10 : NOV : 06
ANGELSPIT Interview in Metal Hammer (Issue#157)
Interview by Natasha Scharf.

The name Angelspit sounds like a bit of a dichotomy - was that intentional?

ZooG: No...we stole it from a Sonic Youth lyric.

What is a Krankhaus - where does the name come from? What does it represent?

ZooG: Krank is German for 'sick', Haus means 'house' - so it's 'sick house'…but there's also the element of Krank meaning LOUD eg" Krank it up!"

KRANKHAUS is about taking the concept of pleasure to the extreme.
We're exploring the idea of 'If a person could do ANYTHING to gain pleasure, how far would they go?'
It mixes many different influences - Medical Fetishism, Burlesque imagery, torture, drug use, wealth vs poverty, secret societies - however KRANKHAUS is not set is any particular time period.
It's important to recognise that we always start with the concept behind the album. The images and music come from this. These images and music help communicate the ideas.
We have a hidden site that contains much of the ideas behind KRANKHAUS. We researched crimes, drugs, hallucinogens, extreme capitalism and cults.
If there is a central theme, it might be that people are capable of beautiful acts of creation, and horrific acts of destruction. It's about the beautifully grotesque (ie: when something is so beautiful it becomes grotesque)

Who plays what in the band?

ZooG: When we play live it's just Destroyx and I going hard.
I use a vocoder and a Theremin, she uses a vocal effect unit.

In the studio we both work on the music using our big modular synth and home made percussion.

How did you both meet?

ZooG: Through a mutual love of zines. She was running a zine distro called VOX POPULIS, I came onboard to help her. We got into art, photography and design. Music was the next logical step for us to take.

Why use distortion on your voice? What does it add to the music that you couldn't normally achieve?

ZooG: ...same reason we use distortion on a guitar!
Distortion is just another cool and extreme method to explore sound.
There are many different types of distortion - each of them mutate the sound in their own beautifully evil way.
We don't want a realistic sound, we want an aggressive unnatural sound.

how important is it to the Angelspit live experience to blow up your PA?

ZooG: It's not…we just do it. It's not essential, it just adds to the light show.
The sound guys usually hate us after a gig. We're a painfully easy band to mix …but somehow there always ends up to be MORE chaos, to much feedback and general audio woe.

So much industrial music is sounding samey right now so how do you keep your sound so fresh?

ZooG: Yes…I fear industrial has fallen into a formula.
It's too easy to make music. I think a song has to be like giving birth to a human-puppy. You have to have an idea, then angst over it and fuck hard to make it happen…then there's the endless pain of birth…
THEN once it's born, you need to turn it into a monster.

We listen to Noise, Ambient Noise, Electro Clash, CyberPunk, Metal and LOTS OF INDIE!

It takes at least 80 hours for us to make each song. EVERY sound is created from scratch. We use our modular synth to try and push our own boundaries of sound creation.
We make most of our drums using a microphone and a sampler. The squeaky front gate of our dilapidated house is the opening atmospherics to the first track on the album 'A La Mode, A La Mort'. The song is followed by clang percussion which was made from a recording of me smashing a metal shelf.
Much of the percussion in 'Vena Cava' was a recording of us destroying an ironing board.
'Flesh Stitched onto a Frame' and 'Black Wine' are played on an acoustic guitar we found in a back alley. We sat a large metal bowl filled with water over the sound hole of the guitar to radically change the tone.
There are sounds within sounds, concepts within concepts on KRANKHAUS that will reveal themselves only after many listenings.
It's too easy to make music that uses a preset of some new lifeless plug-in synth and write your drum track from some stock standard kit or using some boring fucking drum loop….then distorting it through a common and boring distortion plugin.
YES! Most 'Industrial' music sounds the same because people are making it using the same formula! Same sounds, same drums, same distortion plugin, same key, same chords, same bass line SAME FUCKING TEMPO!
...it's slowly becoming Electronic Bullshit for the Masses.
(Don't get me wrong - there is some brilliant EBM being made)

We're heavily involved in a collective called Crash Frequency - it's a group of Australian darkwave/goth/industrial bands. Crash Frequency has been a major breath of fresh air for us - we've had the opportunity to mix with Gothic bands, EBM, Old School Industrial, Electro and Noise bands.

KRANK IT UP!

Metal Hammer Magazine (Issue#157) : www.metalhammer.co.uk