When I first put The Ocean’s latest album Precambrian into my CD player, I went into a mental state of loss. When the CD unfortunately stopped, I thought I had awoken from a dream. The only cool thing about dreams like that is that they have a repeat button. Just a week later I got the opportunity to compose an email interview with founding member, Robin Staps. Of course I was super psyched to be able to pick the brain of a musical genius. Upon my picking, I found out what hardships he has endured through the abundance of lineup changes, the thoughts behind their newest album and the goals he wants to achieve with The Ocean.

Shout!: As the founding member, can you give a brief description on how you got to this current lineup?

Robin Staps: [Laughs] There is no brief description for that…over the years, more than 40 or 50 people were in and out of this band. Recently it’s been a lot more stable, but in the first years it was a nightmare. You don’t really want names, do you?

I’ll give you the story of the most recent change in lineup, the addition of vocalist Mike Pilat. Mike found us through the internet. He saw that we were looking for a bass-player and sent us a few tracks of his other bands that quite impressed us, so we got him to Berlin for an audition. He turned out to be a really nice guy and a kick-ass bass-player, drummer and guitarist, so I really wanted to have him in the band. Mike recorded the major part of the bass-tracks on ‘Precambrian’ during his next visit in Berlin. During the recording session we also tried some backing vocals with him and realized that this is where his real talent lies - Mike can do anything from clean melodic singing to rough ‘throaty’ singing, from death metal grunts to high-pitched shrieks and anything in between. So we ended up recording more and more vocal parts with him.. and in the end it turned out that he did the majority of the vocal parts on the album. After the Black Dahlia Murder tour in Europe, where Mike played bass, we decided to look for another bass-player and have Mike as a main vocalist, together with long-time member Nico Webers. So now we need a new bass-player again and the cycle starts anew…

S!: What was it like having to go through so many members to get where you are now?

Robin: It’s always difficult to find the right people. Good musicians, who share your vision… but also friends, people you wanna share a van with. We spent more than 2 years just rehearsing without playing a single live show. It was a difficult time, but also a thrilling time, since our visions of what we wanted to do and the first experiences of getting closer to these visions at rehearsals were the fire that was burning in our chests. We had this urge to experiment with everything, music, most of all, but also visuals, lighting, stage outfits, fencing masks, everything that would support the atmosphere that we were trying to immerse ourselves in. And with all these different members coming into the band and leaving again, we went through a lot of really different phases, some really productive ones and some rather stagnant ones, but the overall feeling that came up between us down there at our own Oceanland never changed.

S!: What was your vision for the band when you first set out to Berlin?

Robin: I had a pretty clear idea of this band, and I found most of the other people through advertisements in local newspapers…with this band, I really wanted to play the music I was composing at home with my 4-track at that time, to not make compromises. I was telling all the people from the beginning that what I had in mind was a concept of composed music, accompanied by a strong visual performance on stage. The reason for that is that I had been playing in jam-bands for a while and I was just sick of the haphazardness of the music, it never really got me anywhere. It was great fun, but a lot of times I realized that we were too easily content with everything, because you have all this energy in the rehearsal room, but if you go back and listen to it again, a lot of times I was like: this is not good, this can be done much better…and so I started writing my own stuff, started programming drum-beats and stuff… and up to now, the songwriting is done that way: I record pre-productions,. including programmed drums and bass-lines, guitars, vocals, and then I play it to the other guys, and they say “yes”, or “no”.  A lot of people couldn’t take that approach, we tried out tons of guitarists who wanted to place their fucking solo in every song. But in the end I did find the right people, people who can play in a band with the whole in mind, who appreciate the approach we’ve taken. We all agree that you just get much more in-depth with the song-writing if it’s in the hands of one person, you can try out all different arrangements and decide which one works best, you don’t need to explain to 5 people, like, “can you play like this: dum-dum-dum-jigge-jige-dum-dum-jigge-dum”. But of course, in the end we talk about the songs, decide which one’s we’re gonna do and which not, and start changing certain patterns. The difference between most other bands and us is that we don’t start with a riff, but with an entire song.

S!: What is the biggest sacrifice you’ve made to get where you are now?

Robin: My life. [Laughs] Seriously, I have been neglecting my friends, studies and girlfriends to be in this band. I’m not very talented at multi-tasking, I can only focus on one thing at a time. I’m getting better at this now that I’m getting older…

S!: In retrospect, do you have any regrets?

Robin: Hmm…I should have spent less time in the rehearsal basement and more time in bed with beautiful women those first years. I am trying to make up for this now. But no, I don’t regret anything. Music is my life, always has, always will be. There’s nothing else that makes me wanna get up in the morning and keeps me happy and busy for the next 16 hours. Not even girls.

S!: What are you hoping to achieve with this band?

Robin: World domination. I want to take The Ocean to Mongolia, China, Kasachstan, Brunei and Burkina Faso. I wanna tour all over the world and be able to focus on this band full-time while not having to worry about shitty day jobs. I want to be able to record music under humane conditions. The recording process that led to our new album was a nightmare due to the limitations of the budget.

S!: Do you feel you’re getting close to that goal?

Robin: We’re getting closer, but we’re not there yet. Still a lot of black spots on our map of world domination.

S!: If you had to describe The Ocean to someone, how would you describe the sound?

Robin: I suck at that. Musically, there is everything from calm yet dark moments, dominated by clean guitars and celloes, to outbursts of technical metal frenzy…but the most defining aspect is probably that The Ocean is not just about the music - we’re trying to create a certain atmosphere on stage, by means of sound, foremost, but also by means of a programmed light-show in dim, cold colors; video-projections and tons of moving bodies throwing around and chasing their instruments, evaporating blood, sweat and adrenaline. We try to make people get lost in our world for the duration of the show, and also whilst listening to our record. That’s why there are interludes between songs, we try to link everything, we don’t talk in between songs on stage, because we don’t want the overall feeling that is connected to and conveyed by the music to stop and begin again, each and every time anew. We want people to get lost, within the music, within themselves.

S!: Who all is involved with the writing process of the albums?

Robin: Me. The Ocean is 100% composed music.

S!: How did you come up with an album containing successive geological eras, Precambrian?

Robin: This band always had these 2 sides, one being the orchestral, epic, lengthy tracks that build atmosphere, with dynamics going in waves through the song, and the other one being the really heavy, less atmospheric, shorter tunes that do without all the extra instruments. With this album we tried to take these 2 approaches as far apart from one another as possible, to split up the songs and put them onto 2 different CDs. I was then looking for a concept to emphasize and support that separation and that’s how I came up with the whole Precambrian idea. I actually came across it trying to visualize the music, and what I saw was always images of erupting volcanoes and streams of red-glowing lava.

The Precambrian was the first chapter in the evolution of planet earth, its beginning is set to about 4,5 billion years before now. Geologists subdivide the Precambrian into 2 or 3 eras, Hadean / Archaean and Proterozoic, and in the case of our album, the 2 discs carry these names. These eras are further subdivided into geological periods, which function as song-titles here. So the whole concept evolves around the early days of mother earth, which was then a terrifying place devoid of life and reigned by sulfur and lava… During the Proterozoic, the earth started to cool down a little bit and the atmosphere started to build, and first simple forms of life prang up. All this reflects the division within the music: The Hadean / Archaean part of the disc is raw and brutal, continuing where ‘Aeolian’ left off, with a basic instrumentation of drums, bass, guitars and vocals. The Proterozoic part of the disc is much more multi-layered and complex, more mellow and vast, still crushing and heavy for the most part, but with plenty of atmospheric moments that give the listener space to breathe in between the eruptions.

S!: How do you think the sound differed from your previous albums?

Robin: Those who only know our previous album Aeolian will be quite surprised to hear the spaciousness and big orchestrations and dynamics that distinguish the ‘Proterozoic’ disc of the new double-album. But as a matter of fact, we have pursued an approach similar to that one with the 2 albums that we released before Aeolian, 2003’s Fogdiver and 2004’s Fluxion record, none of which was ever released in the US (you can get them from our web shop). The classical instruments and the lengthy, epic songs were always a part of our take on music. Precambrian is just a natural development. It is our musically most advanced album, I think the songwriting is better than ever before, and the arrangements not just within the songs but also of all the songs on the album and their specific order and how they work together in the context of the whole is much better here, I spent a lot of time with that. The sound is also much closer to what this band actually sounds like, it is huge, heavy, yet airy and has a lot of ambiance to it. But of course it is a change in continuity. You don’t make a decision and go with it with these things, you just have an idea and then you start working on it and with it and see where it takes you… this is what happened with this album as well.

S!: How would you rate Precambrian’s ever-growing success?

Robin: How would I rate it? Like, on a scale from 1 to 10? I dunno, man. It’s all going well right now, it looks like people really dig the album and it makes me happy, but I don’t have sales figures yet. Or let me put it like this, if Precambrian didn’t get any recognition now I would probably turn into a serial killer or something. We’ve been working on this album for a good 10 months on a daily basis and I was on the verge of going insane inumerous times. So it better fucking sells or I’m gonna start picking up work in the porn industry.

S!: Do you feel you’ve achieved a loyal fan base throughout the last few albums?

Robin: Getting there… in certain parts yes, but Precambrian is actually the first album that a lot of people are being exposed to. Our first 2 releases were never available in the US, for example. In certain parts and cities of Europe we do have a very loyal following, and it’s getting more with every tour.

S!: What can your fans expect from you next?

Robin: A lot of touring activities. We will be on tour again pretty much nonstop between March and July. We’re doing our first nightliner tour here in Europe with Rotten Sound, Victims and Trap Them. A really strange package, but yet another challenge for us, since we’re way different from the rest of the bands here… and we will even emphasize that difference by playing more of the calmer tracks off Proterozoicon that tour… let’s see how that goes down with the Rotten Sound fans. We will also go to Greece for a few shows and play a 1 week tour in France in April. Then it’s the US in May / June and back for Hellfest in France in June. Then we’re going to Russia end of June and then it’s summer festivals…

S!: Any last words you’d like to say to your readers?

Robin: Be good to your parents. Pet your dogs and don’t pet your cats. Don’t drink alcohol. Drugs are bad. Go buy Precambrian if you don’t have it already. Come see us when we tour the US in May!!! We love you.

• Official Site: http://www.theoceancollective.com
• Image Courtesy Of: http://www.metalblade.com
• MySpace URL: http://www.myspace.com/theoceancollective