Artist Interviews

Q&A: De Staat

By | Published on Wednesday 6 April 2011

De Staat

Dreamt up by lead singer Torre Florin in 2006, Dutch alt-rockers De Staat made their full length debut three years later with LP ‘Wait For Evolution’. The album brought the band widespread recognition and a string of standout European festival appearances.

For their second release, the band took inspiration from sources including Nick Cave and garage-punk supergroup The Dead Weather, and twisted them into the “gut-inducing slab of psycho funk” that is their latest album ‘Machinery’. Made on a remote farm just outside the band’s hometown of Nijmegen, the band developed the LP’s conceptual approach over ten days of recording, eking out sinister stories and characters from the dark sonic backdrop of the music they were creating.

With the album and lead single ‘Sweatshop’ out earlier this year on Cool Green /Mascot Records, the band have lately been causing a stir with a number of UK tour dates. As he and the band prepare for a sure-to-be intriguing performance tomorrow night at Manchester’s Deaf Institute, we caught up with Torre to get his refreshingly thorough responses to our Same Six Questions.

Q1 How did you start out making music?

When I was twelve I got my hands on a MS-DOS computer program called ‘Scream Tracker 3’. You could make simple Moby-like songs with very ugly sounds, but it got me hooked. It was my computer and I, and we could build worlds together. That’s how it felt at the time anyway.

With my life long partner in crime Jop (De Staat bass player), we started jamming with high school mates. Playing with these computers enabled us to build songs together. The process was highly addictive. From then on I wouldn’t be doing anything else. I couldn’t hold any job longer than 4 months. Everything seemed boring compared to making music.

Ten years later, here we are, playing throughout the world with De Staat.

Q2 What inspired your latest album?

Like the title of the record says, the sound of machines, and machine like composition. I love the idea of a machine rumble sounding like one thing, but in fact you hear all these different mechanical elements interacting with each other. In a lot of songs we tried to approach every instrument as a mechanical element. Repetitive and almost dull on its own, but together we’d sound like one big machinal rumble. Loud, scary and sexy.

Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?

I like writing songs from a conceptual idea. I have a thousand ideas lying around, scribbled down on anything that holds ink. Things like ‘combine Beach Boys with desert guitars’, or ‘make a beat that sounds like two clocks that are out of sync’. Some of em don’t make any sense when I read them again, but most of them I end up using. Combining a couple of ideas that seem uncombinable is the most fun. The song might eventually sound nothing like the concept, but a cool idea is a starting point, and that’s crucial for me. Just a guitar on the lap won’t work for me most of the time.

Q4 Which artists influence your work?
Artists like Tom Waits, Pop Levi, Radiohead and Queens Of The Stone Age. Cliché names perhaps. But hey, we’ll all agree, they’re just really good. But we get influenced by a lot of things. A Mongolian band called Hanggai, a great electronic composer named Eskmo, minimal music composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Hell, even the annoying Djembe player on the corner of the street. Whatever triggers an idea, I guess.

Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Nothing, man. I wouldn’t want to ruin the ridiculously awesome experience.

Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
To play every corner of the world, hopefully with some people in front of us. We’re coming back to the UK this spring. Our ambitions are to knock your socks off, let you barefooted chaps get high on the smoke coming from us being on fire.

MORE>> www.destaat.net



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