“Robots are good and totally harmless fun”
S] What do you think of the Northern Industrial and Goth scene now in 2009?
C] Actually, thinking before I give you my usual tirade of bile at the seemingly endless lack of originality, things are not bad at the moment. Bands like Uberbyte, Modulate, Cybercide and many more seem to have pushed the North well ahead on the rest of the isles in terms of ‘hot new choons’, Worldwide as far as I can see the UK still lacks enough major infrastructure (labels, promoters etcetera) to support these artists, so everyone splits out and signs to different labels.
At the Goth end of things, though I am a bit distant from the contemporary UK Goth bands, The Screaming Banshee Aircrew and all the others are making good noises and bands like Zeitgeist Zero seem to deliberately blur the lines between the two camps. We all still go to the same clubs anyway!
S] What are your biggest plans for the rest of the year?
C] I have had a lot of gigs cancel on me, or fail to properly materialize, and it’s still too soon to put any work into a new album, so I think I’m on what passes for a holiday. There’s no Infest either this year, so aside from Maschinenfest (which I will be attending because they won’t let me play) I don’t think I actually have to leave the house. So, it maybe time to dust off ‘World of Warcraft‘ and go into electronic hibernation™ for the summer.
S] What are the aspects that would lead to the perfect robot?
C] The current design (class MGN) scales excellently and is well suited to operating in any open environment; the XD-330 launcher units have been upgraded to house and deploy Cerberus and Euphrates class knife-missiles, and poly-cardboard reinforced plating. Though still experimental, is developing at such a pace that we expect to have up to twice the kinetic ablation profile of kevlar, Our thermal and explosive profiles are something we need to work on, and restricted theatres of war are another development area we hope to address with the next generation of devices but with your continued assistance and funding they should be ready for military deployment some time before… Wait, you’re not the general… oh shi-
…yes, erm… robots. Yes, ‘Music’ robots… good, totally harmless fun and not a front for a multinational military research project at all, no sir.
S] In terms of your inspirations and ideas, how does your latest material move away from ‘Please Keep Moving Forward’?
C] ‘Bone and Blood as Stone and Mud’ is an album rather than a collection of tracks which were already about the same time. I think it runs a lot better as a cohesive and developing narrative. I think it’s better in every sense really, I hate blowing my own trumpet, but I do think that to diversify into many fused styles rather than gunning to perfect some imagined trance-noise paradigm was the correct choice for me. It’s difficult to pin down any inspiration for the albums, they tend to flow out of a fairly disjointed creative process, some tracks are ready in days, some take weeks or months before I’m happy with them, some of the ones with a well thought out message never get finished while others fall into place really easily. There never seems to be much pattern, perhaps that’s for the best.
S] Can you describe to us in as much or as little detail as you wish, your defining moment as a musician and artists since you began many years ago?
C] Since very early on my motivation has been to play on big stages, I always find myself zoning out at gigs going, ‘I wonder what I would do with this space.’ I worked toward Infest, the show was planned years in advance, and it was, to all intensive purposes the zenith of my work so far. It went so well, probably one of the best moments of my life it must be said. It’s such a shame the remainder of my gigs for this year seem to have dried up, I have a whole document of ideas for new and entertaining ways to bewilder audiences.
S] Can you elaborate on how Coreline is a media project – do you explore more avenues than just music?
C] When I started the company I wanted to a, not go to jail for tax evasion and b, not limit myself to one industry. That said, over time Coreline has moved away from just music and towards performance and video elements. I hope to continue to work with others to make music performance actually involve performing and not just playing sonic-tetris™ in ableton. Maybe one day I will actually launch the company as a record label. I was actually planning that for this year, and indeed I glanced over the process for ‘Savage Lands‘ (aka, ‘that CD no one bought with the dark cover) as distinct from ‘that CD which no one bought with the light cover’) which is the pseudonym for ‘Please Keep Moving…’ but the financial depression has put a sharp and bloody end to any new plans for the moment.
S] Do you have to be in the studio to be inspired to work on sounds or do you have a specific location that you draw inspiration from?
C] Like most of the post tool-scarcity school of musicians, my studio is my bedroom which is also my main living space. For us, as a generation of artists a studio is a mindset rather than a location, it’s generally that corner of the desk where all the things with knobs on live. Inspiration for tracks comes from a variety of sources; most often I get ideas from existing artists work and develop them. Sometimes it’s purely academic like, ‘Oh I haven’t tried to do this, while doing that’ other times it’s more ‘I don’t have any of this kind of track for the album, I should write one.’ Occasionally I get an honest-to-goodness bolt of old-school inspiration on a walk or something.
For more information visit the artist’s Myspace.
Check out this live video of Coreline at Infest in 2008:
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