MORGAN Y. EVANS: Your previous album Memorial was very well received, going gold and hitting number one in Portugal. You’ve made many great goth-metal records, but how did you follow up Memorial? Going into making Night Eternal, what did you want to accomplish?

MIKE GASPAR: First of all, it has a lot to do with what we listen to, what Moonspell is used to performing as a band, and what comes out of us naturally when we rehearse. Also there are bands we have been fortunate to tour with who inspire us. There weren’t too many years in the gap between Memorial and Night Eternal but a lot happened. When we did Memorial it was a more extreme album than people expected or had been used to with [1999’s] The Butterfly Effect, for example. This album is also a lot more extreme in composition and with keyboards and other dark sounds and also in the extreme black metal vocals of Fernando. I think that’s from us playing a lot of good metal festivals, including the realization of Wacken, which was the high point of last year for us. We were finally playing Wacken. and it was at 2:00 in the afternoon, but it was full already.

MYE: I wish I could’ve seen that.

MG: It was very cool. There was a professional recording made by Wacken from the stage, and they gave us a DVD so we could see our performance. It was to over 70,000 people. We were just coming from Denmark and had just done Under Satanae, which was done all of a sudden and had been almost a surprise to be revisiting that older material. It was an experience, and we really did spend a lot of time on re-doing those songs and revisiting their energy the best way possible, and all of a sudden we were also caught up in writing a new album of material. Among all the different projects and festivals there were time issues, and we recorded a lot on computers and didn’t really get a chance to record the songs together. So a lot of it was written while trying out parts for the demo stage, and we didn’t really have a feel for the album until maybe the halfway point. Then by the end, in Denmark, we were finally able to see the face of this album. I was tracking drum parts, the guitars were written and the keyboards, and Fernando had all his notes and ideas in his head, so it was a new experience that way, but kept the music fresh right up until the end.

MYE: Yeah, and it sounds like the experiences and approaches kind of all blended together and this is an extension. The title song “Night Eternal” off the new album is amazing. It’s one of the heaviest songs I have heard by Moonspell. You’ve often had heavy sections of albums, like “Love Crimes” comes to mind from Wolfheart. That new song is so ominous though! It almost reminds me of a heavier Wolfheart.

MG: Definitely. The songs like that or “Scorpion Flower”, which are on our MySpace at the moment, truly surprised us in such a positive way on a different end of a sign of what is Moonspell, and we had Anneke from The Gathering giving a beautiful performance. “Scorpion Flower” is so grand and rocky at the same time. They are very special songs. “Night Eternal” was just a riff of guitar and was recorded on the computer at the rehearsal space, and I was just chilling playing drums and we thought it was so fucking cool. It was a fragment that we wrote, another crazy idea from me and [guitarist] Ricardo [Amorim] that we turned into a really intense song. Nobody was really taking it seriously though until we were doing pre-production with Waldemar in Portugal. He heard it and loved it but had a different idea to start the song. But before we knew it, in less than an hour, we saw the potential and all the elements together and thought “Oh, why don’t you change this,” or “Do that here.” It was like, “Yeah!” [laughing] Just the fact that we could, and it was the hardest song that I’ve ever had to play.

MYE: Really?!

MG: Yeah. It’s a really fast song for me, probably the fastest that you’ll hear. It’s a big drum sound, very big booming sound and I wanted to sound natural. And then you get to the fast parts and some people will go for a smaller kit or different sticks or whatever, but I never go for that. I always wanna go for the hardest way possible because it reminds me of proper drummers like Igor from Sepultura. That’s the kind of vibe I want. It has to do with definition and contrast to the song so the guitars just rip out. And there’s the choirs coming from female vocals in the back, but then it still has that raw power that you’ll only hear from weird bands [laughing] from Portugal or Brazil. I dunno, somewhere Latin. [laughing]

MYE: Dynamics. One thing I love about Moonspell is your control of tempos and moods. It’s something you share with Type O Negative, for example. Goth metal is often slower than other metal but I think it takes more self control and skill often to not rush the songs and to have an epic feeling come across. I admire that in your drumming. You can have busy parts but also a lot of straight beats and the band works together as a whole rather than the instruments not meshing.

MG: Yeah, I mean, it’s good that you talk about that, especially because people get caught up in the whole metal world. For me as a drummer I want to stay true to what I think is cool for metal songs ‘cuz I know a lot of newer metal songs where it is all composed as a pattern on a drum machine. Well, now they use ProTools and kids are having a blast composing beats, but it is not the way I was brought up. I started in marching bands and listening to the best way to pound on the drum to get a sound across, but by the time I was fourteen I had my first death metal band and the faster I played the happier they were [laughing]. I was fifteen when I had the opportunity to meet the guys in Moonspell, and they had a completely different approach to music than some people I’d been around, a lot more epic and with a lot more roots in traditional music and that brought out a lot of good things in me. I was already looking for harder medieval stuff. It was very good to be around more of that artistic view of things, and I think Moonspell was born from those influences and we’ve tried to stay true to that over the years. All the bands coming out now, for the most part, you’ll see them live and they don’t sound like they do on the albums or can’t play it like they recorded it. One thing that’s true over the years is that people always tell Moonspell we sound better live than on our albums, and I think that’s the greatest compliment. That’s what I always want when I see something live, to feel something unique and special for that one moment.

MYE: Definitely. There’s many great fast bands like Slayer, who are mostly fast, but it seems like some acts in metal just play fast as a default style setting because they don’t know what else to do or are insecure people, but Moonspell really have artistic freedom.

MG: Yeah, also coming from Portugal we’re very isolated. The music scene is very small, the punk and metal and especially the goth scene. You’d have people listening to Sisters of Mercy or Bauhaus or the Cure. If you wanted to go out at the end of the night and have a beer you’d all end up meeting each other and I think a lot of that went into our sound. We were never that extreme, well maybe for a point it only had to be metal or black metal or true satanic.

MYE: [laughing] Right.

MG: But then you get tired of that and end up maturing. Everyone in the band has done the same, and we all have differences, some lighter, some darker, but we all try to find a balance. Moonspell tends to be the beauty and the beast. There have to be ups and downs. You can’t listen to only songs that are all thrash all the time. It becomes very boring.

MYE: Yeah, unless you’re in that mood and a diehard or all revved up it can be unilateral to hear only records like that all the time. Life is more varied in truth. I always loved Joy Division so much better than plain punk bands because they were so beautiful and stark and edgy, it evokes something deeper. And then after that they became New Order and made more upbeat but still emotionally transcendent music. That’s what I call art.

MG: It’s like the metalcore scene these days. Like Tue, the producer of Night Eternal, he is best known for doing metalcore bands and has worked with that band from Seattle, Himsa, and with The Haunted.

MYE: Those are certainly some of the better bands that are somewhat connected to that scene, though.

MG: He was playing us some of the bands that are from his area and there are some that are awesome. They have a local scene, and it is cool that style of music can come from Denmark, but after awhile some of them start to sound all the same. There needs to be a pause for a moment where things can breathe and people who love music truly come to respect and love that. Be it percussion, a chord or a vocal in a haunted whisper, you have to capture moving beyond one system. It is really special. You have to be spontaneous and we definitely stand for that more than many other extreme metal projects.

MYE: Yeah, yeah. I live in Upstate, NY and I like to go hiking deep into the Catskill Mountain forests whenever I can, and listening to your records, your music has some parts that remind me of the contemplative aspects of being alone and of course there’s also the furious side too. Two sides of a coin.

MG: Definitely. That has a lot to do with our land. We have an immense coast and a lot of hills and mountains, yet it is a very small country, Portugal. It’s all close together. Almost like California but it is a country not a state [laughing]. We’ve always lived off the nature around us and most people treasure that a lot, especially in this day and age when you travel and see the way other people live in the world, and it’s pretty horrible. Portugal is a country where nature is truly important. It’s still very virgin and that reflects on our music.

MYE: Not defiled, yeah. I’ve heard Night Eternal has to do with the theme of nature’s revenge on humanity and wondered with the songwriting process and brooding music, does Fernando tell you ahead of time the album themes or does it develop alongside the music writing?

MG: Well, before we’d start doing anything he used to loved to sit us down [laughing] for a kind of meeting. These days we don’t have time for that always, so it’s a lot more spontaneous. Whenever he has a lyric, he sends it to us and we always try to find songs that fit them. Or sometimes if they don’t exist, he’ll request or almost demand we have a certain song in a certain mood. That was the case with “Scorpion Flower”, but we knew ahead of time the idea, and it had to be epic and a dark metal song, also, “Dreamless (Lucifer and Lilith)”, where it had to have a melancholic feel, but a little more of an old hard rock feeling also. That song’s definitely not happy, “Dreamless”. Most of some songs it takes us awhile to find what Fernando has to say or to have it’s meaning grow with us. I do know that “Dreamless”, when we were talking about it, represents, at least for me, how sometimes time stands still and you kind of dream through it and don’t really touch things like you should. With all that goes on for us it constantly happens, and we go into a cycle where sometimes you have to pinch yourself to realize all these crazy things are really happening.

MYE: It’s like a whirlwind or lucid dreaming. That’s interesting.

MG: I do know most of the lyrics are about the female aspect and that we live on an Earth that relates to the female. How that is represented these days and how women are seen and treated by the male parts of the world, also. That’s what this album has in terms of lyrics, but Moonspell has always felt this way. We’ve always been a bit different than other metal bands by [laughing] standing up for women.

MYE: The album artwork of the woman’s face is striking. It’s one of my favorite covers for Moonspell.

MG: It was done by a guy who did artwork for Paradise Lost [Seth Siro Anton] and we loved his artwork and didn’t even know he was Greek and from this old underground band, Septic Flesh. What a cool coincidence that he was the guy behind this! His girlfriend was the model, [Lithuanian artist Natalie Shau] instead of a traditional model, so it was perfect that he used his own person because that relates a lot to how we do things. Moonspell prefer to always have our friends or girlfriends involved, and they want to help and work with us. I think it helps to have that.

MYE: It’s more personal. Listening to you recently inspired me to have the guitarist of my band, Pontius Pilate Sales Pitch, get our guitarist Nate Kelley’s half sister Lindsey Webster, who’s managed by Daryl from Bad Brains, get on a song to do atmospheric vocals for our demo. So…next I wanted to ask you about individualism and the pursuit of self-discovery in your music and beliefs. Last year a Polish philosopher accused Moonspell of promoting the death of the Church. I interviewed the U.S. black metal band Goatwhore once, and they said for them that Satanism was about rebelling and the search for individual empowerment. I am against Church burning as not productive and wrong and also when people want to be either God or Satan’s bitch [laughing] with no real clue of themselves, but often there is too much finger pointing and no discussion. I was raised in a Protestant family, but whether I interview a Christian band or an atheist band or a Satanic band, I am very open-minded and always say that I think the Bible can’t be strictly interpreted one way. People should just take the good messages of understanding for one another because there’s also hypocritical contradictions and bullshit in there like vengefulness and the things like crimes or political stuff done by the Church in history that you can’t just ignore. It’s also why I think the US should debate with and talk to Iran, but I think it is hypocritical for Christians and Christian metal bands to condemn other beliefs because Jesus is supposed to want to promote discussion and peace so there can be understanding between people.

MG: I can discuss it, but will also tell a really funny story that will give some light on some of the Christian bands. We once got this tour bus driver who was used to driving Christian bands in the Bible Belt of America, and they’d be playing in Churches. There was one with a lead vocalist who was eighteen, and he’d just gotten off the bus, so what does the driver get next but Moonspell!

MYE: [laughing] Oh fuck!

MG: Completely the opposite! We’ve got all the satanic symbols and are wearing black and have black eyeliner and nail polish. We want to smoke and drink on the bus and the poor guy was like,”No! You can’t!” He’d get lost and pull up in front of churches because he didn’t know where our venues were!

MYE: [insane cackling and laughing hysterically]

MG: [laughing] It was so funny, and we’d have to remind him. And after awhile we found old belongings of the Christian band, and most of them were teenage clothes and some VERY odd pictures with teenage girls. So there’s more to some of these Christian bands.

MYE: Yeah man. I want some Catholic school girls now [laughing].

MG: So we were having a blast and talking about how ironic all the bullshit is.

MYE: Sometimes it’s posing, but some people really believe.

MG: I respect peoples that actually believe things, and I definitely know that there are a lot of Christians that are nice people and do want good even though sometimes they want to tell you what to think, but even these sometimes will meet you and see the true person, and you can sometimes get them to agree that you are a nice person and have good principles. That’s what Moonspell is all about. We have a very dark way of expressing ourselves that is poetic, and everything that has come along with it has only influenced us to be better people. But also, when Fernando was seventeen or eighteen he sent away his one hundred dollars to join the Church of Satan and they never sent his membership card, so if the Church of Satan is listening, he definitely deserves one by now! [laughing]

MYE: [laughing hysterically] Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey wanted no religious rites of any kind at his recent funeral. He was very scientific and felt that religion stalls human growth as a species. Sometimes religion can teach humility in a good way or bring people together but sometimes it emasculates or makes people sheep.

MG: I agree with that because we’ve had the opportunity to travel around the world and have been to Arabian parts like Morocco or Turkey and you’re definitely around a different way of life. There’s some positive things like teaching people to have self respect, but the problem is over-obsession in people, sometimes due to education or intelligence. They are simply afraid and don’t know how to evolve and step out to see what the rest of the world has to offer. If you come to a place with a thousand years of tradition you can’t just shit on people’s beliefs, but also religion has brought a lot of war and bullshit, and I’m very sick of that. People have to learn to get along near each other.

MYE: It’s funny that a band like you, who are considered Satanic, and people say, “Oh, they are so bad,” can be less repressive to women than some of these people interpreting religious beliefs that are supposedly so pure. Everyone should see the film Persepolis about a young girl from Iran who is a punk rocker and an activist. One of the best movies I’ve ever seen and animated beautifully like a story book. It kills me to see so many beautiful Arabic women repressed. I had an Iranian girl I used to date who was amazing, and I can’t imagine if she was in the Middle East that anyone would want to force her to hide herself as evil. That’s so fucking lame.

MG: If you look at the Catholic Church, women have always been slashed down. So to the Satanics, we are not going to defend a practice that we think is [laughing] useless. In the original Bible it says basically that woman is man’s slave, and these days it is the other way around. They’ve definitely shown us who’se boss! [laughing]

MYE: What do you like better, playing live or being in the studio?

MG: Playing live is the joy when everything all comes together. When you’re making music it is a lot more private and sensitive. Usually we’re at home or in a rehearsal space and we have to schedule our lives in a way that we see fit. Touring, it’s constantly music and that becomes your window to the world. Sometimes a month on the road can seem a year because so much is going on and meeting people and gathering information or learning techniques from playing and meeting other bands and having fun is the whole experience. Seeing new countries and cultures. It’s like a grand quest that goes on forever and you never get tired of it. That’s why I became a musician, to help people have a good time or take their minds off things in life that suck. At least you have a good metal show to go to.

MYE: I love your drumming on “Of Dreams and Drama” and “From Lowering Skies”. In the liner notes of the Irreligious album Fernando wrote they were the best songs that Moonspell ever had. What’s your favorite to play and do you agree?

MG: There was a time when some of our classics from Wolfheart or Irreligious got hard to play because we’d gotten tired. It didn’t last for long because you see that people are paying hard-earned money and want to hear those songs. You start thinking in a different perspective for the fans. We started respecting those songs again. This was just a few years ago. We had success very quickly when we started, and I was eighteen when we made Wolfheart, and in ’94 we had released Under The Moonspell. In ’96 we were on tour with Type O Negative and I was nineteen going on twenty.

MYE: Wow.

MG: They were big steps to take for any one of the grand bands of that time, let alone one from Portugal. We didn’t really appreciate, unfortunately, all the success we were getting. It was hard to go back and make an album at that time, and I think when we made SIN it was too polished. Somehow we’d lost some of what we’d been doing as a band, some of that rawness that Irreligious and especially Wolfheart had. The more metal, black metal inspired sound. Moonspell gradually came back and have had amazing albums after that. The Butterfly Effect is weird, but it’s a cool album. Not the most typical record for us, but then we had Darkness And Hope, which was an album where we opened up to the Finnish traditions and got to play with Finnish bands a lot, and they received us so well because they were familiar with and loved our earlier records. That gave us the energy, not to reform, because we had never gone away, but to go back to our roots, and The Antidote is definitely a high point of that.

MYE: I love “Capricorn At Her Feet”. That song is amazing.

MG: We closed every show for a year with that song and also did a lot of major tours in the States with Opeth, Devildriver, Type O Negative. It was the most exposed to America. It’s metal and also epic and has strings and acoustics, but also has a very rock and tribal feel to it which I think worked very well for American audiences. I really love the song “From Lowering Skies” and “Capricorn At Her Feet”, like you said and even the opener from The Antidote, “In And Above Men.”

MYE: It’s crushing when the drums kick in on that one.

MG: That album was great for us touring in the States with our European influences.

MYE: So a lot of parts of the music spark the imagination whether riffs or poetry. Some bands sing about fantasy or another world but Moonspell have fantastic elements and stuff only some people think is real like vampires, werewolves or things some don’t take seriously, but still the music reflects back a shadowy side of real life no matter what’s being discussed. Very cool.

MG: Sure, and in real life we all know vampires and werewolves and people who are, in a fantasy world, evil. They’re everywhere and this relates to that. How you use that in your music and creation is where it becomes interesting. Fernando is definitely the best in making that how Moonspell exists. His poetic side and the way he sees life and transforms Moonspell’s experiences into song. He sees everybody’s personalities and the outside world and character of others and takes it a step further and offers it back in a way others can relate to and love. That’s where the magic happens. You get the best out of it because we also have many memories around us when we rehearse and people can hear that.

MYE: A quick pop culture question. First I wanted to recommend a book to you. It is by the author George R.R. Martin who is best known for his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, which that band the Sword based a song “To Take The Black” off of, but he wrote another amazing book called Fevre Dream about vampires on the Mississippi. They take over a steam boat and sail up and down getting fresh prey when new passengers arrive and the setting is lush and full of nature. Also, I wanted to ask what you thought of the movie version of Suskind’s Perfume. Your old song “Herr Spiegelman” referenced the book.

MG: I loved the movie. We were fans of that book and I have talked about it many times. To actually see it come to life was extra special because it was done with style and also had that connection for us to the Irreligious album. It brought back so many memories of those times. Anybody that likes that book will love the movie.

MYE: It was very dark. I was worried when I saw it that they were going to mess it up because I loved the book.

MG: I think it was good. I haven’t read it in over ten years but for the entertainment part these days, it was great. Usually when you go to get a DVD they are all very bad. Sometimes I just desperately wait for something good to come along [laughing].

MYE: Ok, man. Thanks a lot and good luck.

MG: Thank you.