Disclaimer: I was a kid when I wrote this so please withhold any judgements on quality :)
Israeli progressive metal band Orphaned Land released their first concept album Mabool, in 2004. After receiving rave reviews for their unique style of Oriental and Middle Eastern music, they are now working on a follow-up with prog legend Steven Wilson.
Guitarist Matti Svatizky spoke to me about Orphaned Land’s seventeen year history, beards and the Israeli metal scene.
Hi Matti, it’s a pleasure to interview one of the creative minds from such a great band! Before we start, I must know what happened to your beard? I thought it was pretty glorious haha.
Hey man, what’s up? Thanks for the compliments, they’ll get you everywhere! Now for the more serious business, my beard! The truth is, in band photos it may have looked cool, but in real life it turned out to be a disaster, so I really had to let it go.
For those who are new to the band, can you describe what Orphaned Land is all about?
Well, visiting our website (orphaned-land.com) is a very good idea. You can really learn a lot from there, hear sample music, see my ex-beard, see the rest of the guys etc. But to sum up what we’re about, I’d say that we play metal with ethnic touch. The metal we play is influenced by the whole metal genre and has aspects such as thrash metal, heavy metal, death metal, doom metal, black metal, progressive metal and so on. However, our music is not inspired by metal only, but from other genres as well. We consider ourselves to be open-minded music lovers.
You guys are always progressing as a band and as individuals, I’m sure millions of things have changed since you first formed as kids under the name Resurrection nearly 17 years ago, making cliché death metal. What can we expect musically on your upcoming album and is there a concept for the whole album?
Well, you say cliché like it’s a bad thing, I think that it isn’t. It’s all about taste really. Let’s say that you eat a dish and it tastes good, then it doesn’t matter where you eat it or how it was prepared or from what ingredients, as long as it tastes good. I think that this way of thinking is the main difference between the 17 year old us and from us today, because in those days we were full-on metal head kids wearing nothing but Morbid Angel and Sepultura t-shirts and listening to nothing but metal. Today we can turn the radio on the most “cliché” station and enjoy. It doesn’t mean that we don’t like metal or that our next album won’t kick ass. On the contrary, it will be a full-on metal album, in many ways even more extreme than our former ones, with all the melodic and ethnic vibes we used before. It will have a unique concept story like our last album had. The title for our next release will be “OrwarrioR” – “Or” means in Hebrew “light”, so it makes it “the warrior of light”.
How did working with prog legend Steven Wilson come about?
I like all of Opeth’s albums and Steven is responsible for three of them, as well as for all Porcupine Tree albums and he’s also a half of the Israeli/English project Blackfield.
We haven’t started the real work on the album with him, but I myself am very curious about what the album will sound like after Steven will put his golden touch on it, and where this will lead Orphaned Land, especially after I know where it lead Opeth.
We haven’t worked with a producer before so we don’t really know what to expect or even what exactly it is that producers do, but I know that the outcome will be very interesting and in many ways different from what we have done so far.
Doing a epic album like Mabool with a crazy amount of guest musicians including a choir must have been a giant undertaking, are you experiencing the same difficulties with the new album?
The new album will definitely include a lot of the elements that Mabool included, such as choirs that you mentioned, strings quartets and many more. Nobody said that making an album is easy work, especially when this amount of musicians is involved, but we will have the same fun making this album as we had making Mabool, no matter what technical difficulties we may encounter, and I’m sure we’ll encounter a lot.
Kobi is the only believer of god in the group, whilst the rest of you are agnostic, and yet almost all of your lyrics have spiritual and religious themes with elements taken from Judaism, Christianity and Islam. How is working on religious subject matter, with such different opinions within the group and why did you think it was important to use spiritual themes as lyrical content?
Firstly, you are right. I consider myself agnostic and I think that other band members do too.
I sometimes have some difficulties with the lyrical content, but luckily for me things are not black and white in these matters. For me, there’s a big difference between the words religious and spiritual. The word spiritual can be interpreted in many ways, and I do consider myself to be a spiritual person, and when I say spirit I mean inner self or inner nature.
I don’t believe in ghosts or anything similar. I don’t believe in many things that are written in the bible, but I do think that some of the things written there are wise and beautiful, so I do accept it when Kobi makes use of this stuff. I try to make myself believe that using religion in Orphaned Land is not excessive, and even if I don’t always agree with the lyrical content, I accept it as an opinion of someone who is different than me.
One of the six languages featured on Mabool was Gibberish, how did you come up with such a crazy idea!?
I think that the inspiration came from other bands, which make world music. I don’t think that things always have to have a strict meaning. You can hear something that doesn’t have a verbal meaning and it can still be beautiful musically, and that’s what using Gibberish is about.
The Israeli metal scene seems to be growing, especially with you guys doing worldwide tours and the loyal fan-base I noticed you had during your shows in Israel. Can you tell us a little bit about your local scene?
The Israeli scene is really great, but it is not getting the attention it deserves. There are a lot of good bands here which seek exposure, but up until now this scene hadn’t had much luck. At Wacken, the production crew of “Metal: a headbanger’s journey” came to us and asked to have an interview. It appealed to them to shoot us in Israel and have a few words with guys and girls from the local scene. They were here last August, and we are really looking forward to seeing the second part of this excellent film. I hope that it’ll be good for the Israeli scene and more bands from here will get some recognition abroad because they definitely deserve it.
What type of difficulties does an Israeli band experience when touring countries which oppose the Israeli government? For example, in Turkey you aren’t allowed to receive mail from Israel and most of the fans can only get your music online.
Well, Turkey is the only Muslim country we ever performed in and probably the only Muslim country we will ever get the chance to perform in. I don’t know about restrictions to get mail in Turkey, but I know that in other Muslim countries the problem exists. In Egypt a fan was arrested for possessing one of our albums, not because of us being Israelis, but because of quotes from the Koran in one of the songs, which is considered to be illegal there. We have fans in places like Iraq, Syria and Iran because of the Arabic elements in our songs, and we believe in the importance of the bridge we are building between us and them. We hope that one day we will be able to perform in their homelands, though it is obvious that this is only a dream, but you know what they say about dreams, they sometimes come true.
What’s on the band’s rider? Do you have any special requests for wherever you stay during your tours? Such as a shwarma? I could kill for one of them right now, but alas there’s only one country I think you can find them.
Really? I think that other countries in the region have it too! But they sometimes call it differently. Shawarma is a type of Israeli food if anyone was wondering. We do miss Israeli food when we are out on a tour for a long time and we often find ourselves fantasizing about a plate of Hummus or Falafel or other things. But we don’t put those things on the rider because we know that even if the production crew would be able to manage something, in most cases it would be better if we didn’t ask it at all, because it’s just not the same thing. We are not spoiled, we ask just for the basic things and that’s all.
I look forward to seeing you guys in New Zealand sometime! You are welcome to stay at mine, haha.
We will get to New Zealand someday, you’ll see my friend. We’ll see all of the sheep and green lands and beautiful views and get to play to you cool people, and when we come I’ll try to arrange you some shawarma. Stay Orphaned!
By Jimmy Ness