“I wish we could have done it like a punk band and just fucking record the thing in two days and then put it out.”
Mortiis examines his own misgivings about the wait over the new album but for eager fans the six year pause between 2010’s Perfectly Defect and the release of The Great Deceiver was a period of unknowing yet it wasn’t without interest that The Great Deceiver took its time in coming. “It could of been physically out in 2012 but we would have been manacled to some terrible deal. I’ve been there a few times so I’m not doing it again.”
“There was a fear in the end about putting something out.”
“At the end of the day I’m not getting younger.” He states. “I’m not going to work hard to put out music, pour my heart and soul into it, and just give it away to some greedy bastard, which is pretty much all the offers we got.”
Musing about his past experiences he continues, “[They were] all about: ‘You give us everything and we’ll give you a little bit but we’re not making any promises,’ so we stuck in there”
Waiting for a suitable deal came with it’s own struggles however. “There was a fear in the end about putting something out. We’d do a song and my label would be like ‘ah, not happy,’ we’d go back and do it again, ‘nah,’ and it gets to a point where you get paranoid. It’s comfortable never releasing anything because there’s this knowledge with that that you can go back and change it.” He says reflecting upon the circumstances previously surrounding the latest album.
“It’s been a long time in the making.”
An earlier release date would of seen a very different version of The Great Deceiver. “We rewrote a lot in the early stages and the songs are almost completely different from what they were. I reprogrammed at least half [of] the album and we redone the guitar for all of the songs. In my opinion we got better every time we went and redone something. It’s been a long time in the making.”
With the creative process going in overdrive and paranoia in the mix looking back at the approach to recording an album has changed extremely since the emergent days of his career in music. “[Emperors’] Wrath of the Tyrant was recorded in a week and then put out the following week. That’s the way we did it back then. We didn’t second guess ourselves.”
Although the process was intuitive the drive behind writing an album was also quite different. “All of a sudden we had our own record. All these bands we looked up to we did the same thing as them; we didn’t care about the quality; we just thought it was awesome to record our own thing.”
“We ended up creating our own label.”
An active connoisseur of that feeling with at least twelve full-length albums under Mortiis and other monikers the solution to the artist/label disparity also came with those memories finding new ways to manifest themselves. “We ended up creating our own label and we’re also doing reissues of some Mortiis stuff and some Vond; we’re reissuing some of them in autumn starting with CDs and vinyls.”
As choice cuts of the Mortiis back catalogue are going back into circulation will this include a re:release of the very limited Secrets of my Kingdom book that eventually accompanied 1999’s The Stargate album. Unfortunately, “it’s not a project that’s happening right now.” However, he speculates “I’ve got to figure out some stuff before I do. I left it To Be Continued… so we’ll see.”
