Riffer: Actually it's very hard.

Love: I can say that for me it's not that hard, but your question is understandable. What we do is that we´re just taking a step back in music evolution/history to be able to take one step forward. Late 60´s and early 70´s was such a creative time in western culture if you compare with the present. This goes for music as well as film, painting and all forms of art. Sometimes I feel that our culture, nowadays has come to a dead end.

Riffer: I think of a new day dawning as a symbol for a breath of fresh air, positivism and something different coming in a time when this type of riffs are not played any more... 

West: If it could be a new dawn for the hard rock genre as a whole, fine with me! 

Riffer: Oh yes, I think a lot of people need to hear riffs being played our way instead of the stoner way of riffing.

Love: I don't really know what the genre stoner rock includes and who has formed the outer boundaries of this genre. So, maybe some people call us stoner-rockers and if so, we must be stoner-rockers don't we? We usually define our music as root rock. Personally I think of acts like Fu Manchu, wich I like a lot, when you mention stoner rock, but I could be wrong.

West: I think we´re different in the way that there is more to us than just the completely fuzzed-out guitars and high pitched screaming that a lot of bands influenced by the 70´s are using. There´s more than that, you got some nice grooves, the jamming, the acoustic passages and the hammond organ. Sometimes I use just a tiny bit of distortion, more like bluesplayers in the 60´s, sometimes it´s on 11 all the way... We got dynamics in a different way than stoner rock bands, wich tends to be full ahead all the time. I guess Kyuss also is what you would call stoner rock?

Riffer: It took us a little over two weeks to record and mix it.

Riffer: Our lyrics are absolutely as important as our music but the lyrics must be heard with the music. Just reading the lyrics in an album booklet wouldn't do them justice and it would not make sense emotionally either.

Love: We write our lyrics together mostly. On this album there are no clear themes thru the lyrics. This album is more like an anthology.

West: I guess that makes us all responsible for the lyrics. Sometimes one guy provides more to a song than the next guy, but all the lyrics are made to something that we all can stand for. It´s the same with music. What I like personally is lyrics that has a little story in them, which takes you on journey. Then you can read between the lines and see that it could apply to something other than what you first thought. But it´s never just boy meets girl, that´s already covered in 99 percent of the music on the radio.

West: It´s funny that you mention the Jethro Tull-thing. Actually it didn´t sound that way at all when I first came up with that riff. But when I added the thirds played on guitar the second half of the riff, it came out very Tull-ish. It sounds like a piece of a Tull-riff being played backwards or something, so I have to agree to some point. It´s that raised 4:th, raised 7:th minor scale that´s not very common in rock, you´ll find it most in gypsy music. However we felt it was too good to be left out, so there you go... A lot of times when someone has an idea, we later find an obscure recording where someone already did something too similar! This could be very frustrating when you already done a lot of work on something. It was when I heard Rainbow´s second album, “Rising”, that I decided to become a guitarplayer. Before that I played the bass and liked Motörhead and all kinds of punkrock. Nowadays I tend to listen to either old blues or Indian classical music. On “Rasayana” you can hear me playing the Vheena, which is an ancient instrument mostly used for carnatic music in the south of India. On the next album I will probably introduce my Sitar instead, it´s the only instrument I´m regulary practising on these days. I would say that my heaviest influence in composing would be the late great sitarist Ananda Shankar who actually played some pretty heavy riffs in the 70´s, and in the field of improvisation I would say the up-and-coming Niladri Kumar, he can really stop time. So there´s a lot of different influences.

West: You can see that the artwork on the CD is actually made for that. You got the songs listed for an A, B, C and D-side. Some of the songs will be extended versions that didn´t fit on the CD.

Riffer: That's a question for our listeners and fans I think.

West: It´s very hard to review your own album when you know every note, every little mistake and all the circumstances behind the recording. However, I´m very pleased with the result, there is a tremendous amount of work put in to this album. If you play it real loud I think it could stand up to most of the already classic albums.

Riffer: To jam and improvise even more would be a nice element to add!

West: We have a whole bunch of new ideas and concepts to try on the next album. I´d like to develop a more meditative quality to some tracks, and a heavier feel to some. More extremes in both ends... more melody and more monotony. More complexity and more simplicity! 

Riffer: The boomy sounds in the beggining of “Rasayana” comes from my guembri, a Morrocan folklore string instrument and also from a double bass played with a bow. For the percussion Loofe uses a "darbouka" or "Egyptian Tabla". On the outro of "into the woods" we had two friends who are Swedish medieval musicians come in and play wood flutes and "Vevlira" an instrument related to the "Hurdy Gurdy".

West: Music is when performed right a whole spectre of emotions. It´s a very personal thing to the person listening and I believe that everyone responds different because we´re all individuals. A melody that´s pleasing to one person could be very annoying to another. It´s the listeners experiences in the past life that makes him associate in certain way. But as an artist you could somewhat control that by putting a lot of your own emotions into you playing, then it might pass on to the one listening. So on the next tour we will try to enhance this with the help of a light show that will be non-figurative most of the time, but sometimes you will see images and sequences that fit to the lyrics and the theme of the song. I like to see playing music and improvising in a group like collectively painting a three-dimensional picture in the air. You got your frame of the song, and you add colours with your instrument, all tones have different colours, you fill the air with small dots or long lines, sometimes transparent, sometimes very strong. You can fill in something the others missed or paint a circle around what they already did. The hard thing is to create images that you are satisfied with and that are clearly visible to others. This is interesting because just as sound is frequencies, light is too. There´s a few people with perfect pitch that always see colours when they hear sound, so there is a close connection in the human brain for this. I think it´s just a matter of practice.

West: I would like to go 30 years into the future and see a Siena Root concert. I think it would be good fun to see the 27:th farewell tour or maybe the spectacular reunion tour after our crashed solo careers. These gray-haired, near-collapse, fat men going on stage to play heavy riffs just one more time. I would also take some good advice from myself to avoid that terrible commercial disco-period Siena Root went through back in 2014, hehe... 

Love: I like history very much. It can tell us so much about our own time. But what we don't know anything about is the future. We can't read about it in any book, just imagine. I would love to visit the year 2104 because it's a time totally beyond my reach. I would like to see if what we make today results in a better world. Will there still be the same conflicts and the same ways of dealing with them? Will there be any justice, equality and understanding between human beings?

Love: How about "dynamic rootrock"?