Dan Swano interview that may be of interest....

[yourdeadgroom]

JimLotFP has put an interview with Dan he did a year ago, on his website, and it has some interesting stuff on early Katatonia:
http://www.mindspring.com/~raggije/interviews/SWANO-DAN02-2002.htm

If you can't be arsed reading the whole thing (it's very long and covers many topics), just use your browsers Find function or whatever (I'm sure you can figure it out ) to find the Katatonia parts (not all of it mentions the band name, so if you'll need to also search for Anders or Brave Murder Day, or something like that, I would paste everything here but I'm lazy ).

Enjoy.

Thanks go out to Jim, for putting it up....

 

[the-lull]

that's it:

The question about the recording and stuff, what bands did you not have the chance to really dig in and work on songs with that you really wanted to. Not because they needed it so much that their stuff was really interesting and you wanted to bring out the best in them.

OPETH and KATATONIA, and that offer still stands. I was so close before KATATONIA reunited around the Brave Murder period. The original idea was me and Anders writing the KATATONIA album because he was still not friends with Jonas back then. I was so into it, we had this great vision of what it should sound like. And all of a sudden they get back together, and feeling each other again, it was cozy, one guy in this corner and this guy in that corner, and they just made music that both of them like. They made this Brave Murder Day which was totally the opposite of what I had in mind. I was very disappointed at first, then they got Mike to sing on it and it got very brutal and very Hitchcock. I was fucked! We could have done such a blast! If we had materialized what we had talked about, it would have been a classic.

 

[Cerulean]

But it's already such a beautiful album NOW
(AND a true classic imo)

 

[falling bird]

That's a really interesting interview, many questions that were left open are getting answered! Thanks for making it available

Sometimes I realize this gang around Stockholm have some pretty wild things going. Especially Renske and Nystrom and Mike. Wild guys when it comes to imagination. There are some riffs on Brave Murder Day, they were giving me scenarios of what happens when they play this instrumental section. It's a windmill. One riff on Brave Murder Day is the windmill riff. You see someone who has hanged themselves in a windmill. They gave me the whole fucking scenario of what everything looked like. That was the riff! And it's instrumental. You would not get that vision. But they got that, and the way they were expressing themselves when they told me, and the way they were waving everytime this riff came, they were "Windmill…" It was weird. These guys are so weird! It was so evil!

 

[Cerulean]

The best riff on Brave Murder Day is stolen from Iron Maiden's Phantom of the Opera though... (Brave - 3:00)

 

[Hopkins-WitchfinderGeneral]

Swano talks so much rubbish sometimes.

Its not about trying too hard, if you try too hard then everything ultimatly sounds the same.

Just look at opeth, they write and record mostly in the studio and few would begrudge that they are a unique band.

 

[yourdeadgroom]

Well personally I have found the last 3 Opeth albums to be weaker than the first 3, and I think that may have something to do with them not practising much anymore and relying on the songs coming together in the studio