Interview with Erik of Nirvana 2002

By Bradley Smith

Hello Erik. Can you give me a little back ground on the Formation and history of Nirvana 2002?  What led to its demise?  It seemed to me at the time Nirvana 2002 was poised to explode onto the scene.

Hi and thanks for the interest in Nirvana 2002, it´s always a pleasure talking about one of my favorite periods in life. Me and Orvar have known each other since we were 5 years old in kindergarten. We both were really into the early trash scene in the 80´s with bands like Exodus and Slayer, when we first heard Bathory and Sodom we we´re blown away. I have always been a total music geek, spending soooo many hours at the local recordstore (Vinyl dammit!) browsing the racks checking out bands, around the time when "Leprosy" with Death came out we had started to fool around playing some very basic tunes but they didn´t lead anywhere. I don´t really remember specifically how we got so involved in the Swedish Death Metal scene, one thing led to another y´know? I met Sigge Sigfridsson who was a real character to say the least...he had a fanzine at the time, I was really impressed with that, I figured "I could make one of my own....how hard can it be?" Haha! Around the same time I got contact with Nicke from Nihilist, they had just recorded their first demo and it blew my mind to say the least! He sent me some tapes with Master, Repulsion and Autopsy and then it was all over....

I did a little demo of my own where I played drums, sang and played guitar myself, I had borrowed a four track Tascam Porta recorder. I was super into Heresy and Napalm Death then and those first two tracks have a Grindcore vibe to them definitely, those are on the comp cd and they´re the very beginning of Nirvana 2002...then Orvar came over and he sang on some of the tracks but they´re so pitchshifted that it´s impossible to hear which one of us is singing....I think I was 15 then, hence the pitchshift. Then things snowballed, we did the fanzine called Hang' em High and interviewed Death, Bathory, Candlemass and many other bands. Through the zine we got in contact with tons of cool bands, at that time the scene started to really bloom in Sweden, Tompa had Grotesque, Nicke and Uffe had Nihilist, Tribulation from Vasteras, Merciless, Dismember and many other bands. It was really cool times back then.... We did some demos, then CBR did the "Projections of a Stained Minds" comp album, then Opinionate Rec did a split 7" with us and some other bands. The "Projections..." comp did really well for us, we had a really good track on the lp and CBR wanted to do a tape to sell so we did that. Around the second Sunlight Studio demo we did Peaceville Records contacted us wanting to do a Cd, at the same time Orvar did his stint with Entombed who were having problems getting someone to fill in for LG who had left the band.

What events transpired for Relapse to release of the Compilation of all your recorded material? What took soooooo long? I had heard rumors about this happening for a long time and now, thankfully it has finally seen the light of day.

Orvar met someone at Relapse who wanted to do the comp cd around 1999, I don´t know what happened though with that contact but nothing happened. Threeman rec was also interested doing a comp cd but when Uffe quit Entombed that also fell through. There was a bunch of small indielabels wanting to do the comp cd but we wanted something different for the N2002 cd. Then when Daniel Ekeroth’s book came out there was a HUGE interest in Swedish DM again, I mean that book sold more than "the Da Vinci code" in Sweden when it came out, it was just ridiculous! Daniel wanted some bands to play a small gig when the book came out, Nihilist, Grotesque were going to play and he asked us to play as well, we started to rehearse for the gig but somehow there was a mixup with the dates and I couldn´t make gig due a tour I was booked to do in Denmark at the same time. My buddy Robert from The Hellacopters subbed for me and did a great job, Robert and I are also childhood friends, we went to school together and have known each other since we were 10. Then Relapse calls Orvar saying that this time they are REALLY gonna do the cd, it took almost a year or two tracking down all the recordings. But now it´s finally out.

I remember being immediately taken aback by your track on the now famous Projections of a Stained Mind Compilation. How did CBR get ahold of you for this project and what all was your involvement with both the compilation and CBR? What was your opinion of the rest of the bands featured on that comp?

Orvar knew Freddan who had CBR rec, Orvar must´ve played one of our Rehearsal tapes for him and he really dug it. We went to studio Sunlight in Stockholm, Nicke and Uffe recommended it to us, they had recorded there as well and we dug that sound y´know? Uffe and Nicke borrowed us some amps for the recording and helped out alot and some pointers here and there so we put them as producers of that track "Mourning". As far as the other bands...how can you beat that lineup? Entombed, Grotesque, Dismember, Mayhem

Orvar ended up doing session vocals for Entombed on the Crawl EP. How did that come about? Did you come close to losing him to Entombed or was it strictly on a session basis?

When LG was fired from Entombed,(which is a really funny story on its own) they asked Orvar to fill in for him for awhile, they had a tour of Europe booked so Orvar did that. Then Earache wanted something new from them so they did the "crawl" ep with Orvar singing. He didn´t quit the band and he was a session singer in that sense.

Nirvana 2002 basically had the typical Swedish/Stockholm Sound, what do you think made that style so special? With that being said I feel that the songwriting was slightly different than most of your contemporaries. What do you think made Nirvana 2002 different than their peers in this regard?

We weren´t trying to sound different but we DID sound different songwriting-wise, for the "Mourning" recording though we used Uffe´s guitar and amp so the Sunlight sound was hard to shake off. That sound that Entombed and Dismember had was genre defining to say the least....The other demos we did doesn´t sound like what else was going on at the same time in Sweden, of course there´s the obvious Autopsy influence but that goes without saying, imagine playing Blues and claiming not sounding like Muddy Waters y´know? We weren´t drastically unique or different but there were a few twists here and there that made us stand out, especially the lyrics.

How have your reunions with your fellow bandmates been? Has a sense of nostalgia hit you when you performed your old material and what was it like to be back together with Orvar and Lars? Why weren’t you able to make it for the only live gig Nirvana 2002 ever played? Were you there in spirit? Heh heh.

We rehearsed abit last summer and playing together was just like going in a timemachine, that feeling was great. Since that was my first band and the band was active under a period in life which is quite lifeshaping...I’m getting sentimental here but it was so much fun playing together. Granted we were abit rusty the first day but then it was just like wearing a pair of old shoes. The reunion gig was abit of mess, I were going to do it but due a mix-up with the dates I got doublebooked and had to bail

out of the Reunion gig, I had a tour of Denmark booked and had to do that. So we asked Robban from the Hellacopters if he could helps us out, we´ve Robban since we were 10 years old so it made perfect sense, him also being from the same small town as us.

Of course you must be aware of the Swedish Death Metal Book by Mr. Ekeroth. Have you read it? Nirvana 2002 features prominently in there. What are your impressions of the book and what do you think makes Swedish death metal so unique and special?

I have actually not read it, must be the only one who hasn´t. Still waiting for my copy, Daniel? I don´t think at that time that anyone knew that there was a legendary scene/music being created, we were basically a bunch of teenagers getting drunk and playing music....

What makes it special to me in retrospect is the people that you met at concerts, through reading fanzines, sending letters to places like Chile, the UK, Finland and France....there was a curiosity to check out bands and new music.

Back then I didn´t think that there was something unique, I just tried to write the coolest riffs I could and hangout with my friends. Today, my guess is that exactly that made the whole scene what it was.

There are some serious metaphysical themes permeating the lyrics of your music. Even with a somewhat misleading title like Zombiefication. Heh heh. What sort of lyrical themes do you think were a constant for Nirvana 2002? How does that play into your own personal beliefs?

I mean....we were 15 or something at the time, anything cool made its way into lyrics, that´s how our naive teenage deathmetal minds worked then....I remember reading some books and novels about metaphysics and that kind of thing, for my part there was a short time were I was abit fascinated with Hinduism and Krishna. It was kind of trippy but in a cool way. Probably similar what Nile thinks about ancient Egypt I guess...

That didn´t play in at all in any kind of belief.

You formed Nirvana 2002 at such a young age. Looking back, how do you feel about those early years and your attitudes in regards to music and life in general? Do you think you were a little pretentious and overly intellectual when it came to life back in those days?

Like I said I always been a bigtime music geek, I had the great fortune of growing up with an elder brother who had and still has impeccable taste in music and a huge Vinyl collection. By coincidence, so did Orvar.

I was listening to Kiss, Mountain, Acdc, Zeppelin, Hound Dog Taylor, Ry Cooder when I was like 8 years and playing drums every day, I was very serious about music and playing so yes, both me and Orvar were pretentious geeks who at the age of 15 knew our shit! Intellectual no, no more than the usual teenage "who am I and what the fuck am I gonna do?" kind of thing.

I see that you have performed with the Icelandic National Symphony Orchestra. What role did you play there and how was that experience? How does it compare to being in a metal band?

I moved to Iceland some years ago to teach at the music conservatory in Reykjavik. Over the years I’ve subbed a couple of times with the symphony and also the chamber orchestra. It´s not my usual kind of playing, I learned how to play in a "symphonic way" when I went to conservatory in Sweden but I never dug deep into that kind of music and relating to music like that. So usually it´s some really hard music written out in the most complicated way possible so I do my best and then fake the rest so to speak. Last time I played with the symphony was a recording for a German record label, the conductor kept asking me to play louder all the time so that was kind of fun....especially when I was hitting a empty 2 square meter wooden box with a 8 kg hammer! ".. Ze box, I cannot hear ze box, could you plees play louder?"

What have you and the other band members been up to since Nirvana 2002 died? What current projects are you working on?

I´ve been working as a musician for many years now in all kinds of music, sounds like cliché thing to say but trust me, I´ve done it all....

Of course metal has always been close to my heart since that´s what I grew up listening to, I can play Jazz very well but I can´t relate to it like someone who listened to Coltrane from the age of 15 can, when I was 15 I was obsessing about Pete Sandoval and Gene Hoglan and at 36 I still am! I’m not that interested in current bands mainly because I don’t have time to follow what’s going on, sometimes some of my students play me some cd´s of the latest and hippest shit and I must say that it´s all quite boring. It´s too much...too fast and too complex, and I’m NOT too old and I do "understand new and groundbreaking bands" Nile has a couple of cool tunes but overall I can’t stand the constant blastbeat thing going on with almost every band these days, to me Napalm and Carcass took it as far as it could. I really dug Gene with Strapping Young Lad and Mechanism is ok. Meshuggah I’ve known since their very first demo and they keep pushing the envelope with each record they make. Deathbreath and Murdersquad are of course retro but almost as good as a new Autopsy cd so that keeps me happy. For myself playing, the last couple of years has rated quite low on the metal scale, however I did a recording for my old friend Urban Breed who sang with Tad Morose and Bloodbound, that´s more of prog/power metal thing I guess, it´s his solo thing and I have no idea when that´s coming out. I´m doing some recordings for a '

Brazilian guitarist named Thiago Trinsi in January, that´ll be fun, Thiago has kind of a Tony Macalpine vibe.

I have a professional studio and if anyone wants drumtracks for something don´t hesitate contacting me at erikqvick@gmail.com and we´ll work something out.

I’ll leave any final words of existential and aged wisdom to you.

Thank you for the interest in my band and for putting time and work letting others know about N2002 and old school deathmetal!