The album Red Room Ensemble was a pretty quick affair. Work on it began in early 2014, and the entire album was recorded and packaged a year after that. The music is mostly, but not exclusively, written by Kari, who had a bunch of riffs composed at the onset, but nothing that could even remotely be called a complete tune. So, there was a lot of work to be done, especially with the vocals and lyrics. The forced time table was to some extent due to the fact that we had received a small grant for the project, which had to be accounted for within a year. Besides this grant, we had to put in private funding to reach our goal, which meant that studio time was a very valuable resource. As a result of this, of course we see room for improvement, but yeah, we are proud and satisfied with our achievement!
You can certainly hear influences from our diverse musical tastes, ranging from the hard rock of the 70's to the death metal of the 90's, with elements from many of the subgenres in between. All of us listen to metal, first and foremost, but in various forms, and we guess this is what music sounds like when it's created by five guys with their own preferences, actually, we weren't sure where we would land while making it. Clearly, what we achieved is some kind of progressive and very melodic heavy metal.
We worked together with the phenomenal Linus Nirbrant at Audiogrind Studios in Stockholm. As stated above, our studio time was limited for financial reasons, but we managed to record everything in six days. Nirbrant also did the post production and has been a huge asset through and through.
The artwork is a photo, inspired by still life paintings, shot by Christian Soderlund and enhanced by our singer, Torgny. There is no apparent link between the lyrics on the album and the cover, the lyrics going somewhat in various directions topic wise. Many of them came to deal with genre bound topics such as violence, insanity and horror. On our next album, already in progress, we want to be more consistent regarding lyrics, thematics and art.
What do you expect to gain from this release? What are the band's aims at the moment?
We have already gained valuable experience which will facilitate our next release. Our immediate aims are to be able to prepare another album and to be able to do a bit more fine tuning on this one. Expanding our fan base through the promotion of Red Room Ensemble is a step in this direction. We have been talking about trying to get a label, but we are not rushing into anything at the moment.
We released Red Room Ensemble through Spinnup, which is a swedish distribution service for unsigned bands. Through them, our music is available at most major download and streaming sites. Besides that, we pressed a small edition of 200 CDs.
Where and how will you promote this release?
We are promoting it by ourselves, both using Facebook, sending it to various reviewers and radio stations, and by occasional live performances. We also work together with Mike McCoy at Metal Detector Music Promotions, who has been a great asset in this area. We aim to keep this going for awhile, but are already looking ahead to our next release.
In digital format, our songs can be obtained at both ITunes and Tidal or at bandcamp. Physical copies can be ordered from bengans.se, or by contacting us directly at redroomensemble@gmail.com.