Hello Nahja Mora and thank you for this interview!
Hello, Tommi, this is Josef, pleased to make your acquaintance
Your sound is a lot different from other bands. How would you describe it to new listeners?
I’m often at a loss to exactly describe what we sound like. We are informed by industrial concepts in our approach to sound and to communication; we are aurally akin to a digital maelstrom of indecision ensnared by expressionist and psychedelic extremes. I see spirit in music and in sound relating to sound and creating harmony or not. Tension in the unknown and the known.
What were your early inspirations or influences?
I am influenced by a few industrial groups. Particularly SPK, Monte Cazazza, Throbbing Gristle, COIL. I am also influenced by Tori Amos, Arnold Schoenberg, George Crumb, Giles Swayne, JS Bach, Igor Stravinsky. Skinny Puppy and Battery are particularly fascinating. I think if you’re reading this you should listen to Leichenschrei. I am most particularly influenced as a musician by growing up with a piano, buying Throbbing Gristle’s DOA on CD when I was 13, and becoming fascinated with digital audio and digital synthesis when I was a teenager.
What made tou become a musician and why this style?
I have always been a musician. I think when I was growing up I personally listened to industrial and electro-industrial music (i tape traded in the 90s). I also studied music in highschool and on a variety of instruments when I was young. I think of this as all part of the pallete that I use to express an Idea. The idea just has become constantly and consistently informed by alienation by and through technology. So, technology… and the way it distorts… (the medium) has become something intrinsic and as parcel that the sound delivers. It’s communication. It’s overloading to get a message through.
Where do you get inspiration for your songs?
Inside Out Ep is an examination of spree killing events as well as the socio-media-ecosystem that follows. The songs that I am currently working on conceptually deal with communication/assault, being driven to violent thinking, and predicting the future and it being a curse.
As an artist what would be your ultimate goal?
”As Death…” I don’t know that I have an ultimate goal as an artist; it’s more how deeply can I express an idea and I am very very ambitious. I would like to play in more countries.
How is the music scene in US today? How has it changed over the years?
Things leave marks and people have become worked over stuck in home and stuck in the face with rhetoric about sides and rhetoric about each other. Things have been gutted in the interim, the fallout of pandemic … danceclubs do well but less of them ; waiting for scene itself to get over itself if itself is even itself anymore. Where is the scene? Where is the youth? Are we talking witch haus haunts or goth club institutions or punk rock house parties . Noise is huge and so is Dark Electro. Everything is merging into rage.
Lot of artists are saying touring has lost its appeal and it is not financially worth it. How,as an artist, you see the situation?
I will do it and it will be done. But it must be done for everyone and everyone must be more involved to make a scene be a scene if anyone wants any part of this dream. If you want to see a band in your town, you should maybe make some promo yourself and put it up where you can. Xerox logos or make stencils. Do what you will. Also there are these people at venues called talent buyers. Readers, you have to make them know you will buy tickets for some act and you have to buy the tickets too and show up. There’s just not as much money as there used to be. There is no huge giant music industry willing to let an artist be free and paid. If you want a big artist again, you have to support that artist. You have to carry their creed and share their work, get them more fans. Get them shows. Reach out and see what connections can be made. Be a gardener. This has to be grassroots.
Digitalisation from artists point of view, is it good or bad?
Now that more and more music is being released it seems as a listener to be harder to discover new interesting bands.
Is it more of social media these days than of the actual music?
Social media is trash. It’s taken over any indepedence of the internet and is working to constrain it into some sorta authoritarian ”choose for us” nonsense. It limits voices but digs in on delusions to keep end users engaged. It’s nasty stuff that will stage comments and notifications differently in an attempt to get your biochemistry out of whack. It’s addictive and dangerous. Spotify is trash. Most digital distributions-- actually all-- are complete trash. Bandcamp is decent until you have merch. There’s been some decades long reduction of the valuation of music and they’d have you think it’s because of the extreme amount of data but it’s instead to nullify the deviant voice that used to have mass media in its hand. You can’t be that political if you’re not that personally paid unless you have a really big following. It’s not at all fair or like it has been ever before. I wasn’t alive during the 1960s clearly but it certainly seems like the counter culture in the US once had an impact. Since then though there’s been a careening bumper car of ruin knocking down any sort of social care and social remark for too long and Spotify is part of it. It all goes back to something Dead Kennedys... Convenience... It’s undoing everything. Things should be hard to find. You should have to go into the shadows. You should have to learn and have that experience. Putting everything in the light, devaluing it, and cutting its wings so that it ”comports”, is not the way.
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What advice you'd give to young artists?
”Never play to the gallery” Do what you have to do because you have to / need to. Don’t mistake teaching and advice for control and abuse and def do not mistake the reverse. Learn from everyone, judge not . Go on an adventure, and have fun. Release on physical media. Have events and sell merch. Connect with other people local to you and have them involved in your event.
What are you future plans?
Too many to name!
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