Category Archives: interview

>SRM Reviews (#42 March/April 2007)

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Published in Sweden Rock Magazine #42 March/April 2007

Daniel Ekeroth
Swedish Death Metal9/10
Tamara Press

Jag var inte med när det hände, och de som var det borde nästan vara döda vid det här laget. Det känns faktiskt så. Det var ju så längesedan, och de söp ju så kopiöst. Sons of Satan, en tidig upplaga av Nihilist, drog sina första dödsriff redan 1986.
Återupplivade Grotesque, Nirvana 2002 och Interment låter dock oerhört vitala när de på releasefesten för Daniel ”Dellamorte” Ekeroths betongbibel Swedish Death Metal headbangar sig igenom idel dödshits som inte framförts på tusen år.
– Om alla band lät så här skulle jag gå på gig varje dag, säger en märkbart rörd och rusig Danne och skelar med blicken.
Snubben har all rätt att skela en sån här kväll. Han har skapat en tegelsten. 500 sidor väger en hel del, och jag fick rätt ont i handlederna när jag läste den.
Efter hemkomst från festen sträckläste jag till klockan sex på morgonen och innan hjärnan gav upp var jag bara tvungen att kräma på Shreds of Flesh från Entombeds But Life Goes On-demo på högsta jävla volym. Grannarna fick ta det denna arla lördagsmorgon, jag är ju så löjligt kolugn annars.
För det är så här bra musikjournalistik fungerar. Man blir peppad på att lyssna på plattor. Det behöver inte vara mycket djupare än så. Det är musiken som gäller och det är den som Danne fokuserar på. Han viker knappt en tum.
Den maniske nörden finner givetvis detta lysande. Den förvirrade posören som vigt sitt liv åt image och yta kanske inte blir lika begeistrad. Det här är ingen Lords of Chaos.

Ekeroth skriver engagerat, lättsamt och personligt – som i ett riktigt bra fanzine. Jämfört med andra otaliga exposéartade musikböcker jag plöjt genom åren – böcker som tett sig som döda i ordets rätta bemärkelse – så andas Dannes texter hängivelse. Vilken befrielse!
Den sarkastiska tonen infinner sig när författaren närmar sig black metal – genren som avlivade hans älskade dödsmetall. Det är helt rätt, han måste skriva subjektivt annars blir det aldrig genuint. Jag ler brett när han avslutar texten om Lord Belial med följande rader:
”Though their image is extreme, the music is pretty mellow – which figures if you think about the fact that they have used five flute players in the band.”
Och därpå följer en fulländad medlemspresentation – både gamla och nuvarande medlemmar radas upp – samt en komplett diskografi. Kapitel tio – ett bandindex – landar på 125 sidor och Danne lyckas avhandla nästan tusen konstellationer utan att tappa udden alltför ofta. Innan dess har vi fått 315 sidor svensk death metal-historik att förundras över – en översikt som givetvis börjar med Asocial och dylik råpunk i början av 80-talet. Resterande utrymme vigs åt affischer, flyers, omslag och logos som i all sin enkelhet sammanfattar den unika dödsestetiken. Glömde jag nämna genomgången av en bra bit över hundra death metal-fanzines? Att Dauthus, kanske världens främsta fanzine alla kategorier, inte nämns är dock en smärre gåta.
Ni fattar att man får ont i handlederna av det här. Det är helt enkelt jävligt tungt!

Upplägget i historikdelen är lysande. Sedvanlig genomgång blandas med mängder av insprängda citat från de nyligen gjorda intervjuerna (drygt 30 av scenens mest framträdande personer har utfrågats), vilket håller intresset uppe. Danne väljer att avsluta det maniska grävandet kring år 1992, det år då alla hade hittat ett band att spela i och kunde stå med armarna i kors istället för att röja. Han fortsätter dock i ett lugnare tempo och avslutar i Uppsala 2007 med Katalysator: ett gäng totalt hängivna fans i moppeåldern som ser ut som Nihilist och låter som Grotesque. Lysande!

Är det något jag saknar så är det ett register i någon form. Vill man veta vilken dödsplatta som Rex Gisslén (ja, den Rex Gisslén, han från Shanghai) producerade får man snällt lita på sitt tålamod och goda minne.
Och givetvis uppstår en mängd felaktigheter. Vissa bandpresentationer kunde ha varit bättre uppdaterade. Bilderna kunde ha varit i färg. Och så vidare. Man kan leta fel och reta sig på mycket, men kan man inte uppskatta boken för vad den är – ett mästerverk – så är man bara bitter och dum i huvudet.
Dannes tidigare böcker, Violent Italy samt Svensk sensationsfilm, imponerade inte nämnvärt; tunna, amatörmässigt sammansatta och något torra. Swedish Death Metal däremot… Jag knäböjer, dyrkar och talar i tungor.
Only death is real!

Q&A
SRM får mobilledes tag i Daniel precis när han äntrar Close-Up-båten ( i extrema kretsar även kallad ”rensjollen”) där han tänkt sälja sin bok.

Hur lång tid tog det att sammanställa boken?
– Fyra år. De två första åren satt jag och skrev lite då och då när det fanns tid, men de två sista åren var det ett heltidsjobb. Sista året körde jag i princip dygnet runt.

Hur finansierade du det hela?
– Jag sålde filmsamlingen – drygt 2 000 kassetter. Den var kanske värd 600 000 kronor, men jag fick inte så mycket eftersom jag sålde den i klump till en person.

Hur gjorde du för att avgränsa materialet?
– Från början var tanken att ta med allting inom death metal fram till idag, att skriva lika grundligt hela tiden, men det gick helt enkelt inte. Thrashkapitlen var på väg ut ett tag, men jag kände att de var nödvändiga i slutändan.

Hur gick du till väga för att spåra upp alla demos och fanzines?
– En del hade jag sedan tidigare, resten lånade jag. Jag lånade minst tvåtusen demos av en kille exempelvis. Det var ett jävla jobb att bara lyssna igenom allt. Man tappar omdömet efter ett tag, men då slängde jag bara på Nihilist för att få en referenspunkt. Nihilist, Grotesque och Merciless är de tre band som jag tycker är klart bäst inom genren.

Berätta mer om arbetet.
– Boken kom en dag innan releasefesten, så det var ju lite nervöst. Det var problem med allting. Det var inte lika lätt att göra en bok som ett fanzine, om man säger så. Ändrade man ett kommatecken så ändrades ungefär allting på alla sidor. Enbart layoutarbetet tog tre och en halv månad. Men vad fan, man vill ju göra någonting vettigt av sitt liv och det här tycker jag är vettigt.

Hur är det att skriva på engelska?
– Jag är hyfsad på engelska. Jag kollar mycket på Simpsons, så man har ju snott en och anna formulering här och var, haha! Och så har jag pluggat en hel del och därmed skrivit en mängd uppsatser, så då blir det hyfsat.

Vad blir nästa skrivprojekt?
– Ingen aning. Man tror jobbet är klart när boken är ute, men det här är totalt underground så jag gör allting själv. Varenda kväll går åt till att tejpa paket och fixa beställningar. Varenda bok som säljs går via mig. Och så har jag ett band som repar tre gånger i veckan, och ett heltidsjobb på det… Man blir rätt slut.

>Public Enemy’s Chuck D on how copyright law changed rap music

>Public Enemy were one of the very first – if not the first – groups to release an album on the internet (There’s a Poison Goin’ On was released on May 18 1999, the cd was released on July 20).
Ten years ago!
Since then, band leader Chuck D has been the most vocal supporter of file sharing in the music industry. He even testified before Congress in support of P2P and has been quoted saying “rap is devolving so much into a commercial enterprise, that the relationship between the rapper and the record label is that of slave to a master”.
Speaking of anti-materialism, anti-sexism and politically and socially conscious rap: “A lot of cats are out there doing it, on the web and all over. They’re just not placing their career in the hands of some major corporation.”
Chuck D is also involved in the cd set Let Freedom Sing: The Music of the Civil Rights and the follow-up movie Let Freedom Sing: How Music Inspired the Civil Rights Movement.

Here’s an old interview from the Stay Free Magazine with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee about how copyright law changed rap music and destroyed its creativity, and pretty much turned rap into crap overnight.
Interview by Kembrew McLeod. Original article found here. Swedish translation here.

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When Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, in 1988, it was as if the album had landed from another planet. Nothing sounded like it at the time. It Takes a Nation came frontloaded with sirens, squeals, and squawks that augmented the chaotic, collaged backing tracks over which P.E. frontman Chuck D laid his politically and poetically radical rhymes. He rapped about white supremacy, capitalism, the music industry, black nationalism, and–in the case of “Caught, Can I Get a Witness?”– digital sampling: “CAUGHT, NOW IN COURT ‘ CAUSE I STOLE A BEAT / THIS IS A SAMPLING SPORT / MAIL FROM THE COURTS AND JAIL / CLAIMS I STOLE THE BEATS THAT I RAIL … I FOUND THIS MINERAL THAT I CALL A BEAT / I PAID ZERO.”

In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of oppor-tunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. No one took advantage of these technologies more effectively than Public Enemy, who put hundreds of sampled aural fragments into It Takes a Nation and stirred them up to create a new, radical sound that changed the way we hear music. But by 1991, no one paid zero for the records they sampled without getting sued. They had to pay a lot.

Stay Free! talked to the two major architects of P.E.’s sound, Chuck D and Hank Shocklee, about hip-hop, sampling, and how copyright law altered the way P.E. and other hip-hop artists made their music.

* * *

Stay Free!: What are the origins of sampling in hip-hop?

Chuck D: Sampling basically comes from the fact that rap music is not music. It’s rap over music. So vocals were used over records in the very beginning stages of hip-hop in the 0s to the early ’80s. In the late 1980s, rappers were recording over live bands who were basically emulating the sounds off of the records. Eventually, you had synthesizers and samplers, which would take sounds that would then get arranged or looped, so rappers can still do their thing over it. The arrangement of sounds taken from recordings came around 1984 to 1989.

Stay Free!: Those synthesizers and samplers were expensive back then, especially in 1984. How did hip-hop artists get them if they didn’t have a lot of money?

Chuck D: Not only were they expensive, but they were limited in what they could do–they could only sample two seconds at a time. But people were able to get a hold of equipment by renting time out in studios.

Stay Free!: How did the Bomb Squad [Public Enemy’s production team, led by Shocklee] use samplers and other recording technologies to put together the tracks on It Takes a Nation of Millions.

Hank Shocklee: The first thing we would do is the beat, the skeleton of the track. The beat would actually have bits and pieces of samples already in it, but it would only be rhythm sections. Chuck would start writing and trying different ideas to see what worked. Once he got an idea, we would look at it and see where the track was going. Then we would just start adding on whatever it needed, depending on the lyrics. I kind of architected the whole idea. The sound has a look to me, and Public Enemy was all about having a sound that had its own distinct vision. We didn’t want to use anything we considered traditional R&B stuff–bass lines and melodies and chord structures and things of that nature.

Stay Free!: How did you use samplers as instruments?

Chuck D: We thought sampling was just another way of arranging sounds. Just like a musician would take the sounds off of an instrument and arrange them their own particular way. So we thought we was quite crafty with it.

Shocklee: “Don’t Believe the Hype,” for example–that was basically played with the turntable and transformed and then sampled. Some of the manipulation we was doing was more on the turntable, live end of it.

Stay Free!: When you were sampling from many different sources during the making of It Takes a Nation, were you at all worried about copyright clearance?

Shocklee: No. Nobody did. At the time, it wasn’t even an issue. The only time copyright was an issue was if you actually took the entire rhythm of a song, as in looping, which a lot of people are doing today. You’re going to take a track, loop the entire thing, and then that becomes the basic track for the song. They just paperclip a backbeat to it. But we were taking a horn hit here, a guitar riff there, we might take a little speech, a kicking snare from somewhere else. It was all bits and pieces.

Stay Free!: Did you have to license the samples in It Takes a Nation of Millions before it was released?

Shocklee: No, it was cleared afterwards. A lot of stuff was cleared afterwards. Back in the day, things was different. The copyright laws didn’t really extend into sampling until the hip-hop artists started getting sued. As a matter of fact, copyright didn’t start catching up with us until Fear of a Black Planet. That’s when the copyrights and everything started becoming stricter because you had a lot of groups doing it and people were taking whole songs. It got so widespread that the record companies started policing the releases before they got out.

Stay Free!: With its hundreds of samples, is it possible to make a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions today? Would it be possible to clear every sample?

Shocklee: It wouldn’t be impossible. It would just be very, very costly. The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout–meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound–for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now you’re looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album.

Chuck D: Corporations found that hip-hop music was viable. It sold albums, which was the bread and butter of corporations. Since the corporations owned all the sounds, their lawyers began to search out people who illegally infringed upon their records. All the rap artists were on the big six record companies, so you might have some lawyers from Sony looking at some lawyers from BMG and some lawyers from BMG saying, “Your artist is doing this,” so it was a tit for tat that usually made money for the lawyers, garnering money for the company. Very little went to the original artist or the publishing company.

Shocklee: By 1990, all the publishers and their lawyers started making moves. One big one was Bridgeport, the publishing house that owns all the George Clinton stuff. Once all the little guys started realizing you can get paid from rappers if they use your sample, it prompted the record companies to start investigating because now the people that they publish are getting paid.

Stay Free!: There’s a noticeable difference in Public Enemy’s sound between 1988 and 1991. Did this have to do with the lawsuits and enforcement of copyright laws at the turn of the decade?

Chuck D: Public Enemy’s music was affected more than anybody’s because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn’t have been anything–they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style, the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.

Shocklee: We were forced to start using different organic instruments, but you can’t really get the right kind of compression that way. A guitar sampled off a record is going to hit differently than a guitar sampled in the studio. The guitar that’s sampled off a record is going to have all the compression that they put on the recording, the equalization. It’s going to hit the tape harder. It’s going to slap at you. Something that’s organic is almost going to have a powder effect. It hits more like a pillow than a piece of wood. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get off of a record. If you notice that by the early 1990s, the sound has gotten a lot softer.

Chuck D: Copyright laws pretty much led people like Dr. Dre to replay the sounds that were on records, then sample musicians imitating those records. That way you could get by the master clearance, but you still had to pay a publishing note.

Shocklee: See, there’s two different copyrights: publishing and master recording. The publishing copyright is of the written music, the song structure. And the master recording is the song as it is played on a particular recording. Sampling violates both of these copyrights. Whereas if I record my own version of someone else’s song, I only have to pay the publishing copyright. When you violate the master recording, the money just goes to the record company.

Chuck D: Putting a hundred small fragments into a song meant that you had a hundred different people to answer to. Whereas someone like EPMD might have taken an entire loop and stuck with it, which meant that they only had to pay one artist.

Stay Free!: So is that one reason why a lot of popular hip-hop songs today just use one hook, one primary sample, instead of a collage of different sounds?

Chuck D: Exactly. There’s only one person to answer to. Dr. Dre changed things when he did The Chronic and took something like Leon Haywood’s “I Want’a Do Something Freaky to You” and revamped it in his own way but basically kept the rhythm and instrumental hook intact. It’s easier to sample a groove than it is to create a whole new collage. That entire collage element is out the window.

Shocklee: We’re not really privy to all the laws and everything that the record company creates within the company. From our standpoint, it was looking like the record company was spying on us, so to speak.

Chuck D: The lawyers didn’t seem to differentiate between the craftiness of it and what was blatantly taken.

Stay Free!: Switching from the past to the present, on the new Public Enemy album, Revolverlution, you had fans remix a few old Public Enemy tracks. How did you get this idea?

Chuck D: We have a powerful online community through Rapstation.com, PublicEnemy.com, Slamjams.com, and Bringthenoise.com. My thing was just looking at the community and being able to say, “Can we actually make them involved in the creative process?” Why not see if we can connect all these bedroom and basement studios, and the ocean of producers, and expand the Bomb Squad to a worldwide concept?

Stay Free!: As you probably know, some music fans are now sampling and mashing together two or more songs and trading the results online. There’s one track by Evolution Control Committee that uses a Herb Alpert instrumental as the backing track for your “By the Time I Get to Arizona.” It sounds like you’re rapping over a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass song. How do you feel about other people remixing your tracks without permission?

Chuck D: I think my feelings are obvious. I think it’s great.

>Humanism without humans

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Peter Sotos – controversial writer, thinker and musician, probably most famous for being arrested for obscenity because of his fanzine Pure (1984), as well as being a member of the power electronics group Whitehouse – is a man I’ve taken great interest in, pretty much because of what he says in interviews and what you can read between the lines in his explicit works.
Total Abuse is a collection of nearly all of Sotos’ texts between 1984-1995 (including Pure, Tool. and Parasite), and what I find most interesting with this book is the interview and introduction made by Jim Goad. I wrote about this in the paper issue of Ny Moral #1.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview where he talks about humanism and humanity.

Jim Goad: I’d like you to comment on this [line] from PARASITE #5: “Like most humanism, it conveniently doesn’t include humans.” Where has humanism gone astray? What are they not understanding about humanity?

Peter Sotos: Well, I think we’ve been talking about it, really. These people have these dreams and fantasies, it’s like people who decide when they’re two, or when they’re going to their first prom, they decide, “You know, mom, I wanna have a really high-paying job, and I want to have two kids, and someone who loves me, and go out on Friday nights to balls and dances”, whatever they think, I don’t know. And just their whole life shows you that that’s not gonna happen… And they still cling to these things, not as sort of dreams or fantasies, by the end they’re just these sorts of religious beliefs… And humanists, people who are just so concerned with the human element, with others and everyone’s care and concern, so boggled by the actual information that exists. But once again, you say this sort of stuff, and you sound as if you’re – as if I’m – upset. When, you know, the opposite is true. I’ve come to this from – it just seems obvious to me… People aren’t going to have these rosy little lives.

It seems like it’s wishful thinking that gets misunderstood as some kind of ontological verity.

Yeah, right. They’re dedicated to, you know, “Well, this was promised to me.” And they drive themselves crazy. But the thing is, I do like what life has to offer. I don’t want to sound like, “Nah, this is terrible. Why don’t these people wake up?” I mean, it really isn’t like that. I just think it’s a much more realistic viewpoint.

Read more about what Peter Sotos has to say right here.
And then read some more on the Fanzine site.

>Interview: Jex Thoth

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I reviewed the magical debut album from the mighty Jex Thoth in the latest issue of Sweden Rock Magazine. I rated it 9/10 and got to do a short Q&A with Jex Thoth herself. Here are her words.

I hear some Amon Düül 2 in your works. Have they been a major influence? Other musical influences?

Amon Düül 2 is a huge influence on us, as is Amon Düül 1. We are also influenced by many classic psychedelic bands, classic doom bands, krautrock, and even some pop music. My personal influences are Slapp Happy, Glenn Danzig, Kate Bush, T2, Blue Cheer, Can, and Catherine Ribeiro. This band shares more influences collectively than any other band I know.

How important is symbolism to Jex Thoth?

Symbolism weaves its way in and out of our lyrics, but overall, we like to keep things fairly direct.

What’s your agenda? Why are you here doing what you do?

I do what i do because it’s what I do. I’d be doing this whether or not anybody cared. It’s nice that people do, though. I plan to recuit all of those I can recruit, and shake the souls of those I can’t.

Do you have a theme or message that is present in everything you do as a band?

Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality, but there is, unseen by most, an underworld – a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit – a dark side.

Can you name some non-music influences, like authors, directors, poets and so on?

There are a number of things that influenced me during the writing and recording of this record. One of them being the harsh weather conditions we endured during recording. I was also watching a lot of Jan Svankmajer films at the time, I love his films on so many levels. His worlds mix live action with sculpture, stop motion animation, puppetry, animals and so much more. Not only is he an amazing filmmaker but an outstanding visual artist as well. All of his works are super imaginative, dark, and surreal, with a clear message.

How come you ended up on I Hate Records?

Ola from I Hate reached out to us via our Myspace, and we were all very excited at the chance to work with him – we are all fans of the label.

Why the name change, from Totem to Jex Thoth?

There were already several other Totems, and in between the two recordings, we had a major lineup change, with Ezekial Blackouts moving overseas and Silas and Johnny Dee joining the lineup. At this time, it became obvious to me that we use my name, because I wanted a name that reflected my leadership of the band. All of the members have contributed tremendous ideas that can be heard on the record, but ultimately, it is my vision we execute.

When performing live, do you do anything special on stage or is it like watching an ordinary band?

There is nothing ordinary about this band, but we don’t enter on horseback or travel with a guillotine if that’s what you’re asking.

What are your interests besides music?

I like to garden, I like to build things, and I enjoy puzzles.

What about the song Son of Yule? What can you tell me about that particular track?

Silas wrote this one, it deals with closed mindedness and an unwillingness to change. It’s one of my favorite songs on the album, it’s a lot of fun to sing and I was able to take a lot of risks – vocally – with this one.

And what about the Equinox Suite? Any comments to that song?

This came about organically, as several of the pieces grew into one. My hope is that everyone listens to the album as I intended, from start to finish, but this is most important in Equinox Suite. This album wasn’t meant to be listened to on ‘shuffle.’ However, I do feel that each phase of the suite stands on its own, and that is why they are indexed individually.

What about the cover art for the album? What’s your relationship to Albert/Reverend Bizarre?

Albert Witchfinder liked our band and offered to draw the cover. Of course we were flattered and psyched. I love how it turned out. We also love Reverend Bizarre.

Finally, how would Jex Thoth have sounded if you’d skipped the drugs and alcohol?

Just as brutal but maybe more punctual – ha ha ha!

Now listen to The Banishment and then go buy the album.