Anémic Cinéma – interview with M.
http://www.myspace.com/cinemanemic
Nattsol: Say a few words about yourself for a start, please.
M.: I’m a young guy from Barcelona who has a hyperactive mind and can’t stop creating. The problem here is I’m very lazy, so most of the time I simply do nothing until something comes to my mind and I feel stimulated to do something useless with it, like a song, or a photo.
Nattsol: How did you come into the ‘goth’ (etc) music as the listener and as the musician?
M.: This is hard to tell, because I don’t really know what the fuck is «goth». I could say the first deliberately sinister group I heard was Death in June. I got addicted to their music, so I started looking for more grups like Dij on the internet and I became a habitual listener of all the Neofolk music and from that point I started discovering more kinds of music related to the goth scene, like batcave, coldwave, deathrock…
As the musician, this is the first ‘goth’ project I have. Before AC I had an experimental black metal project called Nacht, which I abandoned when I stopped hearing to that kind of music -I keep composing and recording songs for Nacht, although.
Nattsol: How did you catch the idea of creation your own project? How was it born?
M.: It was born after listening lots and lots of times The Cure’s Pornography album. I didn’t understand how they could express so much with so little. I wanted to do something like they did, I mean making people sic, sad, just like I felt after listening that album.
And then I went to a dadaistic exposition with Duchamp’s, Man Ray’s and Picabia’s works and I knew I had found the way to communicate what I wanted: absurd. Maybe that exposition only took outside my addiction to Kafka and Bukowski’s literature, where I felt identified with the misunderstanding of the world the authors reflected in their books.
Nattsol: You took the name of Marcel Duchamp film. What’s Duchamp’s and the film’s influence on your project?
M.: If you look to the film you’ll see it is absurd. I saw it in the exposition, projected on a wall, and I stayed there, standing up, hypnotized by the words that appeared. And even I knew he didn’t want to tell me something, he was only playing with the spectator -me-, who would judge him in a good way because he was a fucking genius, I saw there what I wanted to do. So the project could have been called «Retours a la raison» or «Un chien andalou», or «Ready Made» too.
The influence, so, is not artistic, is… ideological. I mean dada was born from disorientation and the will of breaking everything that had been absolute in art, is nihilism in art, and the message is that everything is relative, irrelevant; everything can be art, so art is absurd, and doesn’t exist itself. That feeling of disorientation and misunderstanding of the world around is what I want to reflect in this project, and that’s the influence of Duchamp -and the dadaistic art- in Anémic Cinéma.
Nattsol: Well, then I have to ask you, what is dada for you. As we know, the period of the original dadaistic activity is 1916 – 1922, and the movement partly broke up because of the repeating of itself. So how do you reflect your dadaistic influences with keeping them original? How are you going to avoid the dadaistic deadlock?
Oh, and what is contemporary dada in your opinion?
M.: Well, the dadaistic influences can’t be kept original as they are pure nihilism, and nihilism only admits the concept of destruction.
To avoid the dadaistic deadlock I’m considering incorporating more themes in AC’s new songs, letting behind the nihilism of that movement and, also, making of that deadlock an inspiration point. Because that deadlock can be seen as the maximum expression of the dadaistic main line, which is destruction, defined by the members of the movement when they started it. And destruction leads us to despair and disorientation which are some of the feelings I wanted to transmit when I conceived AC.
To the second question I could answer only one word: everything. We have destroyed the tradition and hugged contemporary art, which is the abnormal son of the avant-garde movements of the past century, so we have no art, and no past, because the present has broken with the past ways of living. The world is so complicated we have to abandon the purpose to understanding it, so we can’t imagine how the future will be. And our present, our life, pass by between gray buildings and cars, as we work everyday to plough ourselves a future that may not exist. Contemporary dada can be our lifes.
Nattsol: Enough about dada for now. Tell me about your first demo, please. How was it recorded? What is its conception? (Etc).
M.: Oh, god, this may be a bit disillusioninc, because «We all dream / We all die» was created without a conception behind. I simply thought «I must do a demo», and started working on it. Because of that it was a demo, I wanted to create some songs who could defend themselves alone, so I rejected the idea of creating something similar to a conceptual album -which I want to create some day-. It was recorded at home, like the new release, and I did everything, from the programmed drums to the bass guitar -which is not a bass guitar but a guitar tuned in a low tune :D-. And it was after recording the five songs and having heard at least ten times each that I named the demo «We all dream / We all die» -I don’t know why still- and numbered the songs in the order they are.
Nattsol: So you recorded the second demo recently. Could you represent it and say, what has changed in comparison with the previous release?
M.: In this demo I tried to incorporate other elements to the songs, like synths -i.e. in labyrinth- and to omit others in some songs, like the bass guitar -i.e. in fading memories-, which made some songs too dense and saturated. The point was to try to fusion ambiental music with the cold wave, but I discovered shoegaze -especially the band Trance to the sun- during the recording of the songs, so I decided to add some reminiscences of that kind of music in one or two songs. That’s why sometimes the guitars have a bit of echo added to the reverb I use to put on them. Also, I programmed some drums deliberately ‘strange’ -I’m sorry I can’t find the word to define what I really wanted to achieve when I programmed them-.
So the point was to erase some layers whose objective was to give ‘consistence’ and to add others whose objective was to make the songs even more obsessive. And when I couldn’t add that layers to make the song obsessive until nausea I tried changing some drum rhythms in the middle of the song, to make it more slow and paused -and restart after that its normal rhythm-.
Conceptually, the second demo is very similar to the first one, but the purpose here was to make something even more depressing than what I made in the first demo, so I thought on adding samples of rain, cars and things that could make the listener think about grey days in big cities. In the end I put that rain sample in the first song, as an opening, and that’s all, but what I wanted was to end with the rain sample in the last song, as an outro -maybe if I have some time I’ll add that sample one of these days :D-.
Nattsol: Well, what are the musical plans of AC at the moment? I mean, what ideas or innovations you’d love to use in the future?
M.: I’d like to add to AC some post-industrial reminiscences, like the ones in Death in June’s ‘Nada!’ -I’m in love with that album, jaja-. So, in the future I’ll try to make the songs a bit more complex, giving the songs structure and, maybe occasionally, incorporating that elements -I haven’t decided still if I will add them to the songs or in different songs, as interludes-.
Nattsol: Are you going to keep AC as the one-man project? Is there any possibility of gigs?
M.: I’m currently talking to some friends that play bass guitar to meet some day and play in rehearsals. The problem is I don’t have a portable PC, so I can’t put the drums to play on them, so maybe I’ll have to convince a friend that plays that to come with us. So as you see nothing is still concreted. But I’d love to play live and not just only to compose, record and release more and more demos -that would be very boring- because that’s similar to doing nothing as the real life of groups are their gigs.
Nattsol: What other artistic experiments would you like to try?
M.: You got me without an answer here because I haven’t even considered trying other artistic experiments as AC takes me so much free time -composing, recording and now working of the artwork of the new release-, and I don’t have to much free time to spend working on artistic projects or experiments. Although I’m experimenting with some samples I downloaded to create some ‘music’ for maybe a future noise/industrial project which has still no name.
Nattsol: And the final words are yours.
M.: I’d like to thank you for the interest in AC and for the time you take on writing the fanzine, which is fucking awesome. :D
Questions: Pall ‘Nattsol’ Zarutskiy
‘Grave Jibes Fanzine’
