Metal Shock Finland (World Assault )

KYLVER is an instrumental progressive rock and metal band from Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. They have recently released their first studio album, “The Mountain Ghost” which consists of four instrumental tracks.
I, Mohsen Fayazi, had a chance to have an interview with the band’s bassist, James Bowmaker and guitarist Jonny Scott a few days ago.

We started our chat by discussing the band’s name, and as I expected it originates from a Swedish runestone which was found at Kylver, Stånga, Gotland in 1903.  “I just found it online, I was reading things on runestones when I was listening to Wardruna.“ said guitarist Jonny Scott.

The Kylver Stone is still a mystery for us, as we still don’t know what the inscription written on it, means exactly. But some archaeologists believe that it is associated with magic. Well I can say magic and mystery fits the band’s music well.

As I said before, KYLVER‘s “Mountain Ghost” is a kind of conceptual album, however it is an instrumental one. So we continued talking about this album with genius qualities. “We originally wrote the whole music and then came up with the title of the songs.” said James, and then Jonny explained that they got the idea from a folklore item, from a village in Switzerland, “In that village, a lot of houses have these wooden carvings on the walls and it’s called the Mountain Ghost.”

Sometimes music can paint the stories which no words can, when the band lets the fans use their imagination to create their own stories and that is what KYLVER have done. But the band have their own definition for this ghost, “A kind of misunderstood lonely ghost,”  Jonny told me and he continues “He torments this village but he really wants some company and companionship, but he is doing it the wrong way.”

There is a Persian proverb which says “What comes from the heart, will go through the hearts.” And that is probably the answer of why it is so joyful to listen to this album. “We enjoyed playing the songs, we enjoyed writing the songs… It is our first release, we got good feed back.”

After talking about and discussing each track, I asked James and Jonny about their plans for the future and Jonny surprised me by saying “We started to write the next album…” and with this interesting news, we finished our interview. I must say that I am really looking forward to hear from these talented guys soon. You can listen to the whole of this interview on our Audio Player below: