Metal Shock Finland (World Assault )

Recently MSFinland‘s Kostya had a chance to interview SHTURM‘s singer Adar. Shturm is a Russian black/death/heavy metal band, formed in 2003. Shturm are: Adar – vocals&guitars, Omut – vocals&guitars, Petreno – drums, Kane – bass.

1. Hello Adar, welcome to Metal Shock Finland!

Yes, hello, Kostya, I`m glad to talk with you!

2. To start, tell us what did you eat today for breakfast? 🙂

A nice question! I need to remember: there was a fried egg, two toasts with cheese and grapefruit juice 🙂 A traditional morning coffee is not for me :D.

3. Now lets talk about you as a musician. What bands most effected on your style??

There are enough bands who influenced forming my own style – Iron Maiden, Metallica, Sepultura, then I got hooked on the bands like Dimmu Borgir, Marduk, Satyricon, Immortal, and that`s all, certainly, influenced the music I wrote those times.  Then I got interested with the bands like Nile and Behemoth and this inspired me for writing the music of the resembling style. Now there are no bands to influence my own style and the sound of Shturm. Certainly, it`s hard to avoid inspirations, but you can`t see the influence of one single band in our album “Karmaruna”. Some riffs and arrangements may remind the music of the band I mentioned earlier, but, in general, we are going through experiments, and I think that we won`t have any reasons for passing a straight line in future.

4. 99% of all the bands I know always tell me how they sounds like …. How do you think your band sounds like?

I think that we brought to life the one important thing in “Karmaruna” – we have obtained a new, not clichéd guitar sound. We wanted it to be mighty, thick and at the same time cold as they have it in black metal. We thought hard on how to make it exactly as we want to and every time we failed, because the big majority of today guitar combos are sound almost the same way – thick and “fleshy” sound. But soon afterwards we took a look at the head of “Reviera” combo and we realized that we have found exactly what we needed! So, I dare to say that we’re fully satisfied with the sound in “Karmaruna”.

5. The band was born in 2003, as a pure black metal, but after a short time it became black-death metal band, and at the end you decided to become brutal death metal. Do you think all these style changes somehow will effect your fans? What do your fans think about that?

Yes, that`s right! At the beginning we played raw black metal and those times we had quite good reputation among the Russian bands of resembling style, but soon we were bored with such raw music and we decided to add a bit of death metal in our music and so, death metal passages become more and more frequent element in our music. You often meet people in Russia who are fond of death metal and moreover, as the years go by, the level of our music become much better and that were the reasons of our increased popularity in the underground. And when we found in ourselves a desire to make something really brutal, to play on critical speeds and with a very complicated musical structure, we stuck to it with no further hesitation! The result was the album “Kalahia” which was published through Fono Ltd. And this very label helped to increase our popularity in Russia and CIS. That`s why the majority knows us as the brutal death metal band. And even now, when we recorded “Karmaruna” , which contains the other kind of music, still, there appear quite enough people who like it very much! But, as a conclusion I would like to add that when you change your style, a certain part of the fans may turn away from you and there`s no any hard feelings on our part. We’re just glad that those people were with us and still, there’s always a back process – appear people who like this renewed Shturm and who certainly  didn`t want to listen to our old material. Sometimes these new fans begin to interest with our early albums, and, then they say that they like what we made several years ago and this cannot but inspire us!

6. All these years the band exist you’ve got sereral lineup changes. Any reasons why?

The changes in line-up are concerned with a wide range of reasons. Some musicians decided that at that very moment they wanted to consider their families or carrier their first priorities. Some ex-members of Shturm line-up were just regular slackers, and so, we were bored with their “screw it all” attitude to Shturm and finally we were forced to part ways with them. Now our line-up have stayed fixed for several years and only bass guitarist Kane joined us not so long time ago. And for the fact that for quite a long time we have no line-up changes is the factor influencing our music for the best. Now we are ready to make a harmonious material and we are sure that in the next album we can be much more opened as a band.

7. Now lets talk about the band’s new album “Karmaruna”. Why the title Karmaruna??? Does it mean something to you?

I often hear this question!!! What does Karmaruna mean? Just after finishing the recording sessions of Kalahia we found a few ideas for the new album, which we was going to call Karma. In the course of time we gained more and more ideas, so we began thinking about the double album. And eventually we thought that it was good if the first part of the album would be called Karma and the second – Runa.
We were inspired with the idea and began working in this direction, but it happened that publication of a double album is a very complicated thing considering technical peculiarities and money. So, we decided to publish one disc which we would name Karmaruna, we got used to this name and we like it. And it happened, that finishing the material, the same-name song Karmaruna was the last song and it demanded a lot of work, especially if speaking about lyrics. When we began thinking about the meaning of these words – Karma and Runa, and suddenly we came to the biggest meaning of this word. Karma – is the law of cause and effect and runa is a symbol, a seal. Karmaruna is the symbol of destiny, this is the print which every human leaves in this world, in other words karmaruna is the life itself. And as in our new album we sing about sufferings, love, death, solitude, some rueful feelings, the same-name song Karmaruna firmly imbibed the meaning of the other songs of the album.

8. Do you think this album is different from all your others albums?

O, certainly! The album “Karmaruna” is quite different from all the rest music we’ve made. From the beginning of the process of writing and ending with the publication everything was really different than it was in the past! We worked on every song together, argueing and sometimes rewriting the songs completely, we were not stuck to a single theme of lyrics and wrote everything we are felt, hard feelings too, everything we wanted to speak about. We tried a non-standard attitude to the recording sessions of guitars also –we decided not to employ a sound engineer and did everything by ourselves. From our point of view, we managed to work out the sound we needed. These factors and the fact that we broadened the limits of our style, adding to it elements of thrash, heavy, progressive and a different crap, make this album as a not typical for us.

9. Why should the readers check it? What’s special in this album?

Because our album is special as it’s sincere. We didn’t follow any modern musical tendencies, stereotypes, we have worked out everything we could manage and are goddamned proud of ourselves!

10. Now the new album is out, what plans do you have for 2012?

Yes, the album “Karmaruna” has recently come out in a digibook format through the Darknagar records! And we are very glad for it! We have a great deal of plans, we are going to go ahead with the writing of new material and also we soon will be in the studio for recording sessions of our new EP, which we are going to release in the beginning of this summer. Also in summer we would like to make some gigs, begin recording of a new album and make a new music video.

11. Thanks for the interview 🙂 Any last words for the readers and your fans?

Thanks to you too! And as for readers and our fans I would like to wish them to listen to good music, be on good gigs, show more interest to metal, and, certainly, be healthy and happy!!! Follow our news as there will be more interesting news in the future. See you in our shows! Stay Heavy!

Interview by Kostya Aronberg

For more information, please visit: https://www.facebook.com/shturmband