Since the musical histories and other occupations -- apart from corpse disposal... -- of Cadaver Inc.'s members are complex (partially by virtue of the use of various pseudonyms), I present you with musical resumes for them all, for your interest and information. Corrections and comments welcomed...

- Name: Carl Michael - Cadaver Inc.: Drummer - Pseudonym(s): Czral, Aggressor - Former bands: Ven Buens Ende, Inferno - Other bands (some possibly now former): Dodheimsgard (Czral), Aura Noir (Aggressor), Void (Czral) and Virus

- Name: Olle Jurgen - Cadaver Inc.: Vocalist - Pseudonym(s): OJ, OJ Noir, Appolyon - Other bands (some possibly now former): Aura Noir (Appolyon), Dodheimsgard (Appolyon)

- Name: LJ Blavaz - Cadaver Inc.: Bassist - Pseudonym(s): unknown - Other bands: unknown

- Name: Anders Oden - Cadaver Inc.: Guitarist - Pseudonym(s): Neddo - Former bands: Cadaver (though Cadaver Inc. is debatably Cadaver reincarnated)

I'll just say that _Discipline_ [reviewed in this issue] should be on your shopping list if you have any serious interest in extreme metal, and leave the rest of Cadaver Inc.'s mysteries to be unraveled by you, possibly with the aid of this phone interview.

CoC: Why restart or reinvigorate Cadaver? By doing Cadaver Inc. are you trying to distance yourself at all from the past, in any way?

Anders Oden: No, I'm trying to get to my roots from the past more than anything else.

CoC: What were the roots of Cadaver, really?

AO: The roots of Cadaver were originally bands like Slayer and Voivod. <longish pause> And I'm just trying to make metal now in 2001 that is -as- extreme and aggressive like that music used to be for me when I first heard it.

CoC: So, updating all those sounds from the past so they still have the same impact, right?

AO: Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do.

CoC: Cool. And how did you hook up with the line-up? How did you meet up with Czral and Appolyon from Dodheimsgard? Obviously you all live in Oslo, but you've originally come -- it seems at least -- from different scenes.

AO: No, well, not really: it's a small scene in Norway. I got roduced intto those guys through Fenriz, originally. He got me into Aura Noir and that stuff.

CoC: Ah, of course, Fenriz' Aura Noir passion.

AO: Yeah, and Czral, actually, had this really, really weird band.

CoC: Ved Buens Ende?

AO: No, before that. Even weirder than anything else. It's nothing to do with metal or black metal. It is really strange. And I got to know him through these tapes Fenriz had. And... he seemed to be a real interesting guy, and... he also sent Fenriz that -- I remember it clearly -- a "Darkthrone sandwich". He actually made this sandwich with the Darkthrone logo on it. And the -same- sandwich is actually sitting in Fenriz' kitchen now.

CoC: How bizarre!

AO: Yeah, and that's where we rehearse -- in Fenriz' living room, actually.

CoC: I'd have loved to have seen that shit! So were they guys you wanted to work with because of what they'd done? How did that come about? Cadaver folded -- I suppose -- and then...

AO: Well, they both loved the old Cadaver stuff. It's more that I'd wanted to work with them for a long time, actually. They asked me at one point to join Aura Noir because Blasphemer got very busy with Mayhem. But... then we all had different other bands and stuff but we, sort of, kept in touch with the thought of always having something coming together at some point. And then in '99 when Mayhem recorded their album Aura Noir was obviously not really happening, and Appolyon came home from the Dodheimsgard tour a bit disappointed, I think. I was finishing recording with Satyricon and then we just met over a few beers and decided to do some rehearsals. And the bass player is very important too, he's an old friend of mine who was in Oslo at the same time. Everything just fell into place. It wasn't really... it was more the right time and the right place than anything else, actually.

CoC: So, why in the end did you change the name and how much does it have to do with the website?

AO: Well, I wanted to have a "dot-com" attached to the name: cadaver.com -- I'd have to pay three and a half thousand dollars if I wanted to get that. And that's one thing I really thought was important for a band nowadays: to have a website. But I thought it was important for the reason you've seen now! And that's been my idea for a long, long time with that. I wanted to create this world where there is a company called "Cadaver Inc." that do that stuff. Luckily for us we got in touch with this fan in America who wanted to make a website for us. And he just did these normal band websites in the beginning, just sending me examples and stuff. Then we just developed together the idea of having this company.

CoC: So you're very happy with the website, I gather?

AO: Oh yeah. Yeah, it's a tremendous success. Just before I called you I looked up the latest statistics on it. The last few days have been -extremely- phenomenal! I don't know why, this thing just spreads out, it has its own life now! We have 12 000 unique visitors in one day now. That's extremely big.

CoC: So do you think the website is thought provoking or mostly humorous? Is it supposed to be in-line with the press release and giving the band atmosphere, like a dark atmosphere, or is it more kind of a joke on people believing that? Or that sort of bizarreness of modern life where that could really almost happen?

AO: Yeah, actually my idea with filling that out is quite serious. Serious in that if you believe it you are pretty much fucked up.

CoC: Yeah, absolutely.

AO: But I wanted to have this social experiment out there. And I wanted to do something which I hadn't seen before... and still haven't really. I have, because of this website, got in touch with some really weird people on the internet, obviously. But I haven't seen anything like this which is so well... done. Everything works there. Everything you submit to that site goes to me and the webmaster and this other guy who has done all the computer programming stuff. So we survey the whole thing. Most people of course understand the fakeness of what we do. We also get... I don't know: some of the e-mails we get are really weird.

CoC: Like crazy people?

AO: The last couple of days it has turned big in Brazil. I found out that there's some place, some web portal in Brazil giving out the news of this site, and they don't know anything about the band. So I received about ten employment resumes from Brazil right now.

CoC: So you find that it maybe hasn't quite created this image around the band in Europe -- where maybe people are a bit less inclined to fall for it -- but it's like... you remember Brujeria?

AO: Yeah.

CoC: It's kind of like the atmosphere around that where at first people were wondering whether they were -really- Mexican drug barons. It's kind of like that but on a sort of cyberspace scale, I guess, which is very cool. But also, going onto the music, the music of Cadaver Inc. is kind of modern but cold. It has got the darkness, in a way, that you get with older death metal or older sounds. It's cold-sounding. How much do you think the influences that have come in, in the years -since- Cadaver, have influenced it, and how -modern- do you think it is?

AO: Well, I've received questions about this before and some people believe, actually, that we have used a drum machines on it.

CoC: No way.

AO: And we haven't. I don't know, that might be a very uneducated person who asked me that...

CoC: Well, I think uneducated into the incredible drumming of Czral. He's actually that good, isn't he?

AO: He is actually that good: he's not faking anything.

CoC: Absolutely.

AO: And I mean, every drummer in this country has had deep respect for him for many years, but he's never been able to be in a band that really...

CoC: Exemplified it?

AO: Yeah, and that was able to release the record properly worldwide with a marketing budget 'round it. And I think that's for his sake why he's not more known right now. Because all those other drummers that people put in those top ten drummer lists in magazines every year, they have admired him for a long time, and it's about time that people recognised his skills.

CoC: Yeah, I mean the closest he came to getting more notoriety was, I suppose, Dodheimsgard's _Satanic Art_. Which sold relatively well but just never went as big as it needed to. Do you think maybe Cadaver Inc. will do that?

AO: I sure hope so. I mean, we have all the opportunities now to reach out to new crowds with this tour coming up.

CoC: Absolutely, with Morbid Angel and Zyklon.

AO: Yeah.

CoC: Sounds like a real monster and something you can really, really do something with.

AO: I think so. I hope so, actually, anyway. But when you refer to the coldness in the music it's... I wanted to have this sort of metallic sound and we managed to sort of get that with this engineer that has never recorded metal before. He's a Norwegian guy, an old friend of mine. He has always been out there. He co-produced the record of a Norwegian pop phenomenon who toured with A-Ha. That band is quite good actually, kind of Cardigans, Blondie kind of music. They also sound very cold. It's something to do with Scandinavian rock or pop in the scene. It is also a bit cold and dark sounding compared to other scenes. Swedish bands like Kent, all those bands sound very melancholic and have influences also from music like Kraftwerk and stuff like that. It leads on to making new sounds, anyway.

CoC: You've taken elements as well -- I hear bits of the way Satyricon have gone in a sense, like the production side of it. Even though it may not come from that particular part of the Norwegian scene I suppose it's 'cause the same cold element is prevalent. Those bits of that horrible thrashing of Aura Noir, that's so great. What I think is interesting is that it has really, really hard blastbeats. That is one of the things that seems to have been carried over from the old Cadaver: that really hard, grindcore sound.

AO: We just wanted to have that unclean touch to it which I think so many bands lose when they go into the studio. I think too many albums sound too clean. And this music shouldn't be controlled, it should be out of control. But at the same time controlled: if you want to speed up the tempo you should be able to do it, it's not meant to be recorded with click-tracks, I think.

CoC: I agree: click-tracks can sound good in their place but analogue drums are far more impressive and I prefer the sound.

AO: You mentioned Satyricon earlier: when I created the first song on the album, "Primal", I used Frost as a drummer. He actually kicked me into those riffs and everything. He's excellent, he plays extremely fast too. He's amazing on his blastbeats.

CoC: Yeah, the other thing about Cadaver is: how does the lyrical focus work? Songs like "Killtech", "Primal", "Discipline", "Manic" and "Reptile Robots" show kind of a futuristic slant but it has also sort of got a cold, dark, grind feel. The cover, I think, goes with that: a surveillance camera and the image is almost mangled and old. It's kind of interesting. How does that fit with the lyrical side of it and also how does that fit with the whole body disposal website thing?

AO: Well, everything is not connected to each other that way, actually. It's more a mixture of different bits and pieces of the lyrics we had lying around and stuff just written for the songs. It's not a concept album in that way. The thing I wanted to do with surveillance camera thing and everything with the website was to create a no-tech world in the high-tech world. Use technology to show what is not technology.

CoC: What is just simple and basic, right?

AO: Yeah. So that's all we really want to do now: focus on those very simple things and to the core.

CoC: Do you find that with the whole PR statement -- it has got a humorous slant to it completely but, the idea is kind of that this is your day job and Cadaver Inc. is what you do in the evenings.

AO: Yeah. <laughs>

CoC: The lyrics do seem -- from not having a lyrics sheet but hearing bits -- quite odd, a little William S. Burrows, kind of how Dodheimsgard go...

AO: Hmm.

CoC: But also they're quite dark, quite urban dark.

AO: Yeah, that's what we try to achieve, basically.

CoC: Although a couple of the members were in different bands, is Cadaver Inc. a full-on, full-time, serious band?

AO: Oh yeah, definitely!

CoC: 'Cause I've heard rumours and been told that Czral, this is now his main thing that he's probably gonna do.

AO: Yeah, well everybody felt that this is the main thing that we're doing.

CoC: Yeah, Appolyon as well.

AO: Yeah.

CoC: So their Dodheimsgard duties will, kind of, come second now?

AO: Yeah, definitely. I would say that, definitely. This is the band they really wanna be in, and I mean we want to take this band as far as we can. Now, it's all up to the public to decide whether they like it or not.

CoC: So we can look forward to more albums as the years roll by?

AO: Oh yeah, definitely. We are already writing new songs.