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Out in Google Land!

The world wide web certainly brings a lot of information right in to our living rooms, yes. With it of course, it brings in a lot of bull***t as well, unfortunately.

When people come up to me and say "Oh hey, I read a lot about you just now, I googled you..." or "yeah I read your Wikipedia and..." and I'm just thinking "oh crap, here we go" and then I tell them "hey please don't believe everything you read about me on the Net, unless they are official websites, articles or updated interviews by me, because most of the stuff out there in unofficial google land is usually not correct or quite distorted - and Wikipedia is surely not the place to find vital info on an artist!"

Anybody can write stuff about an artist on the Net. Fans write fan material, others write "hate material" or insults about an artist. There are distorted interviews, reviews or comments and there is not much one can do. Wikipedia is also written and edited by fans, so obviously the pages cannot be trusted. But what I find really annoying is that there are "professional" music info pages out there, also called "Rock bibles", "Gothic bibles', musician/band guides, etc., that put out hilarious and completely false infos on artists. Those infos are taken on by other "professional music info pages" who pass their infos on to fans... and the Google ball is rolling. Why the hell don't they check with the official pages for once?

Of course, there are indeed many fine and good journalists out there that actually do get it all right. The problem is just that in the Google anarchy it can be impossible to see which pages are researched and updated and which are giving out incorrect info.

Sometimes one of my music colleagues comes across such a site and sends me a link with a smiley, and oh my, we can read the most entertaining things. Yes, I understand that my occult concepts and ideas can be a little too complicated and confusing for a more simple mind, but how they can get the most basic stuff completely wrong is really odd...

For example, there is one site where my three quite different projects are mentioned. Each one of them was categorised as "Folk Metal" and all of them were about, eh, "northern mythology". Nope, totally wrong (dude, you should have done your homework". Sometimes my music is classed as "Black Metal", sometimes even as "New Age"'. Needless to say, I don't play Folk, or Black Metal, or New Age.

On another site, a dude claims my album Essensual is about "Wicca" (?!), and thus nice music for Wiccans to listen to around a fire. Essensual is mainly about dark themes such as lost love, desperation, depression, suicide, abuse and incest.... so how anyone can think this is nice music about "Wicca", this is beyond understanding. Perhaps because on the album I have a song called Sun God, which is a song about a friend of mine who fell into great depression... Obviously the guy just guessed the concept and never bothered to check.

For the Hagalaz' Runedance project I had, I used many rare medieval instruments. Instead of mentioning the real instruments, or maybe just not mentioning them at all by name, some "journalists" out there just make some wild guesses... and boy the kind of instruments I use apparently... some of them simply don't exist. And the people that play them, oh wow. On Tartarean Desire (amongst others) you can read that Samoth and Trym from Emperor play the viola, violin, contrabass, and the harp. We were laughing really hard. Of course neither Samoth or Trym play viola or violin or anything like that. Somewhere I read about a girl called Kathrine being "in my band"... I have no idea who that could be. There are quite many musicians as well that apparently play with me... which they don't.

Great confusion has always been about my married life. I have been married to all kind of metal guys for example. It appears the writers just pick their favourite. Sometimes they even write I am married to "Emperor"... what the hell is that supposed to mean? I have also been married to "Darkthrone" and to "Cradle of Filth"... maybe I just look like a person with an extremely high sexual appetite that I am married to a whole band...

A lot of those music pages on the Net are just old and far outdated, yet they stand there as today's "facts".

Edi Gathegi, he is an actor in Twilight, made this recent statement: "At the end of the day, artists and actors change and move on. You can see things in a different way at different points in your life. Nothing lasts forever, right?" Absolutely true. What an artist said five years ago is often not relevant anymore today, as the person has moved on or sees things in a different light. Even more reason to always check with the newly updated official sites and thus correct the many Google pages, or take them down.

Bottom line... when out in Google land... beware of untrue "facts" :-).

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