Saturday 12 April 2014

Dancing Deadlips Q&A

Your name:
Dancing Deadlips.

Where are you from?
Kraków, Poland.

How would you describe yourself?
Surreal. I mean the music, not me.

Who are your main influences musically?
Far too many to mention all of them here, but – just to give you a general idea - there are classics that I never get tired of, like Blut Aus Nord, Black Sabbath, Lydia Lunch (as for me - the best female performer on the planet), Fela Kuti, Sun Ra and other free jazz heroes, lesser-known psychedelic and prog-rock bands from 1960-80s - like May Blitz, Fear Itself, Clark Hutchinson, Captain Beyond. On the other hand, there are many bands and musicians that I listen to almost obsessively and I wouldn’t say that they are an influence for me – this is a totally different thing, it’s like they exist in my parallel reality, I mean musically, because they play exactly the kind of music that I would like to play, if I could have a possibility to be an extraordinary guitar player, or a drummer or a saxophonist and so on. I also draw and paint surreal stuff, so the great surrealists – such as Zdzisław Beksiński, Salvador Dalí, H.R. Giger, Yves Tanguy - have a vast influence on me, too.

What do you hope to achieve in music?
I don’t think there is anything more valuable to achieve in music than the music itself - being able to make it and to collaborate with wonderful people, knowing these people, it’s really a blessing. Of course I am not that stupid to think that things like success, great reviews and other positive feedback don’t matter at all, of course they do, especially if you want to survive as an independent artist – it’s just that you have to know what are your priorities and don’t let yourself get lost in all those side issues.

What has been the highlight of your career so far, and why?
I must have been five or six years old. One day I found an old compact cassette in my house, a home-made mix of some songs and - as an extremely nosy kid, looking for something interesting to discover all the time – I dragged a cassette player from the garret, plugged it in and… you could easily “translate” my amazement into the words: “Holy shit, what is this?!”. It was a compilation of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and The Rolling Stones – “Iron Man”, “Whole Lotta Love” and so on. I don’t know who brought along that old cassette, that music was something new for me, because my family was more into classic rock and roll or folk singers that time, and what I mostly knew about music till that moment was that Doris Day, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley vinyls sound funny if you change the speed. So, that was the day I got married to the music – and this is the highlight of my career (laugh).

And what’s the moment you want to forget?
Well, there was a time I set aside the music, because I seriously considered being a scientist. I had been studying things like ethnology, Tibetan Buddhism and philosophy for a couple of years, but I dropped it all out a few months ago. Anyway, I don’t want to forget those years spent at the university - it was certainly a worthwhile experience.

If you had to pick just one of your songs to represent your music, what would it be and why?
I would pick “It Is Pure Jade”, just because this is the direction I’d like to focus on  – more into heavy riffs and dark stuff. Raw and rough sounds, sometimes even out of time and off-key – I like the disturbing effect it gives, it’s like the way the life goes on: distortion, the moments when you’re so lacking in perfection. I’d like to collaborate with a djent band, or technical or experimental metal band someday. I love that kind of stuff - a totally hypnotizing sonic destruction for your ears - but I can’t play it by myself for sure... or maybe I can, but I don’t know about it yet, that remains an option (laugh).

Where can we listen to it?



Where can we find out more about your music?

Anything else you’d like to say about your band/music that I forgot to ask?
Yes, I’d like to say: thank you for your time! Just a word about the near future - in the Summer the black metal Cień will finally release the new LP, I was making ambient/soundscape samples for this release and I’m also drawing surreal graphics for this album right now. In the Autumn we’re going to release the album with my ambient friend Potworów, we already have most of the material recorded, kind of a dark, dreamy and jazzy thing. In the meantime, some new tracks will appear from the collaboration with Peter Flanagan of Renovatio41 and the other collab with Vozrozhdeniya. 

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