Gather ’round, pupils! Class is in session, and Professor Black is about to school the lot of you. When we last spoke with the Professor (or as his friends call him, Chris), it was off the heels of High Spirits’ last 10/10 opus, 2023’s Hard to Stop. Almost two years later and this underground veteran remains busy as ever, juggling bands and projects the way a circus act does flaming knives, or some other life-threatening object. Today’s flaming knife, er, project in discussion is Aktor: A vehicle which sees Black in conspiracy with Circle musos Jussi Lehtisalo and Tomi Leppänen. In this brand new interview, Professor Black reveals the origins behind Aktor’s latest “made for TV” album, Professori (Season Two), those quirky ’80s new wave influences (Spoiler alert: They’re not his doing!), and the possibility of Aktor ever taking the concert stage.
Greetings Chris and welcome back to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
Professor Black: The honor is mutual, Joe! Thanks for having me back. It’s always a pleasure to catch up a little and talk shop with you.
Always! The last time we talked shop, well, outside of shows and record conventions at least, was a couple years ago now, upon the release of High Spirits’ Hard to Stop. I believe that was two years ago now, or was it three?
PB: You know, it occurred to me yesterday. It was almost exactly two years ago. I think the release date for that was late November of ’23. So yeah, very close to two years ago exactly.
Now, two years later, we’re right on the brink of Aktor’s third album, which is what we’re going to be talking all about today. Before we talk about the new album, I’d love to start with some background on Aktor itself. When and how did this endeavor come to be?
PB: The idea, the seeds of an idea of working together with Jussi on doing some music collaboratively, I think our first attempt at doing that may have been in 2008, 2009. Something like that. It took then another few years for it to actually happen, for something to actually get done, which was the Aktor 7 inch. The A-side is “I Am the Psychic Wars” and the B-side is…a different song! “Buried by the Sea”, maybe? We recorded three songs. I know “I Am the Psychic Wars” is the A-side. Without having it in front of me, I don’t remember which of the other two songs ended up as the B-side. Anyhow, we did that in 2013 or 2014.
From there, it was pretty easy to build on that experience, build on that satisfaction in part, but also, the window was finally open to a process of working together on an album scale. The first album came together, again, I think it was 2014 that we were working on it for it to be released in early ’15. Back to your question, the idea came up very naturally. I believe he (Jussi) reached out to me around 2005, 2006. It was 2006 because he had heard In Sickness and In Dreams by Dawnbringer and was sufficiently intrigued or impressed by that. He shot me an email out of the blue. “Hey, I like your music. Let me send you some of my music.”, which he did. We kind of went from there. It wasn’t very long after that, one of us said to the other, and I don’t remember who, but one of us said, “Hey, maybe we should think about putting something together musically ourselves.” Maybe you could past that into the beginning of my answer to the question *laughs*. It goes back pretty far!
Jumping forward to the present day, when did ideas start coming together for this latest album?
PB: I believe, and I can answer well because of good file naming practices by Jussi, the first song was “song #2, demo 2021”, so I think the earliest song…now whether Jussi wrote it with Aktor in mind, because the guy writes three songs a day and records an album every week, so whether he wrote that particular song with Aktor in mind, I don’t know. He might not even be able to remember to say, but 2021 was the first song. I think the wave of the other 10 songs happened during ’22. By the end of ’22, I was adding my parts, beginning to think about the concept. The bulk of the actual work, of putting the whole thing together, was mid ’23 into ’24.
It’s been a long process. It hasn’t been a continuous process. We take it in phases, as a lot of virtual bands do. We’re not getting together to rehearse every week, obviously, cool as that would be. Obviously, we’re not that kind of band, so it does happen in phases. To say it took 2 or 3 years to complete, that’s true, but we weren’t working on it everyday of that time too. It was a lot of work, I can tell you that. It was a damn lot of work. It’s very nice that the release date is finally only two days a way and we can finally celebrate that.
Speaking of the latest album, let’s dive into it, shall we? Professori (Season Two) is the title, and it serves as a sort of musical companion to a fictitious Nordic noir TV program. Now I’d read that you had grown curious of Finnish mystery shows, which served as the inspiration for the lyrics here. At what point did it occur to you this could be utilized for an album?
PB: It occurred to me at the point where I realized I had reached the bottom of the barrel of those TV shows *laughs*, that it was time to move on from my fixation with the TV genre. That moment coincided with the moment of me needing to step up to the plate and figure out how I was going to approach the lyrics to the Aktor album. I decided, since I was looking to break with that fixation, that maybe it would also be fitting to give it a sendoff and incorporate that into my creativity a little bit, or a lot! The fact that my bandmates are from that part of the world too, I felt like there was an authenticity to it by virtue of their geography.
The reaction from Jussi and from Tomi, they were like, “Sure, yeah. Go for it! We trust you. I don’t think we get it completely, but it sounds cool and you should do whatever you want.” That was all I needed to hear. That’s always been the case. That was the case with the previous two albums also. They’ve always trusted me to direct what Aktor’s lyrical component is going to be, so it was no surprise that they were into it. For me, it made it surprisingly easy because without a strong precedent, or without a strong guideline for what Aktor’s lyrics “should” be, having a concept and a story to build with, actually, in a way, it made it easier for me to get that part done.
The last two Aktor album, were they connected at all conceptually?
PB: There were some repeating ideas. Themes of isolation. There’s a lot of solitude, the contemplative style of lyric writing, soliloquy. The topics? Yeah, solitude is a common theme. Pharmaceuticals, institutionalizations. The first song, “I Am the Psychic Wars”, not too many people realized that it was written about Roky Erickson, specifically the period of his life that he was institutionalized. Whether you want to or not, the first song of any band or any project becomes your launching point for any lyrics or concepts that follow from there. Institutions, pharmaceuticals, again, solitude, voluntary or involuntary: There’s definitely some common threads in the first two albums. They’ve not really carried over to the third album. The third album is freestanding for obvious reasons.
While you say this album served as a sendoff to your fascination with these shows, the key words of its title are “Season Two”. Is there a chance that Aktor could expand upon the storyline in the future with a “Season One” or “Season Three”?
PB: Absolutely. There’s a chance. I don’t know how great that chance is. As I was coming up with the story, I realized that it was the middle of a three season arc. Adding “Season Two” to the album title, obviously, that makes it a little more quirky and adds a bit of that Aktor weirdness to it, but it also reflects, again, as I was writing and experimenting with the characters and some of the…morality is kind of a strong word, but with some of the themes and cliches even, you can say, even with some of the cliches in the story, I was like, “Oh yeah, this is season two stuff.”
The lead changes. The Professori is the male lead detective, who has a protege, Sylvie, who’s female. The first season would, hypothetically, focus on him, Professori, the title character, and his unusual methods, his quirks, what some of the specific obstacles are in his environment, in that town, in terms of the hard-ass chief inspector, the corrupt mayor, the criminal overlord who’s connected into everything, including city hall. Season one sets up that environment and the way Professori works within it. Season two, Professori has disappeared. Sylvie, the assistant, is elevated to the lead, not only in solving the mystery, but she’s also the lead character in this season of the show. It was just figuring all this out. I was like, “Oh yeah, this is season two.” Again, it gives that little twist of Aktor weirdness with that being part of the title. Once I figured that out, I was like, “Yeah, obviously that’s a no brainer.” *laughs*
Hypothetically, let’s say a streaming service hears this album and wants to create a series based off of it. If this was a real TV show, what actors, no pun intended, or actresses would you like to see casted?
PB: Oh wow! That’s a good question. I have a slippery answer for you. One of the reasons that I was drawn to this genre of shows from this part of the world is because I wasn’t familiar with any of the actors in these shows. There was none of that where sometimes, you’re watching a show and it’s great. Then, some dingdong actor who you can’t stand walks into a scene and you’re like, “Ugh! Now this is ruined!”, because they bring that baggage with them. I’m sure for a Scandinavian audience watching a Scandinavian show, or a Finnish audience watching a Finnish show, I’m sure that happens just as frequently for them.
For me, being an American, watching from here and watching a TV show that’s been made in another part of the world, I don’t recognize any of the actors. That’s part of what drew me into the genre, because everything was fresh and unfamiliar. The answer to your question is I would want complete unknowns playing these characters. There’s a type, obviously, which you can get from the album cover: The stuffy chief inspector, Professori himself has kind of a rumpled…he’s a little bit unkempt. Maybe he has a little bit of a lazy eye going on. There’s something a little off about him. Then, there’s Sylvie, who’s super put together, motivated, probably has more ambition than talent at this point in her career, but works just as hard nevertheless. The straight answer is I want nobodies.
You’re no stranger to concept albums yourself, having explored this realm in the past with Dawnbringer. What are some of your favorite concept albums and why?
PB: Good question. Well, (Iron Maiden’s) Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, which we’ve always been told by Steve Harris is a concept album, but I’ve never seen that fleshed out very much. I don’t know if there’s a separate narrative by anyone that puts a little more structure to it, but he regards that as a concept album, so w should too. That’s the off the top of my head pick. I like the Nordland albums by Bathory a lot. (W.A.S.P.’s) The Crimson Idol is one that’s easy to point to. Although there are W.A.S.P. albums I like better than that one, obviously, that’s a good concept album to point to.
They’re not metal. They’re kind of an art rock group called Devil Doll. They have five albums. They’re all concept albums, but they’re all very non-linear. The narrative is very loose. It’s very sensory. There’s a lot of scenes that are missing from those narratives. Great stuff, definitely not for everybody, but stuff that I love. I’m sure there’s others that I’m not thinking of. The Quicksand Dream album, Aelin – A Story About Destiny, is a great, great concept album. Anyway, there’s a few. That was probably 5 or so, right? What about you?
That’s a great bunch! As far as my all time favorite, and the first that comes to my mind, I must ask: Are you a (Queensrÿche’s) Operation: Mindcrime guy?
PB: Not so much. I’m a Rage for Order guy more than anything.
That makes sense.
PB: Actually, you could argue that’s a concept album. That’s an elastic term, right?
I’m sure you know that story about The Warning and the sequencing on that record.
PB: No!
So that technically is a concept album, and there is an order the songs are supposed to follow. Apparently, when they presented it to Capitol, they were turned off and said, “Nobody listens to concept albums anymore. That’s some Pink Floyd bullshit.” So they jumbled the track-list, but if you listen to the lyrics, “NM 156” is the first song and “Roads to Madness” is the finale. I forgot what the order was from there, but there is a narrative to The Warning.
PB: That’s interesting. That’s something that’s in the standard record contracts of that day. The record company does reserve the right to put the tracks in whatever order they want to. The U.S. release of (Motörhead’s) Ace of Spades, the opening track is “The Chase is Better than the Catch”. *laughs* You know that wasn’t Lemmy’s idea!
I must’ve picked that record up when I was 11 or 12 years old. I had the CD already and always knew the opener as “Ace of Spades”, so when I dropped the needle on it, I was like, “This can’t be right. Is this side B?”
PB: That’s exactly what I thought! “Oh, I put on side B.”, which wouldn’t make sense either. Oh, here’s one of my favorite concept albums, and in terms of how I have loved it over my lifetime, it’s equal to Seventh Son, and that’s Inishmore by Riot.
Great record!
PB: I’m glad I thought of this now, otherwise I would’ve been calling you in the middle of the night saying, “I can’t believe I didn’t think of Inishmore!” That’s top tier.
Absolutely. I’m glad we were able to drag this question out that we could mention it!
PB: Yep, dragged it all the way out to Inishmore.
You mentioned earlier, in the case of this album, that your bandmates in Finland will come up with the music prior to you writing the lyrics. Is this always the case for an Aktor album?
PB: It’s music first, lyrics second, with the intermediate step of vocal melodies. I’m not the type of writer who fills notebooks with lyrical ideas and then refers to that when it’s time to write for an album. That’s just never been my process. My process is to listen to the song, imagine a vocal melody that would fit. Sometimes, I’ll even record a scat vocal melody as a placeholder while I think about what the actual words would be. But yeah, music first, and then lyrics would come after that.
I’ll add that as Aktor has progressed from album to album, the music, when it comes to me, has been more fully formed each time. With the first album, I got guitar riffs and we went back and forth to build the rest. With the second album, I got guitar riffs and there was some acoustic guitar. There was already some keyboards happening on that. This time, I got basically fully formed…there was no bass, but there was programmed drums, rhythm guitars, and a whole lot of synthesizer stuff happening.
I’ll admit, I was a little bit annoyed at first because there was already so much stacked up onto these riffs that I’m like, “Where do I go?” The openings and the tonality of all this stuff had left me these tiny little openings, but as I began to work on it, I realized that was actually making my job pretty easy. “There’s only maybe 3 ways to sing around this. I just need to pick one of those 3 ways and I’m good.” It’s kind of like with the lyrical concept. It’s counterintuitive. It wasn’t what I expected, but it actually made it easier to write the lyrics, having this framework. Just the same, it made it easier to find the vocal melodies with all this other stuff piled into the songs, but I’ll admit, I was annoyed at first *laughs*. “What am I supposed to do, man?” Once I got going on it, it was still a lot of work, but the process of finding my openings was really easy.
Aktor’s music has never adhered to the conventional norms of rock music, let alone metal, and this latest album is no exception. There’s an underlying ’80s new wave vibe that dominates, and really compliments the emotion of the lyrics throughout. Are you yourself a fan of this style, or is it mainly an interest of Tomi and Jussi?
PB: It was coming from the other guys, for sure. All I know is what the file names say on the demos that I get. That’s my only clue as to what the origins of a particular song might be. I’m not conversant in pretty much anything other than hard rock and heavy metal. As you know, I don’t listen to new wave. I don’t listen to punk. I don’t listen to a lot of these adjacent genres. When I get a demo that’s named “Devo.MP3”, maybe there’s a nugget of Devo in this. One was called “Grand Funk”. One was called “Pretty Maids”. This is the original file name of the demo that I get. Where it goes from there is, I have to assume, completely different from where it began, but that’s my only clue as to what the point of origin is on some of this stuff.
I think the mix does some of that work too. We don’t have a lot of conversations within Aktor about where we want to go creatively, what our intentions might be for a song or an album. We kind of just go and trust the process to work, to bring us somewhere worthwhile. That being said, one thing that we did discuss was wanting a harder sound this time around, just something that is heavier, shinier. I think we got that for sure. I think the first two albums have more of a classic rock production and mix. This one is way more, like you said, new wave, synthy. I think some of what you’re hearing is as much of a result of that as it is the actual music. I think the production does a lot of that work.
When you couple that production with the variety of the music itself, what’s great about Aktor is that no two people will hear the same thing. It’s easy today to say, “This band sounds like that band.” In the case of this new Aktor album, upon first listen, the reaction was, “It’s Voivod meets Blue Öyster Cult meets The Cars.” Yet someone else could hear the same album and pickup something completely different.
PB: We picked up on that, or at least I picked up on that, after the first album. “Man, people are really hearing this in such a variety of ways.” Some of those things were really strange! Not that I was put off by it, on the contrary. Obviously, the music is very saturated. There’s a lot of layers. Like you said, it’s gonna grab people in different ways. People are gonna catch onto different aspects of it. It’s gonna be a very individual experience. I caught onto that after the first album and actually, that kind of is what I was getting at with calling the second album, Placebo.
With Aktor, you can almost suggest to somebody what it sounds like, or they suggest to themselves what it sounds like, or how they want to hear it, and that becomes how they hear it, if that makes sense. It’s like a musical placebo effect. I can hand it to somebody and say, “This sounds like Blue Öyster Cult.”, and they’ll be like, “Oh man, you’re right! It does!” Or I can hand it to somebody and say, “This sounds like Angel Rat from Voivod.” They’ll be like, “Yeah, you’re right!” There’s no wrong answers. That was what I was getting at with the title Placebo.
This sounds like whatever you expect it to sound like, maybe other than Dismember, but what do I know *laughs*? The new album’s mixed by Dan Swanö. Maybe there’s a Swedish death metal thread that somebody will pick up on. I don’t know. It’s all good! There’s no wrong answers. I was saying in one other interview, it’s exciting to be so close to release because now I can see what it sounds like. I can read some of the reactions and the descriptions that people assign to it. I’ll definitely learn something from that, and I will definitely myself hear the album in a different way as a result.
For how all over the place Aktor is, I don’t know if I’d be surprised to hear an HM-2 pedal on a future album!
PB: We don’t have any rules! Like I said, we barely have any conversations about artistic matters. It’s usually like, “We’re gonna use Dropbox to send you those files.” It’s more technical, process-oriented stuff that we’re usually meaning to discuss. Everything else is pretty intuitive. Anything goes, thus far anyway. We haven’t had to veto anything *laughs*.
As of now, Aktor has strictly been a studio project. While I’d imagine it’d be hard given the geographic circumstances, if given the opportunity, would the band ever play live? If this was unfeasible, would you ever play these songs live with the Professor Black band?
PB: We did once play “I Am the Psychic Wars” with the Professor Black band, so it has been attempted. It wasn’t perfect, but in my memory, it didn’t fall on its face. At least that song we know. Not impossible. There are two ways to consider Aktor playing live. One is the playback way and one is the 15 piece band way. Neither of those sound super awesome to me. I think the 15 piece band approach is a lot more satisfying, obviously, than the playback approach, where it’s just the three of us and a whole heaping pile of backing tracks. You can say they’re both not super feasible for different reasons.
I’m not excited about doing a playback show. I don’t see that as worthwhile because that would mean the three humans onstage would really have to carry a lot of the presentation of putting the human persona on it. That’s pretty daunting. Assembling a huge cast of musicians to do it, that could be fun. That could be pretty satisfying. The amount of work…you have to go all the way with it, right? Either one of those, you have to go all the way with. The amount of work in doing it that way, I don’t know if it’s realistic.
After the first album, we had the convenient excuse of, “Well, we don’t have enough songs. We’re not just gonna stand up there and play our album and say, “Thank you, goodnight.”” After the second album, it was like, “Well, we can’t really use that excuse anymore, but there sure are a lot of synthesizers now! I don’t know. Who’s gonna poke all the buttons?” Now that we’re on the third album, we do get the question. It is fun to think about, but once you try to move it from the idea stage into something a little more strategic, it gets overwhelming pretty fast. For the foreseeable future, it’s hard to imagine a way it would work to do that.
While both are unfeasible, being the purist I am, I gravitate towards that idea of a 15 piece band. The last couple times I saw Roger Waters, and I know this is the second time in the interview I’ve brought up Pink Floyd, so forgive me, but the last couple times I saw him, he must’ve had close to a dozen people onstage. And I thought to myself, “Good for him. If that’s how many people it takes for him at 80 to faithfully execute that catalog live, without clicking play on the Macbook, God bless.” So yeah, that’s where I lie on this issue.
PB: Yeah, and I’d like to sometime in my life take on a musical project of those dimensions, but at the same time, I don’t feel now’s the time or that Aktor’s necessarily ready for that. I think Roger Waters probably gets a slightly higher fee than we would be able to achieve, a slightly bigger venue, maybe *laughs*. He’s probably playing to at least 300 people a night *laughs*! That’s a whole aspect that, in my initial answer, I didn’t really touch on that. There’s the financial and travel logistics that would be involved in something like that. It’s a fun thought experiment to imagine Aktor live that way, but I think it’s a ways off. Let me put it that way: It’s a ways into the future for something like that to happen.
Speaking of the future, as of now, what can we expect from Professor Black in 2026?
PB: Well, what’s confirmed that I can announce specifically is in February, we’re doing a mini-tour on the west coast with High Spirits and Savage Master, and a third band called Oxygen Destroyer. That’s a pretty cool lineup. High Spirits and Savage Master have toured together a lot. That’s always a great show. The bands, for as different as we are musically, we do have a lot in common. It’s a fair fight. We’re a good, even match. We do share a lot of audience too, which is fun, of course, for the people buying tickets and going to the show. I think adding a band like Oxygen Destroyer widens that circle, potentially a lot, so we’re looking forward to playing to some new people in new places, so that’s in February.
In March, the Professor Black band is playing Hell’s Heroes. We’re actually the closing afterparty band both nights of the festival. This will be the rock n’ roll version of Professor Black, so we’re doing Superchrist on Friday and Motörhead on Saturday. That should be a wild time for the people who don’t wanna go home after the headliners. It’s sudden death overtime with Professor Black *laughs*. That takes us up to March. Honestly, the rest of the year, I’m looking forward to getting back to doing more songwriting, flushing out the backlog of song ideas and a couple of loose album concepts. Not that they’re concept albums, but ideas for albums I’ve been keeping on the backburner while I’ve been finishing this book that I’ve been writing for about 7 years now.
I’ve been writing a book about Bathory together with a partner in Sweden. We are very close to finishing the manuscript right now. In the beginning of ’26, it’ll be moving into layout and that’ll be out of my hands until it comes out, hopefully late in ’26 and we do some promo for that. The bulk of 2026, at least the summer and the fall, I’m gonna try to get reacquainted with myself as a songwriter. Like I said, see what’s on the riff pile that might be worth pursuing. I have a bunch of partially recorded songs and there’s probably some stuff worth finishing there. There’s probably some stuff that’s not worth finishing that’ll just fall by the wayside, and that’s fine.
I used to get frustrated with myself when I would abandon things unfinished, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve accepted that as part of the long game. That’s just part of the process. If it didn’t get finished, it can’t be because it was so completely awesome at the time, right? There was a reason it didn’t get finished. Maybe that’s fair. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be finished at the time. That being said, I do have an entire album in the style of Professor Black’s Sunrise that’s meant to be a sequel/companion to that. That might be my first priority when I do get back into studio mode. I’m trying to button that up and get that released, and then hopefully move on from there with some other cool stuff.
And you’re in Black Sites now!
PB: I am playing drums in Black Sites. Actually, that’s the very next thing. We have my first gig with Black Sites on December 6th. Yeah, you’re right. Thanks for pointing that out. Like I said, I’ve been overbooked lately. As a younger man, I could keep 6 months worth of dates and places in my head, in the past or the future. Now, I have to look at my phone to see what day of the week it is half the time. I do apologize, but that’s why we got you guys backing me up when I need it, so thank you *laughs*!
The new Aktor album, Professori (Season Two), is out now on High Roller Records. For more information on Aktor, click here. For more information on Professor Black, click here.