MEET IHSAHN.

First of all, if we rewind all the way to the beginning – what got you into music? What were some of those first encounters that set you on this path?

I started fiddling around on my grandmother’s piano and soon after began taking piano lessons. I wasn’t particularly good at following the lessons, though, as I always enjoyed improvising far more than reading sheet music. My interest in music gradually grew, and I think I was a metalhead by the age of ten, which was also when I got my first electric guitar. Around that time, circumstances also gave me access to an electric organ with built-in rhythms and bass pedals, as well as a Fostex four-track recorder. So, already at the age of eleven, I was making my own music, recording, overdubbing, and experimenting with arrangements. That naturally led to playing in bands and eventually writing and recording more seriously. There were also some defining moments along the way, like seeing Iron Maiden live for the first time, which made a huge impression on me.

Musically, you’ve shifted quite dramatically from the early days of Emperor until now, while there’s still a clear thread running through everything you do. Was moving beyond the more defined “boundaries” of metal something you actively set out to do, or did that evolution happen organically?

I believe the changes in my music over the years have much more to do with my personality and my relationship with music than any conscious effort to move beyond a particular genre. Ever since those early days of piecing together sounds from my guitar, the organ, and whatever else I had available, the excitement has always been in creating something that wasn’t there before, and finding new ways to express musical ideas. I’ve never felt particularly bound by genre. The novelty of different sound combinations and musical expressions has always been a great source of inspiration to me. I think the common denominator in all my music is perhaps a certain dark edge. I’ve never been particularly drawn to happy-go-lucky music. Beyond that, though, my influences are incredibly diverse, and finding ways to incorporate more of those influences into my own music, and hearing how they come out through my particular filter of choices and tastes, is what keeps me motivated. Over the years, I’ve sometimes been confronted with the idea that I do certain “crazy” things musically to provoke people or create some kind of external reaction. But that’s never been the case. It’s always been a very personal pursuit of finding new ways to “invoke the muse,” and keeping the process of making music as exciting to me now as it was when I first started out.

How structured are you when you write? Do you “go to work” and sit down for focused writing sessions, or do you tend to create when inspiration strikes?

Especially as I’ve gotten a bit older, I’ve become more accustomed to keeping regular working hours. I tend to sit down at more or less the same time every day and get to work. The irony, of course, is that a huge part of the core material for my music actually comes from voice memos on my phone or ideas that emerge outside those working hours. It might be something I come up with while picking up a guitar at our family cabin, or just noodling around while testing a sound before rehearsal. So, in many ways, those regular working hours are dedicated to all the practical aspects of making music, while the truly inspired moments often happen outside of them. But, as they say, creativity is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. So I definitely need those hours anyway.

Talk a bit about your creative process today. How does a song normally come to life, from the initial idea to something finished? And where in that process does Toontrack fit in?

In the early days, my music was very much built around combining different riffs and sections, often working things out in rehearsals and figuring out how to piece everything together into a complete song. These days, I tend to approach composition more traditionally, working with motifs and themes, and exploring the potential of a core musical idea throughout an entire piece, rather than combining too many different elements. Once I have an initial idea, I’ll usually get it into a Cubase session fairly quickly, often in MIDI format. Over the years, I’ve become increasingly accustomed to writing music using basic MIDI parts. This allows me to bypass the technical limitations and idiosyncrasies of a particular instrument, whether it’s my rather limited piano skills or the physical characteristics of the guitar, and go straight to the compositional aspects of the music.

For many years, Toontrack has been at the heart of that writing template. I use either Superior Drummer 3 or EZdrummer 3 to sketch out drum parts, EZbass for developing bass lines, and EZkeys 2 as a general writing tool, mostly for quick access to piano sounds and basic harmonic sketches. I have these plug-ins installed on both my main studio computer and my laptop, which makes it incredibly convenient to have the same reliable tools available whether I’m working in the studio or traveling. They’re straightforward, always sound great, and allow me to develop ideas without getting distracted by technicalities. Ultimately, I try to work out the structure and composition of a piece as thoroughly as possible before putting on my instrumentalist and performer hat.

Do you feel that working under pressure limits you creatively, or can it actually be a catalyst?

It’s definitely a double-edged sword for me, as I’m sure it is for many musicians. I have a tendency to go very deep into whatever I’m working on, but there’s always the danger of getting lost in a rabbit hole of experimentation. Having a clear deadline and a certain amount of pressure definitely helps me commit to decisions and move forward. There’s also the danger of spending too much time with an idea and eventually outgrowing it before it’s even finished. I’ve been fortunate enough to make music for a rather long time, and to me, it’s always been about the ongoing creative process. Different albums and releases are really just moments along that journey, rather than definitive, static statements. So, I think it’s important to actually finish things in order to move on creatively. Ideally, you want to complete and release something while you’re still excited about the ideas behind it, rather than spending so much time refining them that you’ve grown tired of them yourself. As they say, works of art are never really finished, only abandoned. And I think there’s quite a bit of truth to that.

If you had to pick one song from your entire catalog that you feel particularly proud of, which one would it be – and why?

There are obviously many songs throughout my career that are special to me for different reasons. But within the context of this conversation, I think I’ll pick “Hubris and Blue Devils” from my latest album. The album as a whole represents something of a full-circle moment for me in my long-standing ambition to combine orchestral and soundtrack elements with extreme metal. And I think this particular song is one of the more complex compositions I’ve made, where I feel, at least subjectively, that I managed to get all the different elements to come together the way I envisioned. It also serves as a good example of the compositional workflow I mentioned earlier, starting with the music distilled into MIDI parts and then working through all the details of chord voicings, voice leading, instrumental doubling, and the interaction between the different musical elements. So, both in terms of the final result and the process behind it, I think it’s a piece that represents my approach to composition particularly well, and one that I’m quite proud of.