We mark the arrival of dragons with the return this year of Keep Of Kalessin. Having just released their brand new album Epistemology, we were able to catch Obsidian C. with the band on their exclusive London date at Incineration Fest.

Where we sat down and spoke about some of the themes that are explored on the new album, how interacting the fans can truly be a different experience which not only helps the band but the fans themselves and what the band might have planned for their twentieth anniversary…

I heard that you guys decided to make the album cover a user based competition , what made you decide to do that?

First of all its always difficult when you are getting into a new album, you have a vision of what it’s about but we are not designers ourselves. It’s easy for me to record something or explain how things should be recorded, but its more difficult for me to show my vision to someone who is going to design the front cover or something for the album. So I thought that there is a lot of great talent out there, everyone knows that in this day and age there’s shitloads of people who are extremely skilled at what they do. Be it a designer or guitarist, drummer, anything in this world people are really skilled at their craft. So i wanted to see if our community and the people on Facebook can come up with great ideas and great artwork for this album.

We then decided to hold this competition on Facebook  where designers upload their designs and then our fans vote for these covers. Then we picked the kind of top three. So the fans voted for these covers and I am personally really happy with it, I was hoping that if we get like five or ten submissions that would be great. We got over a hundred submissions of great fuckin’ artwork! Artists that we never would have never had contact from before. I also know a lot of the artists that did this contest, they got attention so they have gotten orders from other bands and stuff out of this. Which was also our intention to help those great artists actually get attention for their work. I think it’s a win win situation. He got our cover, we also paid for it! The designer who won, he got the money prize as well and we got this amazing artwork and we are really happy with that. 

We also have two of the t shirts that we brought on tour now is the artwork from the contest. From two of the people that we liked the most but did not win the contest. 

So you’re kind of thinking quite laterally as well in terms of trying to involve the fans…

I think fan engagement is very important nowadays with Social Media and stuff so, I wish that we could actually do more. It’s a full time job to just update constantly engage with your fans and stuff like this, sometime we also need to make music! It’s a great way to communicate with the fans and who knows be part of letting them create the product. 

Without letting them going into the studio and playing the riff haha!

I have thought about that…..

This is just an excerpt of our chat with Obsidian C. listen to the full interview below on our Soundcloud!

Keep Of Kalessin’s brand new album Epistemology is out now via Indie Recordings.