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18
: JUNE : 07 Where and when did it all start with angelspit - tell us how it began and what were your influences back then? ZooG: Sonic Youth, Skinny Puppy, Placebo. Mostly grunge, electroclash and cyber punk bands. We don't really listen to EBM or goth music. We are currently listen to music that pushes us a little…there’s some brilliant hard Electro-Clash and dangerously hard CYBERPUNK being pumped around here at the moment.Our favourite band at the moment is BAAL… they are from Japan and they are our musical twin band. Destroyx: We started the band in 2004… it was an experiment! We didn't know how it was going to sound… but we knew we liked working together creatively (we made zines together), so we wanted to know what it would be like to work on music together… and Angelspit was born.
On your website you mentioned, that there were a lot of difficulties while putting together "Krankhaus" and that it was demanding everything from you - tell us what happened? ZooG: It was a very trying time for us. We tried to harness these emotions and hardships to create art and music that was sincere and genuine. Art is a brilliant medium for personal change and aids with healing. Destroyx: Life is a pretty extreme thing sometimes, and you are never prepared for what might happen. The CD turned out pretty intensely angry, so you will just have imagine what sort of things we were going through by listening to the music.
Since the release of "Krankhaus" last year you made a great leap forward. You signed with Dancing Ferret Discs, been promoted in all the large gothic magazines, played with Crüxshadows, etc. How did all that come together? ZooG: Patrick (Our Label guy at Dancing Ferret) has been BRILLIANT to us. He organised the tour with CXS plus hooked us up with Wings Of Destiny (our touring agent in Europe). It’s all a little surreal for us, we’re used to doing everything ourselves – so we have more time to focus on gigs and remixing. Destroyx: Our label has been wonderful with the promotion of our album and have helped us get in touch with many artists and promoters. We are extremely lucky.
How much copies of "Krankhaus" copies have been sold and how much was it with "Nurse grenade"? ZooG: What’s really important to us is that people are listening to it and being inspired to make their own music. Nurse Grenade has been through many different incarnations. We have recently re-released it as a mastered and professionally pressed disc. This new version sounds MASSIVE. We get many emails from people who say that we’ve inspired them to push their art/music…which is a tremendous honour for us. A lot of the music and art we are being sent has in turn inspired us to try hard produce more detailed, intense works (both musically and visually). Destroyx: To be honest, I do not know how many copies have been sold, but judging from the reaction from our fanbase… it seems like we are doing much better than we could have ever dreamed. You can't really compare sales of Krankhaus to Nurse Grenade. Krankhaus was our first professionally pressed and mastered CD, with Nurse Grenade just being an experimental EP release.
You played yesterday at the WGT. How was it? How was the audience compared to e.g australia or other places? ZooG: We were so blown away by
the audience that we want to move here. I am serious – we
are living in Berlin until March08, but we have both fallen in love
with Germany and dearly want to move here. Destroyx: The audience was awesome. Our fans in Europe are amazing and it was so great meeting people from the other side of the world, with whom you have so much in common with. Even though the weather was extremely hot, I thought we played as well as we could (while boiling in our latex outfits). We are so grateful for the opportunity to play at the largest gothic festival in the world. Hopefully if we play again we will get to play at nighttime!
You mix rock elements with electronic, basically. Are for example the guitars real or digitally created? ZooG: We are trying to make electronic
music as organically as possible. We recorded many of the drums
and percussion – they are metal percussion. The guitars were
played by Graeme Charles Kent from the Australian band The Grand
Fatal. Graeme is hellishly heavy and has an out-of-control punk
edge….the guy is COVERED in tattoos and is a 100% legitimate
ROCK PIG!
Do you work with guest musicians in the studio or is all composed, played and recorded by yourself? ZooG: On Krankhaus and Nurse Grenade all sequencing, percussion and vocals were done by us – Graeme did guitars on both CDs. With our new material we are using more live musicians. We are wanting to use more industrial percussion and other instruments. The really cool magic happens when you start heavily processing and editing ‘real recorded instruments’. You start to sculpt these insane abstract and almost surreal musical lines which sound organic at the same time.
What equipment do you use - analog synths or more digital stuff like VST plugins, virtual synths? We only use real analogue synths and modulars. On Krankhaus we used: Analogue Synths Modular Synths Digital Shit OTHER More info on our gear here. Since moving to Germany, most of the above is now
locked away in storage back in Sydney…so we’re doing
everything on a CRAP laptop with a basic Modular Synthesizer and
a Roland SH101.
With Angelspit you're not just creating
music but a whole style around with your own fashion, graphics,
performance. Destroyx: We do pretty much everything ourselves… from music production to wig making for our photoshoots. However we do sometimes need our friends to help us. Soon we will need a whole team of people to keep up with our ideas because our ideas are just getting wilder and crazier. ZooG: We have several brilliant friends who we call on to help us. We are also trying to encourage people to be creative – this is why we set up Forum Angelspit (http://www.krankhaus.net/forum/ ), to try and connect like minded creative people. We talk about making music, fashion, art and being motivated to create. It’s reaching a point where we need to start adding people to Angelspit’s support network…any video makers, illustrators or animators who want to help our are welcome to contact us!!!
Fashion and an extreme goth style seems to be a vital part of angelspit. Any plans to conquer the world with angelspit fashion? ZooG: Fashion, just like the music, is one facet of what we do. At the core there is an idea. That idea manifests itself through music, art, fashion, literature, video. We have so much more creative exploring to do….and many more minds to corrupt…! Destroyx: I wish I had the time to design more fashion, however at the moment we are concentrating on our new CD. In the future I will be working on new visual material…. and maybe a fashion line. Who knows?
Read the German interview here: |
