ARKTIKA interviewed by Miss The Stars

Miss The Stars interviewed one of our favourite post metal / post rock bands – ARKTIKA from Cologne, Germany.

A friend of mine gave me your myspace link and said: “Check this out, it’s epic”…I listened to the song “Heartwrencher“ and I was completely blown away by this overwhelming, dark and still catchy sound.

I knew this one would became huge in that so-called scene…and yeah… as far as I know, you really received lots of positive feedback for your first EP “Heartwrencher”.
It was something fresh and a glance in a genre, that was somewhat stuck in nowhere.

So what do you think about that whole “scene” thing? How does it change and what do you think about “DIY”?

Marc: First of all thanks for the kind words! We are always happy to get a feedback on what we do. It’s good to now there are people out there who care. Well concerning the whole “scene” thing, I actually don’t know if we really belong to a certain scene. We get the weirdest reactions from people who can’t get into the screaming at all and HC kids who’d like us to add some blast beats to our sound, to make it sound more crusty I guess haha… I sometimes feel like we are caught between the stools in that so called post-rock scene and the HC scene, which is cool for us creativewise, but also makes it harder for us to score on festivals or gigs, simply because some people seem to have a hard time putting us into a genre. We don’t think it’s too hard though, we feel pretty comfortable in both scenarios. When we hit the road we can easily listen to stuff like WILLIAM FITZSIMMONS or YAMON YAMON and CONVERGE, UNBROKEN or RAEIN.

We all come from a “DIY” background with Tim having played in FRANCIS BRADY, Jürgen and me being in RENO KID, Felix being in dozens of bands and his brother playing drums in BLACK FRIDAY 29 and Jürgen been on tour with this punkband ENCORE. When I was 16 I already played in bands and we would never be able to record more than a crappy demo tape, let alone play a show. “DIY” was simply not happening, when I was a kid, so when I got into the 90s HC scene, it was so amazing seeing people creating something beautiful out of what they had at their hands and without having to depend on weird major record labels or manager types. Today I think that “DIY” is more important than ever for a healthy scene, plus it’s a lot of fun to create your own records and stuff. I just hope that more kids would do stuff themselves instead of let others dictate them what to listen to or which shows are happening in their towns. Btw do you know that book “DIY Album Art”? It’s really great and shows the beauty of diy packagings. I love the way these records, look, feel and sound!!

Read the whole thing here.