Norwegian visionary artist Mortiis recently sat down with Metal Hammer and opened up about the 10 albums that changed his life. Following is an excerpt from the interview.

Iggy And The Stooges - Raw Power (1973)

Mortiis: "Talking of Iggy. I discovered it in the mid-90s, when you could still walk into a record store and find good stuff and it would cost more than a fiver. I was becoming a bit more horizontal in my musical tastes, and I was digging deeper back to see when shit started. David Bowie produced Raw Power, and I’m not going to say it sounds great, but it sounds awesome – it’s heavy and aggressive, and Iggy has the energy of 10 grown men in one little body. For three years in a row, I would play it at every after-party I had."

Venom – Welcome To Hell (1981)

Mortiis: "I love Black Metal, I think At War With Satan is great, and I love Possessed as well. But this has better songs than any other record they did. It’s got this evil-Motörhead vibe – it’s wicked and grimy as fuck. They just don’t seem to realise they’re making an album! What inspired Emperor about Venom was not so much the music as the whole vibe – they were over the top and just didn’t give a fuck about anything. And Cronos’s lyrics were fantastic – he was always about ten levels about anyone else. He was the Jim Morrison of black metal."

W.A.S.P – W.A.S.P (1984)

Mortiis: "I was ten years old when it first came out. I’d been listening to KISS since I was, like, four. My brother, who was two years younger than me and has never had an ounce of interest in music, got it for Christmas on cassette. I thought, 'Wow, what are my parents going to get me?' So I opened up my present and it was fucking Huey Lewis And The News. It’s like, 'You don’t even know me, do you?' I still think it’s one of the best debut albums ever. 'School Daze', 'L.O.V.E. Machine', 'I Wanna Be Somebody' – man, all that stuff is great. The live show overshadowed everything else, but Blackie Lawless is a great songwriter. (W.A.S.P’s 1985 single) 'Wild Child' came on the radio in the car the other night and I thought, 'Dude, this guy’s amazing!'"

Check out the complete rundown here.

Mortiis has dropped a new video for the song “A Dark Horizon”, which is taken from his forthcoming Spirit Of Rebellion release. The bleak-looking video was directed by Finish director Ari Savonen who Mortiis also teamed up with for the “Visions Of An Ancient Future” video. Watch both clips below.

Says Mortiis: “For the 'A Dark Horizon' video I decided to team up again with director Ari Savonen in order to create a similar dark and mysterious mood we previously captured with the 'Visions Of an Ancient Future' video. That first video symbolized the re-awakening of Mortiis (Era I) which is continued by the new video so to speak.

"Shooting conditions were intense, I had just come off a flight from Poland where I played a couple of shows and went straight to the set in Finland where winter had clearly arrived. Since we were shooting in an abandoned old factory and my new outfit basically consists of pieces of latex on my upper body, spending hours filming in a chilly factory environment basically meant I was freezing my butt off pacing around half-naked trying not do die.

"The things I do in the name of art…”

Mortiis released “Spirit Of Rebellion”, a re-interpreted expansion and continuation of the 1994 Era I classic “Ånden som Gjorde Opprør” on January 24 via Omnipresence Productions / Dead Seed Productions.

He comments: "I had to fend off a lot of demons to get to this point. They’ll be back, they always come back, but at least my vision is no longer clouded...When I was working on re-interpreting my old music for the Cold Meat Industry Festival in Stockholm almost two years ago, I had no idea that I´d eventually create an (almost) new record, nor that sections of it would be used for my first 2 Dungeon Synth videos since 1996. But here we are.”

“Spirit Of Rebellion” is available on CD, vinyl and in digital format via the following links:

- CD
- Vinyl
- Bandcamp
- Digital

Spirit Of Rebellion tracklisting:

"A Dark Horizon"
"Visions Of An Ancient Future"

"A Dark Horizon" video:

"Visions Of An Ancient Future" video:

(Photo - Soile Sirrtola)