Triosphere: The more, the better!
Triosphere, a new star on the Northern sky. The Melodic Metal band from Trondheim, central Norway, is making further career steps: After their great debut record “Onwards” they warmed up for bands like W.A.S.P., Kamelot and Jorn. In Switzerland, after their great show with Kotipelto, STALKER decided to ask the charismatic singer Ida Haukland about her dreams, motivation and the future of Triosphere.
How are you? You toured with Kotipelto and with W.A.S.P. Are you glad about touring with this big bands?
We´re doing fine. The tour with Kotipelto and then WASP followed each other directly, only divided by one gig with the Norwegian band Jorn in Budapest and two gigs with the excellent Kamelot in Sweden 🙂 To get the chance to tour with bands of this size and quality is of enormous value to us; we get in touch with fantastic musicians and their fantastic audience, and we grow and learn quite a bit on the road too, that´s for sure! Can´t wait until next time 🙂
Which band would you enjoy touring with?
Wow… hmm, well we´ve had the privilege of touring with a couple of them already! The Kotipelto-guys were just excellent, and we´re always looking forward to sharing the stage and meeting with the WASP-guys! Yet we have a dream of touring with Soilwork, Symphony X or Megadeth so I guess we´ll keep on working on that until we hopefully one day can make it happen! 😉
Perhaps you could first introduce the band members…
First of all there is Marcus Silver, who is the lead guitarist and main song-writer in the band. He and I started Triosphere early 2004 and also mainly take care of the administrative part of the band. He has previously released four albums, toured Europe together with among others Alexi Laiho´s Sinergy and Dark Tranquility and hosted a guitar clinic in Tokyo, Japan on the request from ESP guitars. He´s got a broad list of influences but Ronnie Le Tekrö from TNT, Zakk Wylde and Slash are important names!
Örjan Jörgensen is our eminent drummer whom I´ve played with since I picked up the bass for the first time 10 years ago. He´s probably the more extreme of us when it comes to musical taste, but ranks amongst others Guns n´ Roses high 🙂 He´s done a bit of studio-work before he moved down to join Triosphere.
T.O. Byberg is the newest member of the gang, and joined us on guitar after we had recorded our debut album “Onwards”. All the advanced guitarwork that Marcus recorded on the album deserved a second guitarist live, so then we found T.O. who really manages to keep up with Marcus´ kicks and licks 😉 His main influences are progressive bands like Symphony X and Dream Theater.
Myself, I´ve been playing the guitar and bass for 10 years in various bands before I moved down to Trondheim and started Triosphere together with Marcus. I´ve done several demos and EP´s with former bands and I´m maybe the most 80´s-influenced one in the band with favorites like Dio, Whitesnake and Crimson Glory. But I find inspiration in almost all kinds of metal and hard rock 🙂
How do your define your musical style?
Oh wow…today with all the insane hybrids of all kinds of Metal and Rock I think that´s a really difficult question to get right, but to give a general answer I would call our music Melodic Heavy Metal. That would be the generally most correct label on us, but we also mix in elements of Prog, Thrash and straight Rock so all according to who´s listening we´ve actually been labelled as a Thrash-band, Prog-band, Power-band, 80´s-band or a Heavy Metal-band, haha! We have many influences within our band, but we keep focus on combining it all into one whole sound that creates a good balance between the aggressive and the melodic! But ultimately, you just have to go and listen to our record to decide yourself what kind of metal you would say we play 😉
How did it all begin with Triosphere?
As I briefly said, it all begun in early 2004 in Trondheim. Marcus was working on a Thrash-project with his friend Obsidian C. from Keep of Kalessin, and they wanted a Heavy Rock singer on one of their tunes. I was contacted as the drummer had heard me at a concert, and after finishing the tune, Marcus and I decided that we definitely were going to continue working together in a band of our own. So we formed Triosphere, having a couple of songs almost finished from the beginning, and then started a long and thorough search for the right drummer! Ironically, after some months we ended up with deciding on the very drummer that I had been playing with forever up in my hometown, (about 900 km from Trondheim), and so in February ´05 Örjan moved down to Trondheim. We started playing live and continue writing music, and after signing with Norwegian Face Front Records and Japanese Spiritual Beast we entered the studio in June ´06 and recorded our debut album “Onwards”. At this point we completed our line-up with T.O. on second guitar to re-create the full and strong sound live as we have on the album, and since then we have toured Norway with WASP, done several other gigs and then our first European tour with Kotipelto, Chris Caffery, Jorn, Kamelot and again our friends in WASP!
Right now we´re focusing on writing new material for our next album, doing some Norwegian summer festivals and working towards a second European tour before the year ends!
Ida, you got a price a few years ago for you music doings in you country? Can you tell us little bit more about this?
Ah sure, but it´s really not that much to tell 🙂 Ever since I begun with music 10 years ago I´ve been what they call a bit hyperactive within several bands and participating in arranging concerts and small metal exhibitions in my hometown Harstad. Eventually, the heads of Harstads musical organisations for rock decided on handing me the first of an annual award for this contribution to the local scene, and so I then finally got enough money to buy my first quality guitar amplifier! 😉
Who writes the music /lyrics, or are all in the band responsible?
Marcus is the main songwriter while I write all the lyrics, but in the end we all make significant contributions to the final result 🙂 We often make pre-productions of several of the songs, testing out different arrangements and alternative endings before we decide which one will be the best fitted for the song!
What do you do if you are not in the band (studying, working)?
Unfortunately we can´t afford to only work on the band 24/7 so we all have day-time jobs in addition while I also study at the University of Law. But there certainly are a majority of the hours spent at work that are used to band-related work, hehe 😉
Who do you want to reach, or what do you want to achieve with your music?
We want to reach everybody that have a passion for music and metal, and the more,- the better! We certainly hope that as many as possible find something they like with Triosphere, regardless of their musical background, and this also reflects what we want to achieve with our music! We want to reach out to as many as possible so that we can continue to do what we love; play live and make music to blow your ears off! If we can tour 6 out of 12 months I would say we´re close to what we wan´t to achieve 😉
What will you do if you don´t get to have a career in music business?
Hehe, I guess I´ll be a full-time lawyer helping out other musicians from the greedy claws of the music industry 😉
What is your dream, where does your motivation come from?
My dream is to fulfil all my ambitions, and since I´m very much a realist at the same time as I´m a dreamer,- my dream is simply to tour the world and keep playing full houses and hopefully having the crowd sharing the same passion for our music as we have! There just ain´t no feeling that beats hearing our intro roll, feeling the rush of adrenalin as we walk up on stage and then release a full force metal show! Now that´s all the motivation we need 😉
Would you sell your soul to the devil to become famous?
Haha, absolutely not! My ambitions with all I do have nothing to do with becoming famous,- that´s merely a temporary illusion of achievement and respect created by the mercy of the media 😉 The value and essence of creating music and hopefully touring, for me, lies in releasing your potential, being the best that I can be with all that matters for me and the chance and opportunity to continue doing exactly that!
What was the most exciting/the most disappointing moment in your band history?
Hmm…I think the most exciting moment for me had to be the day we got confirmed for our first European tour, and the most disappointing one was when we got confirmed that some of the shows were cancelled. But the day I heard Face Front was ready to sign us was definitely one of the most important days of my life, and I think I was more shocked than excited at that moment as I couldn´t believe it was finally coming true, haha!
What was the most absurd thing that happened to you?
I can think of a couple of funny incidents with members of the band during gigs, that´s really a bit absurd when I think about it now, but I think the most absurd would have to be that time when the headlining bus was blocking the way to the entrance of the venue so that we had to get 30 people to push our hanger, full-loaded with our entire backline, 50 m with brute force, since there wasn´t space to drive our car in and remove the hanger in a normal way. It must also be mentioned that the only way to move the hanger away was straight over a little hill that was nearly 45 degrees steep, what a sight, haha.
What happened during your best/your worst live show?
It really is a somewhat thin line between what we see as a good show and a show that should have been better. The crowd, we think, is always awesome, and we love to be on stage no matter what, but we know each other so well and what we are capable of doing and sounding like, so we instantly hear if something doesn´t sound 100%. One day the sound in general might be awful and we maybe have problems hearing anything on stage in a way that amputates our performance. But regardless we always work to get better to give the crowd the ultimate live experience, and we always cherish each second we get to be on stage performing our music!
Which song are you most proud of, and why?
Very difficult question because I´m certainly very proud of each single one! But perhaps I could point a finger towards “Onwards Part III” and the reason is that I had a really hard time figuring out a good vocal line on this one! I kept on banging my head into the wall until the very last week of recording! But when the line finally entered the surface of my mind, I think it came out as one of the best I have made so far! 🙂
What do you think is cool/totally sucks about being a musician?
It´s definitely an amazingly cool thing to be able to use your creativity like this and then get the chance to perform it in front of hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who might even buy your work afterwards!! On the other hand, you have to go through a lot of really hard work to get to that point! You got to handle hearing the word “no”, “sorry, but you´re not what we´re looking for at the moment” and pretty much being broke all the time because you spend every single dime on the band, haha. But we keep on keeping on because the things that rock are so enormously more cool than the things that might suck so it´s all definitely worth it! 😉
Would you participate in Eurovision or Idols contest?
Haha, no I don´t belive that that would be a good idea at all. Surely some of the contestants in Finland are true Heavy Rockers and they even win to the great cheers of the Metal scene, but in other countries especially the Idol-contests have grown to be a machine built to create and earn money on a singer/Popstar that don´t naturally contain the qualities or characters of a musician. Of course it´s great to give a person a chance to realise a dream being a singer, and everything is a bit staged as –larger-than-life while the contest is going on, but what happens afterwards? Only a couple of them lasts more than a year because they initially can´t handle the music industry or in any way last without the massive apparatus that so suddenly launched them into the charts and the spotlight. All this ultimately sounds very wrong to me, but this is only one way of seeing it, of course.
What do you plan in the near future? Will you be touring through Germany soon again?
Touring is definitely an essential part of our plans for the near future! We really want to do one more European tour before the year ends, and then we certainly hope to visit Germany and all the other countries we played on the last tour! The chances are good that this can be arranged, we´re working on it every day and we´ll absolutely announce it properly if/when it all is settled! We keep our fingers crossed! But first of all we´re doing some Norwegian summer festivals which we are really excited about where we´ll see headliners such as Sebastian Bach, Kamelot, Mayhem, Chris Cornell, TNT and Jorn! 🙂
Thank you very much for the Interview.
The biggest “thank you” goes from us to you for taking interest in us! Also a huge thanx to all of you who reads this and checks us out, either live or on CD (hopefully both)! Have an excellent summer and be sure to visit a Metalfestival or two! 🙂
Band homepage:
www.thetriosphere.com
