Chants of Maldoror – Interview with Loren
http://www.chantsofmaldoror.com/
http://www.myspace.com/chantsofmaldoror/
Side-projects:
David:
http://www.myspace.com/sexchairprovider/
Loren:
http://www.myspace.com/peoplelikeadance/
Echo:
http://www.myspace.com/gogodivasproductions/
Nattsol: Let’s begin with the pre-Chants of Maldoror period. As I know, two found- members came from the band, called ‘Mater Tenebrarum’. Tell me more about this band. Tell me, how the other members joined.
Loren: Well, “M.T.” was a band in which David and Adolphe used to play a long time ago, before C.O.M., and as far as I know they never did a single concert and never recorded anything, even if I remember that there were plans for a demo cassette that never saw the light. We are all friends by years, and we knew each other long before being bandmates , so for us was absolutely natural playing together when M.T. disbanded. It was very much like being in a band with your brothers and sisters…
Nattsol: The next question is about the band’s name. It was taken from Lautreamont’s ‘Les Chants de Maldoror’. Maldoror is very difficult character. I can remain the quote from the book: ‘I dedicate my talent to the description of those pleasures, which evil can give’. So was that your original conception? Which influences did you take from the book and from this character?
Loren: When we started the band we were in search of a good name, something that gave immediately the idea of what the listener had to expect from us, and a friend came out with the name of the book “Les Chants De Maldoror”… It was a sudden success for various issues, but we were particularly fond of it mostly because of our Surrealist and Dadaist likening and tastes, a quality that lots of people have ever found in our music since the beginning. I think that “Les Chants De Maldoror” is a unique book, but we never had direct influences from it in particular… it’s more in the general mood, in the “surreal” approach to music and musicianship…
Nattsol: Now tell me, how did the band begin? As your bio shows, the band’s development wasn’t too fast. The first ‘unofficial’ show (Dec 1995) had been played one year after the foundation (Dec 1994), the demo (June 1996) had been recorded one and a half years after it, and released only one year after the recording. And the first official show had been played even two years after the band’s foundation (Jan 1997). What were the reasons of these delays?
Loren: We never liked to hurry! Seriously, the first show was basically a fun show, done at a Next Year Eve private party with an audience made of friends, and we played 6 songs from our next-to-be recorded demotape. Then we finished the songs and put some money together (we were all students at that time) to start recording the demo, “Ritual Death” which was recorded between June and July 1996 in a very “unusual” way (we all share good memories of that whacky sessions). Then, we just did rehearsals for a while, and wrote some new songs, in order to have a bit more stuff for a “true” concert, which was done in January 1997 in Rome. After that show we released the demotape.
Nattsol: The next question is about your musical references. As many aspects show (such as image, the manner of the vocals, and cover of ‘Spectre’), you were strongly influenced by the works of Rozz Williams. Tell me about his and other influences to your music.
Loren: Ok, none of us has never denied that, but I’d like to clarify one thing… As I said before, when we started the band we were just a bunch of youngsters (I was 16) with barely an idea of what “playing” was, so it’s normal that we (just like everyone else) started imitating or paying our homage to something that we really liked, in this case was Rozz William’s Christian Death… It’s normal and I can accept it. But as the years went on, we added some elements that Christian Death NEVER had: no electronic beats, no prominent keyboards and pianos and other further elements from other kinds of music (some of the very influential bands on us were and still are early Pink Floyd and Velvet Underground)… Few people has noticed that, because lots of them has no musical culture and knows nothing outside of those 3 or 4 easy names, so even if someday we do a “saltarello” or a “tarantella”, everyone’s gonna say that sounds like C.D. This is stupid, really. I don’t even think that our image as a band has something in common with Rozz or Christian Death in the last 8 years…
Nattsol: Now I’d like to ask you about your first album ‘Thy Hurting Heaven’. In comparison with your demo the sound had changed from more darkwave to more deathrock. What caused this musical evolution, which, as I know, took a place in your demo too in comparison with the band’s original sound?
Loren: I think that was a sort of natural evolution… none of us just came in the rehearsal room saying “hey guys, we got to be a deathrock band”… I think that was just related to our increasing self-consciousness as musicians, since at that time we started listening hardly to more rock-oriented stuff like Bowie, Bolan and Sex Gang Children as well. A funny thing is that today we fell the demo to be much more “darker” than everything we’ve done further, and some of the songs that were in “Ritual Death” were recorded and re-arranged for the cd…
Nattsol: The single chapter of my questions is the texts of your first album, which all seems to me the strong poetry. ‘Thy Hurting Heaven’ is filled with contrasts (‘Lucifer-Christ’, ‘I’ve kissed you or I’ve killed you?’, the blame and the innocence in ‘The Innocents’, and even the title of the album shows this contrast). So what was its conception? And who is the text writer?
Loren: I suggested the album’s title, but Adolphe, the singer, writes and wrote 100% of the lyrics… and it can’t be elseways, since he’s the one who talks and sings about those things, and you really can’t be honest if you don’t believe in what you say. Anyway, you’re right about the issue of contrasts: it’s exactly what we meant at that time. A great part of the record is focused on the contrast between something “good” that heals and helps but at the same time is “evil” , and kills you and takes away life from you, just like a form of extreme payment. But I’m sure that there are hidden meanings that only Adolphe knows, since his lyrics talk a lot about his private life, but in a “symbolic” way…
Nattsol: The next question is about your second CD, ‘Every Mask Tells the Truth”. Once again, this release doesn’t look like the previous. What has changed in this release in your opinion? And what does in express?
Loren: Well, “Every Mask…” was a big step further, maybe since when it came out we were really sick of being considered the next Christian Death clone, since, as I said before, we never ever felt this way. I believe that those songs reflect this deep will of change, both musically and lyrically. For the first time we recorded the album in a more “professional” way, spending a long time in studio searching the good sound of instruments and voices, and trying different mixing solutions, avoiding to be satisfied at first step… It’s a very wide-ranging record, there are very danceable songs and very deep and introspective songs too, acoustic and piano suites and noisy parts, and the nice thing is that most people appreciated that, and we earned fans outside of the gothic movement. If I can say a thing on a personal level, when I listen to “Thy Hurting Heaven” I don’t like it anymore, It just doesn’t represent me anymore, but with “Every Mask” things are different: I feel it distant and surpassed, but I still recognize myself into it, if you understand what I mean…
Nattsol: Now I’d love to ask you about your promo videos – ‘Wounded Canvas’ and ‘Sometimes a Poison’. Tell me more details about these videos.
Loren: We always loved cinema and visual arts, and we’d like to express ourselves a bit more with visuals in the future. We got the fortune of having a talented director in the band, our keyboardist Echo, so when it comes to somebody’s mind to make a video for a certain song, we don’t need to ask for a good producer and start immediately thinking about it, brainstorming over script and scenes… No frills, no bills… Working on videos is very funny, with anyone of us doing something, just like a cinematographic troupe. “Sometimes…” and “Wounded…” are very different videos, the first more “poetic” and “symbolic”, the other is more of a kind that people is expecting from a band, with instruments and stuff…
Nattsol: One more ‘single chapter’. It’s about the video ‘Sometimes a Poison’. What is its story about? Who’s that person, who’s taking out ‘dried’ letters from his mouth and collecting them in jars? Who’s that overhearing person? What’s written in that book? Etc….
Loren: It was our very first video experience, a sort of experiment, completely realized and developed by ourselves (as I said before)… The basic idea of the video script was mine, and came out from my personal feeling of that song… in fact, it has no relations with the lyrics’ content. For personal reasons I relate “Sometimes…” to a situation of extreme solitude: I tried to simplify this feeling by using brutally “meaningful” images in order to communicate an unreal situation of isolation from the world; so my key of lecture is of total isolation, in which nothing means nothing and everything you do is useless, except for yourself. Then I suggested the figures of the one who listens to nothing, and the one who rips up a book that nobody will ever read. Of course we developed the script and the images all together, as we usually do for everything concerning the band, so the other guys created the figure of the one who “spits” out words to be closed in jars as no one will hear them, and of the girl that covers her reflected image in the mirror for no one to see… We did the full video in a very short time, and the result is a mix between german expressionism for the acting and subject and an Italian ’60 horror movie for the use of the colors and the “raw” directing style…
Nattsol: While looking at your myspace prophile, I found some unexpected for me influences like Marcel Duchamp and the French line of Dada/Surrealism. How does this experimental/avant-garde art influence on your music?
Loren: Well, as I said a couple times before in this interview, we all had a crush on Dadaism and early Surrealism… Our artistic background is very strong, if you just think that everybody in the band is involved in other forms of expression outside of music; I am a painter and I’ve studied history of art, Echo is a film director, David is a graphic designer and does paintings and engravings too, Adolphe is very talented in painting, sculpting and graphic art… So, you can understand that we’re deeply influenced by a long list of painters and visual artists as well as bands and musicians, and both have a strong role in what C.O.M. are…
Nattsol: Tell me about the stage you’re in Italy. Is it developed? Are there some related to you bands?
Loren: Sincerely, we don’t know much about the Italian bands… we don’t follow the scene and go to dark/goth concerts as well. If you’re asking for some good bands, I just can do the name of Sex Chair Provider, which is the other band of our bass player David. They just finished recording a 5 songs ep and it’s really nice… I’m also playing in another band called People Like a Dance, in which I play guitar and occasionally bass too… it’s different from anything I’ve done before and features a female vocalist…
Nattsol: What is Chants of Maldoror on stage? And tell me also about the most important for you shows.
Loren: On stage we are a bit different from the record… some tracks assume a more “raw” and aggressive feel, some just stay the same, but it depends on the overall mood and the interaction with the crowd. We usually like to give a complete idea of what the listeners are going to live with for the time of the show… nothing is left to the occasion, from the way we are dressed to the way we move, and even the order of the songs is depending on that. Some people told us that they prefer us as a live band, since we are a bit more “rock-oriented”, if these words are proper for a band like us. I don’t know if it’s the most important of our shows, but I really enjoyed the one we did in Utrecht as opening act for Bauhaus… The place was very nice and the acoustic was perfect… very funny! Moreover, we got the chance to play for a crowd that was there for a bigger name and gain their respect. Some of them had never heard of us before, obviously, and the very pleasant thing is that we’ve received lots of emails and messages of compliments for weeks after that!
Nattsol:The band keeps silence since 2005. There’re no new tracks, updated news and so on. What are the reasons? When should we wait for a new band’s stuff? And what will it be?
Loren: Well, we’ve done lots of promotional concerts in Italy and Europe as well for “E.M.T.T.T.” since the first months of 2006, and did the last one in February 2007. From then on, we just buried ourselves alive in the rehearsal room in order to compose and arrange the new stuff and record some demos. Sometimes we like to manage over a song continuously, until reaching a very different form from its birth, and this takes away a lot of time in rehearsals and recordings too, so I can’t really say a certain date or anything else. Anyway, if I’m not wrong, this summer we’ve put out a live recording of a newer song, “Young Recruits” on a USA cd sampler…
Nattsol: What is Chants of Maldoror in 2009?
Loren: We’re about to release our first dvd, which will contain a complete live performance of the 2006 “E.M.T.T.T.” period, the two videoclips, some special content and a picture gallery. After that, we’re thinking about a couple more funny things that are still in the developing stage, and will remain secret for a bit more…
Nattsol: And your final words….
Loren: Thank you very much for this interview, hope to have been satisfying enough for both you and the readers… Always keep your mind open and look at the truth…
Questions: Pall ‘Nattsol’ Zarutskiy
“Grave Jibes Fanzine”
