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1. Clan Of Xymox

   November 7, 1997 by admin

   An interview with Clan Of Xymox founder Ronny Moorings:

   1. How has the evolution of music technology affected the way you make music? Do you think it’s affectd your creative process or just made things easier on a technical level?

   The main thing in music is that artist always try to find other ways to approach things as with painting etc. The development of all sorts of technological instruments are a big help in that. It gives you greater freedom to express your inner world without being too dependent of other people to interpret your ideas. So on a technical level it makes things easier, but you still have to come up with alot more than that!

   2. The band name went from Clan of Xymox to Xymox and then back to Clan of Xymox – why?

   To confuse you and the rack jobbers in the record store. OK, every time we changed the name it was a sign there was a certain change for us. So I feel Hidden Faces connects better with the 4 AD period, so you could say it is the 3rd album of Clan of Xymox.

   3. How would you compare the acceptance of gothic/industrial music in Europe and America?

   I think the USA is a bit slower in recognising that in Europe Gothic/Industrial etc. is making a huge come back and that it is “cool” to wear black again

   4. Since your music makes use of a lot of electronics, are you thinking at all about how it will work live as your’re composing it?

   No never, after everything is recorded I simply look at the songs which would work live and as we have already a whole back catalogue it is easy to pick the right songs for playing live.

   5. What are the advantages of being on an independent record label?

   I guess it is more personal, you know everyone involved with the label and you get much more attention than you would get with a Major. You also have more control over everything you do and you are better informed about what is going on. So you could say it is much more artist friendly, but I only talk about Tess ; as there are a lot of Indie labels who are not in it for the band/ music but to rip off their artists.

   6. If you got the right offer would you consider releasing your music on a major label again?

   I have learned the lesson not to sign with a major label as I think they are not in it for the music , but for the obvious reason to sell a product which has to sell millions in order for them to be interested in it.It’s very impersonal and it operates as a big multinational. It is frightening to know there are only five major labels dominating the whole music industry.That’s the reason people should give independent companies their full support. Every record we make for an independent label is one step forward.

   7. Do you make a conscious effort to make each album sound at least somewhat different than your past releases, or is musical evolution something that just comes naturally?

   Whatever you do and where ever you are, you are always influenced by anything you hear, see and feel. No one can block out influences around you. The only thing you can do is trying to be as selective as possible and stick to your taste. During” Phoenix” Xymox was in a real identity crisis. At the time all sorts of people were telling me in what direction the band should go. At the time I was living in London and I think the worst thing of London is that it really wants you to be the hippest of the scene. You can’t help but to get caught in that musical trap. That’s why there is already on Phoenix an indication of moving towards a sort of dance area, which was coming up in the UK in the early 90′s.( Even the Cure got caught with their Mixed Up album) Metamorphosis and Headclouds are just a follow up on that general mood everyone was in. On Headclouds Xymox tried to combine dance grooves with a melancholic sound plus vocals. It was part of an experiment of which we now steered clear of. Personally I find it always interesting if a band tries something different for a change as it is easy to repeat your same sound over and over until people are sick of it. Not too many people appreciate a band changing or trying something different.(see Depeche Mode) After Headclouds I moved back to Amsterdam and had a break from making music and regained my interest by meeting different people, going to Industrial / Gothic parties and basically rediscovered myself again. Now I am sick of anything relating to dance as there is nothing underground about it any more. OK that was then , this is now….In a way I feel like I have come full circle again. Now with the new album “Hidden Faces” the band has returned to it’s roots…

   8. I saw you in November in NY- was that part of a full US tour? If so how did it go?

   Well since you were at the Bank you could see that the audience was ecstatic, and kept asking for more. We played 13 dates in the US in November 1997 and it was part of a full US tour.

   9. When you started making music, were you thinking about it in terms of a career, or just a creative outlet?

   I started Xymox in Amsterdam with releasing Subsequent Pleasures on my own label.(1984)Of course I wanted to tour , so I asked my at the time girlfriend Anke to play the bass live and sing on one of my tracks of Subsequent.Pleasures .and my former roommate Pieter to play the keyboard. Looking back I still have good memories of it’s creation. At the time I studied and tried to make some music,,but most of the time didn’t have a clue what I was doing on the keyboards. It was recorded on a portable 4 track recorder. Also it was a period when you had to play everything in real time. The whole process taught me a lot about the workings of music in general. Now looking back at those tracks I find them pretty chaotic. The good thing about “Subsequent Pleasures” was that one day when I was promoting the mini-album in Nijmegen I met Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance in a restaurant. They were having dinner at the same table I was sitting and they told me they were the support act of the Cocteau Twins. After talking for a while they invited me to see the show and asked me to come backstage after the show. There I also met the Cocteau Twins. This was the first real life encounter with 4-AD artists. I gave Brendan a copy of Subsequent Pleasures and we kept in contact. A few weeks later he asked me if Xymox wanted to do a tour with them in the U.K. Of course we felt honoured and accepted the invitation…….. Soon Ivo Watts , the label boss of 4-AD offered us a recording contract………….

   10. Whats in the immediate future for you? We’re still touring our new album Hidden Faces and we are scheduled for festivals, also we will release a new single “This World” on Tess. Further we release on various compilations certain tracks. Also some live dates in the US, Mexico and Canada this fall.

   Category: Feature InterviewsTags: darkwave, gothic, industrial | Comments Off

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2. Luscious Jackson

   by admin

   An interview with Luscious Jackson vocalist and bassist Jill Cunniff (conducted 12/97)

   What do you think of Lilith Fair?

   “I think it’s a really great idea. I’m sorry we missed this last one. We did something else and we weren’t sure if we made the right choice, but…. [laughs] We’re doing this and hopefully we’ll do another one, a full tour in the future.”

   The number of artists performing means that everyone gets relatively short sets. Since you have a lot of material, how will you determine which songs to perform?

   “I think we have 45 minutes. That’s more like an opening length set. So we know how to do that. We do certain songs that people have to hear, definitely the singles from both records, we have three records, but… certain things we just have to include, like ‘Naked Eye,’ obviously, and ‘City Song’ from the first record, ‘Why Do I Lie?’ from this one. That’s between eight and ten songs, a 45 minute set.”

   Your first EP, “In Search Of Manny,” seemed to have a more raw, sometimes spontaneous sound to it. What do you think led to the more polished sound of “Natural Ingredients”?

   “I don’t think we were even conscious of anything changing. We just made the music. I guess the first one was made with lunch money basically , on less expensive equipment, and we thought it sounded really slick. But people were like, ‘oh, it’s really lo-fi’ but we thought it sounded really slick! So we never knew we were doing anything lo-fi. We just chose the sounds that we liked. We did the same thing for the second record, and for the third one we really tried to get a live band. So if anything’s spontaneous, I would say it was some of the live performances.”

   Since sampling was used so heavily in the studio, did playing live pose any problems?

   “The second record probably has as much sampling as the first, and that one was like, we didn’t really have our live show together until we toured for a while. We figured it out. We had to take those songs that were all sampled from “Natural Ingredients” and learn them. They were not written live, they were written on samplers mostly, except for maybe two or three songs. So that was a whole process to learn. Vivian was learning the sampled parts on the keyboard and playing them in time and we all had to re-create something that was not written by us as a band. So that was interesting.”

   Did that influence the way you wrote the most recent album, “Fever In, Fever Out”?

   “Yeah, I think the touring did. We played together so much as a group touring that we decided to pursue that side of it for “Fever In, Fever Out.” We just wanted to record the live band as it was. I’d been getting very into song writing, returning to basic song writing on acoustic and then translating it. Instead of going in with samples. There’s a lot of different ways to write, a lot of what we’d done was taking samples and writing over that. And I started to go back to the other way, which is to go in with a piece music, lyrics and vocals, and translate that into something with samples.”

   Emmylou Harris appears on the album. How did that come about?

   “She’s a friend of Daniel Lanois. He had produced her record “Wrecking Ball”. So one night he said ‘oh, Emmy’s in town, let’s call her and see if she wants to sing.’ And of course that’s an unbelievable honour. She has such a great voice. She was such a good sport too. She came over and we did harmonies and it really brought the track up a lot.”

   You recently appeared on the TV show “Clueless” – what was that experience like?

   “That was fun. The director was ‘Potsie’ from “Happy Days,” Anson Williams. He was very excited and fun. They can make it fun, or it can be a drag. It depends on the show. There’s a lot of sitting around.”

   Do you see those things as a way of promoting yourselves, or just something different to do for fun?

   “It’s for both. The “Pete And Pete” show [a Nickelodeon series where they appeared as a band playing at a school dance] – so many people have seen the show. They must have re-run it 15 times. These kids – we got a whole other audience from that. Young kids, who watch “Pete And Pete,” they just know us now from that. That’s something about television shows, people really see them. So it’s a good thing to do.”

   What made you decide to do the Gap commercial?

   “We look at the style of it. Those commercials are really nice. LL Cool J, Aerosmith, they did Lena Horne, Dave Navarro did one. It’s an interesting group of people doing the commercials. That’s usually the criteria. We’d never done a commercial, and we hadn’t really considered it but we thought they were really cool and we did it.”

   How did the Kostars side project come about?

   “That was during touring on “Natural Ingredients.” Basically, the end of the tour, we were opening for R.E.M. Me and Vivian just went out back and started messing around. Soon enough we had a full album of a certain style of acoustic songs that all seemed to connect together. They had kind of like a summer feel to them.”

   Are the projects kept completely separate? Did you come up with anything as the Kostars that ended up being used for Luscious Jackson?

   “Well, ‘Save Yourself’ was written as a Kostars song. It was very much changed to be a Luscious Jackson song. It was made into more of a bass and percussive thing.

   If you do the next Lilith Fair tour, you could always perform as The Kostars on the third stage.

   “That’s an idea. It’s hard to say yet. I don’t plan like that, I don’t like to make promises I can’t keep.”

   Do you have any plans at all for future Kostars performances?

   “It’s always been more of a recorded thing. We only did a two week tour. When you have another band, and touring as much as Luscious Jackson does, it’s hard to fit in a whole tour.”

   How extensively did you tour for “Fever In Fever Out?”

   “That finished in the beginning of October. We’ve been home a little over a month. We have a third single out now called ‘Why Do I Lie’ and they’re just getting it on the radio now. So if that does well we will do another tour for this album, and in the meantime we’re all writing.”

   Do you have a preference between performing live and writing and recording?

   “My favourite thing is writing and recording. I’ve come to very much enjoy performing. But if I had to chose, I’d rather spend my time recording. Just because I like it so much.”

   How would you describe your live show for someone who hasn’t seen you yet?

   “If someone hasn’t seen us, there’s a lot of audience participation in the show. We have one new song, it’s called ‘Love It’s Real’ and that’s like a punk song that’s fun to play live. A pogo-ing kind of thing. I don’t know if Lilith is into pogo-ing, we’ve got to get those girls jumping, girls and boys.”

   Musically, how would you compare your live and studio work?

   “It’s fairly close in a lot of ways. Kate is playing live drums, there’s maybe one song where she doesn’t. She plays on top of the ‘Naked Eye’ loop. For the most part, it’s all live. We play all the instruments, guitar, bass, drum, keys, and we have a DJ.”

   Do you have additional live band members?

   “We’ve had the DJ, Alex, for a long time. We just started bringing someone else to play when I’m singing. Sometimes I don’t like to play bass, on certain songs I like to just dance around.

   Category: Feature InterviewsTags: hip hop, melodic, sampling | Comments Off

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3. Delerium

   by admin

   With the addition of vocals and an increased emphasisis on dance beats, Delerium’s 1994 “Semantic Spaces” lp represented quite a change for the band. On their next release, “Karma,” the duo moved even further in this direction.

   Delerium is comprised of Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber, who have also worked together on Front Line Assembly and many other projects. Before “Semantic Spaces,” the bulk of Delerium’s music came out on Germany’s Dossier Records (Cleopatra has recently re-issued many of the CD’s in America). The first few Delerium releases sounded like a continuation of Front Line Assembly’s “State Of Mind” album; bizarre, mostly intrumental electronic soundscapes that walk the line between ambient and industrial music. With their Nettwerk releasess, Delerium have taken their sound maniuplation skills and applied them to a more structured song format.

   Former Rose Chronicles vocalist Kristy Thirsk, who appeared on three “Semantic Spaces,” tracks returned for Karma. She was joinded by Sarah McLachlan, Camille Henderson (the back-up singer from Sarah’s live band) and Singe Gun Theory’s Jacqui Hunt.

   During the 1998 Lilith Fair tour, we were able to ask Sarah and Camille a few questions about their work on the disc. Following these Q+A’s, you’ll also find a 1994 interview we did with Fulber.

   Sarah McLachlan

   What was the process like working with Delerium?

   Sarah:“It was a completed track, I was merely to sing over it. It was a bit of a challenge,because it’s very, very different from the type of music that I normally do. Because I write solely for my own stuff usually, I start with chords and melody. So this is very much going from the opposite direction. But I listened to it a lot, and tried to come up with a bunch of different melodies. I went into the studio and sang a bunch of stuff for Bill and he sort of went ‘oh yeah, that sounds great.’ After three or four hours in the studio it came together. Actually, I think I wrote most of the lyrics in the studio, come to think about it now. I sort of got there and wasn’t prepared.”

   Were you just given a track to do, or did you have a choice?

   Sarah: “I was given a choice of tracks, months and months before, and I was like I can’t do it, I have no time. And then they came back to me months and months later and I actually had time to sit down and listen to one and I quite liked it. Actually, I liked a lot of them but the ones they were going to have vocals on had already been chosen. So they gave me ‘Silence’ and I really like some of the melodies and the choral stuff.”

   Were you a fan of Delerium?

   Sarah: “I am attracted to that style of music. It’s very trance like, and it certainly evokes certain moods for me.”

   Camille Henderson

   How did you get involved with Delerium?

   Camille: Basically, Mark Jowett from Nettwerk approached me and asked me if I’d be interested. He told me that there were a whole bunch of artists attempting to write for the record and I jumped at the opportunity. I thought it would be great.

   What was the process like? Were you given a finished track to add vocals to?

   Camille: Actually, the tracks that they gave me were really close to finished. At the time, I didn’t realize how close they were to being finished. When I heard the record, I realized that almost nothing was different. I knew it was a demo, but it was very similar to the finished product. So it was a really interesting process, working from that angle of taking pretty much a finished track and somehow making it my own.

   Were you able to choose which track to sing on?

   Camille: “They gave a lot of tracks to a lot of different singers and just chose favorites from what was submitted. So I wrote for three songs, and they chose that one.”

   Since the music of Delerium is quite a bit different then Sarah’s and your solo material, was it difficult at all coming up with the vocal parts?

   Camille: “I actually wrote them on the beach. It was during the summer and I went down to the beach every day with my Walkman and these tracks and basically did stream of consciousness until something was forming, until it was obvious that my impression of the song was a certain kind of flavor, a certain kind of emotion that kept coming out of all kinds of adjectives. That kind of thing. And then I formed a concept for it. So, it wasn’t difficult. In some ways, the genre that they work in was a bit more liberating than a lot of this stuff that I do on my own. I tend to be a little more concise, my style is a little bit more like the 3 1/2 minute song with a clear verse/chorus and a flow of lyrics that makes a story for people. Where as the Delerium genre seems to, in the past at least, have been more of a creative abstraction. It was really great for me to work that lyrically.”

   Do you generally like electronic music?

   Camille: “Yeah, I really enjoy it. I would really love to do more of that kind of thing. I’d love to work with programmers and set down tracks. I really enjoyed.”

   If Delerium were to play live and you could fit it into your schedule, would you be interested in taking part?

   Camille: “Of course, it would be really interesting to see how we’d pull that off.”

   Category: Feature InterviewsTags: ambient, Delerium, Front Line Assembly, world music | Comments Off

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4. Aphex Twin

   by admin

   When Chaos Control interviewed you during the NASA tour, you mentioned that you built your own electronic instruments. Can you describe them a bit more, and explain how they work alongside commercially available gear?

   “Well, I don’t use the electronic stuff I made before. I use about two things that I built when I was younger, and that’s all these days. I’m strictly into the computer domain.”

   What home made equipment do you still use?

   “I’ve got one thing that’s like an effects box for signal treatments and bizarre sorts of effects that I can’t get out of anything else. The quality is very fucked up and it sounds pretty cool still.”

   What was the reason for the move towards computers?

   “It’s just that analog electronics has had its day for me. It’s too limiting. I’m much more interested in using computers.”

   You’re known for being very prolific. How much material did you write for the new album?

   “For this one, I had about 200 songs. It was quite hard, it’s always hard, because I never know what to release, basically. So I get my mates to listen to it and try to see what they like. I don’t usually end up putting out my favorite tracks. I don’t reckon people will get into those. Not that I care, I just want them to buy the record so I can get some money.”

   Do you try to chose songs with common theme? Do you try to find a varied group of songs?

   “Usually I try to get a sort of range. I approach thinking about what I would have wanted if I bought and what people will actually buy, to get a compromise in between.”

   How long did it take to create those 200 songs?

   “A year.”

   Will the other material come out, as either side projects or bonus tracks?

   “Some of it probably will come out. They just go into the realms of all the other millions of tracks I do that never come out.”

   Do you ever go back to songs you did a long time ago but never released?

   “I’m totally nostalgic, so I get into listening to old stuff every now and again.”

   Do you usually start and finish a song, then go to the next one, or do you tend to be working on many tracks at the same time?

   “I tend to do things in one go, if I leave things I don’t go back to them because I don’t get the excitement out of it. But I do that sometimes, and sometimes I’ll have like four of five tracks on the go. But mainly, just one.”

   How has your live show changed over the years?

   “I use my laptop computer for everything now, I’ve got one effects unit controlled by the computer as well. I think the next shows will just be the laptop, and a 2 channel mixer.”

   So you don’t have any MIDI gear connected to the laptop?

   “I’ve managed to work it all out on the computer, and it’s loads better than the way I used to do it. It’s more flexible than what most people do with sequencers and samplers.”

   Are you using custom software do accomplish this?

   “Some of it’s my software, and some of it’s existing software.”

   What are the advantages of this set-up?

   “It’s like I’ve got quite a big choice of tracks, and I change them around loads when I’m playing them, basically. It depends on what the sound system is like, and what I feel like, basically.”

   Will the Mike and Rich album be released in America?

   “Possibly soon. Rephlex is doing tons of deals, one with Sony and probably one with Sire as well.”

   Have you had any other recent releases under other names? “No” It seems like a few years ago you had so many side projects that it was hard to keep track. Are you getting away from that now?

   “Yeah. I still do other things, but haven’t had anything out recently. I want to keep it simple.”

   What are you plans for the immediate future?

   “I want to come out by the end of the year and do a good tour. Put the rock bands to shame.”

   Is it true that you want to tour with Nine Inch Nails?

   “Yeah, I thought that might be alright. They’re not touring, so I can’t do it. Someone told me they were into it if they were touring, but they’re not.”

   Category: Feature InterviewsTags: ambient, Aphex Twin, experimental | Comments Off

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