Jørgen Munkeby, from SHINING and EMPEROR: “I’d rather die standing than live on my knees”

Some hours before a concert, Jorgen Munkeby chat with us and let us know him better, his personality and good mood let us talk about everything that people wants to know, from SHINING to EMPEROR, from jazz to black metal, nos just a talented and creative guy, he´s a passionate musician, he breathes music, as SHINING said about themselves, they´re “Restless. Fearless. Eccentric. Subversive. Unpredictable. Revolutionary.” and this is just the beginning.

METALPHETAMINE: You’re such an interesting character in the whole combat like the jazz element and the metal element combining them together, it’s very hard to find people that are into both styles and changes of music like how did that all happen for you?

JORGEN MUNKEBY: I grew up with metal music so that’s kind of the start well as soon as I started buying my own music, I bought some rock stuff but pretty quickly turned into metal so I was born in 1980 so that was the beginning of the 90s probably that’s when I started buying stuff and I was into like my you know one of the first bands that I really loved was SEPULTURA with the album “Beneath the Remains” and then obviously I loved “Arise” and the “Chaos A.D.” and the stuff that came afterwards and DEATH I love them, so I listened to all their albums from the old stuff like “Screen Bloody Gore” that kind of stuff too, I think I was mostly kind of impressed and by their individual  thought patterns and human and that where they started doing more like the jazzy stuff and then PANTERA like “Vulgar Display of Power” was one of my biggest records and it still is so I guess and ENTOMBED from Sweden like “Clandestine” was as also still one of my favorite  records and I love “Hollow Man”, so those four bands were probably my biggest fans when I was a kid, and it’s kind of weird to think of that I was like 12, 13, 14 or 15 years old when I listened to this stuff and I just compared with what kids listen to nowadays it’s kind of fucking crazy, but every kid listened to that stuff when I was a kid but all my friends, we were kids and we listened to that stuff so it says something, I don’t know if I’m representative but I don’t know many kids who listen to that uncommercial stuff now, so anyway I’m really happy that I was the start of my own musical trajectory with that music, but for some reason when I was nine years old I decided to start playing the saxophone and I still to this day don’t have really a good answer for why I picked the sax, haha, when we had this tradition with marching bands they play like the 17th of May is the independence day in Norway, with the uniforms playing on the streets that’s like tradition and they do that and they play concerts at Christmas, apart from that they don’t really do much other than practice and rehearse so I love the idea of how they looked and I thought that was a cool thing so I wanted to start in one of those marching bands and it was to me was either drums or sax and I ended up with the saxophone, but I think the common denominator between drums and sax maybe is they have this kind of attitude, this image thing compared to playing the flute or trombone stuff like that, it’s a little bit macho and you couldn’t do it or in marching bands so that was out of the question, so I didn’t listen to any sax music at the time I haven’t, so I just chose fucking sax and went with it so I don’t know really, that’s the best answer I have. After that I love playing music, I love practicing, learning new shit, I love music, I still didn’t listen to sexy music, so I pretty soon I started playing my sax to the records, I love which was PANTERA and stuff like that so I was in my room when I was a kid, playing my alto sax with “Vulgar Display of Power” and stuff like that, I had a teacher who wanted to teach me how to play jazz and I thought I didn’t like jazz, I probably didn’t like jazz but I bought an harmonica like a blues harp thing, so I learned how to do that and I got into blues MUDDY WATERS and stuff like that, so when I finally started practicing jazz it was to me more like I didn’t hate the music, I didn’t love the music either, but what I did love was CHARLIE PARKER and the great jazz guys they were really good at playing and they knew like the theory, the new harmony, they knew the scales and the course and shit so to me it was a way of learning how music worked, the theory and the scales and shit like that, if I lived 500 years earlier or whatever it could have been BACH it’s the same, it’s just scales and music and chords and rhythms and shit like that, so I think to be honest that’s why I studied jazz. I wasn’t really into jazz until I discovered more of the energetic and angry jazz like JOHN COLTRANE and stuff like that, and that was several years later and at that time I probably was a little bit tired of only metal music so I left metal world when I was 15 I started getting really getting into jazz and took more lessons I ended up studying jazz at a conservatory levels school for seven years, I started getting into contemporary classical music, composition stuff like that, and then back in 2005 I started missing rocking metal, I guess I started  incorporating that stuff into my bands and SHINING mostly they started listening to that music again, I discovered MARILYN MANSON and NINE INCH NAILS for the first time, because those were 90s bands that I didn’t listen to, I discovered DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN and MESHUGGAH newer metal that would like this a generation later than PANTERA and stuff like, I came back to the metal world with my knowledge of jazz and stuff and theory and whatever, and that’s you know like it culminated into “Blackjazz” in 2010 and if you look back to 1994 or whatever, when I played sax stupa the “Vulgar Display of Power” album or whenever that came out that day, when it came out but I think it took 20 years before I got that thing to work, to be honest I think it didn’t work really well until “Blackjazz” so that’s the time it took for me to kind of like do that whole stuff into the jazz world and then kind of melt it all together.

That’s a fascinating story man and it’s really cool to bring those kinds of that mastery over music that you maybe learn from guys into metal, which kind of it doesn’t really have a lot of that experimentation and different kinds of sounds coming into it, it’s really stimulating to listen to as a metalhead as well and just as a music fan as well it’s something different to what you normally hear.

Well, it’s a new mix, I think from that time when I developed that “Blackjazz” idea and started giving releasing that album, and a live album, and another studio album was trying to flesh that thing out, I remember that I felt that, there was some kind of tradition with metal-ish music or distorted electric guitar and it was like you had Mahavishnu Orchestra with JOHN MCLAUGHLIN semi-distorted guitar and it was jazzy and it’s out there and later you had KING CRIMSON who was one step closer but it’s still old, it sounded old now, didn’t sound old at that time but it was old when I started doing this stuff and then you had MR. BUNGLE and MIKE PATTON stuff which was kind of from the 90s so that was a little bit more modern but what I felt was that I brought to the table, that was different than the MIKE PATTON stuff was in the 90s I don’t know if you remember, but everything was in the 90s and 2000s. I felt that everything was ironic and it was, and I think a lot of the MIKE PATTON stuff is a little bit ironic it’s like you’re doing it, but you’re also kind of making fun of doing it, a little bit and it’s like this really kind of they didn’t try to melt it together it was more like just to just juxtapositions you had  really aggressive crazy metal stuff and then poof and almost like this Hawaii fun jazz stuff it never really, they didn’t kind of it was like this opposites so I think what was kind of new with “Blackjazz” was that I took, I really sat down and thought hard about how can I bring these things together and bring it together, I needed to figure out what do they have in common and what because metal is a lot of stuff, jazz is a lot of stuff so you can choose between a lot of things so I wanted to find the pieces of the jazz thing that I liked and the pieces of the metal stuff that I liked, that could kind of fit together and had something in common so and I called it Black Jazz and I’m referring to the album “Black Metal” by VENOM (1982) it is which kind of gave the name to genre of music and there’s a record called “Free Jazz” by ORNETTE COLEMAN (from 1961) that also gave kind of like the name there’s something called free jazz so I wanted to make a name of this album that defined the genre, it was like that kind of big thing so I sat down and thought that basically I took away some stuff from my jazz repertoire and new way of playing I took away stuff that I didn’t feel fit and I focused on the stuff that fit and that was the aggressive kind of playing of JOHN COLTRANE the modular thing, we don’t use a lot of chords it’s more like he chooses a couple of pictures and he’s choose some, it’s a modular way of playing and I also do, he´s keeping these kind of cells that you kind of repeat and you transpose that kind of stuff and the aggressive tone of it and a lot of fourths and fifths which should sound kind of hard and screeching sounds like the teeth on the reed, like screaming kind of sounds which sounds sort of like the saxophone itself, if you distorted a little bit and you play it like I do, it sounds a little bit like electric guitar and reaching sounds like near black metal screens, and then from the metal world I tried to focus not really on the fast thrash stuff, more of the like it had some let’s not bring in the industrial part yet because that’s more like production thing but like when it comes to the sound of it, if you look at technical thrash metal you focus on technique and speed and being impressive but if you just look at black metal they’re it’s not really although they play fast the focus is on atmosphere and spirituality and even though they kind of like worship the devil and don’t culture and worship god it’s still religion and spirituality and what’s bigger than the human experience so that’s a common thing so focusing on the vibe and the atmosphere is a common thing the sound of this guitar is kind of like a common thing the aggression from the black men screams and from the screaming sack stuff is common those things kind of brought it together and then I discovered MARILYN MANSON and NINE INCH NAILS in 2006, and I loved the production sound of it like the mix and the production so I decided that I wanted to do something like that like to wrap that thing that I had, which is a really kind of uncommercial idea and I wanted to wrap it into a hard thing but also a commercial thing and actually I feel like NINE INCH NAILS and MARILYN MANSON they’re hard aggressive but it’s commercial so I tried to like learn how to do that stuff I produced, I wrote with that idea in mind and I did some searching online and found our producer like Sean Beavan the mixing engineer and producer who I saw had worked on a lot of these records so I wanted him to kind of help me to bring that sound to it, he did and during that time I also learned loads of production, tricks and I think I’ve learned most of what I know about mixing and producing from him, working with him like for 10 years so that is really how it came together, I would say that’s the story of the black jazz idea and the how I mixed metal and jazz in my way, and it’s simple to explain in a way, but it’s a little bit hard to do it, because you got to have the experience, like I had 15 years of experience playing jazz music in addition to having metal in my veins, but it is possible, I know a lot of younger people now that they grow up with both metal and jazz music, because  now it’s easier, you can go online and you can listen to everything, but when we were kids we couldn’t find all types of music, we could get the music that our friends had, that’s basically.

I thought that at the beginning of the 90s you were more into black metal style, I mean, you were born in the cradle of black metal at the time.

Yes, I was, but I didn’t really listen to it that much, and I like did later, I think I’m not really sure why, but looking back at it I think I grew up in a family where my parents were kind of anti-religious, they weren’t Satanists, so that whole thing of let’s say the focus of black metal is to tear Christianity apart, like the fight against Christianity, that fight wasn’t the problem for me, it was no Christianity in my life and nobody was trying to make me Christian, so it was like kicking in an open door, I know that other people, like for instance, let’s say BEHEMOTH in Poland they still focus of BEHEMOTH is still the fight against Christianity and it might feel weird for a guy living in Norway, but because we don’t have that shit here, but in Poland they have the fucking catholic church, like SLAYER in the U.S. there’s still red songs about, not now, but they did, write songs about Christian and in it and in the U.S. it’s still kind of like they still have that problem, so I guess like from looking at it now, I think that’s probably why black metal didn’t really trigger me, didn’t really interest me at that time, and I think also at that time when I was kid I was into the technical shit, I wanted to into DREAM THEATER, I wanted to learn weird ass time signatures and scales and black metal, like we talked about, wasn’t into the technical stuff mostly, like some bands are, but in general it’s more about the atmosphere and the vibe so that’s something I discovered later.

Talking about technique, I was hearing MARTY FRIEDMAN talking about you, how was that collaboration?

He’s a really interesting guy, the first collaboration we did came out in 2014, so what happened was that he made he’s constantly  looking for inspiration, new musicians to work with, new musical styles, he quit MEGADETH and moved to Japan and you know became a TV star and started playing j-pop, he’s constantly searching that’s important to him, and I can kind of relate to that, and he sacrificed for that, he was and still is, but he is guitar player, what I see now from guitar players all around the world, he’s playing on “Rust in Peace” the classic MEGADETH record like god, like they view it as the best guitar playing ever, so he was in that position and decided to sacrifice that for going with his inner voice and I think that’s really strong, but he just contacted me through our label in the U.S., he told me later that he had listened one of the “Blackjazz” songs somewhere and thought that was cool and then heard it again, then after he went to the label and they played it and he said “oh shit that’s the thing that I heard”, he wanted to figure out what that was, but he didn’t have shazam and stuff like that, and you could heard something you didn’t know what it was, so he asked to get in contact with me and asked to collaborate and I said yes, and then we just sent ideas back and forth, so that was me cooking, then we did the same with something to fight on the next record and we’ll probably do some more stuff, so that’s it, it was great it was great to work with him and we also did a little tour together in Europe like the week tour or something like that, so he’s a fucking amazing guy and I love his guitar playing because he’s got this melodic singing way of playing which I  like more than just  fast stuff.

Speaking of interesting musicians, you also worked with DEVIN TOWNSEND on CASUALTIES OF COOL, how was that, and do you ever see yourself working with Devin again?

I actually did work with him, actually I got a message from a friend of mine on Instagram saying that “did you play on the new DEVIN TOWNSEND record?” (“Empath” the previous Devin), and I said “no, I didn´t”, he said “but it really sounds like you” and I said “no”, and then he sent me a link and it’s like well it sounds like me, haha, before I said that, I checked the credits online and I wasn’t there but it sounded like me, so I checked with Devin and he said “oh shit yeah that’s right”, actually he had taken some files from the probably from the CASUALTIES OF COOL stuff and throwing it in like a sample stuff, that’s what he does as well, so I’m playing on that one solo and then I’m playing on his upcoming album “The Puzzle/Snuggles” like a concept thing with the music and the puzzle, if I’m playing on that one, so these are all different like when it comes to CASUALTY OF COOL it was in 2013 and I was in Los Angeles for a couple of months writing for our “One One One” record and then he wanted some sax and I said I don’t have any mics or anything here like I borrowed the studio from a friend of mine and he had some sax so, as Devin said “I don’t give a shit if you use an expensive mic or whatever just throw something”, so I had my little travel sound card and actually I brought like his retro thing so I have this Unidyne Shure (he showed to us), he had this Unidyne Shure unit mic with like a switch on so I used that one, the first time I used it on the section I loved it, so that’s why I bought this one, so I recorded some slack sent that to him and I think that’s actually like first take stuff so really nice I think it turned out really nice.

We need to give you credit for that, haha.

I think on the puzzle my collaboration thing with 20 people or something like that, he just had this like one hour, two-hour-long thing and kept sending it around to the musicians that he liked and people were just like adding stuff where they felt like it and sent it back and then he kept like doing that until it flashed turn into something, so that was a cool way of working I don’t remember much of it now, but I think it’s going to be like a long movie, like a video for the whole length so that’s how that came together. I love Devin he’s one of my favorite people, every time I meet him, I always talk for a long time and he’s a big inspiration and his singing is so fucking amazing, he’s such a guest that’s been an inspiration in itself.

We see a lot of similarities between you and Devin, in terms of kind of bringing in other elements outside of metal, it’s all kind of experimenting and not being afraid to experiment like your latest song IDGAF (I don´t give a fuck), so that’s different as well, so what direction are you moving in now as a musician?

Yeah well I don’t give a fuck and I think that’s been something that I’m putting words on now like with that song and I think like making “Blackjazz” also was a “I don’t give a fuck” moment because we had something and we were willing to sacrifice what we had to go with what we wanted to do and it was a risky thing to do and it panned out well, it turned out well, it took some time like looking at it now, it might look like that was an instant success but it wasn’t like people were really fighting against it, like the metal world were they felt like we were kind of infringing on their territory coming like jazz people and then it’s like a big fight getting out of the fucking metal community but I always felt like being in a situation where I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to win, it makes me free because if you feel like you have something to lose, let’s say you’re AC/DC or METALLICA or whatever and you’re earning loads of money and you got millions of fans that expect a certain thing, then it’s harder to change because maybe you want to change but then the label says no, and the rest of the band says no, because they’re rich and they wanna continue it, so it’s really hard but I also had something to lose but I just told myself the little thing I have to lose is so little, it’s like I would earn much more money doing something else than doing what I do and I think if you compare the amount of fans we have okay, there are some but if you compare it to what MUSE has or AC/DC has it’s nothing I just try to put it into perspective so that I force myself to feel like I don’t have anything to lose, so I’m free to do whatever I want, that gives me freedom and to not think about that, so that’s what I felt with “Blackjazz” and then changing “Blackjazz” when we released “Animal” was kind of the same, so I had done it before but it was still hard and now with two kids and with a fucking pandemic I feel more than ever that I don’t give a fuck what other people think, I do give a lot of fuck about trying to make good shit probably more than more than ever, I try to learn how to sing properly, I produce and mix, I write. It’s not like I don’t give a fuck about that, but I don’t give a fuck about what other people think because one day maybe soon we’ll die, we’ll be there on the last day, what did I use my life for, did I use my life just to try to please other people, that’s not a good way for me to…fuck that!

The idea now is to make an EP that is actually supposed to be called “I Don´t Give a Fuck” (IDGAF) but it’s not going to be a physical thing, it’s just have some kind of concept right now, I want more songs now, basically two songs and one of them actually like this one that’s already finished, we just need to mix it and then there’s one that I finished these days and that’s actually I have two versions of that, I have one version and that was finished but I felt the lyrics were too cerebral and smart and I didn’t want it to be that way, I wanted it to be more emotional, more straightforward, so I started writing new lyrics and new melodies, new everything like new vocal stuff for the whole song, so I have not that’s finished and it turned out much better so I’m considering maybe releasing both of those songs the same music but different vocal stuff, and the last one I would say it’s a brother song for “I Don´t Give a Fuck” it’s like the same concept same idea, and then after that, my idea was to focus on two EP´s and then after that kind of try to make that into an album and a merch item and whatever but right now I’m focusing on getting those songs out and then making new songs, I think the pandemic has kind of played a role in this because it doesn’t feel to me, right at the moment, to put too much money and time into an album just because you can’t really tour, you can’t do promotion and then with the whole uncertainty about the business of music right now, it’s just like if I make an album: I need to decide who’s mixing it and we could go with one guy who’s charging one thousand dollars per song or you can go with other for two and a half or you can go one with five thousand dollars per song, that´s a huge difference and if you take 10 songs it’s either 10.000 or it’s 50.000. and deciding that amount of money and obviously if you pay the expensive guy you’ll probably get better mixes but it’s a matter of how much are you willing to invest in something, so do you got upfront on a project in these kind of times is kind of uncertain so well song by song, you can go as you can maneuver along the way and see what works and this also goes for writing the music if I do a couple of songs and release it, play some live maybe, then I get this kind of feeling that it’s easy for me to decide what I like about the new stuff and what I don’t like, and then I can do more of the stuff I like unless you have to like, it’s a much more a creative way of doing it, that’s what I like and I think looking better back at our catalog, I think for the albums that are really some kind of statement album change like drastic change of musical styles, for instance “Blackjazz” that to me needs to be an album, it needs to be a concept thing, big things, several songs, artworks, so people kind of get it that this is a thing and “Blackjazz” needed it, the rest “One One One” didn’t really need it, “One One One” is called like that because I wanted to do single songs, actually wanted every single song as a single release I actually also wanted to set the schedule to get one song out every third month, like a set date and then do video documentary stuff between when writing it so people could like see us when writing and the late it was a little bit it was basically too modern of idea for all labels. But that was what I wanted to do at that time and then “Animal” came out and I felt that was also like a switch so that needed to be a full album, so people get understood that there was a conscious big thing and now I feel like we’re at the place where it doesn’t need to be an album, it could just be because it’s a continuation to me of “Animal” it’s not the same but it’s sort of like just a continuation of that.

It looks like a transition right now and it looks like it’s a different way to make music you know, song by song, I used to follow you on your social media and I think you’re passionate about music you always share what you are doing, you’re working on music and you share whatever you want to do, different versions and vocals and stuff, so do you think that’s interesting these days and it’s gonna change the way to make music?

This is if we talk about albums and single songs pop music and EDM stuff they’ve been doing single songs forever and I say at least for EDM it’s been forever because they didn’t really start until like 10 years ago and they’ve been doing single songs so it’s been like it works for them, but in the metal world it’s still been albums and I get it, to be honest the album thing it’s the old school way of doing it, single digital song is a more modern thing whatever you think about it, that is what it is, I’m not saying people need to agree with me but personally I fucking love the digital age, I love streaming shit, I don’t love that the fact that we don’t get any money from it but then again we didn’t get much money from the physical sales either, haha, it doesn’t matter but I love how I can have all this music I want with me anywhere, I love the fact that I can get a song out in three weeks and if there’s something wrong with the artwork I can just fix it, I love the fact that I can collaborate with people. When we mixed “Animal” we mixed it with a guy in Las Vegas Kane Churko I’d never met him before but after we were done, then EMPEROR was supposed to play in Las Vegas like two years ago, then one year ago and it’s been canceled several times now, but I planned on meeting him in his studio in Las Vegas and then suddenly I just sat up and thought have I met this guy before or not he just felt like we were friends and I knew him but I’ve never physically met him, but I just met him online and we’ve been mixing through skype and through like some like streaming plugins, so he’s in his studio I’m in my studio, and it’s so weird that you can get to know people now and work with people that way, and actually with Sean Divine in Los Angeles we’ve been mixing that way since 2014. I love that kind of stuff that I love the digital way, digital technology gives us flexibility and so personally that’s why I haven’t focused on an album yet, but I know a lot of people still are and maybe we’ll get this kind of reaction where people feel like just the single songs, that it doesn’t give them any sort of grand conceptual idea, I get it.

Yes, and then we might go back to like reverse like go back in the cycle to do the albums, or at least, maybe some people will.

We’ll still have some people who do this, and some people will do that, but maybe while they see the general shift, maybe longer songs, maybe we’ll have a clearer distinction between pop artists who do two and a half minute songs, only digital and then you got other people who make like five-minute songs, six minutes long, you release my new non-pop song.

In that way, what can you tell us about your EMPEROR era? Because the last album of EMPEROR is like 20 years ago. Do you have any idea to make something new?

Well, EMPEROR is Vegard (Ihsahn) and Thomas (Samoth) they’re the two main guys and then you got Trym Torson, the drummer who’s been with EMPEROR for a long time and I’m friends with them, and I’m a live keyboard guy for a couple of years, but I don’t know if they were to do new music, then it wouldn’t be up to me it would be up to basically Vegard and Thomas. Let’s see the last one was released in 2001 ”Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire & Demise”, personally I think it would be an amazing and interesting project, like musically to try to figure that shit out, I don’t know how old they are let’s say they’re 45 are they gonna try to replicate their teenage angst 14-year-old vibe? It’s not the same, are they gonna try to do that, they’re probably much better technically and erratically now, are they gonna try to remove what they know because a lot of the stuff, I played a lot of these albums and the temples are all fuck up and down and the mix of it it’s kind of crazy, are you going to try to replicate a bad mix? It’s not like they tried to make it bad but compared to the modern mix it’s not very distinct and clear so you got to figure out all those things and then when you decided, you got to do it, let’s bring it back to if they have something to lose or not, for me I have nothing to lose on them making a new record, so to me it would only be a really interesting project, see what I’m saying, it’s their band but I think for them they have something to lose, if they release the record and then they’re not happy with it, then it’s not a good feeling if the fans are not happy with it, they’re at the level where it’s like somewhat of the bands that I talked about AC/DC, for example, got a lot of people that expect a certain thing, they earn money from this thing they have something to lose and that’s a really hard situation to be in, but I hope they do because I like that, I like challenges.

We all love music, and we want some new stuff of EMPEROR, but of course, it’s a risk.

It is a risk, but let’s say AC/DC or METALLICA they keep on releasing new stuff but they just play the old stuff live or maybe METALLICA play some new stuff but it’s the old shit that people want to hear and then they play some new stuff and nobody cares and then it’s fine, so let’s say if they make a new record and it’s shit it gives you badly, as I mean the old stuff is still here that’s what I feel but to be honest, I don’t think they’ll make a new record, I think Ihsahn is constantly making new shit with his solo project, so he’s got an avenue like an outlet for his creative urges, so he’s fine and Thomas what I feel he´s really into protecting the integrity of EMPEROR, so if you put those things together it doesn’t look like a new album is coming out, it makes sense, well so we must do enjoy EMPEROR live, that’s it.

We all love playing live so we will keep on playing live we’ve been playing like the 25th anniversary shows for ”Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk” is it is like for four years five years like we just keep on milking that shit, haha, so we’ll do anniversary shows forever, if you asked me.

Let me tell you one thing about SHINING music videos, I love how do you invest and your ideas when you make a video, I really enjoy your videos, there’s a lot of work there.  

I thank you we’ve been doing a lot of that sadly we haven’t done many lately and i think maybe it’s just because it’s it is expensive and I think that the value that you get back from sadly the value you get back from like a musical video the return is way lower now what you get much more return actually if you had 10.000 euros worth of  budget for video material for a record if you took 10 thousand made a music video for the lead single you wouldn’t get much back but if it took five thousand and split it up into and just make made like 20 seconds scenes for like five songs like one thousand or a 20 second each thing, for each song like one out in the mountains, one at the beach, one at this studio, like that kind of stuff and no story, just like the beginning of the course whatever then you could use that on Instagram social media, you could use it when you go on tour, you can use it a lot and that’s basically when I do music videos I end up having this wide screen beautiful thing and I just end up chopping it into like the vertical mobile thing 15 seconds, it’s like what the fuck do I make a music video when it ends up being like 15 second vertical snippets it’s kind of sad but so I hope that we’ll see a change of that.

And about the video or it comes it was a concert a few on the mountains

Yeah, we did everything, 35 40 minutes long concert at a moment I still have footage for the whole show, and I’ve been planning on releasing it, but I haven’t been able to do it, but there’s one song like YouTube but there’s the audience and everything like they all just have to walk up five hours.

They really want to see you, thank you dedicated fans man, but weren’t you worried about the sound vibrations of like the kick drum and the bass may be like destabilizing the app?

Seriously it was the first time that anybody did it and it could be that definitely crossed my mind as the whole thing would. Now I feel like there’s one thing that I’ve decided it’s that I don’t want to live in fear, I’d rather die standing than live on my knees, so I wouldn’t force and I asked the guys in the band and told them that it is what it is, it´s dangerous if you fall out of the edge you’re dead it’s like it is, how much 800 meters down, 2000 feet somewhere it was like and you don’t know what the weather is, you don’t know anything, and you don’t know if the base vibrations would make the whole thing fall, it’s like things that we did a tour in Europe and you had the terror attack at The Bataclan Theater in Paris and we were supposed to play in Paris like five days after, we didn’t know if we were allowed to do that because they closed off the whole Paris terror attacks like and there is a risk after the terrorist of that it will embolden other people to do it again like a copycat thing or whatever so it was a big decision, but I took the decision pretty quickly I just said fuck up I’m gonna do that shit and it was a big decision for me, I had a kid that was one month old at that time, so he was just born and I went on tour, like I was one and a half  I obviously didn’t want to die that night, but I felt it’s a good way of dying standing up for yourself so I’d rather take some risks and then feel like you’ve lived and like shown people that, let’s say I ended up dying that night at least my son would have seen that his father would have taught him that you should do what you want and you should not live on your knees that’s what made those decisions easy for me.

And that video of you playing on that cliff edge is definitely worth, the risk, I mean now it’s kind of memorialized forever for eternity, that epic video in that environment.

Yeah!! When you die you do a couple of those things and then though those two things I mentioned are one of the few things that I will remember when I’m on my deathbed I try to collect these things, you won’t get money with you where you go, if you go anywhere you want but what you can collect during the time you live experience and hopefully maybe you can do something that somebody will remember and do in inspiring for other people if you can do that then you’ve done.

Don’t want to take up any more of your time but thanks again for talking to us good luck at the show tonight, a pleasure to meet you and keep doing what you’re doing and keep doing what you want to do, I think that’s it’s like people can hear that as well like when you listen to stuff and that someone’s just following their own kind of passion you can hear that it comes through and that’s awesome. I’m 41 years old, what they call it CIS guy whatever it goes, and I’m heterosexual, I’m mad, I’m white, I’m everything that’s boring, haha, I’m from Norway, and I have no liberating fight I can take, if I was gay I’d fight for my freedom, but I support the gay movement and I support the whatever but the liberating fight, I am taking for people to be able to do whatever they fucking want, musicians or whatever, not feel like they have to dress certain way do certain things, you can do whatever the fucking you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone, I’ve seen scientific articles about the level of pressure to conform to society and to conform to what other people are doing in Norway and it’s our tradition has a really high conformity pressure it’s close to countries that we don’t really want to compare ourselves.

FOLLOW JØRGEN MUNKEBY:

Official website: https://jorgenmunkeby.com

Official SHINING: https://www.shining.no

Official EMPEROR: www.emperorhorde.com

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