Hello Richard and Silenius. Finally a brand new Summoning album is about to release. As I know it was not that easy to carry out work this time. Please tell about recording process and how problems you met did reshape a face of the album?

Protector: The new album is finally finished and I already have the promo CDs in my hands. Finally everything turned out to be perfect. We have a real cool guitar sound this time, which will be much more dominant than ever before this time and have an agressive black metal sound. They are less rhythmic this time and in an arpeggio style this time.

But you are right that there where many problems. The main problem was my work for my other project DIE VERBANNTEN KINDER EVAS. I finished all new songs for more than 2 years, but due to the singer of that time I could not release the songs till now. First the old singer Tania was not able to sing the new tunes, and then after I found a new singer she had so many psychological problems that she could not sing for more than 18 months; and as those songs where older than the new SUMMONING songs, I wanted to release them before SUMMONING. Well finally I gave up waiting for her and decided to release SUMMONING first, but of course there was this huge delay.

Anyway, 2 days ago the new found singer of DVKE was here in Vienna (came from Greece) and the tracks are finally finished, so a lot of troubles are solved now and I really feel very released meanwhile.

"Oath Bound" is a title of the album. It makes me think it refers to a certain episode from Professor\'s books?

Silenius: No not really. In contrary to "Let Mortal Heroes..." we wanted a short title again that simply sounds good like "Stronghold", but of course you can interpretate in many different ways. as the album is dealing with topics of "The Silmarillion" again it on the one side refers to Morgoth who has sworn to conquer the whole of middle earth, on the other side it refers to his counterpart Feanor who swore revenge to Morgoth after he has stolen the Silmaril, but it also refers to us the band who have sworn never to change our concept and musical style.

On "Oath Bound" you use choirs again. Do you make them by yourself or there are guest singers on the album? Do you consider using live instruments instead of synths on future releases?

Protector: We sung the choir by ourselves. We sung each tune twice and also in different vocal style. High, then low than high but more rough etc. So in the end we had 16 vocal tracks which I arranged to a choir.

For sure we will never use live instruments. Well, there is a real flute on a short part and I also used an arabic drum on a short part, but mainly I will not replace any synth tunes by real instruments. I see no reason for that as we never tried to sound like classical music and appreciate the total independence the keyboards offer very much. And especially now as all bands start to add a orchestra I am total not in the mood of doing the same as METALLICA or KISS did.

Once back in 1999 you had experimented with female vocals (track "Where Hope And Daylight Dies"). Since that you have never been applying it again. Does it mean that you weren\'t satisfied enough using female vocals?

Protector: Stronghold was a quite unusual release for us. We forgot a bit of our real style and rather tried to do something else then. It was at the times when most older band changed their style. In contrary to that we kept our style but added many elements that we did not add before. This was the much m ore traditional played heavy metal guitar riffs, and also the female voice.

Meanwhile we returned much more back to our original ideas of SUMMONING and focus more on the epic orchestral arrangements than on "Stronghold", that was for us the most rock album we ever created. We don\'t think we will ever use female vocals again; not for solo singing, but maybe as choir support, we did not plan that yet.

The CD will be followed by as-yet-untitled mini-CD. How soon will it street-date? Will it contain unreleased early material or unpublished songs from "Oath Bound" record session?

Protector: It is far to early to tell anything about the release date of the mini-CD after "Oath Bound". We only know that it will contain a song that did not have enough space on "Oath Bound". It is already recorded and almost mixed. Silenius wants also to make 2 new songs for this mini-CD and maybe we add some different versions of older song on it (like instrumental versions of older songs).

On "LMHSYF" you have few lyrics taken directly from JRRT\'s "The Hobbit" book (like "South Away" or "In Hollow Halls Beneath The Fells"). Have you had to ask for permission from Tolkien\'s assignees? Is that a key reason you never include song lyrics in the booklets of your albums?

Silenius: 90% of all lyrics of all summoning releases are taken directly from Tolkien\'s poems. The basic reason why we never release them on our albums was not the licence reason but in the beginning we lost our lyrics after the "Lugburz" sessions and so we where forced to not release them and later we made a tradition out of this, but meanwhile all the lyrics have been released on our homepage which meanwhile broke, but will be repaired soon.

As I know, for "Oath Bound" you have recorded a song completely in Orcish. What does it tell about? And what is a source you learned Orcish language from?

Silenius: The lyrics in the ork language have been written by a good friend of us who is also a total Tolkien maniac. this song is called "Mirdautas Vras" and is dealing about Morgoth aim to conquer Middle-Earth. It is the only song which is closely connected to "Lord of the Rings"; all other songs refer to the legend of "The Silmarillion".

Due to a rushing pace of IT development today you can build your record studio using only home computer. That\'s why I think it would be interesting for so-called hobby musicians to know what hardware/software you use creating music?

Protector: Sure!! Definitely, this is something very fine. I think it is something very great that nowadays just with a not so expensive PC you can do recording jobs that in the past only very rich people could have done, or people in a studio where they had to pay very much money for each day. Now you can easily do multitrack recordings in best quality and also add total cool effect just by installing new effect software etc.

In the past when I only had a 350 MHz computer I used a very expensive soundcard which did all the audio processing so that it did not touch the CPU. Now I have a faster soundcard, and meanwhile the soundcard does not matter so much, as long as it is not too cheap.

For MIDI and audio recording I use Cubase SX3, for master in Wavelab. For the future I am planning to remove all my old hardware synths and use only software synthesizers and orchestra simulations software, but it is now to really to give any details cause I did not plan that yet enough.

And in continuation of the last question, what do you think about using pirate software in music recording?

Protector: I think that if you really work a lot with a software and earn even money for it it is normal to buy it, but I don\'t think it is fair for a poor band creating a new demo to spend a lot of money for a software; I understand any band that would search for a crack instead.

SUMMONING did never expose their views on religion or, at least, never applied them to music. Hence, it would be interesting to know your opinion on Muslim revolt going on due to publishing of Mohammad cartoons in Danish press? How do you think if people have right to make a smile of another one\'s faith? And if they have where is the border?

Protector: I don\'t like any kind of religion. I make no difference between Christianity, Satanism, Islam, Paganism whatever? For me religion is in general something that prevents people form using their own brains and to see and understand the world with logic brain. Religion is mainly good for monarchs to keep their folk stupid and easily supressable; cause people who believe words written centuries ago instead of trying to understand the reality will surely always be more easy to treat as slaves as others.

Concerning the Mohammed cartoons. As I don\'t believe in any religion I don\'t really understand all the protests about some unimportant cartoons, but anyway I also would not make joke about religions of others. Apart from that I think that Islam is not really different to Christianity, only nowadays Islamic regimes have very much power, whereas the power of the Catholic church has faded during the centuries (hopefully). If this would have happened in medieval time, I think anyone can guess how the church would have reacted those times

In early 90\'s you were members of Austrian Black Metal Syndicate which - as I guess - no longer exists. I suppose it was a growing up that brought it the end, wasn\'t it? It would be interesting to know what is a current occupation of its former members?

Silenius: The main reason to build up this black metal syndicate in the early 90\'s was to have a platform of similar thinking people and black metal fans. In that time you have to imagine that black metal was just listened by a very few people in Austria and over this platform there was a possibility to gather and to get contact with bands tape traders labels and magazines of Austria who support this music and ideology who helped each other and spread the latest news and propaganda of this genre but later as the main bands had their record deals and gained a wider platform in the public most of the members got individual and made their way and the rest disappeared.

SUMMONING members are known for a number of side-projects they are or were involved in. So, it really useful to draw a line from time to time: what is breathing and what is obsolete, what is progress and what are future plans...

Silenius: The only other band beside SUMMONING I am active in is KREUZWEG OST, in the style of military industrial. The latest CD called "Edelrost" was released on the English label Cold Spring which is specialized for neoclassical military and power electronic music, but soon there will be a licensed version from Irond just for the Russian market. Most of the other band I was involved in are dead and gone, especially PAZUZU who immigrated to Canada many years ago. Maybe I will do some session vocals for AMESTIGON again, but this depends on if they will make any new releases or not.

Protector: First of all I want to say that I don\'t consider my other projects as "side-projects" cause all of them are the same important for me and just cause SUMMONING is the best selling one does not mean that this project is the main project. And it also depends on the view and musical interests, for example for many people DIE VERBANNTEN KINDER EVAS is the main-project whereas SUMMONING is the side-project. Anyway. For me both of my other projects (DIE VERBANNTEN KINDER EVAS, melancholisch orchestral dark wave; and ICE AGES, dark-cold futuristic music) are very important in order to keep the music fresh and inspired. It also helps to keep the style of SUMMONING free and not to miss use if for some unnecessary experiments or style changes. If one of us ever gets the desire to create something different we focus on one of our other projects and don\'t destroy the mood of the SUMMONING songs.

Coda. Something you ever wanted to say but noone asked you about...

Silenius: No, I think everything is already said. Thanks for the interview.