3-21-03 Avalon Rising: the Interview
Progressive Celtic, Medieval rock band celebrates 10 years of diverse influences with new album, Spring-Summer tour. by Flash Oxnard

At 10 years old, progressive Celtic and Medieval rock band Avalon Rising is one of the oldest surviving bands of its genre in the San Francisco area - quite an accomplishment all by itself in an extremely competitive music scene. Having weathered personnel changes and a variety of individual crises, the band has come back strong and is poised to release its second CD, Storming Heaven. I recently spoke with lead vocalists Kristoph Klover and Margaret Davis, founding members of the band.

FO: Tell me a little bit about the band - how did it get going? To what do you owe your unusual musical influences?

MD: The combination of our two musical backgrounds and personalities, I guess - we met and decided we were going to play music together, even though we were actually coming from very different places.

KK: We met in the band. We met because of a band.

MD: But not this one.

KK: Right, we were in a different band together before this one.

MD: I'm coming from a Medieval and Celtic background, sort of classical and folkish really, and you're from.?

KK: I've just kind of taken things as they come. But then again, I'm a Deadhead, so I suppose that's probably part of that, that genre, that idea to just hear stuff and go "Oh, hey, let's try that out". But having lived with somebody that listened to quite a bit of Celtic music, it kind of rubbed off a little bit. But I never really paid much attention to it before about '84.

FO: And Avalon Rising is 10 years old now, right?

KK: Right. I always wanted to either be in a band or run a band; we started it in '93.

MD: And I came from a small town with no other professional musicians, and I met Kristoph and I fell in love, and I said, "my God", this is it! I want to play music with this guy, whatever it takes - he is the epitome of [musicianship]. so we had to make our different backgrounds work and this is what we came up with.

FO: So you decided to smoosh together a little Celtic, a little Medieval, some classical, some folk, the Grateful Dead, and whatever else came along?

MD & KK: Right.

FO: What about the name? What do you mean by Avalon Rising?

KK: We'll, I'd been living with Marion, Marion Zimmer Bradley, who wrote The Mists of Avalon, and had dated her daughter. And I had gotten all turned on to the Arthurian myths and legends. Actually, all of my life I've been interested in Arthurian stuff, and had read The Boy's King Arthur, and seen all the Arthur movies, and was really heavily into that when I was a kid, and played with that a lot.The Once and Future King, that's the one I really liked, the one with Wart.

So, having lived with Marion, I said: let's call the band something that has to do with Avalon. I like the idea of that kind of relationship in nature and in the world that that represents.I like that feel, and would like to bring it about in the world, thus the name Avalon Rising.

FO: The feel of what?

KK: Avalon, coming into the world. Avalonishness.

MD: The Celtic heaven, the striving towards Celtic heaven.

FO: Your first album did very well, didn't it? You had 100,000 downloads from MP3.com.

KK: Right. Years after it was produced.

FO: Years? When did it come out?

KK: 1995.

MD: It continues to sell steadily, and even gets reviewed now and again. People are just discovering it.

KK: It's been very satisfying to make an album that's continued to sell. I think a lot of people make albums and they sell them, and the interest dies away, and that's it. It's been really gratifying that the interest has remained - it surprises the heck out of me.

FO: So, how come it took you 8 years to make another album? Can you describe some of what's been going on during that time?

KK: Well, the band's been through some changes. Things were going on. Band members were going through personal trials and tribulations, and we were helping, we were part of that. When you're running a group where everybody is very important in the group as a personality, as a human being, you get caught up in everybody's lives. I suppose that's true with a lot of things, but it's really true of the kind of band that I like to run.

MD: Well, but it was mostly the drummers! The drummers kept exploding.

KK: We'd have a drummer for awhile, and..I don't know.we had a series of drummers. And every time we'd start recording, we'd get partway into the process and get another drummer. And then we'd go through a big period where it was more important to teach the drummer -  as well as all the other band members, sometimes - what the heck all the repertoire was so we could go out and gig, let alone record an album. So there was a lot of process involved.

I feel like the new album is coming out right at a time when I'm beginning to get some maturity on the instruments that I'm playing, and in my arranging skills, so that's fun. It's been 8 years, but boy, it's gonna be good!

FO: You've also totally rebuilt your studio.

KK: Yeah, that's right, went from an analog system to a high-end computer-based system, with much, much better mics.

FO: You built Flowinglass Studio in your garage, and not only recorded the first Avalon Rising album there, but several other projects as well.?

KK: Right, I'm a professional engineer as well as a musician. We've put out loads of albums in the last few years, including Margaret's solo album, Princess of Flowers, as well as 3 releases from Margaret's acoustic group Brocelļande, one of which is an album of Tolkien songs, licensed by his estate. Other projects have been solo albums by singer-songwriter Cynthia McQuillen, and a collection of songs celebrating space flight, in partnership with the National Space Society and the Mars Society - that one's due out very soon. We're also working on new albums from transcultural folk legend and multi-instrumentalist Nada Lewis, and her folk supergroup Panacea.

FO: So tell us what's new.

MD: We have another album coming out! Storming Heaven, our long-awaited wonderful Second Album. It's more Celtic-influenced than the previous one, it features a lot of Celtic tune sets, Irish songs, an original by Kristoph, some pagan material - and the current members of the band.

KK: Yeah, we're really pushing the hardcore Celtic rock end of things on this album, there's a lot of Celtic rock on it, which is a lot of fun. The other album really didn't have any Celtic rock; it had some Celtic-feeling music on it, and the overall feel was Celtic rock, but there weren't a lot of hardcore tune sets. This album really makes up for that by throwing in a lot of them.

FO: Who else is in the band?

MD: We have Cat Taylor on electric violin, Kevin Fanning on drums, and Mark Ungar on mandocello and electric bass. Mark also plays some hand drums on some of the Medieval numbers.

FO: How about you and Kristoph? What do you play?

MD: Well, we're both vocalists. I've had years of operatic training, and have also studied Medieval music. In addition to singing, I play flute, Celtic harp, and recorders. Kristoph has years of operatic vocal training as well and studied oboe seriously. He plays acoustic, electric and 12-string guitars and octave mandolin. Sometimes he and Mark trade off on bass and acoustic guitar.

FO: Why should someone buy this album?

KK: 'Cause it's great! It's got powerful arrangements, it's interesting, its got good solid rock 'n' roll in it, you can head-bang to it if you want to, and yet it's different from regular rock 'n' roll. It's music that has passion and believes in changing the world and all of those things that everybody always wants, but I think there's a little bit of depth involved in the album in places.

MD: .and touches of traditional Celtic music.

FO: Describe your typical fan.

MD: Our typical fan is usually someone who likes Celtic music, science fiction-related culture, very often pagans.

KK: Celtic rock fans, of course.anybody who's into Celtic music at all.a lot of just plain Celtic music people listen to this and go, "hey, that's a nice way to be doing Celtic rock." It's interesting to me that people have said that we sound different from a lot of the bands who are doing it - we're not a run-of-the-mill Celtic rock band; we tend to be more on the rock 'n' roll side and less on the country and western side, which is a different approach.

FO: I've been to a few of your gigs and noticed a lot of pagans in the audience.

KK: We encourage it.horn-wearing, all that stuff. I would say that we're definitely going for a feeling of Goddesshood and Mother Earth-ness; the pagan influence is quite noticeable in places [in the music], and powerful.and meant to be so. There's a certain feeling of the kind of spirituality that we're putting forth that fits nicely with that road.

MD: I like to call it fantasy music, in the way that fantasy literature is fantasy literature; it evokes this certain magical feel of another time and place that may or may not have ever existed, and I think our music evokes that as well.

KK: Definitely.

Avalon Rising is celebrating the release of Storming Heaven with a Spring-Summer2003 tour. For complete, up-to-date information, check their website at http://www.avalonrising.com. Check the right column for upcoming dates.