German metallers Ahab (Napalm Records) recently toured their home country, playing a number of sold out shows. The band got together in 2004 and after five years, two albums, an EP and lots of touring it seems like all the hard work is paying off. Lead singer Daniel Droste took some time out to answer some questions for Leo Kindred in November 2009.
You were recently on tour in Germany with a session guitarist filling in, how was that?
We’re already back home again. The tour was very good, I guess half of the locations were sold out, the organisation was excellent, the guys of Dornenreich and Fjoergyn were nice too....so in the end this tour was a really special experience for us and enjoyed every single gig we had.
One would normally think of beginning an interview with a question like ‘where did you get your name from then’ but I suppose in this case it isn’t necessary. Are you a big fan of Moby Dick?
Thank you very much for your consideration. Sometimes it's hard to answer the same questions again and again...this one’s for sure a classic amongst questions I receive in AHAB interviews! I’m a fan of nautical stories in general, so the novel of Moby Dick has to be amongst my favourites. I remember that I really enjoyed watching this old Moby Dick movie with Gregory Peck as Captain AHAB when I was I child. That was the first time I got in contact with the story. By reading the novel as a teenager I had the possibility to dive deeper into the story and I remember that it captured me back then and still does.
Quickly on the subject of the book; as cool as the themes in Moby Dick are, was it just me who felt like Herman Melville rather over did it in his detailed descriptions of the particulars of seafaring like knot-tying in his writing?
Well there are some chapters where Melville described the life on sea in a very detailed way and those lines are definitely harder to read than the storyline. It fits to the topic but I prefer the story itself of course although it’s a nice extra to have such facts for those who are really interested in the whole matter.
Mastodon’s 2004 Leviathan album covers some similar ground thematically to yourselves, was it an influence on your own ideas or more coincidence?
That was more coincidence. Mastodon is dealing with a similar thematic in an absolutely different way. It was our intention to compose a dark soundtrack to Melville's novel, to interprete his words with our instruments. I’m not sure if Mastodon had the same aims with Leviathan...if they did, they realised it under a very different point of view.
Congratulations on your new album, The Divinity of Oceans, as a newcomer to your work and not that normally into doom I must say I’m surprised how much I like what I’ve heard. I’ll go onto the concepts and ideas, but how would you describe it and is it different from work in the past?
Compared to its predecessor, The Divinity of Oceans is much more complex. The Call of the Wretched Sea was mainly composed with elements of the stylistic devices of funeral doom. The fact that we’re dealing with a different story also required a diffrent way of working/composing. First of all I tried to work in a more open minded way with the lyrical subject. In contrast to composing song after song, like we did on The Call of the Wretched Sea, I recorded every idea I had in my little home studio this time. In the end we chose the best material, and added elements together to songs.
You seem to have rejected being likened to the more conventional doom bands people tend to think of like Black Sabbath and Candlemass and have instead had comparisons drawn rather unusually to bands like Carcass and Devin Townsend, how do you feel about those comparisons and did you set out to try something a little less traditional?
It wasn’t my aim to compose in a concrete direction. I guess the record is just my musical interpretation of the stories we’re dealing with...and as a musician I get influenced by the stuff I listen to of course. The music of Carcass was a part of my youth and I’m also a big fan of Devin Townsend's sound so the fact that an outsider finds parallels, that would be just natural I guess.
The Divinity of Oceans marks the end of the ‘Nantucket Saga’ of your first three albums, what were your aims with these album and the Saga?
Although the books of Melville and Chase have a connection both are also very antithetic. Moby Dick is a novel that is (besides the episodes for the hardliners you mentioned above) nicely written and good to read. The work of Owen Chase is about a real story that is really capturing but written in a quite dry narrative style. In the novel the whale is one of the main “characters”, in the narration it is just the reason for the tragedy. We’re all fans of Melville's book and its roots so first of all it was a challenge for us to realise our vision to compose these topics.
On the album the books by Nathaniel Philbrick and Owen Chase on the Whaleship Essex are cited as inspiration and influences, what was it in particular about their writings which grabbed your attention and made you want to use them in the album?
The stories itself and their dark atmosphere, the variety of possibilities in composition, the fact that this topic is quite untouched in the metal scene and the challenge to realise that!
As you’ve called this the final album in the Saga does that mean in the future you might depart from the theme of whaling and the sea, or with a name like Ahab do you think that’s always going to play a part?
Chris and I founded Ahab in 2004 as a platform to compose nautical topics, so the band name is a synonym for our nautical orientation in music and lyrics. Moby Dick or whaling were just one history in that “universe” so there’s a lot more out/down there that has to be discovered and composed.
The ocean itself has provided a huge amount of inspiration to bands, giving us a large number of bands: We Are the Ocean, Ocean Machine, Oceansize, The Ocean… not to mention of course the thematic matter it provides bands, authors and artists. What do you think it is about the great blue yonder that preoccupies our attention so much?
Well, many reasons I guess...it’s just beautiful, a source of life on the one hand but also a mighty destructive force of nature on the other hand...and above all the sea is an external habitat and mostly unexplored. That mystical side about that topic inspires the reader, the listener and the composer, that’s the most capturing aspect about it in my opinion!
What can people expect of your future work? Could I suggest an album of whale music, I seem to recall Devin Townsend used some whale song on Terria? Maybe you could collaborate…
Like I mentioned earlier...we don’t want to limit the band on whale stories. I’d never use whale samples or anything like that, everyone can do that. It’s my aim to deliver this sea atmosphere mainly with the instruments used in a rock/metal band...that’s the challenge! I’d love to collaborate with Devin Townsend of course, this man is a genius! Maybe you can arrange something? I’m sure that a journalist like you has enough connections to make things like that possible?!
Many thanks for answering my questions, and hope to catch you on tour at some point if you sail across to the UK (without being wrecked and having to resort to cannibalism of course), and I hope things go well for the rest of the tour.
Thank you very much for this interview! Cheers!
