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Freq Talks to Steve Ignorant of CRASS
 To a young mind searching for meaningful music in the early 1980s, encountering CRASS for the first time was a frightening proposition. In those hazy, far-off days, when the Californian IT development nerds responsible for YouTube and Google had barely finished breastfeeding and the ZX Spectrum was the hot shit in cutting edge computer technology, one really couldn’t be entirely sure whether CRASS was a Punk band, a twisted Dadaist subversion, a political movement or some kind of terrorist cell, like the Baader-Meinhof Group fallen to earth in Ongar Great Park. Or, come to that, all four. With no promotional images to refer to (part of a carefully cultivated tactic to avoid the usual characterisation of a ‘band’ with ‘leaders’), one was confronted only by the
Continue reading An interview with Steve Ignorant [...]
 Mark Sanders has been a professional drummer for almost thirty years. His diversity is unmatched, running the gamut between jazz, free improvisation, pop, avant-rock, modern classical, dance, new complexity, dub and folk. He’s one of the few free improvisers who integrates the learning that he accumulates from these broad activities: most improvising musicians’ approach rarely synthesises or overlaps their sets of experience from other styles. You would be hard pressed to find musicians currently working within free improvisation who he hasn’t worked with.
Continue reading An Audience with Mark Sanders [...]
November 2000
 Bobby Conn does his very best to be the model of a post-Modern underground superstar. His two albums to date, Bobby Conn and Rise Up!, have placed him somewhere in a grey area between parody and genuine adulation of crooners, cabaret singers and all-round stars of the spangly stage. This interview took place after his New Orleans gig in November 2000, and as Bobby remarked “I could talk for hours about my favourite subject – myself!”. Fortunately, what the creator of the Continuous Cash Flow System has to say in person is usually as entertaining as his remarkable songs.
FREQ: What was the main motivation for you to start out portraying this particular image you have, as Judeo-Christian Edutainer, as a sort of Antichrist cabaret singer?
Bobby
Continue reading An Interview with Mr Bobby Conn [...]
June 2000
People Like Us is Vicki Bennett, a resident of Brighton on the South coast of England and creator of extraordinarily witty cut-up film and music projects which take the cultural critique of Plunderphonics into new dimensions of layered reference and dissociated signifiers. As with like minded spirits such as Manchester’s Stock, Hausen & Walkman, Californian pioneers Negativland and cod-orchestral Sythetizers The Tape-Beatles, People Like Us recordings use found sounds, old vinyl of dubious value in its original kitsch state, TV snippets and general audio detritus to nag at the edges of what constitutes sampling, copyright avoidance and sometimes music itself. Interviewed by Freq at the time of her stunning Brighton performance in February 2000, sections of the interview were later completed by email.
FREQ: What’s upcoming on
Continue reading People Like Freq talk to People Like Us [...]
After The Deluge
29th May 2000
Jean-Hervé Péron is best known as the former de facto front man for Faust, a group he sometimesseemed to embody the group’s chaotic lunacy for in his onstage antics with chainsaws and naked painting sessions. Following his traumatic personal split with the band after their early Nineties re-emergence, Peron spends his time raising horses and children on his small farm near Hamburg.
For years there were rumours that he would return with a rival group, an Anti-Faust to seal the rancour; instead, his first London show as a live performer took place in May 2000 at The South Bank Centre as a surprise performer in the Ninth Annual Festival of Experimental Music put on by the London Musicians Collective. Before the gig, Jean-Hervé took time to talk to Freq about his musical career,
Continue reading An interview with Jean-Hervé Péron [...]
May 2000
As impassioned and animated offstage as behind his massive drumkit, Charles Hayward radiates a genuine intensity. He first came to wide attention as drummer with the highly influential This Heat as the embers of Post-Punk simmered off into wilder experimental tangents. He has released a dozen solo and colaborative albums, and puts on rare solo live shows which pull the raw muscular percussion at the heart of Rock into new shapes with devastatingly powerful results. The Freq team quizzed him on what makes drives his particular brand of rhythmic intensity as the London Musicians Collective’s Ninth Annual Festival of Experimental Music drew to a close on the South Bank in May 2000. Interviewers: Lilly Novak, Antron S. Meister, Iotar and Deuteronemu 90210.
FREQ: We know about This Heat and all of that, but what you did
Continue reading An interview with Charles Hayward [...]
April 2000
I arrived at this gig a little late and in much overdone panic. First of all we were in South London, and more importantly, I had forgotten to pick up a blank tape to record this interview on. As soon as I located Arrington de Dionyso, which took about twenty seconds in the dimly lit and tiny venue, he sweetly agreed to loan me a cassette and we got under way. Because The Vauxhall Tavern was no more than a small one room pub (with some truly , um, kitsch decor), we took our leave and went out to Old Time Relijun‘s van with the rest of the band – Aaron Hartman (string bass) and Phil Elvrum (drums) to find a little quiet to work in.
FREQ: OK, so
Continue reading An interview with Old Time Relijun [...]
Along the Dotted Line…
12th December 1999
The Legendary Pink Dots are a phenomenon, producing a seemingly endless stream of deeply intense records and genuinely spellbinding live shows for nearly twenty years, initially as a London-based group and for more than a decade now from their Nijmegen base in The Netherlands. While former days on mammoth independent label Play It Again Sam in Belgium produced widespread distribution for a series of classic albums, it also had all the negative aspects of association with the near-majors; the linking of sales to popularity and promotion to potential Indie chart success. For a while the band were in small-scale, own-label limbo, before the saving graces of Brainwashed‘s excellent LPD internet site and the support of first Staalplaat in Amsterdam, and then Soleilmoon in Portland, Oregon restored and replenished their status as one
Continue reading An interview with Edward Ka-Spel [...]
A Splendid Chaos
28th October 1998
Faust have been a legendarily chaotic group since their origins as a kind of experiment in the creation of an anti-rock band in the early Seventies. Nearly thirty years on they remain as surprising and unpredictable as ever, live or on record, as they have throughout their erratic career, as Antron S. Meister witnessed at their London gig at The Garage on October 25th, and in the venue’s Mini-Bar bar on the rainy afternoon before, where the following interview took place. As with Faust’s music, conventional structures and transparent answers should not be expected.
Faust are:
Hans Joachim Irmler Werner “Zappi” Diermaier
Other Faust members not present at the interview:
Steven W. Lobdell – Guitar Michael Stoll – Bass, contra-bass and flute Ché Clément – Spiritual adviser and noise Lars Paukstat – Noise
Continue reading A Splendid Chaos – an interview with Faust [...]
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