Star: No it’s not, this is exactly what I want, this is exactly what I wanted to know. I mean you have to forgive me, I’ve been a fan forever and I didn’t want to loose this opportunity to ask you what the heck is going on.
VNV Nation: There are so many people who tell me… it’s here for the, I suppose the… it’s, we’re agnostic. Not agnostic, we’re a knostic philosophers, I guess, if you want to say it. There's a lot of knowledge and there's a lot of hidden messages within our music, and it’s not a negative thing. These are coded references which are all reflecting the main theme of the album, which is expressed at its most simple and its deepest. I was in Israel doing a DJ tour and I met some people who were scholars, these scholars, who had the most amazing conversation with me about the origin or Hebrew thought. And I was talking with them about the Kabala and what have you, because these are things I’ve read and I wanted to read and I wanted to know as much about. And I said you have all this symbolism, you have the tree of life, you have all these things which are purely symbolic representing other things but there’re mechanisms for us to understand. And the guy who spotted about twenty references in my music or in lyrics to concepts to this. And I said but these are universal concepts, they're archetypes, they occur in Taoism, in Christianity, in Buddhism, in so many religions, but they're all portrayed in different ways, they're still the same concept. Mine is this, it’s just human thought, human feeling and human emotion, human experience, but something with a little bit more depth to it than the two-dimensional boring reality that's around us. I don’t sing about chemical spills, I don’t sing about the cyber future, I think that was the late 80s bad dark future image that really should have died a death. But move on from that, this is what we do. What others choose to do, as far as music is concerned, is to themselves. So there is vast amounts of symbolism. Empires was my analysis of how… there is this parallel that I love in a poem that an Irish poet called Patrick Cavenor, he wrote, which was called Epic. And he talks about the epic events of a small farming town, matched at the same time with what was going on in the world, these huge events. And it was this parallel, one line would be a boring event but to us would seem incredibly mundane, and the next line was something huge and had ramifications for the whole world. And his point was, that to each of us we have a perspective on the world, it’s all relative. And I was saying well I like that… as it is small it is also large, there's a reflection between systems. My personal social structure landing is my little empire, it crumbled, fell apart, rose up again. And I’m amazed to see that as… it sounds like somebody who’s smoking pot and watching friends fall apart. But I watched so much of my life change, I watched the empire around me in real life, in the world at large, I saw empires rising and falling, I saw the creation of what we were moving toward a militaristic period, of the creation of empires, capitalistic empires. And at the same time I saw in my own life this parallel that all around me there were people who were in their own little kingdoms, even the job that we do and all the things around us is our little empires that we build up for ourselves. So it’s still at heart, you know, human nature, we have this need to build little power games and empires. I don’t like to play that game, I don’t like to play this game of power and might with people. I’m not an aggressive male, I never was and I don’t ever want to be. So the thing was… and yet ironically, here I have created this band and it’s, you know, doing all these things, but I use that, for me, in a benevolent sense it wasn’t the intent, it happened and I’m happy for that.

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