Adept Interview with Rob Ljung (Vocalist)
Words by Rant Chick / Photo by Martin Wiklund
Tell us a bit about the band’s history, what brought you together as a band and what are your musical influences? What is the significance of the name ‘Adept’ (if any)?
We are all from a small-town named Trosa and basically everyone knows each other. We decided that we wanted to start a band, to just play away the everyday boredom only a small-town can bring along. Honestly, when you live in a small-town like Trosa there aren’t that much for us kids to do. It’s either drink a lot of booze, play music or play soccer. We combined the first two.
When we started we wanted to play similar music as bands like Funeral For a Friend and Alexisonfire. But as everything else in life, you develop and get new influenced along the way. I guess basically we love everything that has amazingly good guitar-riffs (such as Funeral for a friend), and that brings a lot of emotions.
The name came from nowhere, really. It’s just a stupid name on a band that contains five stupid friends. It just got stuck, and we cant get rid of it.
Andrew Chramer has recently joined the band and replaces Tobias Ottoson, can you share with us why Ottoson left? Did Chramer have to audition for the role or is he someone that guys recruited.
Well, Tobias is a really close friend to us, and we love to hang out with him, though we felt that we have come to a place where everyone in the band needs to put their heart into it. Unfortunately we felt that Tobias didn’t bring that into the music. And that’s why we had to let Tobias go.
Unfortunately Chramer just recently left the band also. We are at a point when we have a lot of shows around Scandinavia and Europe, but we havent started to make any money of it yet. So we need to have a lot of free time from work, but still need to work to pay our bills. And Chramer couldn’t make it go around economically, and we fully understands that. It’s a shame though, because he is an amazing musician.
You guys just wrapped up your European tour and passed by London (amazing show by the way) and hopefully the tour lived up to your expectations. What was your highlight and can you tell our readers about the stressful time you had in Paris on the day you played in London (11 November 2009)?
We are really exited being out in Europe for the first time. And to play in town such as London that has a really good music scene, is a dream come true for us. We are just a bunch of friends from a small town who got this amazing chance to show people the music we love to play.
Since you don’t really expect people to know our songs, the real highlight of this tour is to see so many people sing a long to our songs. It really feels weird to see people sing the lyrics to the songs we wrote back home.
Yeah, the London show. That was a stressful that to say the least. Gabriel, our drummer, lost his passport at the Paris show the day before. So we needed, as quick as possible, to get him a new one. However, on that exact day, the Swedish embassy was closed for some reason and we were in no way able to get a passport for him. But we called like maniac to the Swedish police and so one, that we finally got through to a woman who helped us out. But now we had to drive to London from Paris on just a couple of hours. But we just made it, though we only had time for a 15 minute show!
From which country does most of the interest in your band come at the moment?
Except from Sweden I would say that Germany and the States. We always get a lot of comments from people from those countries, so I would say those two.
There are many aspiring bands out there and the record industry is selective of which bands it chooses to sign. Marketing has therefore become important and many bands are using social media platforms to promote themselves, Is this a strategy that you find has worked for you?
Yes, absolutely. Platforms such as MySpace, Facebook, Lastfm, Pure Volume to name a few has made it a lot easier for bands to promote themselves. You can interact with fans, promote your shows and just spread your word in a way you couldn’t to before without major record labels on your side. So there are a lot of bands that has come a long way just promoting themselves.
Adept’s latest album, Another Year of Disaster, launched in Feb 09 and we feel has tapped into the typically American metalcore scene – how would you describe your music to someone who has never heard the band before? Did you have preconceived ideas about how you wanted the album to sound or was it a more organic process whereby the album’s sound developed as you recorded? Does your album have a message (if yes, what is it)? Do you think it is important to have a message/ stand for something? What inspires your lyrics and music?
I would describe our music as a mixture of metal and Hardcore. We do want to have the raw Hardcore feeling to it but keep the heavy metal-riffs. We also like the variety to go from really fast and hard, to slower melodic parts. But the single most important thing is that it should sound sincere. We want the listener to understand our words, and all the emotions.
When we recorded “Another Year of Disaster” we had a pretty good idea of how we wanted it to sound. We wanted the raw, screamy feeling to it. And I feel like we achived that.
As each song stands for themselves there aren’t any general concept of the album. Its about everyday life and everything that comes with it. Some songs are about picking sides, growing up and being of the verge of not realizing that life is slipping by the minute. As well as we sing about hearts being broken, betrayal from close-ones. Its and emotional roller coaster that a lot of people can relate to.
Adept has filmed music videos for Shark! Shark! Shark! and Sound The Alarm :
– are there anymore videos in the pipeline?
– How did the ideas for the videos evolve? Are they your ideas or did you collaborate with a creative team?
For now we only decided to make two videos for this album, and wait until we recorded the next one for more music videos. When we made shark and sound the alarm we collaborate with the team who made the videos. We wanted them to be dark, as the concept of the songs are pretty dark.
What are your future plans for the band in terms of touring and recording? Any plans for a new album?
As it seems today we are recording a new album in the summer of 2010. The album is more based on guitar-riffs, and we thinking more outside the box then before. We don’t want to narrow us down into a just a genre, we want to experiment more.
What is your main goal for the band in the future/ what do you want to achieve?
Our goal is to one day make a living out of this, so we can be able to afford to play around the world and see all these beautiful places that we might not be able to see without keeping up our music writing.
Thanks guys. Looking forward to seeing you again in the future and .
Check out Adept on MySpace at www.myspace.com/theadept
This post is tagged Adept, Andrew Chramer, Another Year of Disaster, Camden, Camden Underworld, Gabriel Hellmark, Jacob Papinniemi, Jerry Repo, Robert Ljung
