Everon have just released their superb new album "North" on Mascot Records.  We caught up with the band keyboard, vocalist and all round musical whiz Oliver Philipps to discuss the album in more detail, an insight into the making of an album and what makes the band work.  Special mention must go to Oliver's views on illegal downloading which I hope readers here take very seriously and something we here at Virtuosity One feel very strongly about.  Enjoy. 

Hi Oliver, many thanks for participating in this interview with Virtuosity One. The new Everon album ‘North’ has just been released.  The album was six years in making, what length of that time was needed to make the album and can you give us some background into the making of the album.
I don’t think it took longer to make than any of the previous albums, I suppose the overall-studio time was 6 weeks the most. The reason for the long delay has not been that we needed 6 years to get it rightJ, but rather the fact that Moschus and I were involved in other productions most of the time and thus we just didn’t come to going ahead with our own album. When working as a producer in your day job you just have to get used to the fact that productions have a tendency to go overtime when you need it the least. Besides that I was a little unfortunate in terms of my health so that came with an unexpected timeout for me.

The actual making of the album went really easy and smoothly, there were no problems whatsoever at that end.

Was the music solely composed by you or was their ideas from the other members that helped shaped the album we hear today?
The songs on the album were all entirely written by myself, but  actually there was one more song which Ulli had written, which we didn’t manage to get to a final version because we were running out of time; not matching the release-schedule again just wasn’t an option anymore so we’ll save that one for the next record then. But when it gets down to doing the recordings everybody is welcome to bring his own and add his own personal style of playing to the music, in particular Moschus has pretty much free hands in terms of what he plays. I am not a drummer, so I just do a rough drum-programming when making pre-productions of the songs which serve as kind of a guideline to him when he starts working on the songs.

The accompanying press release states you went to work on the album on an island off Holland, what does this location bring your inspiration that say your local area does not?
I wouldn’t put it that way, off course I can as well write here at home and actually that’s what I do most of the time. But at the time of writing the songs for North I was really locked up in the recording-studio all the time, we had production after production going. If you want to do a proper job as a producer you really need to set your mind exclusively on the music of your client, at least for me it just doesn’t work out if I try to also work on songs on my own in those periods. And when coming home from a 10 hr studio day  to then spend half the night to work on new songs at home, this does not always gather applause from the one you’re living with,  to say the least J

That’s why I chose to take a complete timeout from everything, done that already when writing the songs for “Flesh” back then. I just load my car full of instruments and recording gear and retreat for a month or two in some remote place by the sea, no telephone, no internet, no studio, just me and the music. Inspiration comes naturally then, I love working that way, but admittedly it’s not a must-have, I rather consider it kind of a luxury thing, for me it’s a mix of vacation and writing-sessions.

What did you hope to achieve with the evolution from 2002’s Flesh to “North”?
I do not really think much about that. The music changes naturally as the musician does, I wasn’t intent on heading into a particular direction. When getting started, I had kind of a vague plan to use less keys/orchestrations this time, since I was a little tired of doing orchestrations since I had done so many for bands recently. So I was thinking of a more guitar-kind of approach, but when listening to the album you will figure out that plan didn’t survive for longer than a song and a half. As I see it you cannot force inspiration, so I just take the ideas the way they come. To my experience that always works best, never try to be smarter than your inspiration is, and you cannot really go wrong.

How has your musical outlook and vision for the band changed during these 6 years?
As I said, I do not really think much about it. In particular through my work as producer for other artists I am exposed to so many different musical influences, that to me it feels my writing is in a permanent state of change, but that’s going really natural and organic. I firmly believe, the less you think about what you’re planning to do in your music, the better the outcome will be. I never considered song writing a craft or a rational act even, it’s not a lot more than sitting below the apple-tree and then pick up the apples that fall down. I must have “written” a couple of hundreds of songs over the years and not for one of them I could tell how I got there. Actually when I think of it I must confess I do have absolutely no idea how song writing actually works. Then again as long as it DOES work, I do not think I need to understand the why and how.

Your keyboard play a prominent role in the music of Everon, yet combine well with Ulli’s guitar, how do you work out what to do with your respective parts and do you envision the “bigger picture” with your compositions or are you open to suggestions from the rest of the band?
I always do pre-productions of all the songs, so they already contain keys as well as guitar and bass, only for the drums I just make a rough programming. Believe it or not, but I suppose more than half the songs on the album I’ve even written on guitar. In the early years of the band, when Ralf Janssen was our guitar-player still, I only played the solo-guitars and stuck with the keys for the rest of the songs, but that has changed a lot over the years. Nowadays it kind of splits 50/50 between both instruments. So to answer your questions, when I present a song to the band, it already has near-final shape and usually I got rid of all the lose ends already. The big picture I usually have in mind already before I start to sit down and really begin to work a song out. Most of the song writing/arranging is happening inside my head rather than with an instrument at hand. I figured out over the years it’s a method which works well to me, when doing it on the instruments the creative process is always interrupted by technical issues such as having to figure out how to play a part on the particular instrument. To my opinion it’s early enough to figure that out when you’re actually done with the creative process and have the complete picture in mind already. Imagination is not limited by playing skills etc., so in your imagination you may easily pass boundaries you would not manage to come across when trying to play it right away. I think this is even a reasonable way of improving your playing skills, on a regular base you’ll notice you imagine stuff which you’re not capable of playing, and this is motivation enough to learn how to play it then.

But there is a million of possible methods of writing songs, this is just the one that works best for me, I never liked writing songs for instance by jamming around, but I know plenty of bands that come up with excellent results that way.

Can you talk us through the recording process for “North” i.e. timescales, order of instruments recorded?
The pre-production of the songs usually comes already with near-final keyboards. Those are used as guide-track for the recordings then, so first we replace the drums, then the bass, then the guitars and usually when this is done I make some refinements on orchestrations and keys to bring it in final shape. Around that time we also bring in guest-musicians such as cello-player Rupert Gillet, who by the way is a landsman of yours.   

The vocals is the very last thing, I do not even think much about those before all the music is recorded. Off course I do have kind of a vision in mind already from the moment of writing a song, but I never try it out before it’s time for the recording. Ever since “Venus” the first time I ever sing a new song is the moment when we record it at the studio.   

“North”, as with the band previous albums was recorded and mixed by yourselves, what led to you doing it all “in house”?
Actually the technical process of recording and mixing is rather in the hands of Moschus, since he’s the engineer at Spacelab Studio. As for the production, I’ve been a producer for more than a decade now so I suppose I’d be unproduceable for another producer anyway. It’s the same when a doctor gets ill and needs to see a doctor, you don’t want to have that actually. I’d sometimes wish to have a producer though who takes my role, but I am realistic enough to be aware that it probably wouldn’t work out. Already in the stage of writing I think like a producer anyway, so my imagination contains musical details as well as details of how to record or produce it, so I suppose it would be difficult for me to take anybody else’s advice on those issues. I have to confess anyway, that I do have a tendency  to be slightly despotic in recording situations, it’s not necessarily a quality I am proud of but then again it’s a part of me I am aware of.  So maybe the reason why I end up being the producer myself, is that I am the only one willing to work with me J      

How close is the finished album to your initial vision for it or where there any big changes during the recording?
It’s pretty close actually; but off course you’ll always bump into some fresh and unexpected ideas during a production which make it on the album then. So when looking back on it to be honest I cannot even tell what elements have been there from the start and what were added during the recordings. To give a proper answer to that I would have to compare pre-production and the final album, and since thanks to me perfectly organized archive it would take a year and a half to get hold of a CD with the pre-production, so I am afraid I kind of need to leave this question unanswered.

The album artwork and new website is superb, knowing Jan Yrlund he is a great talent but how did you hook up with him and Darkgrove?
Jan and I know for more then ten years already. Besides doing artworks, he’s a musician in the first place, and that’s how we got to know each other. We worked together on at least 10 albums over the years, most of them were produced at our studio and usually I do all the orchestration work for his records. First thing we did together was “Fatherland” of Ancient Rites back then in ´98, later we did Angel and Imperia together, and even had a common band-thing going with Sartyrian. So he’s a really old friend, and since I like his artworks a lot it was the most logical choice to put him in charge of designing the new CD. And we all really love what he came up with.

Is the presentation i.e. artwork an important aspect in getting across the message of an album further?
That would predict the album has a message, and I don’t think that’s the case. But it does have a particular atmosphere off course, and he matched that very well. The general concept of the artwork was my idea, it actually sprang from the song “Islanders”, so I told Jan about what I had in mind since I was unsure if it’s possible to transfer this idea into something that works in the “real world”. Already with the first concepts he made I was really impressed actually, and the final version looks really beautiful.

Where do you draw your influences for your creativity from? 
Probably from a lot of things, but I couldn’t really name one. It’s as I said above, after all these years I still have no idea how song writing actually works. It just happens, to me it’s like whatever I do or experience can mold into music somehow. Creativity probably is simply a gift, not a thing you learn; so if you have it that’s a good reason to be grateful for what you’re given, but it’s never a thing to be proud of, I don’t even think it’s a thing you own.

What music/musicians do you listen to away from Everon’s music?
The shocking answer is, that I hardly ever listen to music at all, since most of the time I am working on a musical project. So I try to keep my ears fresh and my mind clean of other music when I work, and since I kind of work more or less all the time, I hardly get a chance to really listen to music just as a listener and for the fun of it. Off course you’re checking albums out all the times for reference or productional details, but it’s a different kind of “listening”. But if I really have some time off from work, I prefer to listen to music which is far away from the music I usually do, just because I can listen to it with kid’s ears let’s say, when I play a record with Astor Piazzola-music for instance, this can go right through to my heart without having to pass the “analytic mind”, so this I find really refreshing.

I know a lot of other pro musicians feel similar about that, when working as a musician all the time you kind of lose the ability to listen to an album the way you did as a kid. Developing an analytic way of hearing is a must-have when being a professional musician, and it does make you a much better musician. But at the same time it makes you a very bad listener unfortunately.

What do you hope to achieve in 2008 with “North”?
That’s not in my hands anyway, so why should I bother. So far the response is really excellent and I am glad about that, but I do not ponder over album-sales and stuff like that. My reason to do Everon-albums is not to sell records; we are all absolutely free of any commercial expectations linked to the band. I hope the music just finds the way to whoever may love to hear it, if those are five-thousand or five-hundred thousand people then doesn’t make much of a difference to me. The music on the album is not going to change because of that, and it’s not getting a better or worse album because of the amount of people buying it.

Where do you stand on the current musical piracy issues and what negative impacts have the band felt personally from this?
It’s a horrible situation; even with a second league band like ours you find the album on all the major illegal download platforms already weeks before it gets to the stores. It kind of puzzles me how it gets there actually, since at that point in time the only people having a copy are journalists or people working at one of the distributors. So it’s kind of weird to think, even amongst the people working within the music-business obviously there is some who put it on the web for illegal download.

As for our own band I don’t even mind that so much, since as said above we do not expect to earn any money with it. But as producer/studio-owner I do bother a lot, over the past decade the situation has got a lot harder actually. So many independent record-labels closed down already, a lot of the smaller distributors disappeared, so it gets harder and harder for anything which is not absolute mainstream, where nowadays the album-release is just an extra to promote the ringtones made of it which often bring in more money than the album. The budgets that record-companies can provide for a band to record and album have been getting smaller and smaller, more and more bands cannot afford a proper production anymore and thus you end up with a lot of albums in the stores that are hardly more than an ambitious demo. This is not to blame on the bands or on the record-labels even, I can perfectly understand why there is not more money available for it, but I just regret the results we get from it. This is the main reason why I retreated more and more from the regular studio work; nowadays I am doing more film music than band-projects. But I am quite often put in charge by bands to do orchestrations for an album; with the success of bands like in particular Nightwish this has become extremely popular in rock and metal music, so there is a lot of request for this kind of work.

So actually things are going okay for me, but I sometimes miss the studio work as it used to be in the old days. But I do not really see things change for the better, you cannot turn the wheel backwards as they say. With establishing a digital standard we have a situation, where everybody can copy a CD without any loss in quality, and if people are given a choice between either buying a CD or getting it for free, 9 out of 10 will choose for getting it for free unfortunately. I am not sure people are really aware of the consequences, I predict most of them are people who really love music, but I doubt they are aware they’re killing the music with what they’re doing. The big major-companies will probably find a way to survive, although some of them are not doing well either, a lot of people have been let out of work already, but still they are alive and I suppose they will still be there in ten years from now. But all the smaller companies, the independent labels that add the colour spots and the variety to the repertoire you find at the record-stores will be cast out unless they have a chance to generate a proper income with their business.  

Do you have any plans to perform “North” live?
Not yet, we’ll have to see how the album is doing. If there will be a lot of request to see us live, I suppose we’ll put a live-set together. We’ve been away for almost six years, so let’s first figure out if anyone does remember who we are and would actually want to see as on stage.

Any final message for our readers?
Not really, I kind of feel I said too much already, didn’t I? J I am a keyboard-player so I type at talking speed and thus my mails have a bad tendency to go over length.

Oliver, many thanks for your time.
Thanks for your interest, and in particular  thanks for not asking me any of my “favourite” questions such as “can you please tell the story of the band history?”.

Web Links
http://www.everon.de
http://www.myspace.com/everonband