
Photo by Stefan Heileman
(At last the leviathan Ahab has risen again from the watery depths with a new album that will be released by Napalm Records on January 13th, and we are most happy today to present Comrade Aleks‘ extensive interview with Ahab co-founder Daniel Dorste.)
It’s hard to believe but Ahab was founded 18 years ago. Back then the trio from Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg consisting of Daniel Dorste (vocals, guitars, keyboards), Christian Hector (guitars) and Stephan Adolph (bass) tried to make funeral doom a bit more exciting and added strong nautical lines in their lyrics and, partly, in their music. So naturally their first album The Call of the Wretched Sea (2006) based on Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick was labelled as “nautical doom”.
Ahab strengthened their positions with the second album The Divinity of Oceans (2009), retelling this time the true story of the Whale-Ship Essex, which in November 1820 was sunk in an attack by a sperm whale before the men resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. Such a grim fate… and yet you can’t play funeral doom and develop the same theme eternally, and so the band turned in a more progressive and atmospheric direction with the next album The Giant (2012).
This time Ahab adapted the mysterious novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket written by Edgar Allan Poe, and the plot itself demanded another approach. The Boats of the Glen Carrig (2015) took the band even further to the shores unknown just as it was in William Hope Hodgson‘s novel of the same name.
But then the band sunk to the bottom of the sonic ocean just like some weird fantastic submarine. Seven years have passed and Ahab now returns with The Coral Tombs album, which will see the light of day on the 13th of January through Napalm Records. The band’s sound seems to adopt new influences, even as Ahab’s crew has remained the same since 2008: the band’s founders Christian and Daniel, Cornelius Althammer (drums), and Stephan Wandernoth (bass). It is Daniel who joined our discussion. Continue reading »