MetalSucks conducted an extensive feature interview with THE OCEAN guitarist and mastermind Robin Staps at a recent show at New York’s Knitting Factory. Staps talked about the band’s tour with KYLESA, LAIR OF THE MINOTAUR and WITHERED, touring in America for the first time, the writing and recording of Precambrian, and several other topics. An excerpt follows:

MetalSucks: It's [Precambrian] a really, really full album, and I just wanted to ask about the writing process of that. How you sort of approach writing an album that really is a work of art from start to finish, you know, as opposed to just a collection of tracks.

Robin Staps: "The writing process kind of happened in 2 phases: the first phase I was in Australia. I was backpacking there and I was having a really hard time personally, and I just had a lot of really good ideas during that time. It's always like that. When I'm traveling, I'm really inspired and I was just walking along endless beaches during the day and having all these ideas and melodies in my head and then trying to pin them down . . . write them down with a 4 string guitar at the backpacker's place I was staying. And that's the core of the songs on Proterozoic. The half of Precambrian that originated there -- when I came back, I worked them out and we called it pre-productions and worked on the details and stuff.

Then the second wave of writing was the Hadean/Archaean part of it. It was written maybe 4 months later. With my songwriting, it's always like that. It occurs in phases. I write all the songs myself for The Ocean basically. Like 97% of the music is written by myself, and the other guys basically just play the sheet music and stuff like that, like the bass player and the strings. It usually occurs in phases. It's something that is kind of magical. I don't really know how to control it or... you know, it just happens. Sometimes I'm in composing mode, and I just lock myself in my basement and just write forever. It just goes and after that it's maybe like 2 or 3 months when I'm not even touching my guitar. It's just like that.

The whole Precambrian thing came about . . . we've always had these 2 sides to our music: the epic side and the really heavy condensed songs that are just drums, bass, guitar, vocals. The new album we were asking ourselves "How are we going to get this together? What are we going to do?" Another album more in the vein of Aeolian, which is focusing on that heavy side or another album more in the vein of Fogdiver, our first album which was entirely instrumental and really an inspiration and a big band. Generally we decided that it's a bigger challenge to not try to merge the two approaches but to take them apart as far as possible and make a double CD, with one CD focusing on one side and the other on the other side. And then we were looking for a concept to kind of support that and that's how the whole Precambrian thing came into play basically."

MetalSucks: So how do you decide... you say that as if it were some order of God that told you to write the story about the formation of the Earth. How did you actually choose that concept for the album?

Robin Staps: "I came across it like visualizing the music really. That's what I usually do when listening to what I record, like my pre-productions, shut off the lights, put on headphones and listen to it, and try to think what it arouses in you or what you see when you hear this. I always felt like this was lava and volcanoes erupting and that's how I came across the whole Precambrian thing. I like to stay up and study geography so I was exposed to the whole subject matter before, so this is not entirely new to me. It just struck me as really fitting after realizing the music, to try and do something like that: like geological eons and eras. But I've been investigating quite a bit on the subject matter and trying to make it work. It wasn't really easy because you have to find the right... we didn't want to make the music kind of suffer from having to fit into the concept in a way that you would have to add like 3 more songs when you think that the album is done without those 3 just because they're a geological era. We didn't want to do that. It took awhile to make it all work smoothly together without having to cut anything, cut out any tracks or add more stuff when there is no need for more stuff. But it did work, it's always a challenge to get all these things together, but that's what I really love about what I'm doing so . . . it's great."

To read the rest of the interview, visit this location.