Blotnik Brothers - [Satamile] Basterdized Interview 01/12/2004 Founded in Ystad, Sweden in 1999 by Martin Rasberg and Roberto Mensa, and since being joined in 2001 by Patrick Casey, the Blotniks music usually borders on Electronica/Electro/Neo-Electro. The roots of the music are from diverse sources indeed, hailing back to a blend between ‘70s funk and early ‘80s hip hop and synthesizer technology. By the end of 2002 the group picked up their ambitions and started sending out demos, which resulted in a track on a Billy Nasty compilation ("BN02", TrustTheDJ, London, 2003), and a track on "Psychorock ¨03" (Logos Production, Paris). In 2003 the group also did their first live-performance. In 2004 the group established a relationvship with the New York label Satamile Records which led to the release of their 2nd 12” EP, “Pragmatic Response” which turned out to be quite a hit in the fairly low-key world of Neo-Electro. 2005 will likely turn out to be their best year yet, as there’s an LP scheduled and the group will also be making their first credited work for film production. At this moment their new EP is just released on Satamile records, so go and buy it ya basterds. Basterdized present to you, Blotnik Brothers.. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hello Martin, Roberto and Patrick. Thanks for giving us the time to ask you guys a few questions. You had a well received Ep on Satamile this year and another about to drop - things seem to be ticking over nicely. How are things with the Blotniks? Things are pretty good (apart from Martin being hungover & Roberto with a cold), our new ep on satamile "Museful Revolution" should be hitting the shelves right about now. We're making a music video for "Electro Manifesto" the A2 track on that ep which should be done just after new years. We've also started working on a full length album which probably will be finished sometime next year.
We all grew up in the same town in southern Sweden (Ystad), but we where friends long before we started making music together. It wasn't until Roberto moved in with Martin in 1999 that they started making Electro. The early Blotnik stuff came out on an EP in 2001 on a local Malmö (a bigger town in southern Sweden, where you move when you've grown tired of Ystad) label. Later in 2001 Patrick hired Martin and Roberto to do the music and sound editing for a movie project he was producing, and the rest, as they say, is history.
What influences did you each bring to the group? Martin: Early techno and trance along with 2 Live Crew, (before Goa-Trance and Euro-Techno came along and spoiled the scene).Then onto the sound of Cari Lekebusch, Jeff Mills, Adam Beyer etc before venturing "fulltime" into electro. Roberto: The Amiga demo scene, as well as a good helping of disco and funk, and not forgetting the same early Techno and Trance as Martin. Patrick: Was also into the Amiga scene, as well as Industrial, Synth-Pop and EBM, like Einstürzende Neubauten, Depeche Mode and NIN. It feels slightly superfluous to mention that we all listened to Kraftwerk, so we won't.
Thats fine we'll let the Kraftwerk bit swing seeing as you put it on your website (www.blotnik.com), however the trance thing is totally unforgiveable :) Did you have musical childhoods? None of us grew up in especially musical families, but the Swedish school system encouraged an early introduction to music and instruments so we all had an early start with all sorts of instruments and even choir-practice.
What's it like growing up in Sweden? The hard part about growing up in Sweden was all the polar bears that you had to kill on your way to school, but on the up-side our proximity to the North Pole made sure that Santa Claus would always come to us first.
You guys are based in Malmo. Tell us a bit about life there. Is it a stimulating place for a musician? Well, it's supposed to be a good town for musicians and we heard that the city has a reasonably vibrant rock/pop-scene, but since we all live fairly hermit-like lives we don't really spend a lot of time with other musicians. On the other hand, Malmö is a fairly cheap town to live in (at least with Swedish standards), which must be a good thing if you're trying to make a living as an artist/producer.
Well, it doesn't sound like a bad argument, but on the other hand when we did get a studio that was outside of our homes, we never went there because of the bad weather…
The vast majority of our material is done with software, especially Buzz. So apart from our midi-controllers, the one piece of hardware that we always use is the neat RNC (Really Nice Compressor, and Yes it is just that!). And there would be no Blotnik music without Martin & Robertos trusty Hugin Coffee Machine.
PC, PC and PC.
It started off with Martin and Roberto doing all the music together, and that was about it and when Patrick joined it was specifically to write lyrics and do voices. Nowadays the roles are more or less as follows: Roberto writes most of the music, Martin acts as sounding board for him and Patrick has the occasional unskilled opinion about things in general. Martin has mostly moved to designing and creating making the live sets in Ableton and Patrick writes the lyrics, records the vocals and creates our video material (both for the live shows and for broadcast).
Do you play live much? Is this important for you guys and do you ever find yourselves making music with performing live in mind? We didn't use to play live at all, since we do our music in Buzz and it was too unstable to use for a live performance and there was no way we could use hardware to replicate all the sounds that we get from Buzztracker. But then we found Abelton Live, and we've been doing gigs ever since. We do like playing live, even though we don't make the music for that purpose (since we have no technical reason to do so).
I believe you are making a video for one of your tracks. Is that something you guys are interested in exploring more of - the combination of audio and visual media? A big part of our creative life is actually spent slugging it through the professional film and video industry, where we do both visual and audio work. Very often it feels like the two are inseparable, so the answer has to be: Yes!
Many of your tracks have vocoder - are the lyrics done after the track is made or are lyrics sometimes used as starting points/ideas for tracks? Does this mean all your tracks are 'about' something? We actually do both. Usually Roberto approaches Patrick with some new music that needs vocals, and sometimes Patrick has an idea for lyrics/vocals that he comes to Martin and Roberto with. Whether the songs are ‘about' something or not depends who in the band that you ask. Patrick always tries to make the songs be about something whereas Martin and Roberto at the most will acknowledge the fact that there might be some unconscious message of theirs in the music.
We're probably not the right people to ask, since we've never really felt like we've been part of a Swedish scene, but more of an international scene (thanks to the internet). There seems to be a scene in both Stockholm and Gothenburg, where people like Cari and Adam are doing good things for electronic music, but it's hard for us to speak about other people than ourselves. The one person that everybody in the band could agree has done a lot for electronic music in Sweden is Calle Dernulf at the Swedish radio station P3.
Our creative lives are near inseparable from out working lives, and the music and other artistic ventures flow in and out of each other. We hardly do anything else but work/write/produce music/make art. Martin occasionally works as a chef and Patrick and Roberto does some other work than video and audio for an advertising agency (like web and graphics), but most of the time life feels like one big creative mess.
Alt-F4, sleep.
This is really an impossible question to answer in full, so we'll just mention those that first brought us Neo-Electro and got us started on it: Anthony Rother, Dr. Scissors and Andreas Kauffelt. It's actually really painful to not write anymore than these, but we've got other things to do today, apart from answering these questions.
Well, we only make Electro and film-music as the Blotnik Brothers, but we have some other projects running where we're working with some other artists and styles. But this is a Blotnik Brothers interview… :)
The only thing we can mention at the moment is an unnamed project involving a hiphop producer and a female rapper/singer, we don't want to reveal too much about the sound at this point (ie we don't really know what we're doing, it keeps evolving) but it'll be interesting
It feels like electro has grown and evolved since we started working with it, but it might just be the case that we hear more of it now that active on the international scene. Hard to say really. The quick answer would probably be: Good?
Big thanks to you all and we hope you have many decent cups of coffee in 2005!. Cups? We measure it in gallons but cheers! Thanks for having us and thanks for your excellent work here at basterdized! Big thanks to Lusana for the lovely introduction...see it sounds allright dun it? ; ) and remember kids, don't smoke crack
Interviewed by Jimmy 2 Decks |
