Mat-Ant-GR (left to right, 2008)
Born of madness, the self-appointed guardians of chaos,
Gunslingers are a band as comfortable in the mind-bending psychedelic noise,
feedback and distortion that they create as they are in the supple rhythms of a
tasty riff, lurching and exploding forward into an unknown darkness. Noise rock is a pretty heavily growing genre
right now, but there aren’t many people capable of rendering musical madness in
the fashion that Gunslingers are. For a
decade or more GR and his rowdy band of massacre rock deviant inquisitors have
been cooking up their sinister brew of distortion dosed noise and psychosis,
undeniably catchy rhythms lurking like a Punji pit in the dense sounds of the
distorted guitar twanging and crackling in the underbelly of a monstrous rhythm
section comprised of drums that sound like a harras of horses on the loose, and
a bass player who’s got the sonic skills to scramble your brain like an egg in
a frying pan from the grooves of an LP.
Their latest, and possibly most unhinged and tasty, musical offering is
2013’s
Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors, a single-sided slab of sickness
comprised of two tracks taking the listener further down the rabbit hole that
their earlier albums,
No More Invention and
Manifest Zero both for the awesome
World In Sound Records opened,
Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors proves that
while it may have been a little while since we last heard from them,
Gunslingers aren’t coming up short when it comes to showing that they still
have a lot left to do and say. Lead
guitarist GR has been around on the killer French psych scene for a long while
now and seems to be a lot of the brains, blood and brawn behind the Gunslingers
and with several solo albums and other projects going on simultaneously, I am
absolutely stoked that he was able to take time out of his extremely busy
schedule to fill our lucky readers in on the details about Gunslingers
balls-to-the-walls psychedelic sonic attack.
Beware dangerous riffs lurk ahead though, so watch your hands and feet,
and enjoy the ride! I present the
massacre rock deviant inquisitors themselves, I give you Gunslingers…
Can you talk a little bit about how
Gunslingers came to be? How did you all
meet and when was that? What led to the
formation of Gunslingers?
This was around 2003/2004 that we all met up. Though being
firstly involved in our respective bands of that time, we then went on a more
appropriately conducive level to “joining forces & conceiving
together”.
Antoine,
who came to be afterwards Gunslingers’ drummer, joined me on a band I had just founded…
some agitated free-form only 4-piece indulged in frontal automatic execution;
but it only lasted about one year— the band suffered from weird decimation as
one member went pretty over the edge on his saxophone mouthpiece, being taken
very-psychically-captive by self-mutilating dreadful feedback… and while
another member opened a bar to relieve his wistful bladder.
So Antoine & I survived this and found ourselves in the position of
founding a new band in 2005. We were thus firstly a guitar/voice, drums duo,
started to work around some material I had previously primed for guitar solo
and then made it evolve together for the purpose of the band.
I remember first show was offered to us whereas we only had 3 songs
but which were more chiefly 3 improvised sessions around 3 infinitely extensive
hysterico-saturnine themes; the concert turned to be a real catharsis exercise
that led us to play twice the same set in a row, the second one being the
re-improvised re-visitation of the first one though… so much so that nobody
could identify that this was the same songs’ other hand, so was it all about
“mise en abyme” that we had chosen the alias name of Vathek specially for the
occasion (after William Beckford’s roman noir whose both of us were regular
admirers, like all Great roman noir authors in general that we were massively
reading: Maturin, M. G. Lewis, Brockden Brown, Walpole, Hoffmann etc etc).
Then Matthieu, with whom we also had figured about founding a new band
all together, joined us as the bassist a couple of weeks later— that’s the way
the path finally opened for Gunslingers’ lineup…
Who all is in Gunslingers?
Until now it’s been: GR (Guitar/vocals), Antoine Hadjioannou
(Drums), Matthieu Canaguier (Bass).
What does the name Gunslingers mean or refer
to? Who came up with it and how did you
go about choosing it?
Well it refers to nothing but what suddenly crossed my mind
and which my tongue betrayed with the approval of everybody—, a classic name
for an obscure outsider band reclaiming the content of “the classic”. We shot
the so known generic content down and put ourselves as the new fuckin’ thing
behind it…You will recall that the full name in its complete extension is
Gunslingers (Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors). Most people may half-name it
for practical utility (myself included) and it’s fine but as large as the name
is it should be meant to fit into aesthetics requirements.
M.R.D.I came to my mind as an extension (subliminal yet heavy) not too
long after Gunslingers, and is pure surrealistic wit of a gesticulation; but
it’s like a sign of sympathy and a recognition, yeah man, for the listeners’
taste when not abused by prejudice-mongers or STEREOtypes. Being the plaything
of one’s own untamed feelings is much more honorable a thing.
NB: That’s too remarkable not to be mentioned that almost
all distributors handling our records do mess up our full name with its
extension; some even stipulated the issue was big enough since our band name
couldn’t fit in the space allocated on their website… and well, I then
naturally (& sarcastically!) suggested these guys to close their business.
And if we got to appear on a flyer (for a show or whatever) we were very
possibly told that the paper couldn’t expand to our complete legible name
etc.
So to speak, I’ve now
reached the point where I figure our name just means “that does not fit with”.
There’s a lot of things that I love about
music but describing and labeling it.
How would you describe Gunslingers’ sound to our readers who might not
have heard you before?
Melmoth’s laugh in extensible spatialization depending upon
your more-or-less-critical situation. So they’ve got to know who is Melmoth.
Where did you
grow up? How would you describe the
local music scene there? Did it have
much of an approach on you growing up?
I grew up in Grenoble, our metaphorical San Pedro Ville. For
sure the local music scene certainly had an approach on my curiosity above all,
having been a kid who unceasingly enjoyed going & seeing tons of concerts;
and even after seeing a bad show always going to another one, like if you
desperately expected that a miracle of taste would happen next; then the stock
pile (& spirit) is known and your patience is tried as generations come
& go (locals, eat your fucking babies!).— It’s made me well informed of the
stuff I’ve had nothing to do with. Once moving beyond curiosity, you find
absolutely no interest at all in the matter. Though mediocrity is a fine
argument per se which largely enlightens he who recognizes it as such and does
not desire it. But the deal is freeing
yourself of the things that are a headache to you and simultaneously building
up your own musical taste & identity regardless of any geographical point;
detours are often necessary in our quest.
Where are you located at these days? Do you feel like Gunslingers was heavily
impacted by the local music scene where you’re at now? Do you think you could have done and been
what you have and are anywhere or did the local scene play a large part in
sculpting the sound and ideology of the band?
I actually still live in San Pedro Ville, Antoine &
Matthieu moved to Paris. — Gunslingers has never been needed to feel concerned
about the nauseous package the local scene has had to transfer (before &
now and wherever we might live in France). Also, local promoters & venues feed the ones (99%) who best maintain
their taste market’s hierarchies; a very tiny chance is given to the
unexpected. Gunslingers played not much more than 3 gigs in France since 2008. So,
what do you think?
How would you describe the local scene where
you’re at? Are you very involved in
local music scene? Do you book or attend
a lot of shows?
I see, you want to know more about local stuff: FLATTERY FOR
& BY VOLUNTARY IGNORANTS’ RESTRAINT IMAGINATION. Isn’t that good?
I would willingly extend that description on a national scale, and
specifically concerning everything associated with Rock music & its
sub-genres in France. Besides, I’ve nevertheless
thought before that I would try help some friends of mine involved in foreign
bands to perform here, but I suppose time ran out on me more than I’ve
suspected.
Can you talk a little bit about what
Gunslingers’ songwriting process is like?
Does someone come to the rest of the band with a pretty finished idea or
riff to compose and work out with the rest of you or is it more of a cohesive
jam that you all distill into a song over a process of playing with the rest of
the band?
Gunslingers is above all essentially a collective involved
in exploration; improvisation has always been our chief thing, we’ve been
improvising since we were kids; so we’ve found in improvisation an end in
itself like from improvisation was also drawn lots of the substance for
composition. There is no rule like absolute formula really, but each time an
appropriate operating mode that best follows the suggestions of the
imagination, or of just a sudden impulse. Songwriting starts from anywhere
& nowhere, from anything to nothingness. — Then a running is automatically
& intuitively suggested to the band by just keeping the least sound
material explored more deeply, and the further it goes into exploration the
higher it is for the mind which dares to venture. Our Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors LP is total free-form and nothing
was pre-worked before.
And on the other hand, a lot of the stuff we strictly
composed wasn’t initiated by improvisation… and for sure a lot was worked out
around the guitar whose parts were either built up separately on my side before
or directly in the rehearsal space with & under everybody’s creative Eye.
But I think we’ve also known the importance of focusing all together on one
single instrument so we could find how to express our common intention, as far
as we’ve never really considered each member like an isolated entity creating
alone independently of the others. We could spend much time on conceiving
together a sequence of notes for guitar or bass, one rhythm, on just expressing
one tension or a feeling; we’ve never intended to mark off too much a central
point in songwriting, and I believe this has given us more freedom in the
expression, individually like as a whole.
Do you all
enjoy recording? I know most musicians
can really appreciate the end result of all that recording, but getting into
the studio and actually laying that stuff down…
It can be a real pain to say the least.
How is it for you all recording?
I’ll tell you what man, nothing can properly be called
“ended” or “achieved” without the full acceptance of the whole you in relation
with the object. And it obviously starts from ‘laying that shit down’. The studio stuff has to be set up by ME in most cases for there’s a
great chance that nobody else will do it for US, but I’m not likely to dislike
the first step towards “the Great what’s it”! Then, what I can say is Gunslingers’ music deals with lots
of contradictory feelings, which is exhausting to experience only cause the
involvement stimulus is absolutely high (while recording or not). All
Gunslingers’ studio material was recorded live (with no audience), that means
all of us playing all together in the same time, so I suppose we’ve always been
directly concerning the pure performance. I consider a certain ecstatic pleasure as being always inherent to the
performance very energy; thus, recording a performance (and if you’re not
sucked by a recording process that dominates your creative energy) should
always be equally ecstatic, — it’s capturing the climax of our own visceral
& spiritual journey and giving the most consistent indication on the soul
that it carries out through the ecstasy felt. No matter the number of times it
has to be repeated before you can say “this is the one”; the good take is just
the one that will appear to you as the highest combination of everything at the
best time from the moment the record button was pushed. To me the supposed pain
that might occur through repeated versions or interpretations (if several are
needed), is more likely to be felt as an evolution through mere degrees of
transportation, of elevation…until it reaches the highest and which is the
achieved goal.
Let’s take
some time to talk about your back catalog.
In 2008 you released your debut album No More Invention on the World InSound label. What are your memories of
recording that first album? Was it a
pleasurable, fun experience for you?
Where was it recorded at? When
was it recorded? Who recorded them? What kind of equipment was used?
No More Invention was recorded (& mixed) in 2007 at “Le
Ciel” (“the Sky”) in San Pedro Ville and in 3 days. It was a phenomenally
intense experience. Sebastien Norman is the guy (the coolest guy) who offered
us to record it and he made it so brilliantly, he exactly captured the way we
sounded like, proceeded with open instinct & radicalism, just like if the
recorded stuff was our perfect sonic mirror. I think he also entered our
psychology greatly, and with hindsight. He used an 8-track tape (VHS)
recorder…you know magnetic tapes are clearly not to displease me…
Two years
later in 2010 you followed up No More Invention with Manifesto Zero also on
World In Sound. Was the recording very
similar to the recording of your earlier album?
When and where was it recorded?
Who recorded it? What kind of
equipment was used?
I myself recorded & mixed Manifesto Zero in November
2009. The recorder was different but the process the same, a live recording
with no audience. We adjusted the sound recording so it could meet the
requirements of the new music we were playing. The sound treatment must evolve
with the music you play, as much as there is no certitude to guarantee you that
what once worked will work the same in a different creation context. Moreover,
it clearly wasn’t specially our aim to do a similar album to No More Invention,
neither in the form nor in the sound. Every Gunslingers’ record is conceived as
a stand-alone piece of work, and that’s what a few inconsistent grey heads
haven’t understood with us, cause their expectations never go beyond what’s
already known & experienced. Also,
there was no way that we’d afford to pay for a studio since we were able to do
it better by ourselves; and knowing the recording method we had in mind was
perfectly attuned to our conception & aesthetics, and offered us many
advantages: a great autonomy in recording it the way we wanted in our own
rehearsal studio, for free and at all times of day & night, and in the very
heart of the work in progress. Then we used my dusty analog 4-track tape
recorder, a machine I’ve had been using massively since 1999 and which I used
on all the albums I was involved into, that means everything if I except NMI.
How did you
originally get hooked up with World In Sound?
How’s your relationship with them?
Do you plan to continue working with them for future releases or have
you moved on at this point?
Around 2007 I was acquainted with the reissues ‘World In Sound’ was putting up and I enjoyed some a lot. I found particularly remarkable
the fact that this label was chiefly running for obscurities from the 60s/70s;
a very few albums from contemporary bands (and of less interest to my opinion)
were released but this seemed to be more occasional, that means the label’s
true aesthetics was lying much more in the reissues from the past. This was
essentially the reason for me to send them NMI, whose title is addressed to a
certain Time in question. I believe being a contemporary band does not
exclusively mean living in your Time, a certain level of abstraction must be
reached by the disobedience towards the codes of our current era so creation
can be felt for what it is in itself. Being out of date is so much the newer to
me. Wolf
(Wolfgang Reuther), the brother behind W.I.S, phoned me (armed with his coZZmic
German accent) to tell he was into doing it with us. He was the one who first
brought Gunslingers to the world’s table— Our relationship is still good, but I
can’t really say if some future releases will happen together…
Your latest
effort is this years (2013) Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors which is a
single-sided 12”. It’s a split release
between Riot Season and Les Disques Blasphematoires Du Palatin Records. Did you try anything new or radically
different with the songwriting or recording of Massacre-Rock Deviant
Inquisitors? What can our readers expect
from the new album?
Not at all, we didn’t try anything new nor different to us
on Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors. We rather made something usual in the way
we approach music, and self-evident in Gunslingers’ gesture: the appeal of
musical ad lib; we just may have radicalized it into instantaneous composition
and total free-form action, and more than this... we recorded it.
Concerning M.R.D.I, nothing was rehearsed before and we
recorded it as it came to our mind for the first time, it’s raw material which
knows no erasure, the contents and its shaping were instantaneous— I coined it
“alchemical free-form”. On the record you get 2 versions (part 1 & 2), the
second one is inspired by the first one and is as much a re-synthesis as an
extension of it… so it’s chronologically second (and necessarily more
pre-thought) but in part 2 you also get some contents that are totally unknown
to part 1; both parts are deliberately complementary, as are the two fingers of
the same hand…
Yes,
it is a co-production between Riot Season (UK) & my label— we did our best
to make sure that the core concept would succeed and this was precisely what
happened, something wild that transpires no restriction.
Where was that
material recorded? When was it recorded
and who recorded it? What kind of
equipment was used for the recording of Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors. Is Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors a
limited release? If so how many copies
is it limited to?
I did record it, in my rehearsal space at ‘Le Ciel’ in San
Pedro Ville, in March 2012. I used the same old analog 4-track tape recorder
that was used on Manifesto Zero & all GR related stuff, and with dynamic
microphones. This release is indeed limited to 500 copies and each of both
labels getting the half of it. It’s a nice object, an opaque white acetate
medium that you might mix up with your furnitures..
I founded Lesdisques Blasphematoires Du Palatin in 2006. The
main idea was bringing as many as possible of self-sufficient means in order to
release my own stuff (& all related stuff I’d be involved into) as I
wanted, and operating on an non-profit association basis. Besides, I had no
patience to wait for a label possibly interested in releasing my music and I
didn’t want to depend on having to appeal to anybody by way of glorious
self-promotion. I had afterwards a few fortunate opportunities for my music to
be released on other labels though and I took it when it sounded consistent to
me; with Gunslingers we were lucky enough to find in W.I.S some very reliable
brothers who would release our first two albums with strong faith & quite
promptly, and a common aesthetic interest.
But I think being able to do that stuff yourself gives you
considerable stylistic (and logistic) freedom, also putting out limited short
runs _which has been my case_ is an achievable goal.
It feels like I’ve
been urging myself to urgently meet my necessary needs in setting up a
micro-structure that would walk synchronized enough with the recorded material;
I’ve never excluded the possibility of releasing other artists but I’ve barely
been able to run just my own stuff alone without difficulty up to now. The
Great novelty to me is the appearance of Gunslingers on my label (with the
record M.R.D.I) just recently.
I released GR’s first two LPs (Xperiments from within the tentacular in 2007,
GR & full-blown expansion in 2008), “The high speed recording complex”
first issue (an album the wonderful Michael Yonkers & I recorded in 2007),
Paralytic FluXus (a duo including Gunslingers’ bass player & myself on
drums, 2006), and lastly Gunslingers’ Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors EP in
collaboration with Riot Season (2013).
Does
Gunslingers plan to continue releasing music through Les Disques
Blasphematoires Du Palatin Records in the future or are you looking to work
with other labels as well?
I shall certainly do my utmost to get this out on LDBDP.
Does
Gunslingers have any music that we haven’t talked about?
We sure do.
With the
release of Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors not long ago are there any plans
for any other releases coming up anytime soon or on the horizon?
There is more material that we already recorded; the tapes
lie in a preferred place of my home and some highlighted halo of hope
penetrates my gaze each time I happen to get close to it…
With these
completely insane recent international postage rate increases where’s the best
place for our U.S. readers to pick up copies of your albums? More and more these days we’re exposed to
great international music but with the recent international shipping price a
lot of international releases feel like a carrot on a stick for me as I just
can’t afford the shipping on a single LP these days…
Well firstly…about your last remark (“I just can’t afford
the shipping on a single LP these days”): how could you find a full length more
affordable? — I suppose when you purchase a record you aim for the quality of
the music it contains in the first place, not for quantity. Obviously it is
then no less enviable to pay for a shorter record (of the same weigh &
price as an ordinary full LP) if you think the music is absolutely your taste;
1 minute of music can bliss & blow your mind like no record of 45 minutes
could do— it’s a matter of fucking elevation. Duration should neither be a
defect nor a plus, but just a mere necessity of time that suits a pure stylish
proclamation the best. Next, we see lots of aesthetical mistakes happening
around— ‘Too short’ a record does not exist to me as a substantial defect cause
it would mean the music is probably too good to the listener who wants more of
the same stuff. Otherwise he would more possibly describe it as “fortunately
that fucking horrible record is already over!” or “god, it’s perfect it’s over
as I needed to take the tangent!” ; whereas ‘Too long’ a record means the music
(or part of it) is more than likely boring, which in this case is an aesthetical
mistake.
If a bad-&-equally-too-long record weighed less it would make more
sense to me since that shit could be shipped at a more affordable price and in
proportion of its surfeit of mediocrity. But essentially, if international
shipping is ridiculously too expensive nowadays (which is absolutely true &
insane) I don’t think it comes from the record duration.
In our case, Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors is not a
‘single’, but a 2-track album...which is
fundamentally different. ‘Single’, in a certain use of the term and concerning
certain concept, can sound as very simplistic a titling inherited from the
mercantilisation & commoditisation of aesthetics. It’s important that
people primarily focus on the concept emitted by the band.
…BUT… Your admirable readers in US can sure find our
record(s) from our Brothers at Permanent Records (Chicago or LA) or AquariusRecords (SF)…or maybe even at our friend Grady’s Record Refugee (Ventura CA)…
What about our
international and overseas readers?
They might consider the band’s very house LDBDP.
Where’s the
best place to keep up on the latest Gunslingers’ news?
Can you talk a
little bit about the philosophy or guiding idea behind Gunslingers?
“Gunslingers” offers no reason. Being appropriately
transported to the whole us’ best place is all we can aspire to. — We’re not
necessarily meant to intelligibly mean as far as our audience consists not
exclusively in humans but more widely in the Cosmos; our language is expressive
motion, our path its primitive conveyor and suffers no mere hyperbole. I leave
those who want the pastime to feast upon semantics. And
also… Have enough to do with musical cabals without needing them for
entertainment. Always make the
least impression on the common daub enjoyers.
I know that
you are the most involved member of the band when it comes to mixing and
recording so I’m interested to hear what your thoughts on Gunslingers would
be? The music at times sounds very
chaotic but if you listen carefully there are patterns and hooks that emerge from
the din. How do you go about creating
and crafting those sounds when it comes to recording and mixing?
During a recording session, we approach our music exactly in
the same way as we usually do… we’ve always been giving all privilege to the
performance itself; that means the recording process does not interfere with
the very way our music is built up—, we attach great importance to
deconstruction on sound & form and this all arises directly from our
playing.
The material is captured through a very minimal setup
process consisting in an analog 4-track tape recorder. When mixing that
captured material, you know I just take care of merging the instruments into
one another (just like a painter would harmonize substance & form,
‘chiaroscuro’ etc) and with more or less magnification… it is like drawing a
clear line on the aesthetic of the wished sound, and that’s enough to drain
seven thunders’ brains including mine!
I happened for a very
few songs (from both our previous albums) to afterwards create some subliminal
sonic ornaments that I added by way of post-produced analog tapes manipulations
(like reversed tapes, treatment on sound speed & height), but this
represents something pretty minimal and, like I said, ornamental.
I know you
release solo material. You’ve got four
albums out at least that I know of. Who plays with you on those solo albums or
does it alternate between albums? Can you talk about what this work is all
about?
On my solo albums there is only me alone playing, or me
& I… should I say. It’s been one of my key preoccupations for years to
record myself playing successively all instruments (and on each of my solo
albums up to now); I’m not inclined to refrain from such solitary musings, I
will have been the one who conceived the integrality of his solo recordings
that way… and I just keep going like a dissident in the operating mode.
Be it as it may, the notion of ‘band’ as mere assembly-of-persons-playing-together
experiences kind of a shock in its basis… but the notion of ‘individual’ as
well since I object _through action_ to seeing it as
confined-to-himself-and-restricted. I’m precisely more after the things that
could seem like locked away from the individual’s capacity, I want to explore
some landscapes unknown to the simplistic representation of the workability;
the vision of music only matters. And
paradoxically, even a group could barely reproduce or cover just the half of
all the material I recorded alone. Several persons in the same band would
develop a collective instinct of the ‘entente’ (although the collective would
have to face each of its member’s respective singularity & difference),
when in my case instinct & intuition, and upon which depends an essential
part of what makes that music what it is, are exclusively drawn from just one
man, and increased tenfold and redistributed to each instrument. These are too
intangible things to imitation, too spontaneously personal to be palpable by
the collective ‘entente’. I wouldn’t dare even playing some of that stuff again
myself. Being into it is like moving through the troubled waters between the
conscious & unconscious. Pure action often surpasses all preconceived
expectations, for when spontaneous it is loaded with a dose of the
unpredictable which is in the moment.
GR’s music is literally experimental & contemplative,
built on the transmission from sudden vision to sudden action (uncontrolled
accidents included), and using even the most fastidious (yet necessary) means
to materialize it onto some recordable surface. It now feels like the more I
record that way, the more it gets titanic a task to achieve. Perhaps my demands
are getting higher.
Now in place of several persons playing together, the
individual serves all the operations but can only do it in the chronological
succession, exploring all instruments separately and getting them all to
collide progressively up to the ultimate one. The genesis & mode of
generation of such material engage differently with Time—, when I play &
record an instrument, I endeavour to do it with the spontaneous vision of the
one that’s to come next. To be mentioned that each instrument assigned to a
track (I use a 4-track recorder) is played on the entire duration of the music
piece and in one blow (no trick no montage no overdubbing).
My
method is quite simple. For example, 3 instruments (Guitar-Bass-Drums). I get
to play the Drums and while playing it I hear the potential Bass in my head
that’s to come next; and likewise, when my mind hears the Guitar while playing
the Bass upon the captured Drums, I finally know it’s the whole band right
inside me and ejected from me that’s to be heard next while I’ll be playing the
Guitar.
You released
the face melting A Reverse Age last year on Mexican Summer limited to 750
hand-numbered copies. Do you have any
upcoming releases planned or in the works at this point?
Yes sir, I plan to record new material soon this year…
Do you have a
preferred medium of release for your music?
With all of the various mediums that are available to musicians these
days I’m always curious to hear why they choose the specific methods that they
do, and why. If so why?
I do, absolutely— no doubt vinyl (lacquer-cutting process /
acetate, to be precise) is my preferred medium. The way the recording grooves
are cut is totally far out! I’ve figured vinyl, and according to this process, is the most suitable
for rendering the sounds captured with my analog 4-track tape recorder, the
sound amplitude & spectra is precise & powerful & colorful and run
through your speakers like a fuckin’ untamed Beast. If you try to compare it
with a cd of the same music, it’s another world, almost another album…lots of
frequencies which contribute to the analog sound dynamics get lost in a cd…
I grew up
around a fairly large collection of music and I loved randomly grabbing
something off of the shelf, staring at the artwork, reading the liner notes and
being transported to some far off distant place. Having something to hold and look at, read
and feel, while I was listening to the music made for a much more complete
listening experience and offered a rare, albeit brief, glimpse inside the mind
of the artists that made it. Can you
talk about your connection, if there is one, with physically released music?
Holding a physical format into one’s hands (and more
specifically a vinyl) draws us entirely to the artist & his music, our curiosity
gets higher as the cover fascinates or intrigues us, there’s but a small step
to connect with the sound and we just have to remove the record from its sleeve
we know this… but no way time hasn’t come yet we still need to touch the paper
and drink its ink one more time and enter each of its pores properly before,
our Eye is wild & rabid it wants to hear visually first, we prolong the
excitement for it’s too good & sexy and getting more & more sweaty we
delay the liberation time again and then we might start the same experience
again while listening to it even yeah man I know what you mean…by physically…
Do you have a
music collection at all?
In fact not really… it’s rather the music collection that
has me! The more it collects me the more it hears me…
I’ve never had the spirit of the big fat collector to be honest. Though there
are a lot of records that would certainly make my day(s) to get, still the ones
I own are exactly my taste, without unnecessary overstock. We can collect ad
infinitum, but taste evolving forms itself through time & knowledge and
cannot be traded. I suppose an essential record must be tasteful to you over
time and pass the test of all revolutions. I have a comfortable amount of
records that are essential to me.
Thanks so much
for taking the time to finish this, I know it wasn’t short and it can’t have
been “fun” but I hope it was at least entertaining to look back on the history
of the band like this. Is there anything
at all that I missed or that you’d just like to take this opportunity to talk
about?
Thanks to you for your interest in our band. I hope I was
useful.… Man, have you ever heard about the black dwarf man?...
DISCOGRAPHY
(2006) Paralytic
FluXus РParalytic FluXus РCD-R РLesdisques Blasph̩matoires Du Palatin
(2007) GR –
Xperiments From Within The Tentacular – CDR, 12” – Lesdisques Blasphématoires
Du Palatin Records
(2007/2010) Michael
Yonkers & GR – The High Speed Recording Complex – CD-R, 12” – Burka For
Everybody/Lesdisques Blasphématoires Du Palatin Records
(2008/2009) GR – GR
& Full-Blown Expansion – CD, 12” – World In Sound/Lesdisques
Blasphématoires Du Palatin Records
(2012) GR – A Reverse
Age – 12” – Mexican Summer Records
(2008) Gunslingers –
No More Invention – CD, 12” – World In Sound Records
(2010) Gunslingers –
Manifesto Zero – CD, 12” – World In Sound Records
(2013) Gunslingers –
Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors – 12” – Lesdisques Blasphématoires Du
Palatin/Riot Season Records
Interview made by Roman Rathert/2014
© Copyright http://psychedelicbaby.blogspot.com/2014
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