A phone call at 5 a.m. this morn­ing total­ly freaked me out. It was a wrong number.

While you’re here, be sure to check out my review of Shin­ing’s “Win­ter­reise” which fea­tures an inter­view with Shin­ing’s auteur, Jørgen Munke­by. By the way, I did­n’t get chance to talk about “Moon­child Mindgames,” but if you ask me it’s Serge Gains­bourg’s “La Javanese,” played with a know­ing wink.

An unpub­lished ques­tion from the inter­view, after the jump:

Grind­stone seems to have even sharp­er con­trasts and jux­ta­po­si­tions
than In the King­dom of Kitsch You Will Be a Mon­ster, mak­ing it at
times more lovesick and, well, kitsch­i­er. Was that some­thing you went
about doing con­scious­ly, or did it just hap­pen on its own?

Our two first albums (“Where The Ragged Peo­ple Go” and “Sweet Shangai
Dev­il”) where both pure­ly acoustic jazz music. On Mon­ster, we decid­ed we
want­ed to do what­ev­er we want­ed to do, what­ev­er that might be. So we did
it, and the album kin­da was the start of the new SHINING music. We
did­n’t know where it might take us until we were already on our way.
With Grind­stone we actu­al­ly had some­thing to build on and refer to
(Mon­ster), so it helped us alot. While work­ing on Mon­ster, we had been
through many dif­fer­ent phas­es where we’d thought the album was finished.
Dur­ing the first part we cre­at­ed most of the con­tem­po­rary, arty sounding
stuff. But when we had enough music for an album, we had already changed
our minds and we want­ed more a rock­ish sound (we spent more than a year
in four dif­fer­ent stu­dios work­ing on the album, and in between these
ses­sions I was con­stant­ly work­ing on it in my homestudio/bedroom). So we
took away some songs and cre­at­ed some new, and Mon­ster was born.

After the album was out, we con­tin­ued that jazz-to-rock-direc­tion in the
live band devel­op­ment, so when Grind­stone came along and demand­ed to be
made, we were already in a more extreme and hard­er place than with
Mon­ster. In the begin­ning we were very inspired by bands like Meshuggah,
The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Locust, Sunn O))), Fredrik Thordendahl’s
Spe­cial Defects and oth­er extreme met­al bands, so we want­ed to sound
more like that. But after a while we had to mod­er­ate the use of metal
sound­ing gui­tars because it real­ly did­n’t blend that well with the other
stuff, and it actu­al­ly sound­ed a lit­tle bit bor­ing and one dimensional
(but that was just us; the bands I men­tioned does not sound bor­ing). So
we took a few steps back towards Mon­ster; removed some bor­ing guitars
and added some acoustic piano and celeste, and voilà! — GRINDSTONE.

As to the kitschy part of SHINING: We real­ly like to work in the
dan­ger­ous grey zone between what is much, and what is too much; what is
extreme, and what is too extreme, what is taste­ful, and what is not
taste­ful. We also like to try to use ele­ments that has been judged to be
not taste­ful, and try to bring them back in a new way, into the tasteful
realm. It’s not so much about what you do — it’s how you do it.