Why did you choice the name The Ocean?
We chose the name because we wanted something that's a little different from other bands in our genre. We love this name because it doesn't tell you right away what you have to expect. It is open to your own interpretation because it has so many semantic concepts to offer – and that's exactly what we needed. It's a name that represents all the facets of what we do as a band. The ocean can be a quiet, peaceful, blue sea, it can turn into a man-eating stormy tidal wave – just like our music. In the ocean, there's beautiful sea shells and cute little sea horses, but there's also weird jellyfish and freakish deep-sea creatures – just like in our band, haha. No, seriously, that's exactly what we like about this name. It's simple but still so fucking powerful.

How do you describe the music of your band ?
I would say our music is an attempt to prove that things like technicality and emotions, atmosphere and brutality, chaos and concept, do not exclude each other, but go together pretty well. Our music combines elements of modern, technical metal with classical instruments and quiet, electronic soundscapes with wild hardcore outbursts of passion and fury.

Could you resume us the subject of your different albums ?
“Fluxion” and “Aeolian” deal with some of the nasty, hostile excrescences of a society based on commodities, wage-work, material success, individuality... and, increasingly, control. One of these implications is the necessity of leading outlined lives for the sake of career and affluence... we go to kindergarten, to school, to university, to work, and by the time we get out of the sweep through the institutions we're old and tired. We never actually pause and live life in the present tense, in a rewarding way, and a lot of times we don't even seem to know what is rewarding to us. Hence we are content with almost everything -- working shitty jobs doing things we don't enjoy in order to earn money to buy things we don't need. Our discontent with this idea of life is probably the major driving force behind our lyrics, and, as a matter of fact, behind almost everything we do as a band.

If you have the opportunity could you agree to realise the B-O of Pirates of the Caribbean (I said this movie because is near to the word “ocean”) ?
I haven't seen either of the two parts yet, but yea, we'd do it for sure – i mean, is there anything cooler than pirates?

What’s the best memory with your band ?
We we've been through so many weird things together during the past years, especially while on tour, so there isn't THE one best memory... but of course there's quite a lot of great stories to tell. One of our all-time favorites is what happened to us once, on our way from the Netherlands to Hamburg. We had just crossed the border and stopped at a gas station to get some gas and have a little break. After a while, back on the road, about 15 minutes from the gas station, there were two police cars behind us. They pulled us over and accused us of stealing 10 Euros worth of gas. It turned out that at the gas station, our bassist had forgotten to pay – so they thought we had stolen the gas. In addition, the situation for us was tricky anyways because we were 8 people travelling in a 5-seat van. One guy was sitting on an empty box of beer between the 2 front-chairs, 2 other people were laying on a matress in the back of the car... so we all thought, OK, that's it: if they notice that we're eight people in the van, they won't let us go, we'll never make it on time to the gig we were supposed to play with Keelhaul that night... and I mean, eight weirdos in a dirty old van, coming from the Netherlands – of course they would search us and the van. So we stayed in the van and our bass player got out to talk to the cops. As time went by, we got more and more anxious because they talked and talked for almost half an hour. Finally, we saw the cops drive off, and our bassist returned to the van to tell us what happened... he had told the cops that we were a young band, just on our way to their very first show -- and he actually convinced the cops to take 20 Euros from him (10 for the gas plus 10 extra for the gas station clerk) and take it back to the gas station. And that's ! 1031just what they did. They never bothered to look into the van. We could have ended up in serious trouble, but instead we got off and played a great show with the mighty Keelhaul.

What’s the degree of your popularity in your country ?
I guess our popularity has seen quite an increase since “Aeolian” is out. However, it seems to me that in some countries outside Germany it's even better than here. People there seem to talk a lot about us in internet forums, etc. -- much more than German people do. I don't have any hard facts available, concerning record sales, but even if I had, they might not say much. What's more important is the way people perceive us, and I've got the impression that a big part of the German metal scene is pretty conservative. A lot of people rather spend their money on magazines that do the ever-same Iron Maiden features over and again than on going out to see a new band at a show. And if they happen to see a somewhat unusual metal band like us, they measure it by standards that are just ridiculous -- “wait, you're not wearing long hair and leather pants? That can't be metal!”. In other countries, that's different. People in other countries seem to be much more open-minded. Look at Mastodon for example. Hardly anyone knows them around h

ere, but they're huge in the UK.

If there is something to cancel in your band what do you choice ?
I've grown up with MS-DOS and Windows, so I've learned to never touch a running system, haha.

Associate to each member a song from your discography which would correspond to them.
I gotta say, that's a pretty cool question, and a tough one, too... but here we go: Robin = Killing the Flies Gerd = Isla del Sol Torge = Inertia Nico = Dead Serious and Highly Professional Meta = Equinox Andreas = The Melancholy Epidemic Gordon = The Long Road to Nha Trang Nils = The Greatest Bane

What are your future plans ?
We'll be on tour for four weeks this autumn. During the winter, we'll probably start working on the new album. The songwriting is pretty much done, now it's just a matter of rehearsing them – which can take a while; you know how complex our stuff is. And then it's gotta be recorded. We're actually thinking about recording the next album outside of Oceanland, for the very first time. But I'm not providing any details on that right now...

Which were your favorite bands in your youth ?
We all come from different musical backgrounds (punk, metal, jazz, hardcore, etc.), but all of us have always had a passion for music that's a bit on the extreme side. So, at the age of, say, 14, a typical Ocean member might have been listening to Guns'n'Roses when everyone else was listening to Aerosmith.. Or listened to Aphex Twin when everyone else was listening to the Prodigy. Of course, our perception of music changes over time – nowadays, I wouldn't regard Guns'n'Roses or Aphex Twin as “extreme” anymore, but the pattern remains the same (and Axl and Richard are still crucial role models to some of us). Now, everyone is listening to Caliban – The Ocean is listening to Bohren und der Club of Gore.

How did you come to have a metal band? How did you meet the other musicians in The Ocean band ?
The whole thing started when our guitarist Robin came to Berlin in early 2000. He started looking for people, by the classical means of flyers and newspaper ads, in order to form a band to realize his musical vision. He had recorded some songs with his 4-track and had a pretty close idea of where he wanted the whole thing to go. Over the course of the next two years, more than 30 people joined and left the project, then called 'The Technicolor Television Braincandy', until a stable line-up of passionate and reliable people was found. With the exception of myself, none of those people had known Robin before. We all came together through The Ocean and have not only been friends since – we all love each other so much, there's soon gonna be a lot of little Ocean children...

How did your life change since the debut of this Ocean adventure ?
Out of our eight current members, no less than six have lost their 'old' girlfriend during their time in the Ocean. I guess that's gonna tell you something. The Ocean is extremely time-consuming, with several rehearsals a week, plus 'homework' and increasing amounts of extensive touring, so it's a tough thing to be in the band and go to uni and work and have a relationship. By the way, the other two guys haven't been in the band for a long time yet. Feel free to ask us next year...

What do you prefer, playing live or studio stuff ?
We love both, but I guess you can say that we're more of a 'live-band'. We love being on the road, and I guess the only way to absorb the Ocean-experience as a whole is to witness a live show. There are simply some aspects that are impossible to convey by the limited means of recorded music. The whole visual aspect of our performance, that is something impossible to include on a record. It is a strikingly important aspect of our show though, I believe that people are much more receptible on a visual basis than on an aural one. It's easier to convey emotions, to create a specific atmosphere, by using lights and images than by using sounds alone. so that is something we try to pull off when we hit the stage, and it is something mutually rewarding for us and the audience, hopefully. i tend to get locked up in my own sick little world when i'm on stage, and no studio experience hosts the same degree of intensity of experience. But studio work is great, too... we love working on different microphone set-ups, tweaking drum sounds, etc. If it wasn't that fun, we probably wouldn't have recorded all our albums all by ourselves.

What do you think about the metal music is shown by the medias ?
As I mentioned earlier, the German media are extremely conservative when it comes to metal music. I'm talking about all of them, there are some great print and online zines with passionate, open-minded writers, but the majority doesn't have any sense for what's going on outside the territory of Manowar, Iron Maiden, and Slayer. And some of them act pretty strange: there's people who demand more innovation within the metal scene, but when you present them with something like “Aeolian”, they just can't deal with it. I don't really know what's going on inside their minds, but it seems like some of them have got a concept of metal that's 20 years old. But that seems to be a specifically German phenomenon. Abroad, new bands like Mastodon etc. are being appreciated for taking metal further, not criticized for being not metal.

How do you perceive the gothic music ?
As far as I kno

w, none of us has noteworthy preferences for gothic music. Okay, some of us do appreciate some of the bands that are sometimes put, not into, but close to that category; I've always loved Joy Division, and I really like The Cure, once in a while – and classic industrial music, from the time when 'industrial' was not synonymous with 'disco music'. Think Throbbing Gristle, Godflesh. But apart from that... it's just not our thing. I mean, wave, EBM, neo-folk and all that... we really have a lot of heated discussions and fights about aesthetical issues in music and arts, but we can all agree that gothic wasn't made for us – that's for sure.

What do you think about the problem on the environment, pollution, the destuction of animal species, .... ?
It sucks, it definitely does. But when you look closer at that whole complex, you'll see that what also sucks are the answers to that problem given by some people. “We have to save resources; we have to restrict our consumption of this, we have to use less of that, and we have to restrict our needs for that”. Billions of people don't even have access to the resources that are being talked about. Two thirds of the world's population don't even dream of ever being able to afford a car, buy fancy rain-forest furniture. There are resources they could save, and there aren't significally more resources that you and I can save – because we already have to contain ourselves on a daily basis anyways. Even if I wanted to use huge amounts of electricity, I couldn't, because I can't afford it. But that's what always gets spoon-fed into us: “we” have to save here and there. This is highly cynical because in a world where money can buy everything – and no money can buy nothing at all – your consumption is already restricted. And, to me, this very way our society is organized is the key to this whole ecology issue. If profit is the main priority and if your only chance to survive on the market is to expand, then the the environment cannot be your concern. Since environmentally friendly techniques are the ones that are more expensive (solar power...), you're not gonna invest money into them unless you really have to (usually because it's the law). But the techniques are all there – the whole world could run on solar, water, and wind power. If there wasn't that thing called money.

A funeral date, the 11.09.2001, the United States and anywhere all over the world has a thinking to these innocent victims. You a German person, how did you perceive this event there were (or was, I don’t know ) five years ? And now what’s your opinion for all theses terrible events in United States and same in European country ?
When it happened, around afternoon-ish, I was just on my way from the train station to my place with a friend of mine who had come to visit me. I was gonna see my all-time favorite band Shellac that night. There are those TV screens on the subway and they said a plane had crashed into one of the towers. We were like “oops”, not taking further notice of it – I never pay much attention to that stupid TV on the subway anyways. But when we got home, we learned about the whole story – it was a weird feeling that day, and the days afterwards, definitely. But I never felt threatened myself, even though the whole media coverage could have made you feel that way. What was interesting was the way the event was instrumentalized to implement policies that had been thought about before, but were never realized because people wouldn't have taken it. This whole bunch of supposed anti-terror legislation, biometric i.d. cards, all the cameras in public places, etc. After 9/11, all this was possible. By the way, I have a certain dislike for the moral concept of the 'innocent victim' you're bringing up here. Sure, none of those people had done anything 'wrong', but (assuming that you accept this concept) you're saying that if they had been guilty of something, their killing wouldn't have been a problem, or, to use a moral term, not as unjust. That way, you're suggesting that there's reasons for killing people that you can accept and others that you can't – which implies a hierarchy of a person's value. And I'm afraid I have to disagree here. Why should the death of these 3000 be more 'senseless' than that of those that are starving to death every day? Not only is none of those deaths 'senseless', but can be explained, I also don't see any reason to value one higher than the other – which obviously is always the case when the notion of the 'innocent victim' comes into play.

Your country and my country and some other in Europe help to build the famous airplance the A-380 from Airbus Industry. Would you consider to plan in the A-380 to make some concert?
Yes, we'll take the A380, fly around the world, and play all our shows on the plane -- “Robin Staps and the flying Carribean Doomgrind Pirates of Death”

What do you think about all the informations made around the new pope, Benoît XVI ?
I do read the paper on a daily basis, but I always skip the articles that are concerned with him. As a member of the Church of the Ocean, I feel no connection to him – sorry about that.

I leave you, the last word ....
Usually, you're the one who's supposed to say “thanks for the interview”, but this time, I'll do it – there were a couple of great questions. After having done dozens of interviews, I really appreciate that. Everyone else, check us out on tour, buy our stuff, and, as always, stay true to the oceanic power of the heavy metal of steel. Cheers, Nils (The Ocean)