- You guys are from Latvia, a part of the world quite unknown to most of our readers (and the major part of the rest of the world, I might add). How good are the chances to get your music out, and just how big is the ‘scene’ there?

Aigars: “Our home-country, Latvia, is becoming more widely known these days because we have a very nice President and also because this year’s Eurovision song contest took place in the capital town of Riga. The former is a good reason to know a country for, though the latter is pure crap and not worth any web space to give further explanations. Having said that, I have the feeling that Latvia has been living and breathing Eurovision ever since our very own Brainstorm got the 2nd place in that bloody contest, so there has been very little room for other sorts of music except for pop, especially artists with influential friends. For instance, one of the ‘best Latvian bands’ (there are tons of them!) is fronted by a nationally appreciated composer’s son, though the boy can hardly sing. Bands and solo artists like that get good media coverage, quite some airplay and they get invited to play at festivals and clubs, which are never too keen on changing repertoire.
Independent artists are often turned down by festival organizers and club managers who are always saying things like, ‘who’s gonna come to your gig anyway?’ or ‘you’ll scare off our core-audience’. Progressive rock, unfortunately, falls into the latter category, Holy Lamb likewise. There is only one more noteworthy prog band around, Olive Mess, who got a deal with the French label Soleil last year to release their debut album Gramercy. That’s all there is, I guess, so it comes naturally that we have shared a number of gigs with Olive Mess.
However, there is always a chance to get an album released by a Latvian label (there exist a few), provided that they can see instant profit or, at the least, quick return of their investment. Although it may not sound quite like that, the music industry here is starting to gain some sanity, so I do hope it is going to be quite okay one day.”

Juris: “We are not in a hurry for immediate commercial success. As far as our line-up is more or less stable, we are progressing in the right direction: Beneath the Skin is of a better quality than Salt of the Earth, and I am absolutely convinced that our next CD will be even better. At the same time, our live performances are becoming more and more professional, and the band is maturing as well as every band member.”

- Lacking info on when exactly this album was released by Periferic, we’re interested in knowing which have been the reactions so far, and when exactly it was released?

Aigars: “If memory serves me right, Beneath the Skin was released in November, 2002. The album was not available before that, but when it came out, our Latvian fans’ reaction was very good – they had heard several songs at our concerts, and we knew they would love the rest of the album as well, which now appears to be true. We were much more surprised to experience some great support from the local media! For example, there was a Holy Lamb week on the country’s only rock FM station in February, which meant much more airplay than usual. The only music magazine here published 4 pages of an interview with all band members. Also, the reviews we have come across so far have all been positive.”

Juris: “Yes, most of the reviews are positive, even in Latvia… “Stars Fell on Fertile Lands” made it into Top 20 of the best respected FM station here, Radio SWH, plus it remained in the charts for about one month. Most Latvian reviewers, however, tried to mask their incompetence in Western music (prog, art-rock, classic rock etc.) by saying basically the same things – to them, our music seemed wonderful, but old-fashioned (a replay of the best of the 70ies) and therefore not needed for Latvian audiences.”

- The booklet mentions that band members Aigars & Juris produced the recording sessions with engineer Talis Timrots, and then a little further Gergely Böszörményi is mentioned as producer as well. So, what’s up with that?

Aigars: “Easy one! We are aware of that mistake. The word ‘executive’ is actually missing in the credit for Gergely. He was responsible for executing the eventual release, you know, manufacturing, artwork, that sort of thing. The recording and mixing sessions were all produced by me and Juris with some, at times substantial, help from Talis Timrots.”

- Periferic is well known for its quality releases (especially in the reign of Progressive Rock). How did you get in contact with them, and how did you feel about signing with them?

Aigars: “I absolutely agree that the recordings Periferic has put out over the last decade are very interesting and often original as well, so it’s not just the matter of quality which is present in every Periferic release that I have the pleasure to own. A friend of mine once gave me the Föld és ég (Earth and Sky) album by After Crying which blew me away at the first listen and still ranks as one of my personal favourites of all time. That’s how I learned about the label. Next step took me and a few other Latvian prog fans to a festival near Helsinki in Finland because After Crying was headlining the event. That’s actually where I met Gergely for the first time, but we didn’t talk business – I only bought some Periferic stuff from him! Our second album, Salt of the Earth, had just been released and Beneath the Skin was only in the pipeline. So, at the time the material for Beneath the Skin was undergoing the final production touches, we somehow found Periferic at number one position on the list of our potential partners. Of course, we were aware of the label’s mission statement which clearly emphasises the quality part, but that didn’t keep us back from sending a tape with the final version of the album. Although we thought we’d done a good job, there was this strange feeling of doubt, you know, ‘are they really going to accept it’? That feeling kept lingering on for a couple of months (we thought it was years!), until the label sent us a positive reply. And we went, like, wow, do you believe it’s happened to us?”

Juris: “I also admire After Crying and am very proud to be a member of the Periferic family. :)”

- Has the joining of Holy Lamb with Periferic brought the band extra possibilities to perform their music on stage?

Aigars: “Live performances are a possibility to enhance our partnership in the future, if the label is interested in that. This year hasn’t been very good for Holy Lamb, there have been some major personal troubles, and I think the label was aware of them. It is due to those problems we hadn’t made a single live appearance until mid-July, when the band played at a prog festival in Estonia. All in all, an international release always helps bands get gigs, and that’s the main point given the questionable environment I tried to describe at the beginning of this interview.”

- This is a concept album, based on the tale “The Skin Of The Holy Lamb”, which was written by Ieva Dmitricenko. Could you tell our readers in short what the story is about, and why you chose to take it for this album’s concept?

Aigars: “Yes, that’s right – my ex-girlfriend wrote that tale because of the inspiration she had drawn from the band and its activities. It’s about music as a form of business which, in most cases, has very little to do with art. Just like in any tale, there are the bad guys and the good guys. Makhtartam is the boss of the Low Brotherhood, a gang of baddies whose main goal is to assume all control in the music business and force people to buy all sorts of crap recordings so they can make big profit. We, the Majorminors, are there to protect Musicland and its leader Headturn who, at one point, gets seized by the Low Brotherhood and thrown into Gaol. At the end of the story, the Majorminors fight the Low Troops and find Headturn in a rather poor shape, but he soon recovers, so ‘music will reign’. Actually, the tale is posted on the Holy Lamb Universe, our website.
As you can imagine, we liked the story, even though it’s a bit too naïve, but it gave us ideas worth a full-length concept album, the main message being: you can’t kill music for the sake of money. There will always be people who know the difference between good and bad, and you can’t fool them. If you do, they’ll strike back hard one day and no money will help you out of the mess you’ve made.”

- You’ve taken about 18 months to record this album, which is a hell of a long time. What really happened?

Aigars: Well, there’s just one reason that I can think of right now. Recording the whole album at one go would cost us a lot, so the recording process was split up in two major sessions. The first one kicked off in September of 2000 and lasted until January 2001, during which time we recorded something like five songs. The rest of the album was recorded at the end of 2001, and the following months were dedicated to overdubbing, fixing and mixing.
The good thing about the recording sessions was that we could take our time as long as we wanted, there was absolutely no hurry. Plus, all band members have their day jobs, so we had to make sure that our job commitments and studio schedules did not overlap, therefore the usual studio hours for us were weekday evenings and weekends. By the way, there’s also a studio diary on our website, illustrated with photos to better demonstrate the fun that we were having almost every time we were there.”

- Were all songs written before you went to record them in the studio, or was it rather a process of recording and re-recording at times?

Aigars: “Both, actually, although the basic parts for all songs were written and rehearsed before. Some songs underwent minor alteration during the recording sessions, and some parts were added quite spontaneously. If you wonder what the latter are, I’ll give you a tip – everything that can be called ‘experimental’, for instance, the guitar noises in the middle of “Wear it in the Morning” and the intro to “Makhtartam & the Low Brotherhood”. Some of my guitar solos are improvisations (“The End – Headturn’s Release”, “The Plan that Failed”, “Wear it in the Morning”), and you can hear the band jamming throughout the final section of “Audiodurg” on top of a solid bass guitar line.”

- The name of your engineer and co-producer Talis Timrots is one that goes back to the very beginnings of the band (he already produced your ’92 demo “Love To Eat”, in days when the band’s music was rather Thrash/Speed Metal oriented). Tell us a bit more about this man?

Aigars: “Wow, I didn’t expect such a question, so thanks a lot for this one! But yes, you’ve got it right. The band shares a long history with Talis, he has been working with us for ages. He was there to help us record our first demo Love to Eat, he also co-produced and engineered our debut album Bite in the Dust (unavailable on CD), though we chose to work with a different engineer on Salt of the Earth. However, Talis did record one track for that album. Today he is one of the most sought after soundmen in Latvia, he’s got a lot of things going on in the studio and he’s equally busy with live sound engineering, mostly for our country’s top export act, Brainstorm, who recently warmed up for The Rolling Stones in Prague with Talis at the mix-desk.
At the beginning of 1990s, he had a band here in which he played the guitar, so, if you’re a guitarist, you’ve got to know how to play your instrument when you have that man around in the studio! And it doesn’t matter that he’s your friend, he’ll tell you to shut up, learn your part and come back when you’re ready. That’s why so many bands have deep respect for him, I believe.
I think the most interesting thing about him is that he’s never been a fan of progressive rock, except for Rush, let alone speed/thrash metal. So it was a small surprise to us, when he revealed his positive feelings about Beneath the Skin as we were listening to the master copy. We all knew it was no flattery.”

- Since recordings for this album were finished in February 2002, it’s only reasonable to think that maybe you’re already thinking of new songs again; Have any songs been written already…and for when the following album?

Aigars: “Yes, we have written a few songs for the follow-up to Beneath the Skin, three of which have already been performed on stage. I think it’s too early now to predict if they are going to make it onto our next album. We’ll be able to give you more news on that when we have something like ten songs written, but we don’t like to work in a hurry, which can lead you to the routine of one album per annum, each one sounding exactly the same as the previous one. I wouldn’t agree that there’s much of a difference between any two Flower Kings, Spock’s Beard, Dream Theater or Ozric Tentacles albums, which certainly doesn’t mean I don’t like those bands. They’re all very excellent musicians and it’s always nice to listen to some new stuff from them, yet I don’t hear any substantial development in two consecutive albums by those artists. Maybe that explains why I am so eagerly waiting for the day I’ll get the chance to listen to the new After Crying studio album, because six years have passed since their previous studio recording came out. My expectations are really high on that one.”

- Longtime guitarist Ludis left in January 2002 (at a time when the recordings for the album weren’t completely finished yet). Just how serious were the ‘musical differences’ and have you been looking for someone to replace him?

Aigars: “He chose to leave because he thought the old Holy Lamb stuff was more exciting. There are a few songs on “Beneath the Skin” that he never liked. Although the credits for the album say that all music was composed by Holy Lamb, there are certain tracks (“Audiodurg”, “Conquest”, “Wear it in the Morning”) that had very little creative input from him, if any at all. To be honest, we started to look for a replacement when Ludis was still in the band, at the tail end of 2001. The guy we auditioned is a technically skilled guitarist, but we had the feeling that his style wouldn’t match the trademark Holy Lamb sound. Only a couple of weeks later Ludis called me and said he wanted to leave the band. We accepted his decision and parted as friends, which we still are. Months later, he joined us on stage at the band’s eleventh anniversary gig, an event to remember. Of course, we did play a number of gigs as a quartet soon after he had left, and the people who attended it, including my brother, another founding member, said they’d enjoyed the new sound of four players. That’s when we stopped looking further for another guitarist, although I don’t mean we’ll remain a four-piece band forever, because we’re open to more changes.”

- By the way, is there a special reason why you chose to name the band Holy Lamb?

Aigars: “I think there is one, but a lot of people don’t know that. We named the band after a Yes song found on their album Big Generator because of the lyrical content of that song. It impressed us so much that we felt it could be a good name for the band, regardless of what true Christians might say or think (by the way, we have often been criticized for our name). Of course, it was also the first song that we covered at our early days, when were still a bunch of thrash metal kids. As you can see, we’ve always enjoyed contrasts, although the borders between different styles may not be very obvious in today’s music of Holy Lamb.”

- Have there been, on this album, tracks that gave more trouble to compose, or to learn how to play, that gave you extra trouble to record in the studio? Which ones, and why?

Aigars: “There are very few parts that were difficult to learn, and even fewer of those that gave us some headache in the studio. I think we spent a longer time than usual studying the guitar duo on “Conquest”, written by our keyboardist (!) Juris. I mean, the guitar is not exactly the same instrument as the piano! In the studio, we faced some trouble recording the acoustic guitar insert on “Wear it in the Morning”, for which we didn’t use a click track. What a mistake! Our drummer had dropped the tempo only a bit, which we unaware of, but it took hours to figure out what the change was, and, of course, he wasn’t around when that guitar part was being recorded. I think the rest was just fun.
Normally we learn our parts quickly or forget the ones we don’t like and come up with something new, if required. What causes us most trouble is the arrangement. Sometimes we spend a month in attempt to attain the right arrangement or structure of a song.”

Juris: “I can remember quite a few problems with the bass part in “Conquest”. Originally, it was supposed to be played by myself, but our bass player Qba tried successfully to play something very similar and asked me if he was allowed to play it. Later, in the studio, he would regret that. I had some problems as well, most notably with “The Plan that failed” which appeared to be quite hard for me in terms of keeping the pace.”

- What are your three favorite songs on the album, and why?

Aigars: “My personal favourites are “Conquest” (because of its complex, almost symphonic structure), “The Plan that Failed” (beautiful melodies, interesting arrangement) and “Stars Fell on Fertile Lands” (because I wrote it :) ).”

Juris: ““Beneath the Skin, Part 2” because it sounded good from the very beginning and somehow got better and better over time, “The End – Headturn’s Release” because it’s so simple and beautiful, “Audiodurg” because it’s dynamic, requires absolute cohesion between all band members and has plenty of opportunities to express ourselves.”

- The band started in ’91, playing Thrash / Speed Metal tunes, to convert first to more Rock oriented music, and later towards the more Progressive sounds of today. But in how far do you still have an affinity with that music you started out with?

Aigars: “I don’t listen to much metal stuff these days, although there are rare moments that I find myself humming an old Testament or Megadeth tune. I am more into the post-rock scene these days, you know, Mogwai, Sigur Rós, Godspeed and the like. Of course, I do listen to a lot of old and new prog recordings.”

- Any last comments or messages for our readers?

Juris: “We would most certainly like to do a number of gigs for Magyar or other European audiences. There are a few EU countries that host Formula 1 and have a lot of other beautiful things there, so why not try Holy Lamb? :)”

Aigars: “Of course, we’d love to come to your town and pull off a show to remember. But, for a good start, get your copy of “Beneath the Skin” and see if you’re ready to join us in the sonic battle against the Low Brotherhood.”

Tony Holemans