Band: Novakill
Interview by: TekNoir
<< Back | Reviews:
- I Hate God - TekNoir
Lucy interviewed Novakill from Australia about the backgrounds of their project and the new album "I Hate God" as well as some philosophical backgrounds of belief and religion.
Hello Sik, hello Bones. You have been around a while in the music business. Can you disclose us how you came together and decided to form a band?
We first met when Bones advertised for like-minded electronic musicians to form a collective of bands, which we imaginatively called "The Kollektiv". The idea was to act as a block to get gigs and promote what we were doing. It only lasted a year or two but Sik and Bones became good friends, with a shared interest in EBM. In fact, our taste in music is virtually identical, which makes it easy for one of us to make decisions, knowing that the other will always agree [eventually, if not straight away].
In 1995 we decided to work together to create Sydney's first all "Industrial" club night, Virus, which was responsible for breaking a lot of bands, like Leather Strip and Dance or Die, in the club scene here. As part of Virus, we occasionally did live sets and one night Sik did a set under the name Novakill, which was mostly reworked versions of songs he had been doing with his brother as Legion, with a more overtly EBM feel to it. Bones really liked the name, was desperate to use it and so came up with the cunning plan to ask Sik if he was interestd in working together.
Why did you decided to buy a synth instead of, e.g. becoming a painter or sculpture?
Bones was in the Army and needed something to do in the afternoons after work, to stave off a life of alcohol addiction [it didn't really work]. All his favourite bands of the time were bands with both guitar and keyboards, like The Stranglers, Ultravox and Magazine. Because he is left-handed, he wasn't sure he could find anyone to teach him guitar properly, so he decided to buy a synth instead.
As for SiK, it was actually at Art College, where he was studing painting and sculpture that SiK first used a synthesizer. Drawn to sound and filmmaking he started using electronic equipment to create art and began creating soundscapes and soundtracks. MIDI was still quite new and one of his lecturers (who had worked with Severed Heads) demonstrated an early version of Steinberg 64 and he was hooked. Of course that sequencing program evolved into Cubase.
It took a while until you came back into the light with the new material. Has there been a intential reason for this gap?
Not at all. We are not full time musicians and it has not been easy to find the time to work on new material over the last few years. At different times we have both had very demanding jobs and family commitments, which made it hard to build up momentum. Once we reached critical mass, things started to come together more quickly. There was uncertainty around whether we would get to release another CD or not, which meant we never had any kind of schedule or deadline and without that, it's easy to keep tweaking your mixes forever. Once we got a commitment from our label, things fell into place fairly easily.
Did the break result in a musical change? How did you develop thoughout time?
Not consciously or deliberately, although the consensus seems to be that this album is somethign of a departure from the first two. To us it is simply a natural progression from what we have always done and it has benefitted from improvements in our skills and in the software and hardware we use to create it. We also feel that we have established our sound, which probably gave us more freedom to explore and expand those boundaries, so we think there is more variety on this album, an expansion of our sound.
You both have been making music for a long time now also before NOVAKILL. Today, as far as we know, there is only NOVAKILL, isn’t it? What can you tell us about your musical past?
Bones worked under the name DEATHLY QUIET! for many years, releasing some stuff on Cassette, Vinyl and a CD. He began performing live in the tropical Queensland city of Townsville in 1985, using an incredibly complex, mostly analogue set-up that took more than an hour to set-up. That rig soon gave way to a more streamlined MIDI based set-up that made live shows better and easier. The last DEATHLY QUIET! gig was in around the turn of the century and Bones has no plans to revive it any time soon.
SiK had some basic musical training at school, but as stated above it was at Art College that he started to compose, and that was dark soundscapes and noise, rather than anything that resembled a song. Later he formed a band called LEGION with his brother after they bought a sampling keyboard, and played a couple of shows. An extensive collection of industrial music and similar taste led to Djing with Bones at VIRUS and then that led into them working together as the band NOVAkILL.
In 2001 Sik performed live as a solo project under the name EVIL AGAINST EVIL and has worked on music for various friend’s short films. Recently he has been working on material as unofficial “side-projects” some of which might still end up as NOVAkILL tracks. None of it has been released anywhere other than on Myspace (so far), and some will form the basis for a feature film score he has been asked to do, should the film actually get made.
The official year of foundation has been dated back to 1996. The debut has been released in 2003. What led to this very long delay?
Releasing albums had never been a focus for either of us. We have always concentrated on playing live and here in Australia it would never have been practical to try and release anything. It was only a chance metting with Kai Schmidt, whose partnership manages Funker Vogt and runs our label [RepoRecords], that any of this came about. Bones was DJing at a club and had recently purchased Funker Vogt's first album. After he played a couple of tracks from it, Kai came up and introduced himself. A native of Hameln in Germany, he was studying in Sydney and struck up a friendship with Bones that resulted in the formation of their business relationship a year or two later. Everything else has followed from that.
The new longplayer named „I HATE GOD“ is your third one and released on RepoRecords. How long did you work on it?
It's a continual process. When we finished KILLeveryone, we had a couple of songs that hadn't made it on that we thought were good enough, but not finished, so they formed the core of what we started working on next. For a long time we only had about half an album's worth of material we thought was good enough and a whole lot of other things we thought might be usable with more work [which never, ever works out].
Eventually though, Sik hit a purple patch and pumped out a few really good songs in quick succession, which filled out the album for us. When we toured with Nitzer Ebb in 2007, we had the opportunity to road-test some of these songs and from there it took us about another year and a half to complete the album, adding a couple of newer songs in the process.
When we did the remix contest last year, the plan was to have the album finished by the time the contest was, but we struggled with lyrics for a couple of songs and missed two deadlines that we had set ourselves to get it finished. It's actually been finished for a few months now, we have just had to await our label, who have put a big effort into promotion for us, which obviously takes time to organise.
The album contains 11 tracks and 3 remixes, including the winner of the remix-contest. Who is the winner and how did you decide the contest?
We decided the contest by picking the best remixes. Obvious, really. We got a lot of entries but many of them seemed to miss the point, taking out a lot of the energy and not putting anything back in to replace it. Most of the entries were of a really high standard technically but it was easy to whittle it down to half-a-dozen or so that we thought offerred the kind of thing we were looking for. The winner was a unanimous choice but it took Bones a week or two of brow-beating Sik to get him to agree to the other two. There were other entries that might have made it, except they were too similar to one of the winners but not quite as good. We wanted to put three different takes on the original onto the album and we were lucky that we got such great and diverse versions that we thought were good enough.
How many people did participate in the contest? What will you do with the remixes that are still unused?
In the end we got around 40 entries. We put a couple on our MySpace page for a while and most of the entrants have put their's on their own pages. At this stage it is unlikely that we will do anything more with any of them, but you never know what might come up.
Why did you choose the song „Demonizer“ to be remixed?
We had played it live a few times and were comfortable with it, so we recorded vocals for it and bloodELEkTRIk. DEMONIZER was easier from a logisitics point of view, with only sparse vocals for people to download, and we thought it had more potential anyway. At that stage we still hadn't writen weWORK and kOMBAT was still very new, so it was only a choice between those two that we had vocals for.
Let’s talk about the album and the songs of „I HATE GOD“. You did a cover song from Ultravox, „Sleepwalk“. What is the fascination about this song for you?
Ultravox's Systems of Romance was one of the first New Wave albums BONES ever heard and is still one of his favourites, 30 years later. sleepWAlk is from the following album, without John Foxx, but it was a good choice for us to cover as it fits in quite well with our own style. We had originally planned on putting the Cure's One Hundred Years on but it is a very long song and we started running out of space on the disc. We had performed sleepWAlk live and were both really happy with the way it sounded, so we made the swap.
Have you done other cover versions in the past?
Yes, lots of them. We played Cabaret Voltaire's “I Want You” and The Sisters of Mercy's “Body Electric” at our first NOVAkILL gigs, Alice was on our last album and we ahve performed One Hundred Years live a few times. We have also worked on other covers that have never seen the light of day. At one point we wanted to do a version of Real Life's “Send Me an Angel” but neither of us were comfortable singing those soft lyrics, so we never did it. We also did a version of Pet Shop Boys' “It's a Sin” that we were really excited about, but we never really finsihed it before the transition from hardware to software, and it got lost somehow.
What would be your favourites to be covered beside „Sleepwalk“?
The Sisters of Mercy's guitar riffs just seem to work really well with sequencers and they are one of our favourite bands, so we love playing their songs. We have a version of Gary Numan's Cars that we might find room for in a set one day. The problem is that we never get to play for more than about 40 minutes, so throwing out one of our songs for a cover is really hard. Ideally we would probably throw one or two into an hour set if we ever get to do one, but with short sets it gets harder and harder as our back catalogue grows.
Why do you hate God? Or, if you do not believe in Him, why does He deserve to dedicate an entire album to Him?
The reasons behind it should be self-evident to anyone who ever reads a newspaper or watches TV news. The most appalling atrocities are committed in the name of God, things that make people like Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer look like naughty school boys by comparison. That religion remains so popular in a modern society like ours is something we simply cannot understand.
All your tracks bear titles and deal with topics of destruction, death and brutality. What is your approach to NOVAKILL and the background of the band?
We have a definite idea in our heads of what NOVAkILL should be. We want to confront people and hopefully make them think about the assumptions they take for granted in their lives. Why is it important to work hard and make lots of money? Who really benefits from that? Why doesn't it make more sense to only work as much as you need to in ordeer to get by and devote the rest of your time to things you actually want to do? Does a big, widescreen TV really benefit your life or would you be happier spending all your days at the beach and delivering pizzas at night to pay the rent?
Society chews people up and spits them out. It knows what motivates us and uses it against us, to feed itself at our expense. We devote our lives to it and ultimately it cares nothing for us. We think we are working for ourselves but that is just a facade. What does someone get from a $100,000 BMW that they wouldn't get from a reliable second-hand car? What they get is a huge debt that forces them to work harder just to meet the repayments. It the same with housing. No-one needs to own a home, the entire industry exists because it can appeal to people's insecurity and convince them that putting themselves into debt for the rest of their lives is the only way to keep their family safe from predators. It's completely irrelevant.
The western, predominantly christian society we live in is rather ridiculous and hypocritical (words we would use to desribe religion). It needs to be torn down and pulled apart. The ideas of destruction and decay hold a fascination, the chance to exist outside the system, outside the establishment of order and control.
And of course there is still enough death, destruction and brutality in parts of the world that makes these words and concepts relevant, and as stated above many of these acts are carried out in the name of GOD, or at least a god.
The new album – can you reveal if there is any core message or topic you want to transport to the listener?
Not really, we just want people to appreciate and enjoy it. We never set out to preach to people, despite the previous response, we just feel that if we are going to write lyrics and sing them on stage, they should mean something that we believe in. It had quite a different working title but as we worked on the songs more and more, we realiseed there was a theme emerging and “I HATE GOD” summed it up succinctly.
What is your opinion of Platon’s „Immortality of the Soul“ as stated in Phaidon and his cycles of sleep and alertness, death and life in correlation to your album?
The whole idea of the soul is conceit of the highest order. Man is an animal, no different from a ferret or a chimpanzee or any other. I've never understood people's desperation to believe they somehow have a special place in the universe. Why should that matter? I think most people take themselves and their lives far too seriously.
Plato’s ideas are interesting, considering the age he was living in, however it was an age well before modern science. Some of the ideas are restricted by the ideas of the time, and the “immortatilty of the soul” is concluded by a lack of understanding that we have in this nuclear age. Whist the idea of particles and atoms is quite old, the understanding of how they work and fit together hasn’t come until fairly recently (indeed there are still many secrets yet to be unlocked). Back then the drawing analogy between being sleep and awake, to being dead and alive, or to the seasons, where in spring, plants that seemed dead “come back to life” would have made much sense. The idea of an immortal souol has of cousre been hijacked by religion and used to control people. “DO THIS” and you’ll go to heaven, “DO THAT” and you’ll go to Hell. Around 400 AD Augustine of Hippo and Pelagius debated the idea of Orginal Sin. The church authorities in Rome won out and the idea of Orignial Sin became doctrine [dogma].
If your question equates death, or sleep with our time between releases and that the new CD is a “return to life” then I guess it could be looked at that way, but not consciously by us. We do feel somewhat invigorated by the new CD and are excited by the future, with another CD well underway, but we’ll wait and see how “I HATE GOD” is received.
The religious belief led to many conflicts on earth. Do you think it makes sense to direct hate towards one of its causal origins, the religious but invincible religious symbol?
Hate is a strong emotion and therefore an excellent motivator. It's how you channel that motivation that determines whether it is a positive or negative force in the world. Why do you give to charity? We give because we hate that poverty exists and we hate the system that perpetuates it.
Do you belief that hate is a solution to urgent questions?
Hate, like athieism, gets a bad rap. Coaches use hate to motivate their teams to win. It's a simple matter of directing it in a positve way. We hate God as a symbol of religion and as an excuse to commit any act of barbarism. That is not to say we want to hurt anyone who believes in God but it motivates us to try and change people's minds. So yes, properly directed, hate is a powerful motivator and can defintiely be used to achieve good and noble ends.
Do you belief that destruction and negativism can help out of the current situation mankind is struggling with?
We think things are so bad, so deeply entrenched, that meaningful change is all but impossible. What's needed is a fresh start, pull it all down and build it again from scratch. That is not going to happen without massive destruction and we welcome it.
What is your attitude towards death and what will follow beyond it?
Death is the end of life. There is nothing beyond that, why anyone would devote any time to thinking about it is completely beyond our comprehension. you only get one go so don't fuck it up.
The Crusade is a topic of a song – do you refer to the medieval incidents or what can you disclose about it?
What we are attempting to do is draw parallels between the Crusades and current events. it's a classic example of history repeating.
The pressinfo stated that you worked with modern, most recent technology and equipment. What do you use exactly, if I may ask?
Everything is done on PC, using Synapse-Audio's ORION software. We've been using it for a long time now and have grown with it. On stage we use a bit of hardware but most of the sound comes from our PC, the hardware mostly provides an interface.
Other than ORION and it’s available sounds and effects there are a few free VST’s we use, including the synth’s we make.
Let’s talk about your live activities. Your first European gig has been at the Wave Gothic Meeting in 2005. How did it come?
Our management, who are Germany-based, lined it up for us. Once it was confirmed, we were able to organise another show in London, at Slimelight. It was a great experience and one we would really like to repeat.
You have supported a lot of big names in Australia, like Covenant, KMFDM, VNV Nation, Nitzer Ebb or Combichrist– what was the most remarkable anecdote about these tours?
It has always been interesting to see the different attitudes of these guys, from full-blown rock-stars to humble, hard-working guys. But you know the rule - what happens on tour stays on tour.
Do you plan more live shows in Europe or USA in the near future to promote the album?
We would definitely like to but it's not easy to organise around work and family. If this album goes well, it should make it easier for us to do some shows next year. We are already working on our next album and it could easily be ready for a tour mid next year.
What music do you listen to at home?
BONES: These days I listen mostly to old stuff from the 80s or bands that have been around since then. Punk and New Wave from bands like Wire, New Model Army, Killing Joke and Ultravox. I don't listen to as much EBM as I used to, mostly because there is very little new stuff coming out that I really enjoy. The newest albums that I listen to regularly would be Steril's Realism and John Foxx and Louis Gordon's From Trash.
SiK: I browse Myspace a bit, listening to bits and pieces, both new and old. My most recent purchases have been film music. Usually though I grab something industrial or close to, e.g. Zero Defects “non-recyclable” is a favouite I can listen to at any time.
Do you have any hobby besides music?
BONES: I have a small yacht that needs a lot of work before I can go sailing again and I love cars. I have a brand new Alfa Brera and spend a lot of time keeping up with what is going on in that industry. The Alfa is the one possession I have that I could not walk away from [maybe I need my laptop, too].
SiK: Does drinking beer count?
I consider myself something of a film buff, and spend quite a bit of time watching, or reading about films. I work in the Film industry so much of that can be considered work. I have done a bit of painting or drawing, some writing, but other working in the film industry and writing music I find it hard to devote the time to anything else, though I will admit to spending many, many, many hours playing various computer games. I am an avid reader, but that tends to come and go in cycles.
What’s next for NOVAKILL?
More beer, another album and hopefully a world tour. We are supporting God Module here in Sydney next month, which will be our first opportunity to play some brand new songs we are working on for our next album. Beyond that, anything is possible.
What will you eat tonight?
BONES: I have a chicken breast defrosting, which I will turn into a honey-soy-chilli stir-fry tonight, with some fried rice.
SiK: I recently bought a new BBQ and have been getting into that. Last week I had some marinated kangaroo that was fantastic, so I’m doing that again tonight, with some capsicum, tomato, baby spinach, and rice, or maybe cous cous.
And what is your favourite drink?
Beer. Dark beer. Lots of dark beer.
What’s the best place in the world where you dream to be when all is drowning in chaos around you...?
BONES: The beach. Maybe not if there is a tsunami on the way but most of the time, it is the best place to be.
SiK: I would love to be in the thick of it. If the shit is going down, I want to see it, but probably I’d be at the pub, drinking dark beer.
Thanks for the answers and Good Luck for the future!
Interview conducted by Lucy @ Promofabrik
0 replies
Discuss this
|
