“Blind Guardian is a metal band. Period.” – A TMO interview with Marcus Siepen: Part 1

The Blind Guardian guitarist talks about his band’s ambitious new album, Beyond The Red Mirror, and revisiting Imaginations From The Other Side twenty years on.

“We have been described by all sorts of labels and they never do justice to the album,” says Marcus Siepen, guitarist for power metal legends Blind Guardian, whose upcoming album is being marketed by Nuclear Blast as “progressive symphonic metal.”

“We can say we’re a power metal band: yes, we still are, there is power metal stuff going on on every Blind Guardian album; you can call us a speed metal band and, yes, that is correct; you can call us epic, symphonic, progressive, and all those labels fit to certain aspects of our sound. But if you pick only one of those labels you’re ignoring all of the rest, which is why we don’t really like labeling ourselves,” he goes on, and, while most bands contend with restrictive genre labels, his eclectic outfit has perhaps more claim to the struggle than most.

“If we want to write a fast song, we’re going to do it, and if we want to write a progressive song we’ll do it; We don’t care if it’s speed, fast, epic, progressive metal, whatever,” declares Siepen, “For me, Blind Guardian is a metal band, period, and metal involves speed, thrash, melodic, progressive, whatever; you name it, we have it. We don’t want to limit ourselves in anything that we do.”

Another awesome Blind Guardian cover courtesy of Felipe Machado.

Blind Guardian’s upcoming album, Beyond The Red Mirror (out January 30^th), is ambitious to say the least. The record is a concept album that picks up the story begun with the tracks “Bright Eyes” and (ironically) “And The Story Ends” from 1995’s Imaginations From The Other Side – following those songs’ protagonist through its titular red mirror into “an otherworldly dimension” where they get caught up in a quest for The Holy Grail, with features three separate classical choirs – one from Prague (the Czech Republic), one from Budapest (Hungary), and one from Boston (United States) – and two, 90-musician, grand orchestras.

“On the last album (At The Edge Of time, 2010) there were two songs that we used the orchestras on but this one it’s four (songs), and the way we’ve used the orchestras is a bit different; It has a soundtrack – like atmospheric – feel to it,” says Siepen, “we went for a more futuristic soundtrack feel.”

The musical experimentation doesn’t stop there, however. “We worked with low-tuned guitars on a coupe of songs for the first time, which we’d never done before,” tells Siepen, and before you all go shouting “blasphemy!” know that it’s been done with the full musical consideration expected of Blind Guardian, “It gives more room to the music. With the frequencies of those notes you don’t have to fight so much with the frequencies coming from the orchestras. It opens everything up a bit more,” Siepen explains.

The Future?

The addition of further choirs was done for similar reasons. “Normally when we do choirs it’s what call a choir company singing, which is like four or five guys singing and then doubling them,” Siepen explains, “But this time we worked with two big choirs – like 40-50 people – because, at some point when you’re working with only a couple of guys and having them double everything, it doesn’t sound bigger anymore – because you get phase-cancellations or whatever – and we wanted it to sound pretty big.”

“The main goal was the same one as always, which was to come up with something different because we don’t like to repeat ourselves,” he says, though is quick to add that, “Even with all the orchestras and choirs it’s still the same metal band. There’s still plenty of pretty fast, pretty aggressive stuff going on as well. It’s still Blind Guardian.”

 [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdxRHtNw940]

As for revisiting Imaginations From The Other Side twenty years on: “It’s not something we really planned from the beginning; it just happened,” says Siepen. “When we work on writing music, the lyrics are the last thing to be done. We always start with the music and while we’re working on it Hansi (Kürsch, vocalist)¹ singer’s name just sings anything that comes to his mind, it doesn’t have to mean anything, it doesn’t have to make sense, the only thing that matters is the melody line and the rhythm of whatever he’s singing.”

“Only when the song is actually done is when we start writing the final lyrics, which this time happened to be based on those two songs from Imaginations From The Other Side... I can’t really say when we had the idea but at some point (when Hansi was presenting it to us) we liked the idea,” Siepen concludes, rather uneventfully.

The best Blind Guardian album?

“I think the Imaginations album has been very important for us because I think it was one of the biggest steps that we took as composers,” says Siepen, “(but) I can’t really say that there is one album in our carrier that is the main or most important album,” and given Blind Guardians virtually flawless track record² it’s hard to argue with him.

“You could talk to fans and you will get different answers; some would say it’s Somewhere Far Beyond (1992), where we were more or less a straight, melodic, speed metal band; some would say Imaginations, for the more mid-tempo and more epic stuff; some would say Nightfall (In Middle Earth, 1998), the first concept album we did; some would say the later albums,”³ he elaborates.

“For me, I think Imaginations was the biggest step that we took as a band. Obviously, it’s not the last step we took and we always try to develop,” concludes Siepen, and given the scope of their upcoming record he’s certainly not wrong.

Beyond The Red Mirror is out January 30 on Nuclear Blast. Check back next week for part two, where we talk about books and TV and stuff.