With my tiny little corner of the internet here at Ostara Metal HQ (a desk in a tiny junk room), I felt very privileged to be given the opportunity to speak to Emilio Souto of the mighty SKILTRON. We (virtually) sat down for a chat, and there’s a couple of cheeky exclusives in here somewhere.
A big thank you to Emilio for taking time out of his day to speak to me!
For those of you who don’t know Skiltron, how would you describe the music?
We don’t really know how because we are in the folk metal scene and we are ok with that, but we consider ourselves a little different from the normal folk metal band because we are a heavy metal/power metal band with the addition of the bagpipes. We are happy as long as we like the music and the fans do as well.
As you have mentioned on posts, recording has been affected by the current global situation, has anything else been affected with the band?
We were lucky enough to make a couple of tours this year and we were going to have more. Our new album was in the process of being recorded, everything is recorded apart from the vocals. Martin (vocalist) was supposed to fly over to Finland to the studio to record the vocals. This was supposed to happen at the start of all this, so we are waiting for this to be allowed again. We had a lot of summer festivals which have been cancelled, we were supposed to go to Russia for the first time, but these have been rescheduled for next year so it’s not completely terrible.
How are you occupying your time without touring?
The funny thing is that I have a lot of free time now, and so whatever I have already recorded for the album, I am going through and changing arrangements, adding harmonies, it’s given me more time to work on that. I’m not saying that I wasn’t happy with the result, but since I have more time, why not? I have been giving guitar lessons online.
When all this is over, you’ll want to be back touring again, do you have any plans of where you want to start and where you want to go?
We have some shows that are supposed to happen in October but we are unsure if these will go ahead. I think our first shows will hopefully be in April next year, and that will be the official tour of the new album. We also have some summer festivals already booked. We will mostly be playing Germany, the Netherlands, and France, mainly Central Europe. (I had to ask if Skiltron would come back to the UK). We are playing more or less every year in the UK, we are trying to see if we can get any festivals, so we are planning October/November next year.
Is there something you can tell us about Skiltron that isn’t yet on the internet (until now!)?I can tell you something about the new album which hasn’t really been posted yet. It will be a full-length album, it will have 8 songs, 1 instrumental, and an intro and outro, so 11 tracks in total. I think I have mentioned this on a live thing that I was doing, but it’s not officially posted yet. This year is the 10th anniversary of our album The Highland Way, which is a very iconic album for us, which has the people’s favourite Bagpipes of War. We were supposed to do a 10th anniversary version of the song which was going to be a bonus track, but now we don’t know if it’s going to be a 10th anniversary or 11th anniversary of the track!
Do you have any advice for musicians out there at the moment that are going through the lockdown?
Well, I’m hoping for some advice myself! (laughs) I try within the restrictions to keep the band as present as possible because obviously we cannot play and we cannot release anything. We try to do online things with people to interact with them. We recently posted our full Bloodstock Festival show from 2018 on our YouTube channel. We have done the same as a lot of other bands have done and do lockdown versions of our songs. We are probably going to do more videos, and basically try to keep the band active.
Buy SKILTRON music and merch: https://skiltron.bandcamp.com/
Listen to SKILTRON on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4ijzdQPQtKqKGXx762wQJN?si=b5O3Mf4XSkWcxXeQAXK3WA
Follow SKILTRON on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/skiltron/
SKILTRON website: http://www.skiltron.net/
Trollzorn Records: http://www.trollzorn.de/
Ostara Metal 