents and tour managers are very hard and strict and demand all organizers to be 100% professional.

Christofer Johnsson

Successful tour and rap theft

So the world tour has almost come to an end, only one show left this weekend in Moscow - something we have looked forward to for quite some time. This has been the over all most successful Therion tour ever. So a big thank you to all our fans that showed up at the concerts and made our experience on stage something very special almost every night on the entire tour! We can't wait to go on tour again!

As no one can have missed there's this discussion on the forum regarding the theft of Draconian Trilogy - The Opening in a hip hop production. The theft is not only the composition, but also the audio recording it self, wich means this is a case not only for our music publisher Prophecies Publishing, but also to Nuclear Blast records. Legal action are being prepared by the two companies.
Thank you to you fans who discovered this and brought it to our attention.

However, I would like to state that by principle I don't have something against ANY sort of music being mixed.
Hip hop and rap music is really NOT my cup of tea and I find 95% of all rap I've heard as total crap and the remaining 5% as something I can respect, but don't like. However, I know that many people - also very good musicians - would say the same about metal music. So if some rap artist would be a huge Therion fan and wanted to incorporate some Therion stuff, I would actually give my permission for that (though, it is actually - legally speaking - the music publisher that have to authorize it), given the fact that it was clearly written on the CD that a Therion composition written by me was the fundament of the song.
One can not understand (or LIKE) all types of music on the planet, but I like to be open minded and if Therion could be transformed into hip hop by some rap artist and the rap fans would like it - why not? I don't need to like it and Therion fans don't need to like it either, but it's a shame to forbid artforms that we don't appreciete our self. It's like with the polarity in religion - if there's no good there can be no eveil. So if it wasn't for the fact that there's much crap music, the good music wouldn't stand out above it - it would simply just exist.
It's a similar principle of accepting different artforms when I did something new with Carl Orffs, "Carmina Burana" (though I re-recorded the orchestration of course - I would never sample audio from an existing recording like rap artists do - something that lower their status as artists considerably in my eyes), we did a version that was incorporating a totally different music style into the existing one. Some classical listeners may found that unacceptable and bad - still many young people into metal appreciated it.

So to sum it up. If this rap dude would have taken contact with our music publisher and said "Yo Man, me like Therion musica mucha mucho, amigos!", asked permission for using a lyric "sang" on top on the music and to be allowed to re-arrange the composition by adding on a drum machine, paid the publishing money for the music (the lyric part would have been his) and given me credit for the composition on the record (he could write "Arranged by" him self though), then I would have seen no problem with it. Not that we would be talking about much money for such a thing, it's a matter of principles. No idiot should steal both my composition AND my audio recording and then claim it to be his own and sell it on a record. That's first of all not serious or professional from an artistic point of view. Secondly, it is criminal behaviour, not in any way comparable to if someone download some mp3's or burn a CD from a friends original for personal use or using a prated software.
This rap theft is first of all making money on some one else's work, something that have costed us much money and efforts to create. Secondly it is taking credit on other peoples talent and creativity, by saying "I wrote this song" when all they did was some simple drum programming on top on selected parts of a Therion song musically speaking.
This theft we have here is like if you would take a computer program, change some of the graphics in it, re-name it and then sell it openly (not even as a pirate program) and claim that it was you who wrote the program. Or similar to what Ivo said in the News, if your would re-edit Lord of the Rings, cut in some of your own home made scenes and then try to market it as a new movie called "Ring Master" totally produced and directed by your self.

Christofer Johnsson

Hi from Graspop!

Hello and thanx to everybody that came to see us at Graspop! We had a great show and things went pretty well except a few technical fuck ups (a wireless system gave up and Kristian had to play half the set with a cable and my amplifier blew up in the last song). It was two years since we played live last time (Mera Luna 2002) and almost 3 years since we were on tour last time. We also had 3 new members of the live performing Therion artists (including our new permenent drummer Petter), so many things could have gone wrong. But instead it felt like we had never been gone from the stage and we all had a really great time together on stage! We can't wait to start with the other concerts!

Christofer Johnsson

News from the band

The album is now released and so far 99% of the reactions have been very good by the press. I havn't had the chance to get some more detailed opinions from fans yet, but I hope to get some of that soon as well.

I have made around 135 telephone interviews + a bunch over email, so the last two months I have been quite busy with that. Nevertheless I have had some time left to complete the last pieces of the "new therion fan club" - The Therion Society (therionsociety.com). Still some small pieces to be put together by Ivo who (as always) is the man behind the cool graphics on the site. One the site is up there will be a chat. However, there will also be a public chat on THIS page very soon, so save your questions. We'll let you know very soon when.

We have since some months a new drummer called Petter Karlsson and after rehearsing for a while with him, playing both new and old songs, I must say it sounds really good. You can find his biography added on to the Bio section. We have also rehearsed with Matts Lev'en and it sounds really cool, prepare for a different Thewrion sound un the upcoming festivals and tours! Regarding singers there is also a big change. As you all know Sarah Jezebel Deva have been singing with us live for quite some years. Well unfortunatly she will not be able to go with us this time due to some health problems. We are very sad about this, but have found a replacement called Karin Fjellander who is a young swedish soprano that have a background as a viola player, but who now study classical vocals since some years.

We have made a death metal project in secrecy called "Demonoid" that will be released in July! It is mainly Kristian and Johans project musically, but I contributed with some riffs, sang on it and made the lyrics. More info on this will be added soon.

Christofer Johnsson

Announcing the World Tour 2004

Hello everyone!

As you can see in the tour section, we're now in the process of the scheduling of the next world tour. At the moment only the Latin American shows are booked and have a date. This part of the world is the only one were we will tour as a headline act though. We are at this moment looking what options there are for us to go together with other bands in Europe and USA/Canada. In Europe we could tour headline like the last two times, but we feel like we want to get on to something bigger. It's great to play only in front of our own fans, but it is also cool to have a bit of a challange and play in front of crowds that only partly consist of people that know our albums. We're looking for some cool band that plays music we like and a band that we respect. At the moment we have a suggestion that I perticulary like and hope is going to happen. If we can get that to happen it would be a total killer package for you guys in Europe - I'll be telling you as soon as we know (if it happens and then of course with which band it is, it's still a secret).

In USA/Canada will still have some way to go before it would be a successful idea to play headline, so as this will be our first time over there we simply have to do the same work, as we once did in Europe many years ago and open up for other bigger bands. This is something we look forward a lot to though. Therion is a band that never had anything for free and the success we have always tastes better if we know that we have earned it by hard work and that we are a band that really deserves it.

We also have a new drummer that's gonna do the touring with us. His name is Petter and he's a pretty unknown talent (except for those well initiated in the Stockholm music life) that used to play in a band called Master Massive. We'll give you more news on this topic as time goes by.

Christofer Johnsson

Sayin hello while taking a break

Hello everyone!

We're right now in the Sun Studio in Copenhagen, Denmark and are mixing the new Therion album together with Lars Nissen (known for among other things TIAMATs "Judas Christ" album). So far we have mixed 5 songs and are working on no. 6.Things are sounding very cool and we are really exited about to see what reactions the album will cause when it comes out next year. But who knows, there might be some small taste of it put out as mp3 even before that...
In any case, right now we still have loads of work ahead of us. After the mix is ready we will master the album in Stockholm and start preparing for the artwork.

Stay metal!

Christofer Johnsson & Kristian Niemann

New album is underway

I just got back from the recordings of choir and orchestra in Prague. All went fine, but there are yet some more things we have to record here in Stockholm in our own Modern Art Studio before we can go to the Sun Studios in Copenhagen, Denmark to mix the album. The producer that will mix the album will be Lars Nissen, famous for (among other things) the latest Tiamat album.

We expect that the mix will be finnished in the middle of October and if we can keep that time schedule there is a big chance that the album will come out already in February (not March like earlier spoken of).We have had some talks about maybe tour with Tiamat next year. Personally I think that wwould be a great idea. Stay tuned and we'll inform you what's up with that as soon as we know.

Christofer Johnsson

Plans for the new album and DVD

We are finally starting with the pre-production of the next Therion album! I won't give you any name for the album, lyrical ideas or how it will sound... at least not yet! But what I WILL tell you is that we have an absolutely INSANE amount of songs written and that what we will be doing the upcoming months will be to actually figure out what songs should be on the record. AND: we will (for the first time since the recording of Theli) actaully rehearse (!!) together as a band before we enter the studio. The plan is to start recording drums in March. How long the recording will take is always impossible to say...
The plan is that we should have a finnished recording this summer and a release this autumn.
We promise to take the band one step further in the progression with this album, so be prepared!

The DVD... Well this have been delayed and postponed quite a few times by now. BUT, this is actually for the better for all of you. When we started to plan a DVD release, it was still not totally ordinary that bands had DVDs out and the standards was not so high. Suddenly we realized that more and more bands were putting out DVDs and that the standard now was raised quite considerably, so we thought of gathering more material in order not to be under the highest level of quality. But then there was this quite cool opportunity coming up last year and we thought of a rather unique thing - to include something quite special for you... He.He.He. AND to make it a double DVD. So the final masters for this DVD won't be finished before late summer. But I think you will all be thinking it was worth the waiting in the end.

I can reveal what the disc 1 will include:

- The Wacken show 2001
- A few songs from Vilnius, Lithuania on the Deggial tour 2000
- One song (with guests on stage) from the Nuclear Blast 10 year anniversary festival 1997.
- Private tour bus footage
- Private backstage footage
- All videoclips (from the first one "Pandemonic Outbreak 1992 to "Summernight City" 2001).

Does this sound ok? Dics 2 will BLOW THIS AWAY!!! =)

Christofer Johnsson

What's going on lately

Right now I've been doing tons of interviews with magazines regarding the fact that we've been around for 15 years now and of course about the (in Europe) newly released "Live in Midgard". I still have some interviews to do and I'm surpriced how big interest it has been over this, normally it is hard to get much attention for live releases.

There's a change that we might go on tour at the end of the year. It's just a short thing and nothing is sure att all yet. I'll keep you updated on this, so stay tuned!

We have over 50 songs written so far, so we will have quite a lot to choose from when we will put togather the upcoming studio album. We have decided to start on this task early next year. Hopefully we will have a finnished recording before the summer. At least that's the plan.

Christofer Johnsson

Sami Karppinen's departure from Therion

After a long consideration Sami Karppinen have decided not to continue with Therion. He is tired of touring and drumming with a band. He will instead concentrate on working in our studio (this mean we will finally have more time avalible for other bands that want to record there).

Therion will still be working together with Sami in a way, as he is the permanent engineer/producer in the Modern Art Studio (where Secret Of The Runes was recorded) and we will record at least the most parts of the next album there.

He has of course not given up the drumplaying, but at the moment he will only play alone and practice to get even better. Possibly he will appear in some musical studio projects in the coming future.

The desision to leave the band was not coming over one night. We knew that he had lost a bit of the inspiration since earlier and we all sat down and talked about it. Everyone agreed it would be the best for both him and us if we would use another drummer. So there's no hard feelings from any part.

As Sami didn't want to cause us any trouble, he made sure he already knew a drummer that could replace him. We have listened to stuff he has recorded and he's for sure a damn good drummer. We have met a few times and we seem also to get along very well personally. More or less we've already made up our mind, but just for the sake of it we'll have a jam just to see everything feels great for all of us. His name is Rickard by the way.
We are planning to take part in some tributes and he'll play on those tracks no matter what. So you'll be able to hear him play even before the next Therion album.

Christofer Johnsson

"South American tour?"

THE SECRET OF THE RUNES TOUR 2001 - SOUTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA

* Best Food: Sao Paulo - That steakhouse....WWWOOOOOWWWWW!!! Every kind of meat you can imagine; all perfectly prepared. Un-beliavable!

* Best Backstage: Monterrey - Candles, fresh coffee all day, Absolut Vodka, Single Malt Whisky, superfresh food/snacks, great beer. Big, big room with nice leather couches and everything else you could want. Worldclass!

* Worst Backstage: Chihuahua - Outdoors right behind the stage with no roof or anything. Not even a tent. Not cool. Well actually it got pretty cool when the wind picked up...

* Coolest venue: Mexico City - An old theater I think. 3300 capacity. Really big, nice place! Marble in the foyer...

* Crappiest venue: Guadlajara - A stinky cold concrete box. Great crowd though, one of the best shows of the tour.

* Best Onstage Sound: Bogota, 2nd show - Great big hall with good equipment and cool techguys. Seems like a simple concept, but......

* Worst Onstage Sound: Mexico City - Nothing wrong with anything I think. It just sounded incredibly bad. Simply atrocious.

* Interesting Nighttime Activity: Warpspeed cabride through Mexico City at 3 a.m., not stopping for red lights, other cars or anything. I seriously thought my time on earth was over...but what fun it was!!!

* Best Hotel: Intercontinental Presidente Mexico City - The name says it all. Just like the movies. We got treated like royalty.

* The "Most-money-spent-on-the-lobby-none-on-the-room" Award goes to: Hotel Intercontinental Bogota - Incredible lobby, entrance and foyer. Nice posh shops inside and great restaurants too. However, our room looked like a black and white Ingmar Bergman movie. Very depressing.

*Best playing by KN: Curitiba - Second show of the tour. I guess I got lucky...

*Worst playing by KN: Sao Paulo - Third show of the tour. My 30th birthday. Unbelieavably bad playing.

*Quietest audience-turned-loudest: Buenos Aires - It resembled a funeral at first; very quiet, very reserved, everybody sitting down. When we got to playing To Mega... and Cults... however, it was total pandemonium!

*Hottest gig: Cochabamba - 2000 people crammed together in a hall without airconditioning. I almost passed out in the middle of the set. I could just BARELY breathe! I can´t imagine what it must have been like in front of the stage!

*Coldest gig: La Paz - Quite an experience playing outdoors in the highest located capitol in the world. The thin air of course made it hard to breathe but the COLD!!!! Wasn´t it supposed to be summer? Therion members sporting hats and thick jackets onstage.

*Most disappointing event: Not playing Sucre. For various reasons beyond our control the gig had to be cancelled. Mostly because it was raining pretty heavily and the outdoor site for the show didn´t have a roof over the stage.

*Most scary event: 20-30 angry fans in Sucre outside our hotel. Some threw bricks through the hotel windows and shouted some very angry words including *"@@%&¤!!! and []@!@££$!!! I wanted to go home to mommy.

*Warmest welcome: Cochabamba - 300 crazy fans screaming and waving Therion banners as we got off the airplane in the middle of the night! Incredible! I really felt like Michael Jackson there for a minute!

*Most annoying occurence: Having to get out of bed at 5:30 in the morning after sleeping 2 hours to catch a flight, only to wait 5 hours in transit at the airport to catch a connecting flight!!

*Best beer: Bogota - ...but I can´t for the life of me remember the name of it. Must have been a DARN good beer!

*Most frequently spoken phrase by a band member: "I´m soooo tired...I REALLY need to go to bed!"

*Best show: Bogota, 1st show - One of those rare occasions when everything works. Good performance, great sound, great audience.

*Funny moment 1: The British Airways purser trying to keep us in a good mood when told that we´ll be sitting in the plane waiting for take-off for another HOUR. (in heavy british accent): "Well folks, remember that time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana!"

*Biggest surprise: We didn´t get ill!

*Funny moment 2: Our soundengineer Richard commenting on Andy Engberg singing a Russian folksong during soundcheck:"Hmm...Andy...all your vocals seem to be coming out in Russian...must be a reversed cable somewhere..."

*Loudest audience: Cochabamba - 2000 totally crazy metal maniacs! We love it! During the set, we could feel how the stage was literally being PUSHED BACK centimeter by centimeter!

Kristian Niemann

Planning the SOTR tour

The decision to bring two support acts instead of making a package with another bigger act give us the opportunity to play a much longer set. So we will besides all the classics that people expect to hear on a Therion show also play some songs that we didn't play very often (like "Beauty in Black") and some that we actually never played before. For example "Seawinds".

As we are playing many shows in South America and Mexico, where or our old records are almost as popular as our new ones, we made a set where we play songs from ALL our albums except "A'arab Zaraq Lucid Dreaming" (yes even from "Of Darkness"), 3 of the very early ones will be put together in a medley though. Normally we would skip these songs in the European set. But as the re-release of the 3 first albums actually has sold pretty well (for being such a release) and as we now have time for a longer set, we thought about to do the same set over here. So all you people that want to see old Therion songs live, THIS IS YOUR CHANCE!!! I seriously doubt we will do this again, so it's now or never really! You will also never get more Therion for your money than on this tour, as we're gonna play the longest set ever! I won't you tell what songs though, you'll just have to wait and see. But I can tell you as much as this; we will play minimum 25 songs (3 of them as a part of a long medley though), so basically there will be a pretty long regular Therion set + half a set with old songs. The plan would be:

1 Of Darkness
1 Beyond Sanctorum
2 Symphony Masses: Ho Drakon Ho Megas
3 Lepaca Kliffoth
4 Theli
4 Vovin
1 Crowning of Atlantis
4 Deggial
4 Secret of the Runes
1 Cover song besides the already mentioned "Seawinds"
(or even two more covers? Who knows what we'll do if there's an amazing audience that never wants to go home?)

If you're gonna see one Therion show in your life time, I suggest you do it on this tour!

Christofer Johnsson

How a tour is organised?

PLEASE COME TO xxxyyy!!
(or, the infamous WILL YOU EVER VISIT zzzwww?)

How a tour is organized:

1. The band Therion decides together with the management to do a tour.

2. The management deals with a touragency who have contact with many different promoters, both local and national. As they are in this case a German touragency, they have a direct contact with the german local promoters. The touragency are checking out the offers that are serious and that could make sense for the band to do. The serious offers are being put together and presented to the management who will take a decision regarding if it is acceptable. If there are any doubts, the band (in this case Christofer) is asked, if it is absolutely clear that it is good, all bandmembers and tourcrew (tourmanager, sound engineer, stage crew etc. etc.) are informed. However sometimes promoters pull out, change their mind or fail to fulfill what was agreed before a legal contract has been signed, in this case there are changes of the dates in the tourschedule. Some parts of the world are very reliable and once a date is set one can be sure it will not change, others are less reliable and the fans should visit the homepage regulary to see if there are any changes. However, the closer to the tour it gets, the more one can be sure that there will be no change of date or place, because then the contracts has been signed. The only reason for a change would be if there are too big or too small interest in the band, so that the show will have to be moved to a bigger or a smaller venue. This is however very rare.

3. The promotion for the show, the choice of venue, the sales of tickets etc. is done by the local promoter and/or a national promoter.

The "National Promoter" is someone who knows the country and who has contact with the local promoters. He is the one who is responsible of who will set up a show and where (what town and if multiple choices available, sometimes what concert hall) it will happen.

The "Local Promoter" is the one who set up the shows at the concert hall and sell the tickets to the fans. He usually works with one venue which mostly belongs to him.

In some countries there are national promoters who also are doing the set up of the shows. This is either because they are so big that they have their own network of venues, or if the country (or the market in it) is so small that there basically is only one promoter that sets up metal shows.

If you want to see a band in concert in your part of the world, wait until you know they are making a new album. Then gather as many friends you have that also want to see the band and try to contact someone that you know organizes concerts in the area where you live. It only makes sense to contact the management or the tour agency if you want to organize a concert your self.
To ask the band directly never makes any sense if it is a big band that has a management, as the band is not responsible for the bookings and as the band anyway have a contract with a management and therefore isn't allowed to book concerts of their own. Also keep in mind that booking a show isn't as easy as it may seem. The promoter need to have cash to pay the band in advance (one can not count on the ticket sales, in case the sales are bad, it is the promoter's problem). So the promoter is taking a risk of loosing money and therefore will only book bands where he see a low risk and also the possibility of making money, as that is his/her job.

Another thing is that it is not only to book a bunch of airplane tickets and have the musicians to grab their guitars and go. The show will need promotion in media, posters. There are also expenses for hotel, food etc. And certain technical things need to be fixed, a stage isn't enough. The promoter need a PA-system that holds the technical requirements, a sufficient lightsystem, electricity installations that can handle this type of high consuming electrical equipment, security people, distribution channels to sell the tickets through + many other things. So it is not easy to be a new promoter. The ones that have been around for many years have everything already, but are aware of the expenses and have to make a calculation on how many people they need to show up in order to break even. So if one or two persons would ask to have a show set up it make little difference. But if 20 would call and ask for a certain band and the record sales of the actual band is OK in the actual country, then it could make sense.

Christofer Johnsson

New video!

Finally got confirmed that we will make a new videoclip. On what song and how it will look like will be a secret. Just let me tell you one thing. You have NEVER seen any other metal video even close to the vein of this one. I never though we'd make another video, but as the idea for this one is so damn cool, it kind of lit my fire again about making videos!

Christofer Johnsson

What was going on after recording was done

After finnishing the recordings we invited music journalists from all over Europe to come over to our studio and listen to the album. Normally this is a rather boring event where you give them a bunch of beers and play a few songs. This time we did something special.

As it is a nordic theme on the album, I started with bringing the whole horde of people (there were over 20 of them) out to an ancient nordic cult place and had Thomas Karlsson to make a small lecture on the topic the lyrics deal with him self. Normally he is this mystic figure that no one has seen, so just to make things different than usual we even allowed pictures taken where he was standing with me (which was published in some of the major music magazines already). After this we went to the studio for the usual stuff with listening.

The night was ended on a wiking ship that I had rented (with Nuclear Blasts money of course, he he). It sailed out to sea for some hours and meanwhile the people (that had to dress up in wild wiking clothes) were served tons of meat and other type of foods that they had to eat with their hands of course. Mjod (an old swedish honeybeer that the wikings used to drink) was served as much as people could drink and the wiking waitress was singing for us in old traditional folk way.

After this there was Wacken and Eurorock! Wacken was good (even though we made a few mistakes here and there), but I heard from many people that there was some dissapointment that we didn't perform with a full orchestra as was announced by the Wacken advertisment (it was later removed when we discovered it and complained about it). There were many people that didn't know we were not to have the orchestra and when discovering it at the festival, it for sure decresed the enthusiasm a bit. I think we would have had a better response if the Wacken people didn't fuck this up (we NEVER said we would bring an orchestra), thank you a lot! Another "thanx" goes to the lightguy of SAXON that where fucking up our lightshow by making only 30% of it accessable (even though it was in our contract to use the full light system). The stagemanager was freaking out and did what he could, but we had to start the show. That fucking lightengineer asshole was swiching it off just before we should go on stage. Thanx alot! SAXON didn't need shit like that, they have pondus enough anyway! I'd like to belive that the band was unaware of this act as I grew up with and am a great fan of the band.

The Eurorock was great! The audience was loud as fuck and we did one hell of a show! We ended the show with an Accept cover, "Balls to the wall". We tried to invite some fans from the crown to come up and sing it with us, but no one dared, ha ha! Instead we had guys from Nevermore, Napalm Death, Opeth and a guy from Israel coming up on the choirpodium and sing with us! This meant a lot to me as Accept was one of the very reasons for me to start dreaming about one day becoming a musician. Balls to the wall was the first song I heard and it felt so cool to play it with a bunch of similar metalheads in front of such a big crowd! I've been making music for almost 15 years and from a very personal point of view this was actually something worth waiting for!

Straight after Eurorock I went to some weeks of well deserved vacation in Germany, France, Switzerland, Lichtenstein and Austria. Mainly hanging around with good friends, drinking hefe weißbier (a very special beer from Bayern in southern Germany), walking in the mountains, swimming in a mountain lake, staying in the middle of nowhere at a farm...

I also paid the recordcompany some days of visit and besides making some interviews and finnishing the work with the details of the lay-out for "Secret of the Runes", I was getting drunk with Schmier from Destruction (really cool guy!) and some of the Blast people. Loads of beer on this trip for sure!

Then I ended it up with visiting my friend Christian Rätsch (the guy who translated and fitted the german lyric in one song on the new album) and his wife Claudia for some days. This guy has EVERYTHING Wagner ever did! He has a room full of his recordcollection, but only the CD's, all the vinyls don't even fit in there, so he had them in the garage! After writing down all the cool versions and till this moment for me yet undiscovered pieces, I realize I will be a very poor man after purchasing them all! I have to join Metallica or something so I can afford to extend my Wagner collection... =*

Speaking of Richard Wagner! On Thursday I will go to Helsinki in Finland to see Götterdämmerung! I'm so excitied! It's a 6 hour long opera (the last part of the Nibelungen Ring opera) and every secound of it is like an orgasm of musical euphoria!

When I get back I will spend my time doing over 100(!) phoneinterviews, try to catch up with my oceans of unanswered email and finnish the stuff for Fanclub with Ivo (there's loads left to do - you guys have to send him some mails to encourage him as he has the biggest burden to carry in it).

Christofer Johnsson

About recording of "Secret of the runes"

After many turns with testing all kinds of guitars, guitaramplifiers and other equipment, we are finally ready for recording. No Therion albums has ever been close to as well prepared as this album, so I have very high expectations my self.
The album will be a concept album, but I'm not gonna give any closer details on that, you'll have to wait and see. But as the title indicates, it has a nordic theme. How it will sound musically is as usual nothing I talk about before the albums are recorded. Wait and see. But I expect most of you fans to sheer my enthusiasm over it when it is out - it is for sure not "just another Therion album" coming just because it comes so soon after Deggial. I am amazed my self how quick it went to write it, but the result is better than ever! The line-up is the same as on the last album and I think you guys will hear that we have had time to play much together now and that we sound better because of that. The other members have grown into the band and are giving more of their own personalities into this record and Kristian has also written some music this time.
We are starting to record this weekend and the recordings should be done by the end of June. We have already booked the Finvox studio for the mix, which should be finnished the second week of July.
The reasons for not mixing at our own studio are two; one is that we don't have output capacity for such an amount of channels. We can record IN up to 96 tracks or possibly even more, but OUT we have at the moment "only" 24, which is enough for most bands, but Therion will need 64 tracks.
The other reason is that even if we have good equipment, there are always other studios that have better. For recording our stuff is excellent (we have stuff among the top of the line products regarding micophones, mic pre-amps DA-konverters etc), but the mix is the most important part of making the album, so therefore we go to a place that have a better mixingdesk. We have a good one our selves, but even so, it can't be compared to the biggest studios with mixingdesks in the priceclass of $400.000 (DM 1.100 000) and similar. We concidered to mix at Woodhouse, but thought we would like to try something new again. We also want someone with more experince to mix it as it is not an easy task to mix such a complex record. But we will produce it our selves this time and our drummer Sami will engineer it. We will consult an advisor for the classic recordings though.

As I get the question quite frequently about if we will record other bands at our studio so I'll give a comment on that too. Yes, we will. Sami will work with other bands there when there is time left from his duties in Therion. BUT, it is a private studio and not a commercial one, so we might use much of the avalible time there to record projects and stuff of our own, meaning it will be much harder for interessted bands to get studio time there compared to a commercial studio. The good part of that though is that the bands that do get time there will get a more relaxed and different studio enviroment (it is built in a more "comfortable" way as it was designed and built for our selves) and they get a more personal attention as there won't be dozens of new bands in and out and out all the time. And the name of the studio? Modern Art.

The album is estimated to be released in October.

Christofer Johnsson

Regarding touring

We will play Wacken this year. They gave us an offer we couldn't resist, he he! =)

We will start touring on the new album in mid October (South America and Mexico) and end it in November (Europe). There was some plans for shows in USA, but the organizers offers were so awfully bad that even if the musicians would have played for free, I would have lost money on doing the shows. It seems like there are almost no organizers in USA that have any sort of cultural interest in booking bands, it seems to be only a thought of making an unreasonably high economical profit on each show behind it. If poor countries like Columbia can afford to book us and pay almost as well as promoters in Europe, then it really is a shame that no US promoter even wanted to bring an offer of half or even one third of that.
We were of course looking forward to play there for the first time and the negative results of the efforts to book some shows there was indeed a dissapointment. But we have so many other shows to look forward to visit and play so the greatest pity is in my opinion that the american/canadian fans likely never will get the chance to see us - I feel mostly sorry for you guys. The only possibility I could think of bringing us over (besides double or tripple the recordsales) seems to be if the dudes behind any festival would want to bring us over. So to be honest; the american fans should rather than wait try to save some bux and see us in Mexico headline or in Europe on some metal festival (and get plenty of other cool metal bands on the same bill) if they wanna catch the chance of seeing us live before we get too old and retire from the band.

Christofer Johnsson

More about recording

After loads of work we are finally almost ready with the constructional work of our new studio. It was scheduled to be finnished before Christmas, but it was a great deal more work than expected (even though we hired proffessionals to do most of it, else we would be bulidling for another month or two). It will be finnished on thursday. The we have to make some electicity installational work and after that install the studioequipment. Then we will make some tests and the pre-production (what we did already was the pre-pre-production). As we will do some shows in late february, the new shedule is to start recording will be after that in march. We will rehearse the songs a bit this time before recording as well, so I suppose mid march is a realistic guess on when the actual recordings will start. The album should be finnished in May.

Christofer Johnsson

About recording

We were able to take over the room next to our old studio, so we now have over 150 squaremeters and the constructional work is in process. The studio should be ready before the end of the year. Then we have to make some tests for a week or two before we finally will start recording the next Therion album there.

The other day I was also nearly cutting off the top of my finger! For a while I thought I wouldn't be able to play guitar for months, but now I think I'll be able to start trying carefully again in a week or something. Gotta be careful...

Christofer Johnsson

General News

1. New album? He he. I have written enough material for the next album and for half of the album after that! =)
I will start working on the pre-production on the new album this month. Soon I should get together with the other guys and make demos of all the songs.

2. Me and Sami have planned to sell our present studio and build a new one
from scratch. This one will be financed partly by money from selling the
present studio, the next Therion budget and a big portion of money from Sami,
who will then owe 50% of it (the studio today is owed 75% by me). We are planning
to record everything at our own studio, but we will mix somewhere else together with a more experienced producer.

3. We never played in Poland due to some circumstances and therefore no live material have been recorded. It will be done on the next major tour instead.

Christofer Johnsson

Regarding Kristians comments on Deggial and Mexico tour

"Sami finished his drumtracks in 4 days,".

This is in one way correct, but one more day was dedicated for drumsoundcheck and another day was deicated fo