Hi,
I could not watch the video since I'm at work but:



Enjoy!

Well, the title is a bit misleading because in this interview he opens up about the scene, etc. as much as he does in every recent interview of his. He is very well-spoken though!

Sounds like an intelligent guy. Great album anyway, haven't listened to it for about ten years.

It's always have to nice this kind of input on the creative process of a band, especially when it comes to iconic records. I like how he explained that Emperor had an ideal of what black metal was and had to be. Whenever I think about black metal artists and bands of the early 90's and how strong the culture surrounding it was, it gets me wondering if the musicians were working towards a strong ideal or if they were just exploring and coming up with new ideas without actually strongly trying to orient the music in a way or another. With Anthems, Emperor seemed to have a strong ideal, a strong idea of what the genre had to be and where they wanted to push it. I like how Ihsahn references Bathory's Blood Fire Death as a major influence for Anthems, borrowing the epic elements from it. In this sense you can kind of understand how Emperor wanted to create a more "sophisticated" form of black metal, focusing on continuity between tracks and building epic symphonic black metal albums.