Interview by Mohsen “Stargazer” Fayazi

It’s always a pleasure to sit and have a chat with a metal friend, especially having had a chance to work with them. Niclas Etelävuori, an amazing bass player who has been in the heart of the rhythmic part of AMORPHIS music for seventeen years, is now busy with his new band FLAT EARTH. To know more about his past and present, I had an interview with Niclas from which an excerpt can be read below:

Perhaps you agree with me that mankind is a creature of habit and seventeen years is long enough to make it difficult for any person to change or want to try new things. So I asked Niclas how he feels about those years with AMORPHIS now?

– “It was great times, it was a huge part of my life. I mean I don’t know, sometimes you just have to move on. But I have good memories and bad memories, but mostly good memories.”

In April 2017, Niclas announced his departure from AMORPHIS via a post on Facebook, where he mentioned his decision as “the hardest decision he ever made”. I asked him about it and what exactly happened during that time which led him to make that decision;

– “It wasn’t a sudden decision, it’s been growing for many years probably, five or six years but then I don’t know. I felt like things were getting just worse and people didn’t stay to their words and you know, a lot of things didn’t match. So I don’t know, I’d just had enough. We had an agreement that we do changes but it never happened. So I thought ‘this will never happen, I have to do something else’.
That’s basically it in a nutshell. But it’s very complicated and a long story, it would take a week to tell it. There’s some personalities, their egos go before other things.”

FLAT EARTH, why and how was it formed? Niclas responded:

– “After a couple of weeks sitting outside drinking beer, I had to do something. Then I had this one song and my Spanish friend Juan came by and ‘yeah yeah I wanna sing on that one’, so we released this one song in Spanish with him. But I knew I had a lot of songs on my hard drive and some of them were pretty old, so I didn’t even remember what I had done. So it took weeks to listen to all of that.
Then later, I started to look for somebody to play with and then Linde came up through a common friend. I liked his style always and I knew that maybe he wasn’t going to do anything after HIM finished. So then I asked him over and he was right away into it. From there on we start to look for a singer and then I have forced almost Gas to be in the band, but now he’s really into it (laughs). But Gas and I go back, we knew each other almost thirty years now. It’s all good.”

If you know AMORPHIS and if you’ve checked the FLAT EARTH single, ‘Blame’, you will also have noticed the difference in the music. So let’s see what Niclas thinks about it:

– “I feel good about it. Actually now we can do whatever we want. So it would be pointless for me to play the same music that Amorphis is doing. This is our first album and there’s a lot of different music on it already.
I’m very excited when we get to play more and compose the second one.”

I was curious about the band’s name, you might be too. So I asked Niclas and he answered:

– “It was kinda from many coincidences. We had a day planned to set the name for the band at Linde’s house and it was kind of our first get together. And we were to come up with a name and we cooked food and had drinks and stuff. Linde has four hairless cats and one of them passed on as soon as we got the dinner, from a heart attack. In the end we couldn’t come up with a name that day. The next morning, we thought we have to come up with something and we had a couple of names and Flat Earth came up. Then we somehow felt that we had to give tribute to the cat, because he lost his life when we were coming up with the name.
Then we also heard a story that if the earth is flat, then all the cats would shove everything off it, so we had a lot of coincidences.”

You can listen to the whole of this interview on the SoundPlayer below:

FLAT EARTH online:

• Official website
• FLAT EARTH on Facebook