Interview: Ultimatium (Written)
Games, Brrraaains & A Head-Banging Life bring you a written interview with progressive power metal band, Ultimatium.
1. Hello! Thank you for taking the time to chat to us. First things first, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started.
Hi, our start dates back to 2001, when Matti Pulkkinen started this band as a solo project to showcase his keyboarding talents. First two demos introduced also handful of vocalists and on third demo, where Harri Niskanen joined group, vocalist JT Partanen was doing the leads for the whole demo. After that we got signed to Mastervox records, and made two albums with them. Vocalist Tomi Viiltola joined the band on second album, Hwainoo (2008), after JT had left. Third album, Vis Vires Infinitus, came out 2015 and by that time, drummer Matti Auerkallio joined the band. At the time we were already out of Mastervox Records and we’re working independently. That album took us steps towards more progressive output and we continued evolving that style and sound with Virtuality (2020), with enhancing the vocals with four extra vocalists, making it a theme progpower opera. So, that’s the short version…
2. Someone comes to you and asks you to sum up what kind of music you play – what do you tell them?
We play progressive powermetal, infused with symphonic and arcadish keyboards. So it’s fast songs, combined with tricky rhythms and also a lot of long, mid tempo and slow songs. Kind of something between Stratovarius and Dream Theather, with elements from Ayreon and Devin Townsend project.
3. What’s currently going on in your camp? New releases? Tours? Etc.
We’re currently making new album, but are not yet in a stage that we could reveal more of it. We also released new video from Virtuality and next one will go out mid-February.
4. What has been the most positive experience of making music to date for you?
I think release of any album is always a positive experience, to let go of something that you’ve been working for years and let the listener enjoy it.
5. Likewise, what has been some of the more challenging aspects and how have you overcome them?
Between the Hwainoo and Vis Vires Infinitus, there was a lot of challenges with the members of that time and there was practically no way to get our of that mess other than firing some members and moving on.
6. How do you handle the modern expectations of being in a band? Always online, having to put out content constantly, your success measured in likes and follows?
Hah, yeah we don’t really put content out that much. We should, definitely, but we’re kind of people that doesn’t meet face to face that often and whenever we do, we rarely remember to post any pics and stuff. I don’t see that the likes and follows determine our success, we do long albums, rarely, and in a bit niche genre, so every new album we managed to put it, is a triumph itself.
7. What’s something that really ‘grinds your gears’ about the industry/business these days and what would you propose is done to combat it?
One word: Spotify. When it first came out, I was like ‘nice, people are again paying for their music’. But it soon turned out that the money did not really get to the artists or not at least to independent artists. But at the moment is necessary evil that we just have to live with.
I think best way to combat is that if you find a good band from spotify / youtube, whatever, go visit their homepage and purchase something, even small. Or go to nearest record store and buy one album at least.
There’s also new platform coming up, ROKK, one founder is drummer from Kamelot and hey promise much more fair distribution of money, but sadly they’ll probably not have means for independent artist to upload own music to their service. But at least the promises are good, hope they get the service running smoothly.
8. Speaking directly to listeners – what would you ask they do to help support your music?
We have two hi-res digital releases in our homepages, Vis Vires Infinitus and Virtuality, buying any of those helps us most, since there’s no one else to get a split of that money (except for small fee of credit card provider) except the musicians.
9. Outside of the music, what’s do you do to relax?
Playing games, mostly strategic games, like Civilization 6, but now I started Cyberpunk 2077 from the beginning, with that 2.1 update. That game as some similar elements than is in our latest album, Virtuality. And of course because we are Finnish musician, to relax, we usually take a beer or two.
10. Where can people find you?
For a lot of information, there’s www.ulti.fi and we’re also in the wretched Spotify and we have extensive amount of videos in https://www.youtube.com/UltimatiumMetal. In social medias, we’re always found with UltimatiumMetal “handle” or what’s it called, since Ultimatium alone is usually taken already.
