The Lure Of Oblivion
As the unstoppable Motorpsycho trip out with Kingdom Of Oblivion, Bent Sæther talks to Prog about the vital importance of being free to follow wherever the muse leads them, even if it’s on a merry dance with Greta Thunberg, Victorian weirdos and a cosmic octopus.
Words: David West Images: Terje Visnes
As they enter their third decade as torchbearers for Norway’s progressive rock scene, Motorpsycho seem to have tapped into a deep wellspring of creativity. Since new drummer Tomas Järmyr joined in 2017, they’ve released three remarkable albums – The Tower, The Crucible, and The All Is One – that have spanned everything from trippy space rock to folk and synthwave. Now, with Kingdom Of Oblivion, the Trondheim trio of Bent Sæther, Hans Magnus ‘Snah’ Ryan, and Järmyr are leaning into their formative influences by getting their riffs on. “The guitar player Snah and I are both in our early 50s and we grew up on the new wave of heavy metal and all that stuff, so we’re basically metal kids at heart, that’s where we come from,” says bassist and vocalist Sæther. “We cannot really say no to a good riff when it presents itself.”
Motorpsycho: hats on, gentlemen!
“A lot of the lyrical stuff is about that imaginary Victoriana that Alan Moore has written about in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that kind of vibe.”
L-R: Hans Magnus ‘Snah’ Ryan, Tomas Järmyr, Bent Sæther.
The seeds that eventually bloomed into Kingdom Of Oblivion were sown two years ago when the band were working on The All Is One. The centrepiece of that album is the five-part N.O.X. suite and they found they had written material that didn’t quite gel with the rest of that particular musical journey. “When we got that N.O.X. thing together, we figured that a lot of this other stuff doesn’t fit with it; it’d just be too big, too bulky, too heavy and too much,” says Sæther, “so we decided to do something else with the heavy metal songs or the hard rockers and put them aside. We had a bit more of a psych rock focus on that record, so this is the metal batch. That was where we started: ‘Okay, let’s make a pure metal record, that’d be fun, we haven’t done that in quite a few years.’ As these things usually do, we started adding some acoustic guitars here and there and, all of a sudden, it was more balanced. It’s a record with a lot of light as well as all that shade and heaviosity. It turned into a bigger album than we originally envisioned but it works the best this way, we figured. The softer stuff makes the heavy stuff heavier, and vice versa, so it feels like a balanced and worthy record.”