Featuring alex from digital geist | Interview by Ruud Dreessen aka ebm-industrial.nl | 25 januari 2010 19:33
1- For the first question will be - do you know the netherland?
Yes, though while I've been to Belgium several times I've never managed to get to the northeast to visit your country. I know that you speak with a lot of "oorts" and "ijs" though. :D
2- Do you follow the electronic music scene, do you have any other favourite bands?
Of course! I follow many, many artists in the electronic genre. It's really an inspiration to me to see what other artists are doing. I try my best not to restrict myself to a specific style though. I think if it's good, then it's good and that's enough for me. Artists that I try to have every release: Front 242, Sasha, Underworld, Brian Eno, Deadmau5, Praga Khan, BT, Kraftwerk, Tom Jones (I know I'll catch hell for that one)... and lots of others. Some projects like Nulleins and Gabriel Le Mar from the Thinner label are fantastic too.
3- Greetings alex could you please shortly introduce our readers your music project digital geist Please fill also a biographical resume about how,when and where...give us a more background information?
Well DG started in 1999 as a noise experimentation as I worked towards my Fine Art college degree. I recorded demos for free to anyone that wanted one and they were quite bad, but with time and effort and a solid direction towards making a project that had many genres and a focus on music that moved me the project evolved quite steadily from a background hobby to something I consider to be a full-time concern. The resources I found online and classes I could take at university helped a great deal (along with trial and error) with theory and MIDI programming. I had a choice: I could spend $1000 to get some repairs to my car or I could buy a Roland JP-8000 and dedicate myself to learning electronic music.... so my car suffered quite a bit in 1999! Mostly listening to my favorite bands told me quite what I wanted to do with music - if I could mimic whatI liked with their music then perhaps I could create something personal to me that I found really explorative. Something I could take away from it and use to my own ends to capture the audience's attention and see things my way for a few brief moments.
4- How did you start to make Trance / Electro / Progessive and what is Trance / Electro / Progessive for you?
It seemed a very natural progression to me. I just listened to what I liked and brought in my influences. If you look around there is not very much difference between even some Nitzer Ebb tracks and Underworld if you get to the theme. Maybe the mood but not much else. For me the very industrial side of electronic music was already in tune with the other genres, it was just a bit more menacing.Trance/Electro/Progressive - these are all just buzzwords. EBM to me is more of a manifesto - much like Ambient is to Brian Eno. If a painter likes Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock they are obviously drawing from two very different categories but it's still painting. It's not a genre umbrella you put your songs under, there has to be a worthwhile methodology. I really like to challenge what a person hears when they listen to my songs. There are breakbeats and trance parts, sure...but also ethereal and noisy too!
5- What and who are some of your influences in Trance / Electro / Progessive ?
Of course the big names I mentioned before but it's very hard to measure what will catch my ear...most pop shit drives me crazy. It's not just one or two names - it's really my entire iTunes library that brings my ears to life. Juno Reactor, Shpongle, Underworld, Prodigy, Infected Mushroom, etc...
6- What are your top ten favorite Trance / Electro / Progessive Club Songs of all time? Who are you influenced by? What would you consider your favorite cd's?
Tough questions!!! Songs:
10. Front 242 - Lovely Day
9. Morgan Page - Longest Road (Deadmau5 Remix)
8. Motorcycle - As the Rush Comes
7. Praga Khan - We Fuel Our Own High
6. Renegade Soundwave - Renegade Soundwave
5. Implant - Is it Fear or is it Love? (Moonitor Remix)
4. Underworld - Dark and Long
3. Nitzer Ebb - Shame
2. Home Video - That You Might (Invol2ver Remix)
1. Shpongle - Dorset Perception
I'm definitely influenced by all of those artists and a few more. I constantly listen to music in different genres so I can expand my horizons. For my favorite albums of all time I really like Sasha's Invol2ver, Vangelis Blade Runner Soundtrack, Eno's Music for Airports, F242's Front By Front...
7- Do you have a favourite track and album?
Not really...I mean it kind of changes depending on my mood. I usually listen to things for a while then switch and then a few months later go back to it. I guess the albums I ALWAYS come back to are Haujobb's "ninetynine" and Vangelis "Blade Runner Soundtrack" - the 3 disc version released a few years ago is fantastic!
8- So tell me a bit more about yourself, such as musical?
I started with music playing piano. My mother forced me to go to piano lessons (much like my younger and older brothers) and I wasn't very responsive at first. I was a kid and I wanted to play with my friends outside...eventually I took up trumpet in school and then in high school I was introduced by a friend to electronic music and hip hop. I wanted to learn how to make it but when I went to college there was only one class in my school - basics of MIDI. It was a great class but I realized afterwards that if I wanted to make electronic music I would have to teach myself. So I bought a keyboard and practiced.
9- By the way do you like my questions? tell me what you think about it! ;-)
There's a lot of them! I like it a lot, you can learn a lot about people by asking questions. :)
10- What is the main idea, the message you want to leave to people who listens to you? What is your motto?
I think what we want to do is show that we can express ourselves through different genres of electronic music - that other genres aren't something to be afraid of. Try different things and use what works. For that reason the dark electronic crowd might think we're too techno and vice versa, but I don't make music to make people happy anyway so...
11- What’s the name of your band? What’s the origin of that name? Have you changed the band’s name before?
The name is Digital Geist. The german word for ghost is geist and it's a word I've known for many years and liked quite a bit. When I thought of a name I wanted to give a type of mysterious sound to it, like the saying if a computer has a weird problem with it - it has a "ghost in the machine."
12- Zero Engine and the new Motorcade where did the concept come from? and whats planned now that your album is finished? or anything else you're working on? Tell me why this title,Zero Engine and the new Motorcade" Tell us a few words about the concept of this?
Well the concepts were what we've always used to create music. We play a powerful live show and we wanted to bring that into the studio work as well. Experimentation with other sounds - ambient pads, drones and whatnot just came along pretty naturally. With The Zero Engine released in 2006, we tried a few new things with current technology. The synth company Access released their Virus TI series during the production so there's many parts from that included on the album.
In Summer of 2009, I had many songs that weren't finished and really felt the need to get something out. I took the best sounds I had created in the studio over the last 3 years and compiled them into a 4-song EP. The title song is Motorcade, so that's where the name came from.
13- When's the new album coming out?
There will be a new Digital Geist album out in June 2010, followed by a tour in the EU for August that we are currently booking.
14-How is the current promotional tour going for supporting this album?
Well I couldn't call it a promotional tour... DG doesn't have the budget to do much more than online adverts and sending discs out for review. Without a record label we have to pay for everything out of pocket and sometimes it's a huge investment. The Zero Engine album in 2006 was initially thousands of dollars out of my own pocket just to get the product, and still more money to send it out for reviews. It's a full-time job without much glamour or return. If you work hard, you'll probably get the money you spent back in time.
15- What do you think of a modern Trance / Electro / Progessive and about Trance / Electro / Progessive scene?
It's expensive but there are some amazing things you can find if you look into it. Here in NYC you can find some great club nights but they are very expensive and selective about clientele. I think the biggest problem facing the progressive scene is that it becomes exclusive - a fashion show. I don't care what somebody looks like if the music is good. But that seems to be the minority view.
16- Our usual question - what is Gothic for you?
Gothic? Well it's first and foremost a movement in the art world (like the arches on the Brooklyn Bridge) and I think that got twisted into something commercial and very different. We all know Siouxsie and Robert Smith became the figureheads for the music side of it in the 70s/80s, but today it seems to be distorted. It's become kind of a bad stereotype because of the actions of a few people (the kids from the Colombine incident or the recent shooter at university in Montreal for examples). Because those are such bad atrocities many people just assume everyone in a black jacket is a bad guy - it's actually quite the opposite. I think of gothic as being what a person does in their lifestyle because they love it. Just as much as sports! You have your favorite "teams" and you wear those colors because you have a passion for it and want to show it off.
17- What was your best live experience so far?
We performed a gig in Toronto in a small room with a big name playing in a larger room below us as part of the same event. We played our set - very, very intense with the crowd right in our faces - to a packed room that was as hot as hell itself. Afterwards we learned that many people had come from the other room during our set because we were performing live and putting on a great set. It meant a lot to us because it meant that even though the big name on the ticket was performing and it was probably 40 Celsius in the room, we were so in sync that we kept the crowd there watching us.
18- Please list the name, age, school, and respective instrument of each band member
Newt - He does live accompaniment on synths/drums/etc. He's in his 20s and he's currently going to SAE for audio engineering
Alex - I do most arrangement and main synths/drums, mastering, sampling, etc. I'm 31.
19-What are your views on the current state of this Trance / Electro / Progessive scene in New York Verenigde Staten.in terms of creativity and audiences? And the scene in other countries?
Well in NYC my view of the scene is very narrow because I cannot afford to go out to these ridiculous club nights often. Manhattan especially has great parties but you will spend about $100 in a night easily. It's not very practical if you have rent to pay. That doesn't stop me from going out once in a while though because you really do get what you pay for when it comes to the DJs and music.
I've been around to a few different countries - Greece, Canada, France, Belgium, Germany and Poland and the difference in party scene is not very drastic. People go out to have a good time, even the music is the same in most!
20- you have very nice numbers`.............. tell me about lyrical compositions what you can tell about the done work? How does your music creation process work? How do you create a song?
The lyrics I usually leave to the person singing. In the case of Someone Like Me, Newt wrote the lyrics and sang them, then we vocoded them. For Motorcade our friend Bill Boulden both wrote the lyrics and sang.
The process for the songs we write doesn't change very often. Usually we say "ok, we're going to write a song with vocals" and then deliberately work towards having a spot for verses, breakdowns and a chorus. If a track will be an instrumental we start laying down parts that we like using synths or drum sounds and try different combinations until something clicks.
I think this process is probably the same for many artists in the genre...we also put a limiter on the master bus so that we don't overload anything when we experiment, later on we bring levels down and slowly make everything fit into a song as we get closer to the mixing process.
21-What genre of music do you consider your work to be? Who are your major influences?
I used to think it was EBM, kind of a dark trance theme to it. The more I listened to recent EBM the less I thought I was associated to it though. There's definitely some songs we do that can be considered in an upbeat trance type of theme...but if I had to pick a genre without using too many adjectives it would be trance/dark trance. I mentioned before our influences but specific to that genre, there's some stuff on Armin van Buuren's A State of Trance disc from 2009 that was really good and surprisingly dark.
22-Since the music industry is more open now to purely electronic music has this made things easier for you?
I've always managed to find help at every corner, the community of electronic music isn't savage towards it's artists...unless you consider piracy. ;) Usually even people that pirated your music are nice enough to give a comment or two about what they thought.
The information age definitely makes it easier to communicate with people though. Without the internet it would be very difficult to get anywhere with music.
23-So what are their main influences as a band at the moment?
Well at the moment we just started work on an album that will be ready by June of 2010. We're trying to keep our ears clear and get creative rather than be influenced by other artists for now.
24-What is currently inspiring your material as an artist? tell me all about the Trance / Electro / Progessive scene of New York Verenigde Staten?
When you're looking for inspiration it's good to keep yourself in a creative environment. Change your routines a little bit so you can make habits the right way. Currently I've been drawing and using ink and pastels with a notebook I keep with me when I can't work on music. It helps to keep my mind on task.
The NYC scene of dark electronic music (noise, industrial, EBM) isn't as big as many people overseas think. There's a few crews around that put events on in different boroughs and parties like Smack twice a year, but many nights come and go almost every other month or so. Lots of times promoters don't realize it's a full-on job to make your club night successful, and you have to spend money to make money.
25-Do you think that people from the music press didn't expect you to grow up musically?
Well I don't know, really. We'll see what their opinions are when they get the new album in June. Our sound has progressed quite a bit since The Zero Engine and I hope that the new disc will impress people...but you can never make everyone happy.
26-what is the key to making music from digital geist and what inspires you to keep growing as a musician?
For me it's exploration and experimentation. There's always some excitement when I find or do something I haven't tried before. When that's gone, then there's no artistic content and it's time for a break.
27-How do you see the future of download / Copyright in area of goth-Trance / Electro / Progessive music ? What are the best ways to develop it in your mind ?
This is a really tough question. People have been working on it for years and it always comes down to it: If someone wants to steal your music, they just will. After The Zero Engine was released in 2006 I saw it pop up all over torrent sites. While my goal was to sell the physical discs I paid to get pressed, it's inspiring to see that many people wanted to try out the music.
I believe that an artist deserves to be compensated for his/her/their work but you don't have to be rich to be successful at what you do.
28-If there was one thing you want people to know about your band what would that be?
That we plan on touring the EU in August of 2010 and we will have an album ready in June!!! :D
29-Please let us know about your upcoming plans, some new releases you like to confirm here
June 2010, our new full-length album should be ready on CD. There will be many collaborative songs with vocals from artists we know. After that, we hope to do some gigs in Germany, Poland, Belgium, France, Netherlands...we'll see what we can set up!
30-It has been a pleasure to interview you on your musical activity,Well,any last words to your ebm-industrial fans?
Don't ever compromise! Thanks for your interest in my music as well, we're a small project and we rely on help from nice people like you.
31-and what is next on New York Verenigde Staten agenda?
Well today it rains in January. I plan on keeping our tight schedule to get this album ready...the first 4 songs were started already now we just need to keep working on them. There might be some shows coming up here in the USA but my focus is more on the album.
32-thanks for your time! great work on the albums and good luck with everything.any How can fans-to-be gain access to your music? Do you have a website with sample songs or a demo CD?
And thank you for your time as well! This was a huge interview, I hope I didn't bore anyone to sleep.
There's a podcast, blog, and of course a store for you to purchase my amazing music! :D
There's many other sites too:
Or just search iTunes for Digital Geist and you'll find plenty of hits. :D Thanks again guys!
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