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24 : JAN : 05 AngelSpit AngelSpit’s music is similar to tanzwut, or dance-metal with its grooves and percussion. What do you call your music, what are your personal influences – and how do you reconcile those with the masses wanting to drink, dance and screw to your music? Zoog: I would describe our music as being cyberpunk, necro-industrial or Electro-punk or even “clanging crazy stuff you listen too when you’re inebriated and angry”. Musical influences include Skinny Puppy, Sonic Youth, Cobra Killer and Mr Manson, while we draw upon a plethora of conceptual ideas inspired by historical and world religions, bizarre philosophies, cannibalism and daily corporate slavery. DestroyX: We like to make uber-high energy music that allows people to rock out at a gig or on the dance floor. I’m not interested in making wanky self indulgent music that has absolutely no appeal to anyone other than the composers. I want to make music that I would personally enjoy listening and rocking out to, by combining fat electronic beats with crunchy heavy guitars, vocoder and an unhealthy amount of distortion. As I am a very visually-minded person most of my inspiration I draw from my favourite artists like Orlan, J.P Witkin, H.R Giger and Bill Henson, as well a wide variety of music and literature.
A lot of your lyrics are painted with the futuristic and bleak imagery commonly associated with industrial music, but there’s a tribal, energetic aspect to them also. What is the band’s ethos or mission? Zoog: FUCK SHIT UP. Distort music
and lyrics so their meanings become confused. DestroyX: To incite riots among the bored and complacent. To inject energy, emotion and chaos into the consistently sterile music that pervades the airwaves today.
Vocoder and analogue synthesisers feature heavily on many tracks. What equipment do you both use and what are your personal favourite toys to play with? Zoog: We use a machine we call
the GIGA-SYNTH (read in a deep voice with lots of reverb). It’s
70Kg of genuine analogue Frankensteined fury that’s all inter-patchable.
It’s the messiah of FAT. We put voices, drums, samples and
analogue filth into it and it spits out the most beautifully vile
analogue Grr-owl you’ve ever heard. The output is sometimes
routed to the vocoder and DISTORTED TO SHIT. DestroyX: I’ll have what he’s having. My favourite toy is my bit-crusher called the Sonic Alienator which decimates and distorts my vocals.
The songs seem to fall between a rock style and an instrumental/ambient style. What steps do you take to writing fast and hard single material, and what is your approach to writing seedier, laid back pieces? Zoog: We start with a cute and fluffy pop idea. DestroyX: We then scream at it until it’s a damaged puppy. Zoog: Then we mince it up, put it in a tin and serve it up. If it’s not high energy, offensive, infective and very danceable then we keep grinding. We know it’s finished when it starts screaming FUCK OFF back to us. DestroyX: Slower songs are subjected to post trauma counselling. I don’t think we really have distinctly different writing approaches for each song; we just start the riot and see what’s left at the end.
You’ve released the EP and the majority of your remixes online for free. What possessed Angelspit to do this and how do you feel about the internet as a medium for musicians? Zoog: It’s all punk, baby! We decided that it’s more important to get the word out than make money so we can feed our unquenchable boot habit. You can download everything from http://www.angelspit.net – if we sell a CD it’s to recoup the price of making it (only a few bucks) and we request that the purchaser COPIES IT AS MUCH AS THEY WANT. DestroyX: We aren’t here to make money, and I’d much rather people listen to the music and enjoy it for free instead of confining it as a commodity. The internet is a great way to distribute music all over the world, as we have surprisingly had exciting responses from places such as the USA, South Africa, Denmark, Canada, Sweden, Japan and New Zealand. It is amazing where your music can end up.
Attitude and image seem a strong aspect of Angelspit, and that gives polish to your music, but what can we expect in terms of live performance? Zoog: Two well dressed psychos making as much vocal distortion as humanly possible. DestroyX: A high energy dual vocal attack proclaiming bold socio-political diatribes, brash anti-capitalist/consumer slogans, interpretive hand ballet and cool hair.
Finally, with a fistful of songs and remixes with the likes of Australian industrial acts, Ikon, the Crystalline Effect and Anxiety Whispers, what’s in the works at the moment? Zoog: More remixes with Crash Frequency (www.crashfrequency.com) bands and trying to get sponsorship with Absolut Vodka. DestroyX: We’re writing
our first full album, as well as developing new merchandise designs,
publishing a ‘zine and concocting theatrical stage performances
for our live gigs. We are also planning to tour and organise some
all-ages shows. Download the EP : http://www.angelspit.net/nurse_grenade/ |
