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Push to Fire Interview: The Ocean
"I figured it reflected the music very well...", Robin Staps, mastermind behind musical endeavour The Ocean, sits trying to keep warm with his hood up in a run-down, drafty room in the back of Sheffield's Corporation venue. Tall, healthily European looking, sporting some impressive tats, a hint of fashion-stubble and with goggle-style glasses, he comes across as an affable, articulate, focused man. The sort of man who'd work as a team manager in an office and then go snow boarding on his days off. The sort of person, in short, who'd get a band like The Ocean off the ground.
"the music progressing", he continues, discussing his band's most recent album Precambrian, "from something that is very archaic and simple, to something that is very multi-layered and multi-levelled".
Welcome to The Ocean, also known as The Ocean Collective for the reason that the band is a collaborative international cross-breed between numerous musicians, with the core line-up itself fluctuating.
We Are Many
"It's partially because a lot of people ended up starting families and jobs", says Robin on the line-up, "and partially because we've always been this collective that have people in a fixed live line-up as well as people who were only coming in to play on recordings. And it's always going to be like that", he underlines.
"On the next recording there are going to be people playing on the album that will never play with us live, because it's all these classical instruments and stings and we can't bring them on tour with us for logistic and financial reasons...But the core line-up is definitely consolidating right now, and I think the people in the band now sit very well - the only line-up change we may have in the future is our vocalist Mike" [Pilat, who indeed left the band in April this year]. "He needs to work to get some money in... everything else, bass, guitars, myself, are probably going to be on the next album".
Serious Business
The more you talk to Robin (slightly distracted by the imaginative graffiti of a woman's most intimate parts behind him on the wall) the more you get the impression that this is a man who is dedicated to driving this band forward and making as professional a job of it as possible. The set tonight for instance has a sequenced light show, smoke machines, visuals screen (Robin confesses great interest and ambitions in writing music for visuals), even LEDs. Nothing seems done by halves. He's clearly not satisfied with just coasting along with it and taking a back seat attitude to proceedings.
"I really believe" he says, "that if you want to make money in this business you have to do as much of it as possible yourselves. Label, management, even, in the best case, run your own bus company...That's something I've learned". He smiles, "22 people on the bus - it's a little bit crazy".
Even on this tour Robin appears to have had fair organisational input. "With the tour package, we've picked the bands for it [Burst, Bison B.C. and Medeia]...and it's been really great, on a personal level as well as a musical one. It's an interesting bill and we're really having a good time..."
But wait, there's more.
If You Want Something Re-released Right...
"I just started my own label called Pelagic records", he added, stating the fact like it was the most usual thing in the world. "It's going to be closely linked to The Ocean but we're still signed to Metal Blade records for the next two Ocean albums". It transpires that the reason for founding Pelagic records was primarily for re-releasing The Ocean's first full-length Fluxion, which went out of print and demand for it made The Ocean consider their options. With typical motivation and energy they decided to take it on themselves.
"The record wasn't available anymore", laments Robin. "It'd been out of print for two years and we were in the position where we really wanted to reprint it because people were asking about it all the time. With Metal Blade, their offer wasn't agreeable. So we decided to do it ourselves and we ended up setting up a distribution network all over Europe. So we turned it into a private proper label."
So what of Fluxion's re-release? Completely re-recorded with the band's [previous] vocalist Mike Pilat providing the vocals, and Fluxion's reincarnation will be re-released this June (or as you read this: NOW!).
"I think the re-release sounds much better, it's really an improvement. Our old vocalist [before Mike] had good death metal growls but that was all he could do, Mike has a much broader range so now it covers a fuller range of vocal styles. That's a step that makes the re-release a much more interesting version of the album than the old one".
The re-recording itself more than does itself justice. The sound incorporates an updated, blisteringly clear re-recording with intricately arranged string, percussion and piano all skilfully interweaved with some hefty metal bludgeoning. A clever, sophisticated work, that still sounds so heavily massive you could use it to crush whales. Sexy.
Geology, It Rocks!
Besides the seemingly hyper-organisational force of Robin, what's also noticeable is The Ocean's inability to lay down and be dull. One look at the beautiful artwork on the covers of the albums, the shirts and even the band's snazzy website attests to this. Then there's the album concepts. The band's current release 'Precambrian' is a 2-disc album that contains the musical metaphor of planet Earth's geological evolution. The transition of Earth is mirrored from primal sounding ferocity on Hadean/Archaean, sounding not a million miles away from Converge or Meshuggah, to classical influenced complexity on Proterozoic.
Wouldn't it just have been easier to stick to the format of one CD with 12 songs and have done with it? "I'm just fascinated with the idea of creating something genuinely different and interesting, and I was always fascinated by double albums", Robin passionately enthuses. "One of the reasons we did it with Precambrian, we really wanted an album that represents the band as a whole", he explains. "The band has a very large sector of musical influences...had a lot of different styles, and with Precambrian I wanted an album that represented all of it. We tried to take the two styles apart as far possible. Focusing on more heavier arcane parts on Aeolian and then focusing on the epic atmospheric stuff, and we started looking for a concept to underline that. The whole Precambrian thing came into play. The evolution of planet Earth, going from something that was once all fire and volcanoes to somewhere where life started to spring up and the atmosphere was good, and it started to get more complex: exactly what's happening in the music".
Wow. Maybe a dinosaur-era Earth is next? "Yeah, I was asked that before", he smiles. Damn, I thought I was being original. "It's going to happen at some point...if Mastodon don't do it before us!"
The Future, Tense?
I decide to ask about the next album. The subject is raised of the band having to relinquish there old rehearsal space, fondly nick-named 'Oceanland'. How is this loss going to affect the future work?
"Oceanland was a very important place for us when we started out because it was a huge underground area we had to use for 24 hours a day 7 days a week", says Robin, clearly fond of the old haunt. "It was a very inspiring place though for me, so it definitely helped shape things. Now we're in a different position with the members in different countries; some of the guys are from Switzerland, one's living in the UK right now, I'm still in Berlin and the band is still based there and we basically meet up for rehearsals a week before the tour so we don't really need Oceanland anymore".
And as to the next musical work for The Ocean? "Pre-productions are already made and recorded", he confirms. "It's hard to say what the actual album is going to sound like, although one thing is that there's going to be more clean vocals. It's still fun to play those heavier songs live like 'The City in the Sea', but the main challenge I see is in going to more progressive waters right now".
I wonder about the large number of bands that have started out quite basic and go on over their later career to be more experimental. Robin is keen to refute this more predictable idea. "It's not a linear evolution I would say", he says. "It's not that we're developing from this really heavy band that's getting softer. We just have to do whatever feels right at the time and keep it interesting to us. It's really important".
Strange Tour-Fellows
Certainly more wide-ranging than Cannibal Corpse. With the range of musical styles, influences and ambitions piling up like dirty laundry in a student's bedroom, it's clear that Robin's vision for The Ocean isn't restricted by genres or traditional barriers. Even so, for a band still firmly rooted in a metal sound that have toured with the likes of Opeth and Neurosis, it's still surprising what he throws out when asked about ideal touring bands in the future. "I would love to tour with Thrice", he professes. "I've been a big fan of that band ever since they brought out their last album 'The Alchemy Index'. They really got the whole concept album thing down as well, so there's definitely a mix between the two and I'm a big fan of their music. They may not be into the same things but I definitely feel there's a link. Hopefully we're going to be able to tour with these guys".
Aside from the experimental post-hardcore Thrice, other unlikely ideal tour mates include art rock mainstays And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead and post-rock act Mogwai. Mogwai? "They're very big and heavy sounding as well. It's massive. They claim to be louder than Man o' War!" I don't know. Man O' War dress louder than most bands. He laughs, "That's the kind of direction we're looking though."
"We're kind of more interested with touring with more indie bands these days than metal bands", clearly unconcerned by the 'sell-out' reactionaries. "The tour with Opeth was really good for us but it was a die-hard Opeth crowd", he says somewhat regretfully. "That was kind of difficult to crack at times, but we sold a lot of merch and it was very successful. We still had a good tour with them, but that's what makes it interesting touring in different directions".
The Ocean's Horizon
'Different directions' - possibly the best way to sum up The Ocean. Always looking at new things, trying new sounds and concepts. Even the bands line-up isn't traditional. It's precisely what makes The Ocean a unique and exciting proposition. Anything goes with this band.
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