Hi, first, thanks answering this interview. And could you start it with a
little biography of your group ?
Hello! Where shall I start...Thomas, Mike and I founded the band in 1997,
and called ourselves \'Infernal Dream\'. Thomas and I had been playing for
quite some time already
at school, since we were both in the school band. Our interest in extreme
music was obvious, so we decided to start our own band together with Mike on guitars. In 1998 we met Otto our bassist and almost immediately we changed our name to Detonation. Around that time we also recorded our first 2 songs for a Dutch underground compilation CD, and a year later we finally recorded our EP, Lost Euphoria which was released by a friend of ours from Skullcrusher records. This EP helped us a lot in finding gigs, and things started to go better and better for us as a band. In 2001 we recorded a 3-track promo cd to get labels interested in signing us for a deal, but this didn\'t work unfortunately, so we decided in 2002 to move on and record our first full length album \"An Epic Defiance\".
We wanted to do thigs seriously, so we booked the excess stduios and spent 2 weeks in total there. Afterwards we were completely broke, especially
because we also had Niklas SUndin hired for the artwork. Luckily for us,
there were several labels interested after we released the album ourselves
in Ocotber 2002, and in the end we signed a 3 album deal with Osmose
Productions! A lot of things have happened with Detonation ever since, we
played many gigs throughout Europe and gained quite some succes already. And now, after a whole lot of stress and problems lately, we are back with a new album: \"Portals To Uphobia\"

So Detonation is back with a brand new album, how would you present it ?

It\'s still 100% Detonation, but we\'ve grown a lot as songwriters and
musicians the last 2 years. I think you could say that Portals is a logical
continuation of the debut album, the songs are a bit better, better
structured, there\'s more diversity on the album, and everything
just sounds a bit more mature and professional. We are very happy ourselves
with the way it turned out, especially concerning all the problems we have
had this last year, with Thomas his injury and the dealy of the release
etc...

Tell us about it's recording process, where and who did record it ?

Just like the previous album, we recorded \"Portals\" in studio Excess in
Rotterdam with the help of producer Hans Pieters. The recording took us
about 10 days, and another 6 days or so were spent for the mixing. But as I
said before, we had a lot of problems before the recordings.
Thomas was still suffering from his arm injury, which took about 6 months in
2004, and it was uncertain if he was going to be drummer for the new album,
because he simply couldn\'t play the drums! Originally we had planned to
record this album in April 2004, but we had to postpone it to further notice
because of his injury. So finally in December 2004 Thomas let us know he was
capable again of playing drums, but of course he only knew about half of the
new songs, because we didn\'t rehearse with him whatsoever. We still decided
to enter the studio and make the best out of it, we didn\'t have the patience
to postpone the recordings another few months...in december we started the
recordings, and we made a schedule so tha

t THomas would lay down some
drumtracks on day one, and Mike and I would do the guitars fro those songs
on day 2, etc...I had to be present at Thomas his sessions, to make sure he
played the right
drum parts for the new songs, but everything went pretty good. We mixed the
album in January and february of this year.


Were you satisfied with his work ?
Yeah, Hans did a decent job, like he always does. But of course, just like
the debut album, we produced it ourselves as well, we like to keep things in
our own control as much as possible. But I think the new album sounds good,
it has a fresh sound, not particularly brutal or massive, but a clear and
transparent production in which you can hear all the instruments, that was
our intention. I think we got the best out of the capacity of this studio...

What are your inspiration sources to compose this album ?
Our main inspiration is ourselves. We want to get better as musicians every
single time and see how far we can evolve and develope within this genre of
music. But of course we also made this album for the people that enjoyed our
first album, and to show them there\'s enough inspiration within us to make
another 10 albums. Music is everything to us, that\'s also a reason why we
will continue to make albums, we just need to do it.


What do your lyrics talk about ?
On \"Portals to Uphobia\", the general topic behind the lyrics is about making
choices in life, especially the wrong ones in this case. The word Uphobia
reflects the words Euphoria, Utopia and Phobia combined to display the main
key words of the album, while the portals reflect the different choices we
can make in our lives.
As with An Epic Defiance we wrote all the lyrics from a personal point of
view, that\'s the only it works for Mike and I, we write all the lyrics. For
this album I wrote 80% of all the lyrics, and I took experiences from my
daily life as a source of inspiration. It turned out pretty personal and
emotional this time, I guess I had a lot on my mind lately ;) But I didn\'t
want to get to specific about my personal shit of course, so I made every
lyric a bit less transparent, so that everybody who reads them can get
something out of it for themselves to identify with.

What are the bands that influences you ?
I can get influenced by a lot of bands. But when it comes to metal, I tend
to get influenced more from classic stuff such as Iron Maiden and old
classics from the Death metal genre like Morbid Angel and Dismember, Edge of
Sanity. That stuff really inspires me a lot to create new songs!
But basically you can get influenced by all music you listen to, when you
hear something that is cool, you sometimes automatically storage it
somewhere in your head and use it in a different way in your own music.

And what are the bands you are listening to ?
Right now, I am a huge fan of Pain of Salvation, that band is simply
amazing...I know a lot of metal heads won\'t agree with me, because they tend
to get very soft and poppy at times, but I like the diversity in their
music. They are probably the most talented band I know.
But I also listen a lot to Katatonia, I have been following htem from the
early days when they released their debut album. Other Cd\'s I have been
spinning lately are A

perfect Circle, Green Carnation and Opeth. Oh and
Necropahigst from Germany, those guys are good!!

As your fist album, “Portals to Uphobia” is signed by the french label
Osmose, so totally satisfied with their work ?

Well, we signed a 3 album deal with them, so it was logical that this album
is released by them and the next one will be as well! But yeah, we are very
satisfied with the cooperation with Osmose, it only gets better and better
lately.

Is a tour planned to promote this album ? Will french metalheads have the
chance to see you on stage soon ?
We were on a tour lately with Decapitated and Gorerotted, which was supposed
to be 3 or 4 weeks, but things went wrong and we got kicked off the tour!
It\'s a long story, if you want to know the details about it, then visit our
website www.detonation.nl, we have a statement put on it concerning this
crappy situation. We are no longer part of the actual tour bus, but we do
stil play several of the tour shows as scheduled. We just returned home
after touring the UK for a small week, which was absolutely great! Tomorrow
we are leaving to Germany to do the last 3 shows of the tour, and after this
we will concentrate on playing some headlining shows in The Netherlands.
Hopefully we will be able to finally visit our French fans early next year!
Bookers get in touch with us please, haha ;)

What are the bands you would like to go on tour with ?
I guess a tour with bands such as Soilwork, Hypocrisy or In FLames would be
great and good for us, but we are not at that stage yet. For now we are
happy to tour with whoever crosses our path, we just want to tour as much as
possible and meet as many people we can!


You wishes for the future ?
We really hope that Portals will get us to play more gigs everywhere, and
that the next album will kick even more ass! We have written about 8 new
songs already for that 3rd album, and it\'s going to be very good stuff if
all goes well. We\'ll just continue to do the things we like and see where it
will get us.


Other projects now ?
Now that you mention it, yes. Thomas and I are working hard on a new band
called Cardamon. The style is melncholic Rock/Metal with a female singer,
but not like all those Dutch Gothic bands out there, this is different. It\'s
like a softer version of Detonation, but then with female vocals. I think
it\'s very cool, and it\'s really a challenge for me to explore this kind of
music. Check it out at www.cardamon.nl and see what you think of it! Besides
Cardamon, I\'m also active in 2 other bands, Engorge and Concealed(former
M-90\'s), but nothing substantial to mention here right now.

And, to finish, could you explain to us, your vision about the “spirit of
metal” ?
The Spirit of Metal is something that lives and breeds inside all of us
metal fan. For me it is all about being myself and enjoying the music that I
like, I don\'t care about what other people think about it, and I\'m proud to
be part of this global metal feeling!

Thanx for your precious time, last words are yours.
Thanks a lot for the interview, big hails to the French metal scene,
especially Yyrkoon (great band). See you guys on tour hopefully early next
year, till then, take care...