Dr. Oz Interviews Zoog Von Rock from Angelspit their album “Carbon Beauty” while on their UK Tour
Angelspit are back on British shores once more! Coming straight off the back of their Apocalyptic Dissection Party Tour from America, they are destroying Europe once again with their unique industrial beats, bleeps and overdriven guitars! This is the world of Cyberpunk, question everything!
Tonight myself and my girlfriend (Nurse Lutease) are relaxing in the chill out room of one of London’s most infamous Goth clubs, Slimelight in Islington, famous for delivering up to the minute Goth, industrial, cyber club hits we anticipate the arrival of Zoog… “Hey! Ready? let’s do this”! A familiar voice speaks in my ear.
Ducking under some hazard tape we find a fairly quiet and secluded spot in one of the industrial stairways leading to the room where the band will play later.
Conveying his infectious enthusiasm, knowledge and incredibly upbeat nature there is a buzz of excitement in the air, clearly happy to be back at “Slimeys” after storming their last gig here, he promises their set will be longer with all three new tracks from their Carbon Beauty remix album.
Dr. OZ – How are you?
Zoog – Good! I’m amazing
O- How is the tour so far?
Z – Fucking good so far, I can say fuck right?
O – Of course
Z – Excellent, yeah the tour is going really well, Budapest was awesome! We love Europe, we really want to do more of Europe and England is one of my favourite places to play.
O – Where in England do you prefer to play?
Z – It changes from place to place, London is wild! You guys like to party like no other country.
There are various types of wild depending on where you go; so theres the hard, reserved wildness of Wales, the all out insanity of London and then there’s the AARRRGGGHHH! of Sheffield and Manchester, then there is the post apocalyptic, almost punk thing you get in Scotland. An then heading to Ireland , Ireland is probably the wildest place we’ve played; they are fucking crazy!
O – With each time you come back to the UK do you feel you’re going in popularity?
Z – Erm yeah I guess so. More people are starting to hear about us, they’ve gone “oh this aggravating band, we’re finally going to have a listen”. I think we’re getting bigger, I’d like to think so, but it’s difficult to tell as the genre is ebbing and flowing right now.
O – You’ve added two new members to the band how is that working for you?
Z- Yes! In the past we had this grand plan, we wanted to tour the world as a two piece first off, the trick of a two piece is that we can pack all our gear, all our synthesizers, merch, costumes, everything into two 20 Kilogram bags and go anywhere in the world with that.
We were attracted to bands that needed support so we either two bunks on the bus or on the backseats and the plan was once we did that we were going to expand. This is also about us expanding on our sound and trying something new. I feel the sound of Angelspit has been pushed as far as it can go in this incarnation. Along with our remix album, Carbon Beauty, we really wanted to question what is Industrial Punk music?
And with “Hello my name is” our new album which comes out in October its pushing the elements even more. It has more beauty, more emotion and not just sheer fucking anger; we’re just trying something different, as different as we possibly can.
O – With that in mind then can you tell me a bit more about the new album”?
Z – The concept of “Hello my name is” is about the occult of the corporation, it’s a religion we are all a part of nowadays.
I came up with this statement “If God money..then I am the devil! The whole thing is about exploring this concept, as Satan isn’t shocking enough! We wanted to raise questions, like what is anti-capitalist or anti – corporate? Today if you want to scare someone you don’t say “I put a spell on you”! You say “I’m going to audit you or you’re going to get sued, you’re insurance isn’t going to pay for that”. These are the things that really frighten us now being audited, labelled or even losing your job.
I was on the tube the other day and there was an advert for helping you find a place to live for your commute to work. So my question is this? To what degree are we losing the fun of life? I want to live wherever the fuck I want! Increasingly I feel our “fundamental rights” are being slowly removed from us. I want to be happy within myself as an approach to my career, I am more than a fucking career and this is a lot of what we talk about in our music but I think now more than ever that we have forgotten what it is to be human.
So it’s about the occult of the corporation, the taxation, the career ladder, audits, all this endless drivel, these are the things we are questioning now and it’s getting worse.
O – You have put a new track out to DJ’s promoting a new song; can you tell us about your reasons for releasing it this way?
Z – Vermin! Yeah! We wanted to do something a little bit gorilla, we know some amazing DJ’s and I love Metropolis but I wanted to send out a high quality mp3 to those guys supporting us. A kind of thank you and something to start the hype!
Vermin has that cheerleader sound sequence to it, which it follows. It’s mainly about the high collapse theory. Einstein has a load of conspiracy theories that no one gets into, the high collapse theory refers to the fact that if butterflies and bees stop pollinating, life on earth stops because plants can’t pollinate due to genetic alteration and pesticides. Butterflies and bees become sterile or avoid the plants altogether, this is actually starting to happen now! There is actually another track we might be dropping out there soon but we’re not going to say it’s by Angelspit.
O – In regards to what happens next for you do you have anything more you wish to add?
Z – We’ve got the rest of this tour, the album release in October, and we hit America. I just hope people dig what we’re doing and get inspired. Our roots are in punk rock and I think it’s time we broke away from the machine. A close friend of mine, Stephen Archer from Ego Likeness, once said to me “Industrial is punk with synthesisers”. That is something I’ve always taken with me.
If you remember in the early 90’s there was all this amazing cutting edge industrial music out there; I want to find that sound again!
Rock!
