Photo by Sebastian Ludvigsen.
Following on from last years The Great Deceiver Mortiis, one of many projects from HÃ¥vard Ellefsen and probably his best known, are set to release a companion album titled The Great Corrupter. We spoke with the maestro behind the many faces of Mortiis about the upcoming album.
“I’ve went back to my hard rock roots. That’s where I came from.”
“I started this project [The Great Corrupter] in autumn last year and now there are all kinds of artists doing remixes on it.”
“I reached out to a lot of artists. At the point where I’m done with my songs, when I’ve got my ideas out there finished and all ready to go, I love sending them out to get a new take on them. I’ve never been a theoretical musician, I go by my heart and listening to what other artists would do differently; hearing their take on it, how they deconstruct it and turn it into something new is really cool. It’s still the same song in a way but with a different interpretation, and with twenty-eight songs there’s a tonne of really cool people with their take on there. Chris Vrenna, Die Krupps, Apoptygma Berzerk; there were way more artists we could of reached out to but I only had so much time.”
“We have Je$us Loves Amerika from Glasgow on it. I met Patrick last year and after meeting him I wanted to check out their music. It was really punk, angry, techno stuff and I was like ‘you have to do a remix!'”
“I’m like a hard rock archaeologist now.”
“I also spoke to people from my Cold Meat Industry days like Deutsch Nepal and Raison D’Etre, that’s kind of a blast from the past for people who were into the stuff I was doing in the mid-nineties. Ambient people probably wouldn’t call it ambient, but it is what it is, is it ambient in the true sense of the word, maybe not.”
“I became more broad minded when I started discovering kraut rock and pioneering electronic artists like Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and Einstürzende Neubauten. I naturally progressed from there more into the industrial underground and when I got signed to Cold Meat Industry I found a whole new world; I’ve always been interested in weird music but in the past couple of years I’ve went back to my hard rock roots. That’s where I came from. In the early nineties I was very narrow minded and just into various forms of hard rock and metal so I’m like a hard rock archaeologist now.”
The Great Corrupter is out 21st April on On Your Own Records.
