Oomph : Agnostic Front

-How would you present this new LP?

-Dero: Well, the first difference is that we composed it separately: we are three different composers, three different human beings, and that’s a good thing that makes the thing even surprisingly richer. After the success of the last album, which like the single went both platinum in Germany, we wanted to keep the spirit, the energy, and didn’t want to go for holidays for half a year, but just continue to keep this spirit, this energy and this enthusiasm concerning the last tour. Each member has his own studio, where we live, and we have headquarters studio also, where we produce and mix all of our stuff. So, after three months we met, and we were pretty much satisfied with what we did. We did another role, two month, and then collected the new material, went to the record company, who were also very satisfied with what we did. We are a rock team, an album band and not a single’s band, and they took a bit of pressure from us, because they didn’t wait another number one hit single. That’s of course all about luck a bit, so they said us to do a good album, and that all. Hopefully we did, and everybody was fine with it. The album went straight to number five in the charts in Germany, which is cool for us!

-What main differences can we find with ‘Glaube, Liebe, Tod’?

-Crap: We tried to experiment more with the electronic sounds than on the records before because we wanted to get back to more electronic elements as when we started, but when we counted all the tracks that we recorded, we found out that it’s much more guitar than we ever used. We tried to work on each song very long, so some parts of guitar you might hear are electronic elements with samplers, and some electronic elements you might hear are actually guitars. We mixed it, and worked very long on the sounds and atmospheres and I think that, for the time, we took a poem from a very famous German author called Erich Kästner, who is more famous for his youth novels, which are really funny. This poem is totally different, it’s more dark, more adult; he wrote it when he split from his wife, so it’s very different and that’s what makes it so interesting for us.

-Dero: we always try to find new stimulating points, new aspects. That’s why, for example, we choose a movie soundtrack also to transform into a song, ’The man with harmonica’ from Ennio Morricone. That was a new door to open for us, we always have in mind that we should try some of these. There was a couple of candidate for it, but this one fit the best. The original has no lyrics, so I did it, and there was no vocal line, and so we invented one for it, and some chords, because we just took the main theme. And then, the hardest thing was to get through Ennio Morricone in order to get the permission, but as we passed all the lawyers, then we’ve got through to him and he was pretty relaxed guy, saying that he has listen to the stuff and found it great. I let him a translation for the lyrics, and he said ok, you can do that, no problem. He’s one of our favourite soundtracks composers ever.

-Crap: The good thing with a movie theme is that you’re not supposed to do another boring cover version, but it’s an opportunity to put something new, unique to put this movie theme in a realistic context.

-Are you found of remixing your own stuff, by the way?

-Crap: We’re not remixing our own stuff, which would be boring: we just figure out the final version of a song and work hard on this version, and afterwards, it would be for us totally unthinkable to have to make it another way, as we thought that this is the only one right version for this song. But we like it for other stuff, as we did for Korn, for example.

-This new Lp is totally sung in German: is it today a deliberated choice for you?

-Dero: There was no plan actually, this happen that way. English and German are very different languages: English is very musical, it’s very well sounding, and German is very rough, special and unique. So, on one hand, you can express your own feelings and emotions the best way in your mother’s tongue because you lived through those emotions in this language. Also the deeper songs, lyric wise, are the German songs. But it seems like an exotic bonus to sing in German: The market is big for English spoken music, but people likes it because it sounds different, and maybe it fit also perfectly to the heart and rough appeal of the guitarist, this phonetic appeal of German language.

-Don’t you think that this raw German language fit more than English for industrial and electronic music in general?

-Dero: Yes, maybe people see the authentic aspect of that. There were so many bands in the past who made the way, like DAF or Kraftwerk, very authentic in what they did, and it’s still that thing that people see when they listen to German music, it’s pretty much linked to the industrial way of thinking. Of course, we’re coming from an industrial town, Volsburg, where Volkwagen has his manufacture, so what we do it very linked to this ‘indus’ stuff!

-When you started, did a band like Neubauten inspire you for the same reasons?

-Crap: Yes of course: they were sort of the first band who tried to bang and hit on everything they had recorded or sampled, which was new at that time, recorded and made music out of objects and industrial elements, banging on metal and steel things, and I think they are very interesting for all those interested in electronic and avant-garde music.

-Metal, not ‘metal’, but when I interviewed Jurgen Engler, from Die Krupps, and he told me the term metal music was invented by Lou Reed on his ‘Music metal machine’ LP…

-Dero: Yes, there are two words for metal: the steel, and the guitar! The early NIN stuff was very inspiring too, and many bands tried to combine that there are two aspect of industrial music: one around the Throbbing Gristle stuff, about noises and sounds, and the aspect of the monotonic appeal of the guitarist. People prefer one reference or another, but I think both are true to represent it.

-Skinny Puppy is another way too. But what do you think of bands such as Depêche Mode, very keyboards orientated?

-Dero: We love them: we come from the eighties, and this period was very influenced by all that electronic stuff, and that’s why we started to combine all that stuff, because we liked the electronic appeal of Depêche Mode, Kraftwerk, Nitzer Ebb, and the dark appeal of, for example, Sisters of Mercy or the Cure, plus the roughness of dirty guitars like Motorhead and AC/DC: so why not combining those three worlds instead of separate it, like in the eighties?

It was very boring and sad for us to see that three interest fields have been separated.

-And what do you think of Alec Empire?

-Crap: I don’t like him, he doesn’t touch me, there’s no melodies, no emotions, no loops, but that’s personal.

-It’s very different now from what he did with Atari Teenage Riot anyway

-Dero: We didn’t hear his latest stuff, we only knew is ancient material. But we have to listen to it!

-Last time we met, you had Nina Hagen on your record: Is it some guests this time?

-Dero: well, there’s some guys supporting us in a way, a female singer who did some vocal tracks, and a guy who did the harmonica for ‘Die Schlinge’, as it wasn’t allowed to us to sample the original track so we had to record something new, but no other guests, it would be boring to do it each time: for the last CD, we had Sonia from ‘l’Ame Immortelle’, but this time, we didn’t have the feeling to do that, so, why forcing it?

-Talking about that, the trio formula is still the best for Oomph?

-Crap: Never change a winning team! We know, for more than fifteen years, how to work together, we know all the good things and all the bad things of each other and who can help us in that kind of situation of us three. We can easily write songs together, and we have the possibility to create everything we have in mind for the record, we don’t need anybody…apart a harmonica player! On stage, it’s different, we cannot create a full rock band on stage with three people

-Dero: Green Day did! And the Stooges, and Motorhead, and the Young Gods...

-Crap: Yes, Dero cannot play bass guitar as good if he sings at the same time, and we like to feel like a rock’n’roll band when we play live, we like all the real drummer behind this and feels the bass guitar on the left when I’m there. That’s why we’ve got two friends of us on stage, and fortunately, they are totally confident with their role, only to play live, and they have no ambition to compose or go in studio, but they’re waiting for each next tour, and we ask for them.

-About Ennio Morricone, what are your favourites amongst all the music he composed?

-Dero: Of course, it’s the movie too, and it’s a perfect mix of pictures and music in this

big western movie. He created so many emotions, and you already see the picture when you hear the music, and that was the main goal to transform it and create emotion and to write lyrics that would fit to that song. It was kind of new for us to have this kind of western appeal in our music, we never did it before. And this soundtrack is our favourite, ‘Once upon the time in West’.

-Crap: Yes, and he did some for Belmondo’s movies too, amongst other: some of the stuff he did in the eighties was a little bit too sweet , but he’s a movie score maker, and sometimes he’s not artistically free I think, to do what he would want, he has to do what the people ask.

He’s the best for great melodies.

-Did you ever get proposal for movie score yourself?

-Dero: That would be cool. In the past, we did some instrumental things, and if it’s some movie where it’d fit, we would like to do it very much. It should be a very dark and schizoid movie, which would fit to very psychotic stuff! Maybe in the future, why not? It would be of course a great challenge.

-Crap: Even for computer games, that would be cool…

-Or for your videos: aren’t you tempted to adapt some of your songs in small films for that format?

-Dero: We’ve always tried to shoot small movies when we shoot a musical video, as there are too many videos which are only performances videos, and that’s boring in a way. So far, there’s always a challenge to create like small horror movies or whatever, we like that and it’s another aspect of our music dome, it’s always amazing to see how many aspects your job have: writing, composing, mixing, producing, promotion, shooting a video, be an actor, be live on stage, so many faces and so many aspects are always great, we appreciate that very much.

-As usual, this album is self produced by Oomph?

-Dero: We produced ourselves, because we are real control freaks, we can’t let it loose, our records are our babies! But we did the mastering in Paris, at La Source mastering, for the second time, great job, and that’s it. There are so many bands in that era of casting acts who don’t do their own shit, but we still do, and that makes a difference: there’s important for the kid outside that there are still bands who do their own stuff, and hopefully the music industry will believe more in the future in bands who do their own music and reflect their own emotions. Right now, it’s a bit a sell out concerning those casting acts, they’ve spending a lot of money for that shit, and for us, as real musicians, it’s very sad to see actually. This is what we made fun of with the song ‘Gott ist ein popstar’ ‘cause it shows both aspects, the marketing of the church and the marketing of the pop world, the young guys from casting shows who are celebrated like gods, those people who have changed the traditional religion into TV, and the new gods are recruited through castings, faceless acts, they took the dream of other people, and it’s very boring to see. Of course, the other aspect of this song was a criticize of all the marketing aspect of the church, as a German pope was elected, that has been really a huge marketing aspect going around, and the Vatican P.R department made a really proper job, they made a popstar out of a really old guy! The world youth put it on the top, there was like a Michael Jackson concert, in Cologne, where the pope were speaking, with so many young guys crying and nuns falling down, it was very strange to see. Many people were asked in interviews why they were here, and they said because ‘it was in the media: I’m not a believer but I’m here because it’s on TV, I want to take part on this big media event’. It was really funny of course.

-Is this title has mainly to do with your views about religion?

-Dero: I think those are the three main aspects of the human life, as long as it’s consciousness in a human brains, as long as we reflect ourselves from the beginning of reflection of life: people ask themselves those three big questions, where do I come from, where am I going to, what do I do in the middle of that, and of course it’s all linked with do I believe in myself, do I believe in life, do I believe at all? We are no traditional believers, we are more those who ask questions, sob we consider ourselves rather like agnostic people, so we have to ask yourself what love means to you, do you believe in it, do you love yourself, and whatever. Of course, that’s a real important aspect of life, and, in our so called fun society, it’s a bit negotiated: there are so many people who don’t want to talk about things like death, which are still taboo. We grow older and older in our society, and it’s really special because it will be a real new society when we’ll be old, people of our generation, there will be nearly only old people, and this is a really new thing in the evolution, many millions of old people and only a few young ones, so we have to face death, because there will be millions of people waiting for death, and no birth coming to show that the evolution continues. It’s a bit strange development within evolution, mostly in Europe, and of course not in the Arabs countries, but in the western world, it is like that, in industrial and big nations. Death can make your life richer, for me, it’s not an enemy, it define my life: without death, I wouldn’t have definition, feelings, thoughts about life, I wouldn’t even know what life is, it’s like a silent friend, who sight me, reminds me how precious, unique and fragile life is. People have to face that, it can make your life richer.

-Yes, without shadow, there’s no sun…

-Dero: Yes right, it’s all dualism that makes the whole universe…

-And so, you appreciate more the good things that happen to you…

-Dero: Of course: in our music, we rather reflects the dark side, but we also like the bright sides of life, but never had the feeling to reflect it musically, we just lean back and enjoy. I like sometimes music reflecting the bright side of life, but it’s not Omph, we don’t have the feeling to do that.

-On the record, we can find an interactive section, with a video for ‘Gott ist ein popstar’, and, if you click on the fire in the middle of the three symbols, you go on the Internet: but to see what?

-Dero: There’s a game going on, you can play ‘One arm spends it’ (?!) against us, with those symbols, and you can win a backstage access for a Oomph gig, and you can also play blackjack against us. It’s all about those three symbols, and there’s good to see there’s a big response on our homepage (Oomph.de). But, of course, in another sad aspect, concerning this song, ‘Gott ist ein popstar’ and its video, there were many death threats on our homepage, from radical Christian people, and that’s a very ambiguous thing, because we also thought that Christian people were lovely and they forgive people, but our Christian society is radicalising more and more, and that development is really scary to see. Bands are banned or boycotted on some music stations and TV stations in Germany. On one hand, they broadcast the American way, sex and crime all around the clock, and, on the other hand, especially about things concerning religious feelings, they seem really scared. That’s the American way, and I’m really afraid of that. The Christian societies are radicalising more and more, as a contrast point to the Arab nations: we all know why Arab nations are radicalising more and more, that’s because that’s their lone weapon: the Americans comes to threat them, and there’s still the only weapon that they have: they have no arms, so now, concerning terrorism, the western nations are more and more afraid. So, they radicalise more and more and they rely more and more on own traditions, and that’s really sad to see because we consider ourselves open minded free democracies, its on the way back to middle age, I think. We have to take care, bad things are lurking everywhere.

-Each time, in the history, where there has been huge renaissance of religions, it’s generally bad period for humanity, dark ages, strong government, wars, all at the same time. There’s not so much fun at the moment…

-Dero: Yes, and freedom of speech become quite a new thing: we ask questions, and of course, and we know that’s dangerous, as the world goes and how the situation becomes. We’re just a mirror for the society, and this society cannot bare the picture that we reflect, it’s really frightening. That’s all we do, we’re not people for answers, we just say to ask questions, that’s the most important thing. But of course mass media do not want people to think themselves, they want them slaves because like that you can manipulate them. Andy Warhol said that TV is chewing gum for the brain, and that’s what free TV does, it chews the brain, it glues the brain. But hopefully, people will make it, there are more and more people against globalisation and all those things. Now it’s the radical and fast end of capitalism. I’m pretty sure, because globalisation makes it very fast, high speed, so it will be a high speed end of it all. All the high cultures that we know, Rome, the Egyptians, the Incas were before us, but we’ll take part of that history also: a great culture, a then, gone with the wind…

So, it’s the end of the movie. Cut.

Interview conducted on April 14th, 2OO6 in Paris by JP Coillard.

Thanks to Roger Wessier.