Ring Van Möbius
Norwegian retro proggers are having a blast with album number two.
Ring Van Möbius firmly believe that more is always better. After a two-year gestation period the Norwegian classic prog act have returned with their second album, The
3rd Majesty. Frontman Thor Erik Helgesen tells Prog why he’s definitely not holding back.
Progressive rock is not a genre that tends to reward reticence. If you’ve got a fantastic, preposterous idea, then the correct way forward is always to pursue it with every fibre of your being. That’s definitely the approach that Ring Van Möbius have taken on their second album, The 3rd Majesty. The Norwegians have proudly proclaimed their devotion to prog’s first wave from the start: their 2018 debut, Past The Evening Sun, was a feast of overdriven organ and power trio fireworks, with a huge and proud debt to ELP and Van der Graaf Generator. The follow-up, which begins with the absurdly opulent sprawl of the 22-minute title track, blows its predecessor out of the water and sounds like the work of band enjoying a dizzying surge of confidence.
“You’re onto something there,” says founder, frontman and organist Thor Erik Helgesen.
“We were pretty unafraid of trying new things and I really feel we’re not answering to anything or anyone. So we just do crazy stuff, if we think it’s good, great, funny or whatever.”
“We were pretty unafraid of trying new things and I really feel we’re not answering to anything or anyone. So we just do crazy stuff, if we think it’s good, great, funny or whatever. After finding our sound on the first album and having the right recording techniques, these two years in between have done us good.”
Shortly after the release of their debut,
Ring Van Möbius were briefly sidetracked by another project. In October 2018, at the request of a local horror movie festival Tysvaer Skrekkfest, held in the village of Aksdal, the band performed their own soundtrack to Dario Argento’s seminal Italian horror flick, Suspiria. Helgesen cites the experience as being fundamental to his band’s evolution, and a testament to their collective enthusiasm for experimenting.
“That pushed our boundaries. We had to relate to what was happening in the movie and add to those moments, to those feelings on the screen,” he says. “None of it was forced. We were willing to go outside of the norm and find new feelings from the same instruments. I think that also made us grow more confident… and weird and crazy! [Laughs.]”
Prog bands are often judged on their epics, and Ring Van Möbius have delivered a mindexpanding colossus with The 3rd Majesty’s title track. Bursting with deranged ideas, wilful complexity and moments of irresistible beauty, it makes the band’s self-proclaimed status as purveyors of “progressive rock straight from 1971, but made today” seem ever-so-slightly reductive. This isn’t straightforward, retro prog: this is the real thing, if not beamed here from five decades ago, then certainly plugged directly into the pure prog mainframe.
“This album is definitely a ‘more is more’ kind of thing!” Helgesen chuckles. “At one point, I had some ideas for an intermezzo between riffs, and our drummer had another idea too, and it was always, ‘Why don’t we do both?’ [Laughs.] It’s that kind of album. There’s timpani and strings and all these crazy elements. Even the artwork is pompous! If we go any bigger, we might explode!”
Was it particularly satisfying to write something of Supper’s Ready proportions?
“It took about two years, but yeah, we’re very proud of it. Somehow you just know, when you write the first riff, that okay, this is probably going to be a long one, because I feel that these lines I’m writing are part of a bigger whole and I have to tell a story. Of course, it’s sometimes hard to get the big waves flowing and to tell the full story. With other songs, I can tell that it’s going to be a quickie! [Laughs.]”
According to Helgesen, The 3rd Majesty is a concept album about the birth, life and death of a star. Open to interpretation, it’s a wilfully trippy conceit that adds extra weight to the sumptuous, over-the-top progness of the whole thing, even if it doesn’t necessarily make immediate sense, even to the man who wrote it.
“Man, it is rather abstract!” he chortles. “It’s a story that could be about the birth and life and death of a star. There’s a lot of universal ideas connected to it, lyrics-wise. It’s a story about something growing too big and becoming overwhelming, and it all goes to hell. It could be about a star, or a leader. It could be about humankind, growing too big and killing the planet. It was written as a story of a star being born, and the life cycle of that star… but that’s just a part of the story, I guess!”
Despite impeccable retro credentials, Ring Van Möbius are clearly driven by a shared desire to explore as much new territory as possible. The 3rd Majesty is bound to delight fans of the early 70s, but it’s performed with a special kind of intensity and gusto, as if the band are racing to get all their best ideas from right now out into the open before the next wave arrives.
You can almost hear Helgesen’s eyes twinkling with delight as he relishes the prospect of getting his hands on the vinyl version of his new record: an enthusiast, in love with progressive rock and hell-bent on making it bigger, better and crazier than ever before.
“Oh man, I can’t wait for the vinyl! It’s been frustrating but I know that some people have held back on their albums, waiting for the right time. That’s not for us. I think it’s dangerous to hold music back. I think it should be released as soon as possible, all the time, because then you get to start again with all your new ideas, and the creativity that’s been under pressure for so long. Having an album released is very refreshing. Until now we’ve only listened to our music, trying to notice stuff that needs to be fiddled with, but now it’s set in stone and that feels great. So what’s next?”
“This album is definitely a ‘more is more’ kind of thing! At one point, I had some ideas for an intermezzo between riffs, and our drummer had another idea too, and it was always,
‘Why don’t we do both?’”