interviews

• moshpit ezine; a new interview with thomas, 2/2001, following the release of divorced land
• moshpit ezine; interview with thomas, 4/1999

thomas interviewed by the moshpit ezine, 2/2001

german original at the moshpit-pages

why the hell do you make such complicated music? why not diduda-chorusses?

i have to be a little more expansive here... i did not get into prog because i liked it, but because there was no means of and no room for expressing what i wanted to express within mainstream rock. saying this, i am assuming that you consider pop music as a serious form of art, i.e.: as expressive, as something that includes an urge to exist, not just as a hobby horse. stephen king was once asked why we wrote and her answered the interviewer in return why he breathed...

however, as i could not really find a lot of things within me that could be expressed in thorough fashion and because i did not like to present a simple song that at least 3 bands had written before me in a similar way as my own, the songs became a little more complex most of the time - all the more so because in my experience, moods are not that easy to survey and always feature different facets within them; so how could it be adequat to try to express them by means of a uniformly floating pop song? (at least this is valid for what music wants to get out of me...)

what is complexity for you? how important is it?

what i said above means that complexity is rather a means to a different end. personally, i detest purely brainy music, and i would fight the reproach that we would do this as hard as i could. to me, complexity is what comes out when i want to bring into being the things that i have in mind as thorough and authentic as possible. no more, no less.

are you complex after all? or are you just nuts ;-)?

i really do not think that we are quite as complex as it seemed to you. i only think that the listener needs a kind of connection to the atmospheres inherent in the tracks in order to understand them. if you cannot connect, you will not like DL or at least you will not get into it. this does not have an awful lot to do with your brain - alright, it is wonderful to see that here and there may bewierd things passing off, but they are not focussed on too much in our music (at least i hope so), but do not become visible until you look at them very hard, that is to say: when you let your brain work on them. first of all, the music has to work on an emotional basis, and this is what i am interested in working at still a lot harder in the future.

is scythe a form of art?

in the sense i tried to explain above: yes. there are not many things in my life that are more serious to me than "denied", f.e.

have you ever ventured to estimate how often your ordinary listener would have to listen to DL in order to get into it?

that depends very much on the listener and what he is used to. what could one ever call normal? even people who customarily only consume straight music know from the very beginning what DL is about if they can connect to the overall tone. on the other hand, a friend of mine has just told me that she likes the cd a lot... but only after having listened to it 10 times with all due concentration etc. to put it simply: i do not think that you can stand by any objectifiable statement at all in this matter.

is there not a big danger of over-sophisticating rather bad compositions by listening to them from a certain point of view that is mostly connected with demanding music (i just maintain here that you are demanding ;-) )? everybody can make a note follow another one. where are the limits?

where everybody puts them. e.g., i think that the new king crimson records are the worst kind of musical masturbation that i know. udo likes them. i like the repetitive world you know from old cure records. udo thinks they are boring. i repeat myself, i know, but that depends very much on how well the listener can connect to the music with regards to his own experience. if i sing about a friend of mine who was a drug-addict and died from it, it seems plausible that someone who might have experienced something similar, albeit "just" the loss of a beloved hamster likes the song more than someone to whom this emotion is something external.

in the meantime you have managed to create a certain amount of fans, who you keep informing via your mailing list. how important are those fans for you?

this is always a difficult question. first of all, i would like to make it clear that we do not think like that - band here, fans there. this concept is too hierarchical for me. what we have is rather a congregation of benign friends who are friendly enough to accept our offer to get something out of it for themselves. this means that every listener makes up their own DL from our cd, and i always think that it is terribly important to get to know as much as possible about these "parallel universes" so that we ourselves are capable of learning new sides to our own compositions. insofar do we profit musically from our "fans" as much as they do from us (hopefully).

on the other hand: i do not wish to conceal that i solely write music for myself and not for anybody else. alright, you would not really say that it is logical to release records then, but there is this certain urge to express themselves and be understood in each of us, is there not? i have never really come across the feeling that i wrote something especially for an audience... well, except for the one occasion when udo came up with this boogie-polka-middle section of OSF; then, my first line of thought was: all these long track-epic-fantasy-everything-has-to-be-ever-so-serious-fetish-people are gonna kill us...

anyway you seem to invest quite a lot of time and energy in scythe. how important, then, is music in your life?

my life does not work without it for one single day. i cannot refrain from writing, listening, humming, singing, guitar-ing... this is really something natural to me like washing myself, but rather a spiritual way of doing so. it seems to be even "worse" with udo who spends a lot of time on running the BABYBLAUE SEITEN, a monster of an internet project...

DL was released by galileo records. inhowfar does the work with a (small) label differ from self-organisation?

well, it hardly does. patrick does support us a lot, especially by his commitment and his idealism. e.g., we (and black flame) could create exactly the cover artwork that we wanted - this is quite unusual in the music business! the same applies to the mastering of bob katz - maybe the ONE right engineer for the album - which was not really necessary to this extent, but has improved the whole package a lot: patrick made it possible although it would have worked if he had not. by and large does he work a lot to support us, and i really hope that he gets something back for it one way or the other.

what are your future plans? how about ruling the world? what about the next progparade?

ruling the world is not scheduled for the nearer future (der udo, der udo und der brain brain brain brain), the next progparade is just being planned, and although i help organizing it a little, i can already tell you quite definitely that we will not be on the bill because we want to focus on our next album.

you told me that there were quite a few things to say about DL. is there anything that is still missing?

yes, there is, but that is much too much for me to unnerve you with here...

anything else? now you got the chance to pacify your urge to communicate yourself?

come on, people, buy buckets!

thomas interviewed by the moshpit ezine, 4/1999

the following is an excerpt from an eMail-interview with Thomas, conducted by the german moshpit-ezine, following the release of our demo in 1999.

how did you get the idea to make that kind of music? and how does one do this anyway?

first of all, i don't think you get the idea of making a specific kind of music just like this. It's rather that you sit down and write or play anything. the sound of it depends on who you are, i think. so we all seem to be rather strange guys...

seriously, udo and me, the main composers, found ourselves confronted with the main problem that pisses off every newcomer band: everybody says things like "you sound like..." we ourselves are even more sceptical and i would have (had) difficulties in claiming such a clichee chord-section a la westernhagen my own. Just think about it: how often have you already heard C-a-F-G? no, just in westernhagen-songs, i mean ;-)

how exactly you do progrock, i don't really know. at SCYTHE rehearsals, however, udo or me or both of us present a new song, whose sound we have already a detailled impression of in our minds. then the band plays it, and as soon as the drums join in at the latest, is the 5/8 time, e.g., suddenly polyrhythmic... martin says strange things like: "if i play seven 7/8, one 4/8 and one 5/8 while you do the seven 9/8, it should fit in, shouldn't it?" Most of the time, you want to say some "but..."; however, when he plays it, it sounds as if it was the most natural thing in the world and had been planned in your composition right from the beginning. EACH OTHER is full of those polyrhythmic passages you don't even realize at first... this guy is mentally ill, but so is bruford...

ingo doesn't want to play the pre-composed basslines as well -luckily!- and always thinks up something "more groovy". There you are: a SCYTHE song. i think ingo is our man for staying on the ground a little, which always suits a bassman. certainly, i get flames now from all over the place, but i prefer a tony levin-groove to the high notes of chris squire. of course, he is good, but it seems to me that the bass should be really deeeeep.

how do you want to do it live? i guess it is not too easy to play music so complex on stage?

it is far from impossible to do it on stage. if i think of yes' "gates of delirium", ok, THAT is difficult, and i think i had major difficulties in playing it live... there are still parts in it that i rhythmically can't understand - i guess they are all playing in different times!?. sometimes i wonder what bruford would have done to this piece... well, yes, SCYTHE... we are rehearsing a lot at the moment, change the one or other arrangement, share the backing vocals to ingo and udo, but by and large we do the same that we did on the cd. everybody plays his parts, just like in every fartrock-combo. however, there will be more improvisations live, of course, some a-capellas here and there, freak-out drums, a guitar player doing tap dance on his fx-thingies, a keyboarder dying of a heart-attack because of the hectic 321435 sound changes within one song, anda bass player laughing at all of us. just the usual band stuff, really.

how do you imagine your audience? who do you make music for?

our music is an acquired taste to the ordinary music consumer, no doubt about that. but we are not really preoccupied with who we want to see at our concerts. we have received positive feedback from indie-fans, heavies, my mum, and there are even 16-year-old girls who listen to our stuff. whoever can access the atmospheres we create, should not have difficulties in accessing the whole of the music, as well. there are days when my girlfriend whistles some 13andahalf/8 times without knowing. if you think it sounds well, it sounds well. and if you don't like it, well, i am sure, you would not like it then even if it was straighter.

do you think you could be commercially successful as well? if you make good music and earn money by that, it is nothing bad!?

of course it is! at our mp3.com-page we were nr1 and 2 for some time with two tracks. and the cd sells better than we had expected, if you keep in mind that we do the promo ourselves. [...] it s quite alright, but you can t get rich doing progrock. even people like robert fripp don t. as long as we are not losing too much money, it s ok for us, as it all is still a hobby to us. but you have to be very much an idealist if you are doing it professionally and thereby risking everything concerning your future.

what are your influences apart from other progbands? there are quite a lot traceable on EACH OTHER...

yes, there are! they are too many to mention here, really, so i ll just try to give some general hints; udo and martin are rather hardcore proggies. they both have other cds on their shelves (udo has just lent me a photek cd), but as far as i know, it is all somehow progressive in the latin sense of the word. i know, e.g., that udo likes the beatles. ingo is rather open in his taste: radiohead, the verve and david bowie are just two examples of this. i myself used to listen to new wave stuff very much - the cure, nma, smiths - and i like the last 2/3 bowie-albums and radiohead very much, too.

when will the next album come out and how will it sound?

the next album seems to be planned for march or something, and it will either sound like EACH OTHER or absolutely different or something inbetween. we don t really know what we sound like until reviewers tell us. including your comparisons, we should have a list of about 30 bands that we undoubtedly sound like. just like: "the first song makes it obvious that the band know the finnish-baskish singer hunde anleinen." or "the lyrics of the magnum opus can be traced back in their intertextual approach to the roman-etruscian epic writer crutzius caputzius with his chantoes on the beautiful margret". honestly, most of the bands we copy we don t even know! that does not so much show that reviewers all dont know what they are talking about, but rather how subjective all this sound-business is. but that s ok, we are all postmodernists, arent we ;-) ?