Hi!
I'm finally back from unforseen hiatus and will try to be active from now on. And what would be better way to make a comeback than an interview with NovaKill!
Hello NovaKill and thank you for this interview! Lets go back to the beginning, how did you form the band and what made you want to be a musician?
B: I had only a passing interest in music growing up. It wasn't until I heard a bit of Punk, back in 1979 or so, that I found music I could really connect with. Ultimately, it completely changed the course of my life.
Sik and I had been running a club night for a couple of years, having been doing our own projects, when we decided to collaborate. It came together very easily, he and I have very similar tastes in music. I honestly can't think of anyone else I would want to work with, it works so well for us.
S. I did music at high school, and played in one of the school bands, but it wasn't until Art School that I started composing and making my own music and sound scapes as soundtracks for my films and installations and playing with tape, synths and sequencing, and it was possible to make the sort of music I was interested in. Art School was a great way to discover new sounds and ideas.
What were your musical influences?
B: For me it is very much Punk, New Wave, Post Punk and what came out of that. Old school Industrial music doesn't do anything for me but when Cabaret Voltaire released The Crackdown, that was a type of Industrial Music I could definitely get into.
I was never much into purely electronic music. When I started performing solo, as Deathly Quiet!, my aim was to sound like a proper rock band, using only synths. At the time I worked solo because I didn't know anyone else who had any interest in the same music I did. Almost 40 years later, I still don't really know more than a handful of people who do.
Living on the other side of the world, I'd never heard of EBM. I had some Skinny Puppy albums but that was really all I'd heard. I think it all crystallised for us in the early 90s, when we first heard Leather Strip and got some insight into the existence and extent of the EBM scene in the Northern Hemisphere. Solitary Confinement was something of a revelation and it opened up a whole new world of possibilities for us.
S. It wasn't until I was in my mid to late teens I started listening to “pop” music but was drawn to the overtly electronic sounding songs, but was also listening to film music, and then through alternative radio and art school I was exposed to weirder and stranger music, what the independent record stores labelled as “AVANT-GARDE”.
Where do you get inspiration for the songs?
B: Musically, most of my inspiration comes from the tools we use to create it, Playing around with our software instruments and effects, coming up with something that interests me. If you look at Rage, for example, that came about because I had recently bought a synth plugin called Thorn and I discovered it had this thing called a Glitch Sequencer that made these mad riffs and sequences. I found one I liked and layered a couple of others with it and started playing around with different progressions. The main part of the song came together in a couple of hours, although it was probably a year later that I added the last part, which was what finally turned it into a NOVAkILL song.
Inspiration for lyrics comes from all over the place. Sometimes it comes from the voice samples we put into our songs. Other times, Sik will have given me something he's started with a working title and that will serve as a theme for the lyrics.
S. Cyberpunk, sci-fi, etc and all that stuff that “holds a mirror” up to society etc. - movies, books, philosophy are great for ideas, but the inpiration for the sound just comes from listening to other music, and then playing around with synths and DAWS to see what starts to emerge as something worth pursuing and turning into a track.
How would you describe your sound to new listeners?
B: It's usually a difficult thing because most of my friends and work colleagues have no frame of reference for what we do. To those people I usually explain it as being like Techno with Heavy Metal vocals, which is not a very accurate description, really, but it gets them thinking in the right ball park.
I really like what Sik put up on our Bandcamp page - "dark post-punk tinged electro-industrial". I think that pretty much covers it.
S. I have heard the term “dystopian” from people outside the “scene” and unfamiliar with the genre, but it is quite vague. "dark post-punk tinged electro-industrial" seemed a better “tag”
What did you listen to when growing up?
B: Mostly it was whatever was on the radio. I liked The Beatles and The Monkees as a teenager because that's all I'd been exposed to. I was three years out of high school before I got to hear The Stranglers or Buzzcocks and that's when it all changed for me.
S. Growing up my parents didn't listen to top 40 music and always had classical music playing, and from that I had an appreciation for film music.
Congrats on new album Artifice, how was the writing process of the album and what inspired the album?
B: Thanks. This album actually came together quite easily. It had been a couple of years since Iconoclast, we hadn't played live for a few years (thanks to Covid) and we hadn't really thought much about what we'd do next. Then we had a proper band meeting (something we never do) at Sik's place, made a list of things we'd been working on separately and chose a few to get serious about. Pretty much the whole album came out of that list, except Darkness, which I wrote while we were working on the other things.
Unusually, we settled on a title quite early on. Often we have a few different ideas and don't pick one until the album is in some kind of shape but we both liked the sound and feel of "Artifice" so that's what we called it. It reflects our attitude towards society, the artificial nature of so much of it and the way it is used to maintain control. We like to think we can encourage people to pull back the curtain and see beyond the artifice to the reality of the way we all live our lives.
It's been almost 21 years since your debut album, what keeps you going after this time? How has the scene changed during this time and has it gone to better or worse?
B: Honestly, I can't imagine not doing this. I went through a period of 4 or 5 years, between I Hate God and (D)Anger, where I found it hard to get motivated but that passed and I can't see it happening again. I'm 65 now and it seems ridiculous ot me that I am still doing this, still just as passionate and angry with the world as I was 40 years ago. The world is so broken and the fact that no-one seems to see that, or care about it, keeps me fired up.
Here in Australia, the scene barely exists any more. In the mid-90s there were three or four club nights a week in Sydney and they all got a decent turnout. Today there are one or two clubs that run a few times a year and get a fraction of the audience from back in the 90s. The live music scene is a joke here, so it's hard to find gigs, although we are determined to play as often as we can this year and beyond.
To me it's always interesting in darker scene how artists make such a long careers compared to other genres, where long careers seem to be very seldom.
B: I think that is largely because we don't have the same expectations as artists working in other genres might. For us, in particular, it is a hobby. We both have careers outside of music and we've always known that what we do could never be commercially viable. We also keep getting better at this and while we keep improving, it just makes sense to keep going.
S. Yeah, we aren't doing it for fame and fortune. It is something to keep us “sane”, or at least insane in the right way, or something, but it feels like something I just gotta do.
B: To further my point, I think a lot of people get into rock and pop and dance music to get personal recognition. They want to be pop-stars and when the reality of their situation finally bites, they lose heart and move on. OTOH, we've only ever been in it for the music. I'd be perfectly happy never to see my name or photo anywhere, for people to be focussed only on the music. Of course, that's not how people are so we do what we must but I am generally deeply uncomfortable with shamelss self-promotion.
As an artist what would be your ultimate goal?
B: It would be nice to get to a point where we could play live on a regular basis without having to beg for venues and organise everything ourselves. It doesn't sound like much to ask but it is something we have never really managed to achieve. I'd love to do a proper tour of Europe and/or the US, even as a support act, but I can't ever see that happening.
S. Doing a large or long tour would be great, though it seems very unlikey. My “ultimate” goal is, I guess, to have a body of work that I am proud of, and that I have improved and grown and challenged myself as an artist and as a “human”, (and maybe to work out just what that means).
What are you future plans?
B: As I said, we want to play live more often this year and beyond so we are rehearsing every week and looking for opportunities. We'll probably start looking at our next album later this year, or early next, but we haven't really discussed anything yet. There are still songs from our last two albums we haven't had a chance ot play live, so we're not in a hurry to write any more, at least for the moment.
S. Keep making noise.