B-Side
Feb/Mar 94
Author: Sandy Masuo

Multi-instrumentalist Cevin Key may view his ten year tenure in the industrial music world as a brief history, but it’s definitely one that’s witnessed some revolutionary changes in the music technology. “We started in the analog era” Cevin says, contemplating his long career both with Skinny Puppy and as a principal in various outside ventures, including Hilt and the Tear Garden, “and somewhere in the middle of our careers we had to completely assimilate a new technology – the midi computer world, which is obviously much more technical and much different even in the approach and the concepts. I mean, even in our short ten year history we’ve seen major changes and I expect that the next ten years will see something just as major…I’m not sure if it’s going to be the music itself that evolves. I think the technology can evolve and we can get the perfect sound, but the music…It’s still [repeatedly] proven, with Nirvana or whatever, that the classic aggressive aggro-pop is always going to be something that will remain at the forefront because, you know, that’s the language of the masses.”

Well, it may be the language of the masses, but it’s not Skinny Puppy, whose tulmutuous sound has little to do with aggro-pop aside from a sense of louder and larger than life gestures. So, for Cevin, the Tear Garden is more than just a side project to wile away the time between Skinny Puppy albums. In it, Cevin (on drums among other things) together with bassist Ryan Moore, Legendary Pink Dots vocalist Edward Ka-Spel and guitarist Martyn DeKleer, plus an assortment of other contributors from both the Dots and Puppy camps, explore a sonic realm that is quite removed from Puppy-dom. Though they employ many of the same electronic implements and use much of the same vocabulary, they refrain from plunging into the depths of exquisite despair that are Puppy’s stock in trade, and instead roam across strange terrain that is alluringly diverse – from slightly somber, thoroughly elegant pop songs like ‘Love Notes and Carnations’ and ‘Romulus and Venus’ that seem to have evolved from the same melancholic filament that linked Joy Division and New Order to ‘The Strong and Whining Toad’, a deliciously creepy soundscape of samples that unfolds with the juicy premeditation of a Stephen King novel. Yet even at their most digital, there’s a pervasive sense of flesh and bone about the music – a factor Cevin attributes to the amazing live rapport at the core of the group.

“I think Martyn DeKleer is a great guitar player,” he says emphatically, concluding, “There’s no doubt about that. He’s like 25 and he just has it inside him. The three of us got together – Ryan Moore, Martyn DeKleer and me – and write a lot of songs [playing live] and then base a lot of electronic stuff around that. So we have a real human element that normally people ignore when they’re working in an electronic mode, or apply it so unevenly that something ends up getting lost… I’ve never worked with two other people that I felt so good playing with in a live situation before. It’s quite the opposite with the Tear Garden than it is with Skinny Puppy in the sense that Tear Garden is mostly written around a lot of live playing, where Skinny Puppy isn’t. So that’s where I get a chance to explore my real live desires.”

The Tear Garden’s first album, ‘Tired Eyes, Slowly Burning’, appeared in 1987, and it was five years before they re-convened to record the material that appears on the current ‘Sheila Likes The Rodeo’ album and its predecessor ‘Last Man To Fly’. Both albums are the product of one five-hour session, and they reflect the volatile contrast between iron control and spontaneous disarray that lies at the heart of the band’s music. ‘Last Man’ is the more deliberate, composed collection full of moments that stun with their quiet pop demeanor interspersed with carefully cultivated outbursts of angst, while ‘Sheila’ staggers from one mood to the next. The distinction between individual voices blurs; guitar lines and streams of samples seem to resolve into dialogue as Edward’s voice disintegrates into white noise. According to Cevin, much of the material that eventually became ‘Sheila’ was recorded without the band’s knowledge by engineers who simply let the tape roll.

“There’s a certain greatness to knowing that the tape isn’t rolling and knowing that the song that you’re playing is simply the last time you’ll ever hear it, if your in a jamming, improvisational mode. And then going in and hearing that somebody actually recorded it is just,” he pauses, pondering for a moment, “the ultimate gift I guess.”

Augmenting the persistent tension between control and spontaniety in the Tear Garden is a strange temporal dynamic that’s generated by the collision between the past and the present as they tumble toward the future.

“I think the Tear Garden is more like hippy-type people exploring their ’70s roots,” Cevin postulates.”I mean, there was some amazing stuff that was written in the ’70s, starting with Kraftwerk and the whole early German scene. A lot of people create music without any knowledge of these bands, and if they went back and listened they’d be damned surprised that there was a lot of alternative-ness going on twenty years ago too. I find that it’s not a matter of revivalism as much a matter of keeping that [tradition] alive. I think there’s a reason to go back and listen to that if you’re a musician. It’s like going and reading a lot of books if you’re into literature. It’s a matter of getting exposed to the right things – that’s one thing I realized when I was exposed to a lot of the late ’60s/early ’70s stuff. I felt like ‘well, gee, this is going way back.’ But from there I went all the way back to…” he considers for a moment, “You know, I believe cave men probably made some great tunes.”

From: Greg Clow Aka: ecurrent@sizone.pci.on.ca – ecurrent@io.org

Well. I finally finished transcribing the interview that I did with Edward on Nov 16. What follows here is the complete, unedited interview (a full 60 minute tape). Well, I did drop out a couple of bits where the conversation shifted focus away from Edward (like the point where I told him that I’d met Harlan Ellison a couple of years ago, and he got rather excited and started asking me “what was he like??”… heh.). Also, after the tape ran out, we continued talking for another hour or so, but it was more general gabbing than an interview type thing, so most of the important stuff is included below. As you might expect, I’ll probably be editing this and moving stuff around quite a bit before it actually gets published (February is the likely date, which’ll give me the chance to include a review of the new album as well, I hope). Anyway, here goes…

GC: How did the Dots come together, and what inspired you to do so?

EK: It was way back in 1980, when I met up with Phil (Knight aka The Silverman, the LPDs keyboardist) again – he’d been an old friend that I’d hung out with here and there in the 70’s. Our friendship had sort of come about since we both liked weird music, and there wasn’t so much of it about in the early 70’s, so what there was of it was to be cherished, and the few people into it would tend to find each other. Anyway, we’d drifted apart for a few years. I got a sort of regular job, and he got a regular job in another part of London. Then I moved, and it was into his area, and I was I suppose looking for something to do in a way, since I was kind of bored with life as it were. I’d just come out of a split with a girlfriend and things like that, and Phil called up out of the blue. He’d found out my new number from my mum, and for some reason he got in touch with me, so we got together. He was living in a house with a girl called April, and she actually became the third member of the Pink Dots.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we all went to this free festival at Stonehenge, and we had this really amazing experience in the middle of the night. We were lying in our tent, and we heard this great music from somewhere far away. There was this band playing at the end of the field, with a full light show, and they were just sort of improvising on four synthesisers and a guitar. So we wandered up the field, and *we* were the audience, just the three of us. And we still don’t even know the name of the band! In a way, I think that’s where the Dots were born, because it changed something in all our lives. We came back determined to create something. I bought a really cheap synthesiser, a drum machine and amplifer, and there was already a piano there in the squat, and we just started playing together, even though two of us had never played music before. We liked it so much that we tended to play for 15 hours at a time by single candlelight in this broken down old house.

This was a time where there was a heavy cassette culture in England. Lot’s of people were recording cassettes in thier rooms and putting them out the next day by themselves, which is something that I really like – as an idea, there’s something really fresh about it. Basically, we started doing it too. Some people heard our cassettes and wanted to put the stuff out on vinyl within a few months, so we were lucky in that way. From there on, the Pink Dots became the institution it is now (laughs).

GC: So you were aware of the stuff that was happening in the late 70’s and early 80’s like Throbbing Gristle?

EK: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, Throbbing Gristle were a really impotant band in the *way* they did things. They said “Look, we can’t play, but listen to it”, and when you listened to it, you were really excited by it. They believed in direct communication with the people who got into them – you could phone Throbbing Gristle, whether you knew them or not, and somebody in the band would actually answer the phone, and I always liked this level…

GC: Sort of the breaking down of the barrier between band and audience?

EK: Yeah, and we actually picked up the strands of that in that our communication is very direct: if anybody writes to us, we write back. It’s just always been our tendency.

And I think the popularity of the Pink Dots has grown through word of mouth, through people telling their friends about us and playing it for thier friends, and friends playing it for *their* friends. That’s how we’ve always wanted it. I mean, the media and the promotion machine hasn’t played much of a part in our growth in popularity – it’s always been a very organic thing.

And the music itself – well, it’ll always be the way that it is. We’ll never try to commercialize it, since we’ve never wanted to be “rock stars”. There’s no fun in that. If that’s what you want, you may as well take a job in an office, ’cause being a pop star is a job. Basically, we’re pleased with our underground heritage (laughs).

GC: What led to the move from London to Holland?

EK: I had a Dutch girlfriend at the time, and it was a good reason to move. The rest of the band followed about a year later. Since then the band has changed in it’s membership many, many times.

GC: Besides yourself, have there been any other constant members of the Dots?

EK: There’s no other *constant* member, but Phil was there at the start and he’s there now. He spent about 6 months outside the Pink Dots in 1981, but in a way you could say he’s been a constant as well. It just didn’t feel the same without him, really. It was actually through a disagreement with another member of the band that he left, but when that member of the band left, Phil came back.

It was interesting the way he rejoined the band as well: we had our first official show in Cologne, which was quite a weird prospect, because we’d hardly played at all live, and we were invited to play this festival. It turned out to be quite a big deal – about 400 or so people had showed up, and we were headlining! We sort of thought “How can this be, we haven’t even played a gig yet?” Anyway, Phil drove us over, ’cause he was the only guy we knew who had a van. And in a real state of, uh… well, it was a really emotional night, and we simply invited him back into the band on the night of the show. But he didn’t have any instrument with him, so he played a CasioTone on stage! (laughs)

GC: Are there any other bands that you feel a connection to, either through a similar philosophy, or through friendships?

EK: Well, for sure, bands like Current 93, because we both go back a long way, and David (Tibet of C93) is a good friend. And Nurse With Wound for sure, ’cause they’re alway changing, but they always maintain a level of excellence and Steve (Stapleton) always does exactly what he wants to do. The way he looks at it all is, I think, very similar to the way I look at it all. I just wish more people were listening to Nurse. Maybe he’s the best one of the lot, the most talented guy around.

GC: Do you think their lack of popularity comes from the fact that their music is a bit more “difficult” than the Pink Dots or Current 93?

EK: Yeah, but some of it has great appeal, though. I mean, it’s all sound, and it’s like something that delightfully dances on your ears. And the thing is, Nurse has actually gotten stronger as the years have gone on, and yet strangely, it seems that Steve had more success in the earlier years. I think it’s time that people really gave a listen to his stuff.

GC: What brought about your solo work? Was it a case of your coming up with material that you didn’t think would fit in with what the Pink Dots were doing?

EK: In a way it was – it was in 1984, and I wrote two songs that I was fiercely proud of. Now the Pink Dots had always been not *exactly* a democracy in the early days. I was – well, I wouldn’t call myself a “dictator”, but I was very firm in what I wanted. But after much discussion, we were agreeing to try to democratize the band a bit. I thought “fine”, until these two songs, which were “Even Now” and “Suicide Pact”, were actually rejected by the rest of the band, and I thought “Ahhh… well, I’ll just do ’em myself”.

So, I put together the first EP (DANCE, CHINA DOLL) and the first album (LAUGH, CHINA DOLL), and In Phase wanted to release it, and I found myself very pleased with the results. The problem within the band resolved itself very quickly, but by this point I enjoyed doing stuff by myself, and it put it into perspective. There’s a side of me, I suppose, that does want every note to be like this, and to be played this way, and have these sounds in it, and it isn’t really fair if you are in a band to sort of crack the whip. But you can crack the whip with yourself. I think having a strong say in a band in one thing, but being a virtual dictator is another.

GC: So when you initially come up with a song or a piece of some sort, does something go off in your head saying “This would work well with the Dots”, or “This would work well as a solo piece”?

EK: No, usually I throw them all out to the band, and my pride isn’t hurt if they say “no” here and there. I think the process only went wrong around the time of ISLAND OF JEWELS, which is actually my least favorite Pink Dots album. I think it’s an awkward listen, and there’s a lot of tension in the band. It’s when democracy got too… well, it got silly. There’s one track in particular on it that I’m always sad when I hear because I know what it could be – that’s “Shock of Contact”. I think after ISLAND OF JEWELS, once again the thing resolved itself. Noone was completely happy with it, but ANY DAY NOW (the following album), I think everybody who’s been in the band until now really stands by that record, and considers it a bit of a landmark.

GC: I think ANY DAY NOW was sort of a breakthrough for the Dots in a sense, since it was the first LPD album to get widespread North American release.

EK: Well, in terms of popularity, there’s been two breakthrough albums for us: ANY DAY NOW was the first, and THE MARIA DIMENSION was the second. MARIA was one that sold a lot, and it still does. And we did the typical Dots thing after MARIA DIMENSION, and went as obscure as possible with SHADOW WEAVER and MALACHAI. I think artistically, MALACHAI is a little landmark for us because it’s as wild as the Pink Dots have ever gotten, and I’m very pleased that we did that. Not everybody gets into it, and I can see why and respect thier opinions, but I like it.

GC: From personal experience, I know that a lot of people that got turned onto the Dots through THE MARIA DIMENSION don’t really know where the two SHADOW WEAVER discs are coming from in a way…

EK: Especially MALACHAI. SHADOW WEAVER people could get into more, but – you know, it’s nice to keep things changing all the time. It keeps fresh blood running in the band. We’ve just recorded a new album now, and it’s completely different again – it’s a gentle album, actually, and very dreamlike. We worked with cEVIN (Key) from Skinny Puppy on it, he came over and did some drums on it for us. It’s a very arranged and complete sort of record. It’s really like nothing we’ve done before. It’s still the Pink Dots, but it’s like another stage in our development. I’m curious to hear what people will think.

GC: Speaking of cEVIN, what brought about the collaboration with him as Tear Garden?

EK: That goes back to about 1982 or 1983. The first I heard of cEVIN was when he sent me a letter with a photograph collage of all the Pink Dots things that he’d managed to get, and I thought “Wow, Vancouver, that’s a long way away!”. He really liked the band, and he wanted to get all the tapes and everything. He always mentioned that he played in a band, but he would never talk about it, he’d just say “it’s a bad band, it’s a bad band” – and it turned out to be Images In Vogue. Then in one letter he said that’s he’d started a new band that he was much happier with, and he even told me the name of this one, Skinny Puppy, so I thought “Wow, that’s great!” (laughs)

So in 1986, I was given the phone number of an agent in Vancouver who was very active with sort of “weird” and electronic music. Since I was getting a lot of letters from Vancouver at the time, I thought “Well, I’ve never been to North America, so maybe I could play there.” So I dropped him a letter proposing that if he could arrange a couple of solo shows, since it wasn’t practical for the whole of the Pink Dots to go over and it would cost a fortune, that the money that they would make would probably cover the airfare, and that’s all I was interested in. I could stay with friends, and I said “Why not? It should work.”

I didn’t hear anything for about a month or 6 weeks, and then there was a phone call in the middle of the night and it was the agent. He just said “Yeah, I’m gonna do it”. So I came over, and he’d arranged three shows on successive nights in Vancouver, and cEVIN said “Oh, I’m gonna do your sound for you”. He was quite excited, and he sent me a tape of the instrumental version of “The Centre Bullet”, and said “if you write some words for this, we could record it together in the studio”. I wrote the words on the airplane, and we recorded it and really liked it, and then we went on to record the whole first Tear Garden EP in about 3 days.

That was the start of a really good friendship, and a really good working relationship, too. cEVIN is one of the best people I’ve ever, ever worked with. He really has tremendous energy.

GC: When did the Tear Garden change from what it started as, a collaboration between you and cEVIN, to what it is now, a project involving a lot of other people as well?

EK: It was a decision at the beginning of LAST MAN TO FLY, although in a way, it was “You and Me and Rainbows” (from TIRED EYES, SLOWLY BURNING) which changed everything. TESB is a peculiar album in that for the first side, all the music was there, and all I had to do was put words on it, which was a little unsatisfying in a way, because we were only given ten days to do the whole album. But since the material on the first side could be done very quickly, we decided to spend a lot of time on “You and Me and Rainbows”, which is, I think, in a way the crown of that record. A lot of that was improvised, and we didn’t decide where it was going to go beforehand, and that idea was the basis for LAST MAN TO FLY – we would simply go into the studio and play and play and play. There were some bits that we planned beforehand, but when you put it all together, you have a really nice simmering pot.

SHEILA LIKED THE RODEO was recorded at the same time as LAST MAN TO FLY, and the second half of it is literally the improvisations that happened on the spot. Everything was done simply as it was played and put down onto tape, and edited very skillfully afterwards.

GC: Was it a conscious decision, then, that so many people would be involved, or did it just sort of come about?

EK: It was a conscious decision that it would be cEVIN and Dwayne (Goettel of Skinny Puppy) and myself and Phil. Martyn (de Kleer, Pink Dots guitarist) became a part of it actually when we were there in Vancouver after our show. cEVIN liked his guitar playing and said “Do you fancy going on with Tear Garden”, so Martyn was suddenly there. Ryan (Moore) was a bass player who had played on the Hilt records, and then – this is where it gets complicated even further – Ryan is now a member of the Pink Dots. He flew from Vancouver, now lives in Europe, and is a really great member of the Dots. There’s this family, in a way, between Skinny Puppy and the Pink Dots – there’s always been a lot of connections.

GC: Have you ever tried to compile a Pink Dots family tree?

EK: (laughs) It’d be too complicated. One thing that does please me is how Skinny Puppy have evolved over the years. I mean, it gets more and more interesting all the time. LAST RIGHTS is not an easy album, but it’s a *great* album. It’s one that you can play in ten years and… it’s like this huge landmark. What I love about it so much is the emotion. It’s such a shot of emotion and pain – Ogre’s performance is amazing.

GC: I really felt they were building towards something with TOO DARK PARK.

EK: Yeah, that’s a good record.

GC: It felt like there were a lot of really good ideas that had started gelling together but they weren’t quite “there”, but with LAST RIGHTS, everything seemed to solidify into a very intense album.

EK: Well, I’m very anxious to see what comes next.

GC: On some of the Pink Dots albums, such as THE TOWER, there’s a very apparent “concept” running through all of the songs. Do you consider every Pink Dots album to be a “concept” album?

EK: It’s very difficult to talk about individual “concept albums”. The whole of the Pink Dots, in a way, has a very, very wide concept, like an ongoing tapestry where characters reappear and themes are taken up again. It’s like this story which is so vast that you can’t pin it down but you intuitively feel the links. Apart from THE TOWER and ISLAND OF JEWELS, there has never really been what you could call a “concept album” by the Pink Dots – that is, we’ve never really set out to make a “concept album”, but some of them have kind of worked out that way. I suppose it depends on what I’m busy with lyrically at the time. The next one will certainly be called a “concept album”, but it was never conceived as such. It goes around in a kind of circle, and it feels like everything relates to each other. It’s very complete.

GC: What was the concept behind THE TOWER and it’s sequel, ISLAND OF JEWELS? The war imagery is very obvious, but which war specifically is it referring to?

EK: Well, THE TOWER came out around 1984, and while I’m not a political person, I know what I don’t like, and I certainly don’t like the sort of politics that Thatcher was imposing on Britain at that time. THE TOWER was a projection of what things were going to be like. Thatcher had just been voted back in and I couldn’t believe it, so I proposed the idea that they would reopen the Tower of London, which is one of the oldest political prisons in the world, and it would be there for the deviant. Except they would extend it this time – it would be Tower Complex and Tower Town. On ISLAND OF JEWELS, it’s Tower World.

GC: Why did you do ISLAND OF JEWELS as a sequel several albums later?

EK: Because it didn’t go away. It got worse.

GC: I’ve heard that the titles of several early Pink Dots albums were taken from a Indian Tarot deck.

EK: Well, not intentionally. CURSE had a tarot card on the cover, THE TOWER is the name of a tarot card, and THE LOVERS is the name of a tarot card, but it was accidental up to that point. ASYLUM was recorded at a very, very troubled time for the band. We almost split up during ASYLUM. We’d been roughly treated by the only manager we’d had in our history, we were depressed and having breakdowns – there was a lot of bad shit going around. But still, we recorded ASYLUM, and you can hear this troubled feeling on the record. So at the end of it all, when we were listening back to it, the band really all came together again. It was a very special night the night we listened to ASYLUM. And just to finish the evening, we decided to see what the fate of this album would be and we looked to the tarot. And the card we pulled from the deck was Asylum, and that was obviously the title that had to be, because we were all looking to escape from somewhere. We were all looking for something to escape to. It’s full of desperation, that record.

ISLAND OF JEWELS (also a card in the tarot deck) was conscious. It was a conscious decision. And that’s when it stopped (laughs). The minute that we made a conscious decision to name an album after a tarot card, then it was time to stop.

GC: Even though you say that the whole of the Pink Dots has a very wide concept running through it, do you still look at each album as a separate entity?

EK: Each album is an album full of memories for me. I mean, THE GOLDEN AGE is a very sad record for me. It’s when the band lost four members just like that for varying reasons – they couldn’t stand the touring any longer; they couldn’t stand the poverty any longer; and the saddest thing of all was that Patrick (Wright, violinist/keyboardist and long-time Pink Dot) left after recording the album. He was a very important member of the Pink Dots and nobody wanted him to leave. We actually had to build the band back from scratch after that, and I think that’s why THE CRUSHED VELVET APOCALYPSE is so fresh. And THE MARIA DIMENSION also maintains the freshness, I think.

THE MARIA DIMENSION was recorded very much by myself, Phil, and our guitar player, Bob (Pistoor), who was a tremendous guy, and a very essential part of the music that we made. He was the most dedicated Pink Dot, apart from the originals, that we’d met for years. And he died. And that’s why SHADOW WEAVER is the album that it is, because it was after this… like this horrible lightning bolt from the sky. So, yeah, each album just has so many memories.

GC: So, what’s next?

EK: There’s a lot of stuff. Solo, there’s a couple of things just released. One’s a retrospective of rare tracks and things like that, LYVV CHINA DOLL.

GC: It’s different from the original cassette release? (The original cassette was one side studio tracks and one side live.)

EK: Yeah, it’s the studio side from the cassette, and it’s got about 20 minutes of little experiments added on. Because a CD can only hold so much music, it seemed silly to put the studio side and just a couple of live tracks on it, it just didn’t feel right.

There’s also a 10 inch mini-LP just out called THE ILLUSION. I’m very proud of that. And I’m busy right now with a new solo album – THE ILLUSION is actually quite old, it was recorded about 1 and a half or 2 years ago. The new album is something that I’ve been working on actually for a year already, and it’s a very complex piece.

GC: Will it be the next in the CHINA DOLL series, or something seperate?

EK: It’ll probably have a different name. It’s the official follow-up to TANITH & THE LION TREE. But I don’t know when it’ll be finished, it’ll probably take a while.

There’s a new Mimir (a collaboration between members of the Dots and H.N.A.S.) that’s coming out – it might even be out now. Christoph (of H.N.A.S.) is releasing it himself.

GC: I also saw something mentioned that Robot (the label that released THE ILLUSION) will also be putting out a solo 7 inch.

EK: Probably a double 7 inch.

GC: Will that be live or studio material?

EK: All studio. There’s no plans to release live solo stuff, apart from Robert (Oliver of Freedom In A Vacuum Records, and curator of the series that Edward performed as a part of) who might release some tracks from the live concert on a compilation CD.

GC: Is the CHINA DOLL series over for you, or will you go back to using that name at some point?

EK: Whether I’ll use the term “CHINA DOLL” is debatable. What it is that I’m working on IS the third part of “The aaAzhyd Trilogy” (aaAZHYD CHINA DOLL and KHATACLIMICHI CHINA DOLL being the first two parts). That’s why it’s taking so long, because it has to be quite enormous, it’s gotta be a work that I’ll be proud of for the rest of my life. I’ll take it apart a hundred times before I’m totally satisfied with it.

GC: Do you see anything happening in other music today that you consider interesting or exciting?

EK: One band that I’ve heard a CD of in the last year that I was absolutely thrilled by was Miranda Sex Garden. It was absolutely so well done, and had such an edge to it. I love to be suprised by that, because in earlier days – around the turn of the 80’s – you were suprised every week by something that came along. Now it’s much harder.

GC: Do you think that’s because so much has already been done, or that people are just getting more complacent?

EK: It’s a bit of both. I mean, it’s hard to be completely original these days. And too many bands are career-orientated these days. But it’s a much harder climate to work in, so I can see why they’d be that way as well. In the Pink Dots, we’ve been through times of such poverty. I would eat maybe three times in a week, and stuff like that –

it was ridiculous. I don’t recommend poverty, it’s not fun. It might be very romantic to the outsider, but it’s not very romantic when you’re actually living that way. So, I can see why people don’t volunteer for it. But I think the Dots are an example that you do come through it, and you don’t have to commercialize the music. You don’t have to compromise at all. You just have to work at it. There’s a lot of hard work involved, and you have to *tour*.

GC: Are the Dots on the road pretty much constantly?

EK: We tour a lot, maybe 5 months in a year. It’s a bit hard, really, with a wife and a little baby.

GC: Does she come along with you?

EK: Well, she used to, but it’s kind of impossible now with the baby. (laughs) She’s great, she really supports me, and that’s all I could wish, ’cause I’d probably whither away without touring. I need to do it.

One other band that I must say I was really impressed with is Parade (who opened for Edward’s show at the Music Gallery). I like the decisions that they’ve made, and where they’re going – it’s very exciting, I really like them a lot. I liked them when they opened for the Dots here a couple of years ago, but they blew me away this time. And there’s Mauve Sideshow. That’s a good new band. They haven’t been around long, and they sound unlike anything else. It’s the outgrowth of Kangaroo Kourt. Yeah, when I hear something like that, it makes me feel really warm – knowing that there are still guys who do it to make a strange kind of headspace, and they do it well.

GC: Do you read much, or see many films?

EK: Not much, since I’m usually so busy working. I’d like to see more films. I went to see “Jurassic Park” (laughs). It’s the first movie I’d seen for a year. We had a babysitter for a night, so it was sort of like, “well, what the hell, let’s go see what everybody’s talking about” – and I really enjoyed it, it was good entertainment.

I read when I can. I’m particularly fond of Harlan Ellison. I really like Robert Sheckley – he’s one of the few people who makes me laugh out loud on tube trains and get the whole carriage staring at me. Yeah, mainly sci-fi writers. In a way, I think “science fiction” is a pretty poor term for what these guys are actually doing. Guys like Ellison sort of defy catagorization, I think.

GC: What brought about the decision for the Dots to start their own CD label?

EK: Poverty again, actually. (laughs) We’d had a very good couple of years after THE MARIA DIMENSION. It got to the point where we moved to a place that’s not very expensive by Canadian standards, but very expensive by Pink Dots standards – it costs about $800 a month between four of us. That’s a lot – it sounds crazy, but it really is. This year, unfortunately, has turned out to be one of the worst years financially that we’ve ever had. It’s due to a number of factors: we had $3000 stolen – pickpocketed – as we began the American tour, in Amsterdam airport, before we even got on the plane, and that was a BIG blow. SHADOW WEAVER and MALACHAI did not do so well. All these factors added up to sort of warning lights all around, and it was sort of like “what could we do to put this on level again?”. And the fact is, if you release a CD yourself, and you sell 1000, it’s the equivilent of selling 20,000 CD’s through the record company.

GC: Even through a small company like Play It Again Sam?

EK: Play It Again Sam isn’t a small record company anymore, they’re a big record company. And that’s not bad mouthing them, they’ve been more than fair to us. So anyway, we came up with the idea of starting our own label. And the thing is as soon as you start the idea of your own label, the idea of the money you’ll make becomes extremely secondary – I mean, “Four Days” is our first release (a CD re-release of a cassette only album from 1990), but our next release is going to be typically obscure: an album of 300 copies, which will make us absolutely no money at all (laughs). But everybody’s very excited by it, and Play It Again Sam (who will remain the Dots label for thier “major releases”) don’t mind because it doesn’t get in their way at all. We’ll do it mainly from home – people can write to us and order them directly, and it builds the relationship with the people who listen.

GC: Will the 300 copy album be new or old material?

EK: It’ll be new stuff. We’ve already got it recorded, in fact. Another future project is that we may re-issue the tracks off of that 3 inch CD (initial copies of THE MARIA DIMENSION in Europe included a bonus 3 inch CDEP) as part of a compilation.

GC: That’s good, ’cause I don’t think many copies of that release made it over to North America.

EK: Yeah, it’s frustrating for us, and it’s heartbreaking as well. I don’t understand why it was so hard to find. It’s not like it’s *that* limited – there were 3000 of them. But after 2 months of it being out, I didn’t see it anywhere either. People are asking and asking about it, and we’ve heard stories about it selling at record fairs for 100 dollars and stuff like that – that was never our intention. I mean, “Four Days” was done in an edition of 100, and it took us six months to sell 100, because we only allowed it to go through the mail. It was there for everyone, and it wasn’t expensive either – it was 12 dollars or something. So then we thought it logical that something like the limited MARIA DIMENSION would be around for a while.

GC: What’s the situation as far as CD releases of your solo material? Of the three that have been released on CD, only TANITH and aaAZHYD seem to be easy to find…

EK: Oh, aaAZHYD is *lousy* to find on CD! In Europe, aaAZHYD and TANITH are basically unavailable. I was happy to see that TANITH is easy to find here. CHYEKK is unavailable – it’s been unavailable for a number of years. I had a fright the other day ’cause I thought I’d lost my own copy (laughs) – but I found it, it was under the couch or something.

As for the other stuff, I don’t have the masters. I actually used bootlegs that I did myself for LAUGH (the re-release) and THIN BLUE LINE (a vinyl-only retrospective from a couple of years ago). THIN BLUE LINE is likelier than LAUGH to be released on CD simply because of the quality of what I have to use. KHATACLIMICHI will come out on CD. EYES will come out on CD, ’cause that’s the rarest of the lot. But I just wish some of the more recent releases were available – like I said, aaAZHYD is horrible to get.

GC: Is that Torso’s fault (the label aaAZHYD is on)?

EK: Yeah, plus the fact that I can’t even afford to get copies of aaAZHYD. They sell it to me at 25 guilders (around $18 CDN) a shot! But I don’t think it’s around anymore. Torso might still have some there, but I don’t think so. It’s a shame, because it’s the one that people want a lot.

The things that have already been re-released have already disappeared, and Torso is too big a company and PIAS is too big a company for the solo stuff – they can only sell 4 or 5 thousand of them, so they’re not so interested in them. The only real reliable way to get this stuff is again directly from us – when something new comes out, it’s there for a while from us. But when it’s gone, it’s really gone. Like THE ILLUSION – it’s ominous that it’s going to disappear very, very soon. But we have copies over there. Kevin at Robot is great – he could afford to press 1000, and that’s what he did. He’s already sent me 65, and he’s sending another 35. We’re not selling them to distributors, just to people. We’re finding it hard to cope with the number of people who actually want it, and it’s tending to get very expensive in Europe. I’ve seen a wholesale price on it which is the same as what we actually sell it for, and that means it’s gonna be ridiculously expensive in Europe. I know the price that Kevin is selling it for, and there’s no real excuse for it to go up like that.

Montreal Mirror, May 20, 1993.

MAPS, LEGENDS & DOTS Thirtheen years on, Edward Ka-Spel and The Legendary Pink Dots are still difficult to locate in the continuum of pop

by Chris Yurkiw

Two campus radio announcers joked at a party about one of their younger, fledgling colleagues – a pale and awckward waif who was shrouded in mystery, big hair and black clothes.

“The kind of person who’s waiting for the next Legendary Pink Dots album,” quipped one, while the other thought that the reference was obscure, kind of cool, and maybe just a little flaky.

The Legendary Pink Dots are a quintessential cult band. In the early ’80s, the group’s name popped up on compilations and a slew of cassette-only releases. Led by Edward Ka-Spel, a legend of the ululating underground, the group has produced a steady stream of albums that totals fifteen… or sixteen. “I’ve lost count,” says Ka-Spel in a tour-worn voice he’s trying desperately to save for the evening performance. “There’ve been at least 10 cassettes, as well as eight solo albums,” he says. Over the past 13 years, the band has created soundscapes that jump from ambient to atonal, has written soundtracks that incorporate ballads and “jazz actuel,” and has consistently treated electronic experimentation with elegance. Ka-Spel adds his wispy lisp sing-speak, spinning tales of fantasy, spirituality and CNN. “I’d say the Pink Dots are psychedelic in the original meaning of what psychedelia was all about,” says Ka-Spel, commenting on the oft-used adjective to describe the band.

The Pinks Dots were formed by vocalist Ka-Spel and fellow keybordist Phil Silverman [sic] in East London back in 1980. Four years later, the pair decided to do some Channel hopping over to the more tolerant Amsterdam, where the group is still based.

“It was also 1984, the year we released the album “The Tower” which was all about England,” Ka-Spel recalls. “It screams about the way the country was going back then (under Margaret Tatcher). England was my country, and countries are basically loved, but I was tearing my hair out at the way it was. That album was actually celebrated in Europe, but completely ignored in England. So the signs were there – leave.”

“The band has had about 19 members over the years and that’s always breathed new life into it. No one’s ever left in anger, and at the moment, I think it’s a particularly healthy band.” says Ka-Spel. Filling out the line-up these days with Ka-Spel and Silverman are Ryan Moore on bass and accoustic guitar, Martjin de Kleer on more guitars and percussion, and Niels Van Hoornblower on horns.

The Pink Dots may take their inspiration from psychedelia, but the group certainly doesn’t mimic the ’60s style. Comparisons with ’70s progressive rock are much more apt, including the influence of Can, Faust, Neu! and middle-period Pink Floyd. To boot, Ka-Spel has a penchant for the concept album, and the group’s latest effort “Malachai” is the second part of a mystical journey of a character called The Shadow Weaver. Says Ka-Spel of this unfashionable approach: “We go on our own sweet path that relates to very little else that’s going on. I’m quite happy to carry on winding that way.”

The enigmatic exile has hit on something here. Perhaps it’s the elusive if anti-climatic answer to another mystical quest. Is the way the Pink Dots carry themselves the essence of being an alternative group, or an independent band ?

“Alternative to what?” scoffs Ka-Spel mildly. “I think way too much is put on those two words – alternative and independent. I would say The Legendary Pink Dots are simply a unique band. I don’t know what we’re independent of, or what we’re alternative to. We’re just the Pink Dots.”

The Legendary Pink Dots play Backstreet Saturday, May 22 [1993], $15.

The Legendary Pink Dots were without a venue Wednesday after Cafe Campus lost its appeal of a court injunction ordering the bar to close. The Quebec’s Court of Appeal ordered the popular Universite de Montreal hangout to shut its doors because of repeated complaints from local residents about the noise.

[Alan’s note: Eventually they found a venue – Backstreet on Mayor, formerly known as Mars, a very nice goth-industrial club, but now a metal bar!]

Phone interview with Legendary Pink Dots, Wednesday May 12, 1993.
Locations: Madison Wisconsin (Ka-Spel) Montreal, Quebec (Elnuaimy and Ezust)

E: Edward Ka-Spel
M: Mo Elnuaimy
A: Alan Ezust

M: So I heard you just got back from Vancouver. Were you recording a new Tear Garden during your visit?

E: No, I didn’t have time, you know we were only there for 2 days.

M: I thought that was all the time you were there for last time.

E: Yeah, we were there for at least 6 weeks. It was a full month of recordings – we brought 2 CDs together. Tear Garden certainly goes on.

M: Both Tear Garden and Shadow Weaver were recorded at once and released over two CDs over the course of a year.

E: That’s right, and there was about 5 hours of material recorded during that run. Basically, the studio was there, we were all extremely excited, getting back together after some years – to actually play together, I mean we see each other a lot, Kevin and the guys, but, yeah, it’s like, we all just totally celebrated in style, and just went for it. A hell of a lot of material was recorded. Shadow weaver though, was conceived as a double CD.

M: Why were the CDs released almost a year apart?

E: Basically one half of it was finished earlier than the second half and Play It Again Sam really wanted to put it out quite quickly, so there was no other way around it at the time. We wanted to take our time on finishing it, so Malachai was a couple of months longer to work on, even though it started at the same time as Shadow Weaver, it finished way after.

M: There is a considerable difference in styles between the two of them.

E: Yeah, we put them together according to the feel. Like Shadow Weaver, what we selected for that, it all seemed to accent a certain mood. Everybody agreed that it worked as an album in itself. Malachai was the same. Kind of like, the Pink Dots never tend to record in a straight line. Like, while we would work on some really set ideas which were fully constructed, we would also the next day, like, maybe completely improvise for the whole day and see what would come up. A lot of those fully realized tracks appeared on Shadow Weaver. That’s why you got the contrast – one type of work got on one CD, one type of work ended up on the other.

M: So you’d say Shadow Weaver was more “thought out” and Malachai was more “experimental”?

E: In a way, yeah, I would say so. Though both are of course experimental. Something we really wanted to do, stretch the boundaries a little bit on this project.

M: Shadow Weaver’s actually a bit of a comeback for you guys, after The Maria Dimension. I don’t know if you guys perceive it the same way as I do, but it seemed to be a major flop.

E: Yeah, you thought so?

M: Yeah, I’ve heard a few people comment that they don’t really like the Maria Dimension.

E: That’s so strange; it’s our most popular album (laughs) – seriously, it outsold everything else we’ve done before, and after, unfortunately for us.

M: Maybe it’s just those people who considered you their own personal discovery getting grouchy about your success.

E: In a way, it’s very heartening for me to hear that, because an awful lot was said about the Maria Dimension, and we thought about the Shadow Weaver “It was a flop compared to the Maria Dimension” that’s generally what people have said to us, not the fans, but the record companies for sure.

M: So what do you think?

E: Well, (pause) I think the Pink Dots weaves in its own peculiar way.

M: That’s rather an obscure comment…

E: It is true – it’s all according to the mood at the time. And y’know There are only two albums in our history that I would say, “I do not like those albums.”

M: Which ones are those?

E: Island of Jewels. I think it’s a mess. I think – you can take a track in isolation, and it’s fine, but to listen to it as an album, (sighs) it’s tough! The other one is The Lovers – I really can’t stand the live side. The live side sounds too clean – I like it a little rougher around the edges than that. It’s also too rushed – we had to do it in 3 days.

M: So what are you looking for in the perfect album? What’s the difference between The Lovers, Island Of Jewels, and say Shadow Weaver. What is that subtle difference between them, that makes Shadow Weaver, or The Maria Dimension, a “Good Album” in your eyes? And Island Of Jewels or The Lovers bad albums?

E: It touches the soul, and is a rich and colourful journey – that’s why I personally like The Maria Dimension – I must admit, ’cause I think it’s a rich and colourful journey.

M: But it’s a little bit loose, that’s the trouble with it, and there’s not much structure to it… Unless you’re actually concentrating on it, where you made the time for it, it doesn’t really grab you. You actually have to sit down and want to listen to it, as opposed to a lot of the other material I’ve heard, that seduces you into listening to it.

E: Yeah, see I think a good album is never something you can listen to while dusting the house, or wandering around, or… hoovering the plants.

M: Maybe my own personal bias comes in here – I am a music critic so have to listen to a lot of music while dusting the house and watering the plants…

E: That’s a lot of the criticism of the Shadow Weaver I’ve heard; was actually what you were saying, that basically it wasn’t instant enough, but The Maria Dimension was considered extremely instant!

M: Was it?

E: Mostly, yes, that’s the reaction we’ve had… It’s peculiar – what people say about the Shadow Weaver is what you said about The Maria Dimension – it’s like a weird twist on it… I’m personally very fond of The Maria Dimension and Shadow Weaver, but I think Shadow Weaver is a particular mood; I think it’s a lonely album.

A: I was just speaking to a few people who work for WZBC in Boston – they’re the ones that give you the most airplay in Boston.

E: Oh they’re great people.

A: They do tend to agree with you more on The Maria Dimension – I was speaking to one of the DJs and he was saying that the problem with Shadow Weaver was that there weren’t any particular “hit songs” as he put it, while The Maria Dimension did have some.

E: It had Pennies For Heaven, Grain Kings, Belladonna. Shadow Weaver is a mood, from beginning to end, it’s a very precise mood.

A: I believe it’s what most of your older fans are looking for in your releases – a mood, rather than the hit songs, and so that may be why you have some die hard fans who really like the older albums, or also Shadow Weaver who are a bit disappointed by The Maria Dimension.

E: It’s interesting because the whole Shadow Weaver project, most comparisons that have been made, a lot of people said it was a return to The Asylum, and I can actually see that, I guess. I think it’s a little more realized than Asylum, but yeah, it’s definitely got the feel of Asylum a little bit.

A: There were some things in Shadow Weaver Part 2 which started to remind me of perhaps Controlled Bleeding or SPK; it got quite noisy at times.

E: Oh Sure, I think SPK, the early days, they were a really wonderful band. Actually we were listening to a lot of jazz during the time of Shadow Weaver, like Sun-Ra and Miles’ “On the corner”.

A: Yes, it was an interesting blend of a lot of different styles.

E: It was another adventure for us. We were going to try to do things we have not done before, y’know we always want to try new things and to put the pieces together in a like, unusual way and see what comes out.

M: Moving off the comparison of albums thing… I was wondering where you get your inspiration for this material – you mentioned earlier, you say some of it is structured and some of it is improvisation but, is there any particular process you use for inspiration or does it just come out from the air?

E: It’s always a variety of processes. I mean Shadow Weaver was very much 5 people putting in their ideas, and I think the band is richer. More people actually, putting in their own personal contributions, or coming out with an original thought, which they hand over to the band, but it’s not out of the question for someone to have a fully realized concept as well, that is to put into operation by the band wither… There shouldn’t be any chains on creation.

M: Do you have any stories of inspirational moments, like walking down the street and seeing something or hearing something that inspires a song?

E: Dreams are very important. Whole tracks have appeared in dreams before, and attempts have been made to recreate the dreams, Crushed Velvet a little bit, and Maria, and Lisa’s party, for sure, the whole track was dreamed before it was recorded.

M: So basically, you go to sleep and wake up with these concepts which you scribble down into songs. Are there any particular dreams you can tell of, or are they all basically in the song?

E: A recording walkman helps… Like Lisa’s party for instance sort of basically the little hook line was playing over and over in this dream. I was lucky enough to have a recording walkman by the bed, sort of like I’d wake up for like a minute, sing the hook line into it, and crash back to sleep again, play it back the next morning and say, “Aaah- that’s neat.” I’d hear “Lisa’s party, lisa’s party” like that, because that was the line that was going on in the dreams, this the hook line… And it brought the dream back.

M: back to the Tear Garden stuff – what is it like recording them?

E: It’s absolutely wonderful.

M: What’s a typical recording session like with these people? How is it different from your own recording sessions?

E: With Pink Dots recording sessions, we’re just using a little 8 track recording studio in a barn. It’s like very primitive equipment, we got a couple of effects, things and we make the best of what we got – it’s not much, but we try. Tear Garden is like a 40-track studio in Vancouver. You got these really ideal situations where you don’t have to think of the technical side of it – our own engineers as well, generally. In Mushroom Studios there is an engineer who really loves what he’s doing. There’s Cevin who is an absolute dynamo, brings the best out of everybody. It really works, the combination of personalities on the Tear Garden – it turns the whole month into a party, and it’s something that’s worth repeating again and again.

M: Now tell what happened with this last set of Tear Garden releases, because, I mean, Tired Eyes Slowly Burning had a lot of edge, and was very a hard-focused album, with a lot of songs that stand alone very strongly, and they also seem to flow together very well. It was that combination that seemed to work well and I noticed with Last Man To Fly, I was expecting a Tired Eyes Slowly Burning kind of feel and it was completely different.

E: Completely threw everything on its head, didn’t it?

M: There were a couple of interesting songs, but in general it was more of a mood album the sort of thing you would play as one continuous run, rather than anything you could – there were only a couple of tracks you could lift off and they could stand on their own.

E: It’s is a mood album. You hear Last Man To Fly in the very order that it was recorded. I questioned that at the time, like, “Ya can’t make the order of the album simply the chronological order of recording”, but actually now I couldn’t hear it any other way. There are a lot of loose pieces, like the Running Man, was one glorious jam, with a little bit of structure in there, like chord progression was obviously written before. There were a lot of other things which were almost live onto tape, like, the two acoustic songs. There were pieces where Cevin and Dwayne had the music prepared before we got into the studio and basically said, “write some lyrics for that” and try to fit the melody into that, like R&V. There were a lot of different approaches for Last Man To Fly.

M: what about Sheila Liked The Rodeo?

E: Sheila Liked The Rodeo, you’re getting the hard jams live onto 2-track – the second half of it. we improvised an awful lot of it – just straight live everything, vocals, everything. Whereas the first half of it, the music was prepared by Cevin and Dwayne, mostly, apart from Sybil the Spider, and all I had to do was write the lyrics and sing.

M: so you’re saying that for Sheila Liked The Rodeo, that’s basically all you did. You had lyrics written before you came in?

E: No I wrote them on the spot.

M: You wrote them as you were jamming?

E: I wrote them as I was either jamming, or sort of in the studio… The whole Tear Garden project was done like that. It was a very creative time.

M: You guys going to do be doing another project soon?

E: Don’t know when. We will, cause we’re extremely fond of Last Man To Fly.

M: Speaking of another project, you were supposed to do something with Bill Leeb.

E: Time in a way didn’t permit it, and I must admit, he sent me some basic material which is good, for sure, but if I actually added my own contribution to it, in the way Bill wanted me to add it, it would have sounded exactly like Tear Garden, and I don’t think it is right. Tear Garden is Tear Garden, y’know.

M: Which Tear Garden? They’re so different.

E: Oh true… Well, like the mini-album, Centre Bullet. That kind of thing, which I didn’t think it is such a positive thing – you gotta move on…

M: Do you think it’s because Leeb actually wanted to produce a Tear Garden type of thing, or was it accidental?

E: I don’t know – that’s something you’d have to ask Bill.

M: So basically that’s not likely to happen? That was three years ago, now.

E: I don’t really know… I don’t have so much contact with Bill. I have much more contact with Skinny Puppy as a whole, they’ve been close friends for many years now. There’s a good chemistry there between the Dots and Puppy.

M: Here is another question regarding projects, what exactly is the difference between Dots material and your solo work?

E: Well, the solo stuff is absolutely conceived. The Pink Dots, it is very much 5 people who are putting in their ideas, and it’s better that way. It wouldn’t be a band if it was “I want it done this way, right down to the letter.”

M: But you used to do that in the beginning with the first couple of albums…

E: There were elements of it, not quite as hard as that, but certainly they played their parts. But you see, I do have that side to me, and the only way I can reasonably realize that need is to make solo albums as well.

M: So basically the solo album is your opportunity to do what YOU want, without anybody else meddling with it.

E: That’s true, ad they’re highly constructive…

M: None of this improvisation stuff?

E: Not really, well, there are elements of it at times but there is a very good idea of what I want to do before I record it.

M: In 1986 you were singing ’89s a good year. Was that 1889 or 1989?

E: 1789, actually. The year of the French Revolution…

M: Why did you move out of London’s east end?

E: Basically I had a dutch girlfriend at the time, and I never felt particularly comfortable in the East End of London. It was a tough childhood. I’d never seem to be able to completely shake that off, the only way to really do it was to get the hell out of the country.

M: That was what, 10 years ago?

E: 9 years ago.

M: And, you ever look back on that decision?

E: London’s a nice place to visit now. We play there every year, maybe I go back there at x-mas, to see my mum. It’s great for about 10 days, but I wouldn’t live there.

M: Whereabouts in Holland are you living?

E: A little town called Nijmegen, on the German border.

M: Why? Most artists seem to flock to Amsterdam…

E: A Long complicated story, really. We lived in Amsterdam for 5 years, but we were squatting, and they knocked the house down. Our friend, Niels, who is in the band, had a farm close to Nijmegen, and we stayed in the caravan for 6 months because we couldn’t get a place to live, at all. Basically the people who deal out the houses say that you don’t earn enough. Eventually with a few well-chosen lies, we convinced someone to let us hire a flat, and Nijmegen was the closest city.

M: So you still making the rent?

E: Oh we always made the rent, but in Holland officially, it’s supposed to be a 5th of your income. Our reality, it was more like half of our income, and it’s either lie and get somewhere to live, or try and go back to England, which would also be impossible now, because how the hell can you get a place there? It’s a very tough time.

M: Alan tells me that Xymox is also based in Nijmegen. Is there any connection between the two of you?

E: We don’t know Xymox at all.

M: Really? How big is Nijmegen?

E: Nijmegen is a city of 100,000 people.

M: And you don’t know their music at all? You must have been asked this question several times…

E: I know their first 12″, but I didn’t get along with their stuff later. I thought it was a little programmed for my own personal tastes. There is one other great band in Nijmegen which who hardly anybody knows called U-Slashes, there used to be a band called Mechanic Commando… They are wonderful, but not so many people know them over here.

M: What label are they on?

E: Their own.

M: That’s probably why they’re not getting very much international distribution…

E: It’s true, but they deserve to really.

M: what kind of stuff is it?

E: Nowadays, it’s quite folky mysterious, a little like current-93.

M: I’m not familiar with Current 93.

E: Ohh, it’s a good band.

M: Ok, here’s another one…The press release goes on about…

E: Oh the cult in Tucson Arizona! [the 4th secret]

M: I spoke to you two years ago when you played the Foufounnes show, I asked you about “The Prophet” monniker, and you said yeah it’s a bunch of baloney, a bit of humour. And you start off in this press release with the cult in Arizona thing..

E: I must explain about this Tucson, Arizona thing, it’s not our story – it’s a story concocted by a very imaginative spokesperson at Caroline.

M: So it is actually fiction?

E: There isn’t a cult in Tucson, Arizona at all… I’m actually quite thankful for that.

M: The last question I got for you is one from one of your fans – are you going to be touring Israel soon?

E: We already played there.

M: You did? Did you like it?

E: It was fascinating. We played two shows, we were a bit wary of it, before we went, but when we got there it was like the reality of the place isn’t anything like it’s presented to you on the news, y’know? Two sold-out shows, a lot of very friendly people, be them Israeli or Palestinian. Tel-aviv is actually a very relaxed city; I won’t say the same for Jerusalem. We didn’t play in Jerusalem, we can’t play in Jerusalem, actually. It’s a very divided city; fascinating, but by God I wouldn’t [undecipherable]…

M: There is also a Hebrew connection with the Shadow Weaver. The press release says that the title is a translation from ancient Hebrew, but it doesn’t say that the story is a Hebrew story. Is it something you came up with yourself, or what?

E: Malachai? It’s “The angel stands in the shadow of god.”

M: There is also an inscription in Shadow Weaver, “Mezhkal Zhaveeda”

E: That’s another bunch of baloney…

M: What is the Shadow Weaver story?

E: It’s not so much a story – it’s a quest for enlightenment. It’s the all-powerful being is just outside the corner of your eye. He who weaves the shadows, he who is in between the dimensions, but is absolutely there, but where?

M: Is this a concept of yours, or is it a mythological concept that is…

E: Just a passing thought, really, but a really big passing thought.

M: So that’s the idea behind the Shadow Weaver title. Does that continue, is that a theme for the albums?

E: It’s an ongoing theme that started with Crushed Velvet Apocalypse, went through The Maria Dimension, and sort of crystallized in Shadow Weaver. Where it will go from here, I don’t know. I’m busy writing for the next album already.

M: What is that theme, can you quantify it in better words than I’ve used?

E: Tentatively, the next album is “The Politics of Agony”. But it’s tentative.

M: What’s the concept with that? Is it the same theme you’ve been running with for the past 4 albums?

E: I don’t know, they tend to take shape with passing of time. It’s very early to say more about it at this particular time. It makes sense when we’re actually recording it, all the minds are focused on it. At the moment all the minds are focused on the tour but the first steps have been taken towards that next record.

M: You seem to be doing a sort of hopscotch tour.. All over the country…

E: All over the world, actually.

M: How is it going so far?

E: Fairly well, in America. It seems quite remarkable. We’ve sold out in a few places already over here. Biggest shot was Los Angeles, 500 people turned up at the Roxy, on Sunday night; nobody expected it – the club or us. It goes better here than in Europe these days..

M: Is it? It used to be that you had your success in Europe and the North America was a flash in the pan for you…

E: Europe is a patchwork. France is always a great country for the LPDs. Germany, it’s like little pockets of fanatics. Holland is by nature, a very trendy country, and you’re either in favour or not in favour, and I’d say we’re not particularly in favour in Holland at the moment, although there’s a loyal bunch. England it goes well now, where it never used to. And Eastern Europe is like the big blossoming flower.

M: What kind of shows are you playing in Eastern Europe?

E: It’s still to come on this tour – we’re going to do a little of Czechoslovakia and Poland, and probably Moscow. We’ve been invited. Maybe we’ll go to Japan for the first time as well.

M: You have significant sales in Japan to justify that?

E: I have no idea what our sales are like there. We’ve just been invited. If we’ve been invited, sure we’re going to go to Japan!

M: Why not… The Australia, New Zealand tour comes next, ay?

E: We haven’t been invited there yet, but who knows, I’m sure there is a bunch of people who know us there, but you get surprised all the time.

M: How many Canadian dates have you played so far?

E: Just the one in Vancouver.

M: And how was that one?

E: For me, personally, I thought it was the worst show of the whole tour. It was one of those seminars with 4 bands… All these bands perform “for the industry” kind of thing, We just kinda wandered into it, not knowing what it was all about, and it was a 4-band bill. It was a disastrous sound on stage, and we were only allowed to play for 40 minutes. The whole band tends to hate those things. If we can avoid them, we will avoid them, but there was no choice. It was just the time we arrived in Vancouver and this is going on all over the city for that week, and you can’t afford to wait until the festival is past and then play, you have to play when you arrive, and we had little choice in the matter. I mean, the people liked it; I just didn’t personally like it.

M: Is Montreal the second and only Canadian stop, or are you going to do other ones?

E: At the moment it looks like it. It doesn’t look like we’re going to play Toronto. It’s still in the wind a little bit, but Montreal looks like probably the main show of Canada. It’s always a place that we love to go to.

M: Why?

E: The crowd.. The audience, yeah, it’s like playing Paris.

M: Really? How is it different from the rest of North America then?

E: Well, the fact that the audience is French, really makes a big difference, sort of – for some reason we really connect with French people. LIke in Paris, the next time we play in Paris, we have to do three shows in a row, it’s sold out in Paris whenever we play there. It’s a special connection.

M: And you’d say Montreal is one of the best responses in North America, or one of the best crowds?

E: It’s both really. The two Foufounnes shows were pretty full, but the reaction is what counts more. If 100 people reacted like that, it would really make us feel good. It’s on par, sizewise with a lot of crowds we’re playing to these days. All up the west coast you get 400 – 500 people, that seems more to be more the rule rather than the exception these days, which is quite good for us.

A: I suppose the only lingering question I have is, if you are disappointed by the recording quality of the Lovers, have you ever thought of re-recording it in the studio, at least those first four songs?

E: I wouldn’t… Yeah, that smacks too much of going back. I’ve always been allergic to going back.

A: Why is that?

E: I don’t know why. It’s just a thing of me, really. It’s like Laugh China Doll, if I re-recorded Laugh China Doll, I’d do it completely differently, because I’m quite fond of the songs, i’m not very fond of the arrangements or the sounds I used. But I couldn’t go back.

A: Does going back, for example, bring back unpleasant memories associated with the songs?

E: No, it’s just a need to move forward all the time, to sort of like, we’ve re-recorded a lot of songs which were on the very old cassettes, y’know. I would say around only half of them improved the originals. Like, Light in My Little Girls eyes was less than the original. Plasma Twins was WAY less than the original! That’s why the original appeared on the pink box, because I *LOVED* the original. Some with drastic re-interpretations, like The Blessing, I thought that was good, and Tanz Der China Dolls is certainly good, but y’know it’s a question of, if you got so many new songs that are just waiting there to be recorded, why go back to old ones?

A: I see your point… If it’s any consolation, however, I should mention that I’m in contact with about 70 fans around the world through the computer internet –

E: Yeah – that’s great!

A: I can tell you more about that when I see you, but there are quite a few of them that are longing, hoping and praying for another album that is sort of the same style as Tired Eyes Slowly Burning, and if you THINK that it’s likely that something might turn out like that if you do this collaboration with Bill Leeb, then you’ll get the appreciation of the masses with that! It’s something to think about, anyway.

E: Well we’re not desiring the appreciation of the masses, y’know.

A: It seems to be that that was your goal with The Maria Dimension though –

E: Oh no, no, it’s just the way it worked out. No – it’s just the mood of the moment in the studio that produced The Maria Dimension and coincidentally it seemed to catch the mood of the masses; we don’t know why y’know. It’s never even considered. It’s quite possible there will be something along the lines of Tired Eyes Slowly Burning, something from the Dots, or from the Tear Garden, again, but it won’t be planned – we never make a commercial career move – it’s completely alien to us.

Interview Legendary Pink Dots: Edward Ka-Spel & Ryan Moore
By Ivan Drucker Portland OR, May 5 1993

This is an interview I conducted for KLC radio in Portland about three weeks ago. In retrospect, I realize that I was quite flustered at the time (for any number of reasons) and so this interview is far from perfect…there are a lot of things I meant to ask and didn’t, and there are some things I don’t know why I asked at all, but in any event, here it is. I hope you enjoy it. (This was conducted before I was on this (cloud Zero) mailing list, and thus I was in communication with very few Dots fans…)

me: I have a friend who saw you in Los Angeles, said your show was great…

EK: That was a good show…definitely the best of the tour.

RM: Probably one of the top three since I’ve been playing with the band.

me: How is this tour going…how far are you in it?

RM: We’re almost exactly at the halfway point now.

EK: Yeah, L. A. was the halfway point…although there may still be a couple of shows coming on that make this the halfway point.

me: I imagine you’re meeting plenty of different sorts of audiences?

EK: It’s similar…a lot depends on the age of the audience…when it’s an all-ages show it tends to go better than if it’s an over-21 show. This particularly American phenomenon…we don’t have this in Europe at all. L.A. was an all-ages show, sold out…it was an extremely electric night for us. We almost had slam-dances [laughs]…which I’ve never seen a slam-dance at a Pink Dots show before.

RM: Crowd-surfing.

EK: Crowd-surfing, that was what it’s called. There was only one person…

RM: And I suppose it was actually disruptive

EK: It was during the slowest song, it was strange!

me: Really, what song?

EK: “Close Your Eyes, You Can Be A Space Captain.”

me: Oh, you played that! Are you going to play that tonight?

EK; Don’t know, depends. We change it from night to night.

me: Oh, that’s interesting…that’s one of my favorite tracks actually.

EK: Well maybe we’ll play it then! [laughs]

me: The new records — Shadow Weaver part one and part two — to me those sounded as though they represented a shift musically, in terms of song structure and the way the songs and sounds were set up…was that a conscious decision?

EK: It represents the band at a particular time. It represents a band that had just changed. Ryan joined us for the Shadow Weaver project, and Martijn had just come into the band as well, and it’s his first recordings with us. So it’s like two new inputs into the band. And to a point we were getting to know each other, in these recordings, and it was, you know, very rewarding for the old members of the band as well. There was a lot of experimentation, a lot of improvisation, in the studio. It’s always nice to have a fresh, new breeze going through the band.

RM: As far as being a conscious decision, how everything turned out, I would say it was more of like an unconscious decision. It was more a result of throwing the five of us in the studio, having a few peanut butter sandwiches, and that’s just what would come out…I would say that the common thread between it all is the fact that there was little or no pre-planning.

EK: That’s true, and it was fresh in the aftergrowth of the Tear Garden recordings, as well, very soon afterwards, which had lifted us quite a lot, we enjoyed that. That’s where we met Ryan, he plays on the Tear Garden, and he flew six thousand miles to join us…[laughs]

me: I thought it was interesting how different the two Tear Garden albums were.

RM: You mean “Last Man to Fly” with what came before…I think once again with that you hear the effect of different people bringing in their influences…

EK: It has to be said that “Tired Eyes Slowly Burning” you actually hear how the Tear Garden itself was evolving. The first side, actually, all the music was composed before I even got there…things that cEvin had made. All I had to do was simply write the lyrics and sing. The second side, however, was written there and then in the studio between the band, as such. The second side, I think, relates very much more towards “Last Man to Fly” than the first side does. So you are seeing an evolution…it’s not just a sudden “flip the coin.”

me: There have been a number of lineup changes over the years…has that, aside from bringing in new influences and producing new results, have you felt that has changed what the band is in some way?

EK: Essentially the thought and spirit within the band I think is completely unchanged from the very first day when we sat in this cold little room, wrapped up in overcoats because there was no heating, and jammed away for fifteen hours. I think that technically the band has come along quite a way, like myself and Phil, the two originals, we both play better than we did back then ’cause we never even touched a keyboard before that time. But sure, new people coming in all the time, it must have its influence and it must change the sound in subtle ways but I think the Pink Dots always sounds like Pink Dots. It’s a band that’s never made a career move in its entire existence, it never will, it can’t…more like it’s this underground institution, and it’s really an institution, it’s a lot of lunacy… [laughs]

me: What kind of following do you have at this point?

EK: Well…a very curious following, I would say. I mean, in L. A., someone was arrested before the show because he was trying to get in with a gun. In San Francisco I was given a dead scorpion, a plastic rat [laughs], some kind of amulet which is obviously some kind of magical thing…I mean, all of this is blowing my mind. I have no idea why anybody would want to come to a show with a gun (I actually don’t want to know either), I have no idea why anyone would want to give me a dead scorpion or anything like that…I think in some ways these people are actually getting the wrong idea. A lot of the people are quite obsessive who come to the Pink Dots shows. A lot of the people are gentle, sensitive, great people…but some go a little over the line and sometimes make you want to escape in the corner, to be honest.

RM: I would sort of classify it as a small but loyal following. I mean it’s around the world, in Europe, America, in Israel…

EK: There’s even one fan who’s actually come from Belgium to see this tour. That’s quite dedicated, I’d say…In America especially, we encounter a lot of travellers, some people travel like 800 miles a show, day and night just to get to the show.

me: I’m actually quite excited because I’ve never seen the band live before.

RM: Oh! Well, you never know what’s going to happen…I would say the one thing that sort of typifies the present mode of the band and going on tour is that you never know what’s going to happen. Every night is different, it’s a constant mutation in the sound, and how we approach the songs, from one night to the next and definitely from the beginning to the end of the tour it’s changed.

EK: And it all depends on the atmosphere. We’re very sensitive to the audience itself and the space that we’re playing in. San Francisco was very different to Los Angeles even though we actually played the same songs in those two shows (bar one, we just changed it by one song). It’s quite a voyage, in itself, the tour, musically for us, not just what we see, but…

RM: There’s all sorts of factors, the kind of which I can’t even put my finger on, that make these changes.

me: You make, I think, a very personal sort of music but you express that in a lot of different ways…I’m curious as to how you feel the expression of ideas through music and how those are presented, be they political ideas or personal ideas…

EK: It’s entirely personal. I’m not trying to preach to anybody. I like people to fill in their own spaces in the lyrics. They may actually come up with interpretations that are completely different to how I saw those particular songs, and that’s fine, that’s what it’s meant to be like…I get a little allergic when people sort of like hold me up as the person who speaks the Great Truth…it’s only one truth, it’s my own ideas, it’s my own view and it could be completely wrong. And I can also change my mind from time to time! I deserve that right, I’m just a human being, you know…

RM: I think the thing that some people miss in Edward’s lyrics is actually the fact that he’s someone with a big sense of humor. I think many things have a very ironic quality to them.

me: I’d say that would be hard to miss, actually…

EK: Well, some people do miss it completely, unfortunately [laughs]. Like the guy from Brasil who wrote to me just saying how intensely depressed he was all the time, and…*You Are To Blame!* [suddently pointing his finger outward], pointing the finger at me. I mean, what do you do! I don’t know this guy, yet he’s blaming me for his perpetual depression.

RM: I guess it’s something that’s open to interpretation, so what one person could conceive as, you know, the grimmest, most depressing, darkest, gloomiest thing you could possibly imagine, another person could get an image of soaring through the clouds with images of sun beaming down.

EK: In some ways it’s all things, it’s like all colors, it represents the entire spectrum. There are dark moments, for sure, because who amongst us doesn’t have a dark moment when he looks inside himself.

me: Have you encountered any problems either in touring, or artistically, or with your record label that impede what you’re doing?

EK: You mean the industry…I mean nobody dictates to us what we must do, and any attempts at that have been absolutely shot down at birth. Once in a while Play It Again Sam, the record company, will say, “Can we hear a demo tape” and we will automatically say, “No.” And we simply deliver the master tape, and the deal is that they have to release it. Sometimes they don’t promote it, because they weren’t so fond of Malachai, it went very much out of the lunatic threshold for them…and yet it’s doing as well as anything else. I mean, the Pink Dots does. We reserve the right to take the journey where we want to take it, where we want to see it go. And the album will have its own head space…we already know what we want to do for the next album, we know the kind of direction we want to take it — and it’s a constantly changing direction.

RM: To elaborate more on that subject, the other side of that is that necessarily because our involvement with the music business is so minimal due to the sort of loathesome characteristics contained therein, that necessarily keeps the band small. Because we don’t want to play that game…that also has the effect of keep it at a very underground level.

EK: We can’t relate to the music industry as such. We’re with a label that’s good, I think…I would never put them down.

me: I remember reading that you said you were on finally on a record company that didn’t rip you off.

EK: That’s right, and it’s a relationship that goes over years. Everybody before, actually, treated us appalingly before this label. At least there’s a nice mutual respect. They stick with us as we stick with them. We actually haven’t had a written contract for five years, so it shows there’s actually a decent level of trust — and I like it this way.

RM: We’re also self-managed, as well, so there’s nobody pulling our strings really. We do whatever we want.

me: Was Shadow Weaver conceived of as a two-part project?

EK: It was conceived as a two-project, but it was a very loose concept. I mean the way we worked it out is that we noticed that there were a whole number of songs in a particular mood, that made there a subtle journey within itself, and that’s what became part one. The wild experiments we had — the improvisations, the mini-symphonies, things like that, they sort of like seemed to sort of go together very well on part two. And the completion of the two parts, there was actually a three-month bridge in between. We hadn’t actually finished part two when part one came out, you know, we carried on working for a little bit, but largely we wrote them side by side.

me: You, I think, create sort of a fanciful image of the band, in your names, they way they’re presented, in the artwork, and it kind of varies from record to record and I think it’s interesting to see what overlaps from one record to the other in terms of various characters or themes that are repeated. I’m curious as to where you draw upon that from, or whether it just comes from somewhere, or…

EK: Impossible to say. It’s like one big tapestry, really, and it’s a tapestry that sort of like is extended and extended, and sure characters reappear, references come…I mean, musical references like “We Bring The Day”…sort of the tune of the little song part of “We Bring The Day” actually appeared once before for ten seconds on “Khataclimici China Doll.” Things like that reoccur…reference points, points of reflection that you have to bring it, to tie it all together. I like things that way. Pink Dots never actually made a concept album; in a way the tapestry is the concept.

RM: And who knows where it leads…I mean it’s kind of like now we’re on a new trail and definitely there’s lots to explore there. I’m pretty excited about it…I kind of find these latest records, you know, it’s just the sound of we’re kind of finding our way. There’s lots of possibilities.

me: What do you see the relationship as being between the Dots and your solo work, or the Dots and side projects?

EK: It’s a bit within this idea of the tapestry, they go side by side. On a personal level, the Pink Dots is very much five people putting in their ideas, it’s very important. The solo records, actually, reflect my need sometimes to be a dictator. I can’t be a dictator with a band, I’m not that kind of person and don’t want to be, but I do have a need, within me, to have complete control on certain things, and that’s what ends up as a solo album because I can start dictating to myself, and take it the way I want to go. It’s just one side of me, and as long as the solo records are there that need is satisfied, and the band doesn’t feel like it’s in chains or anything. I don’t want that…a band is a band.

PERIOD PIECES

AFTER 13 ALBUMS, THE LEGENDARY PINK BOTS STILL PLAY BY THEIR RULES

By Ted Simons | published April 28, 1993

Attention! The prophet Qa’Sepel is about to speak:

“It shocks me when people seriously think I have answers to anything,” says the tongue-in-cheek, self-anointed seer. “No one has all the answers. No one ever reaches their ultimate destination. And in a way, I’m kind of glad of that.”

Qa’Sepel, better known as Edward Ka-Spel, is the front man and chief songwriter for the Legendary Pink Dots, a longtime Netherlands-based cult band. With Ka-Spel’s prodigious imagination leading the way, the Dots have released 13 mystical, hippie-dipped albums since first forming in London a dozen years ago. Ka-Spel has also released four solo CDs (a retrospective is due next month), and he has collaborated with members of Skinny Puppy in an art-noise band called Tear Garden.

Most of Ka-Spel’s work is charmingly moody. It’s rich in psychedelic earwash with plenty of electronic gimmickry on the edges. But even with all the artifice, Ka-Spel’s music can be curiously tuneful and attractive. Especially engaging–most notably with the Pink Dots–is Ka-Spel’s all-consuming gothic mindset. Ka-Spel plays the part of the English eccentric with panache. His songs are composed from an inward line of sight and his sing-talk sounds like a wobbly Syd Barrett before the fall.

On “Stitching Time,” a magnetic opus from the Dots’ 1992 disc, Shadow Weaver, Ka-Spel croons sullenly that, “The rules of the game are all mine for the making/You’ll cheat all the same, but you’re mine for the taking/There’s no special favors and no one forsaken/I live for you all, but I’ll die alone.”

Such evocative navel gazing has made for a devoted battalion of Dots fans worldwide. But anyone looking for scripture in the Ka-Spel canon will likely find his private “prophet” looking straight back at him.

“My music allows space for interpretation,” Ka-Spel says, his British accent dripping long-distance from a Florida hotel room. “I once wrote a song [Space Between’] based on the idea that events have feelings. We played the song at a show here in America, and this one time a girl came up and said, ‘I know what that song’s about. It’s about abortion, isn’t it?’ I thought about it, and I could see how she thought what she did.

“Those kinds of things can be scary,” Ka-Spel continues. “My music is very, very personal with many, many messages. A lot of emotion goes into it. A lot of questions are asked with very few answers. It’s all very much a personal search–a realization of how utterly small everyone in the human race really is. Including me.”

Ka-Spel’s existential crusade includes an array of offbeat visions. An example is the Dots’ 1988 concept album, The Golden Age. It tells the tale of a psychotic slacker who thinks his former lover, now a wildly succesful model, is taunting him via TV shows and magazine ads. Other Dots ditties range from “The Death of Jack the Ripper” (off 1990’s The Crushed Velvet Apocalpyse), on which Ka-Spel intones a “Jack is dead” mantra over the sound of dripping water, to Shadow Weaver’s “Prague Spring,” a subtle but stunning neoclassical piece.

The resulting eclecticism brings to mind early-’70s art-rock acts like Can and Faust, along with such disparate avant-gardians as Syd Barrett and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Ka-Spel says he doesn’t mind the inevitable comparisons–not much, anyway.

“No, it doesn’t bother me. I just don’t think the Syd Barrett comparison’s a good one. Nobody could be Syd Barrett,” he says. “He’s a unique character and such a magnificent songwriter. It would be a disservice to him to say we sound similar.”

The Legendary Pink Dots’ most recent album is Malachai/Shadow Weaver Part 2. It was recorded at the same time as last year’s Shadow Weaver disc. But Part 2 is more ambient and textured than its predecessor. The latter release also incorporates a slightly more acoustic soundscape with “special guests” Patrick Q. Wright (viola, violin) and Steven Stapleton (exotic devices) adding to the efforts of Dots regulars Phil “Silver Man” Knight (keyboards), Martijn de Kleer (guitar), Ryan Moore (bass) and the aptly named Niels Van Hoornblower (sax, clarinet, flute).

“We like using acoustic instruments very much,” Ka-Spel says, belying his band’s reputation for electro high jinks. Ka-Spel maintains that “a sampled cello isn’t quite right. It’s like a blurred Polaroid. Electronics should only be used for sounds that you can’t get naturally.”

But the Pink Dots are still most “legendary” for their more adventurous noise applications: sampled car horns, dentists’ drills, the rhythmic bluster of someone snoring like a sailor–they’re all in evidence throughout the Shadow Weaver discs. One of the band’s more inventive audio ideas was to use a creaky floorboard for percussion on a Malachai song titled, imaginatively enough, “On the Boards.”

“We simply put a contact mic on a noisy floorboard and stepped on the board for rhythm,” says Ka-Spel. He adds that the original version of the six-minute song went on for a full 17 minutes. “The person ‘playing’ the board couldn’t walk for a week,” he laughs. “On the Boards” likely won’t be performed when the Dots hit the Roxy on Wednesday. Ka-Spel cites too many “exotic devices” needed to re-create the song live. But the fact that Ka-Spel and crew are even touring at all this spring is something of an achievement. The Dots’ current U.S. tour had a shaky launch, to say the least.

“We started out the tour with the worst disaster in the entire history of the band,” Ka-Spel says, a sense of wonder slowing his voice. “Someone stole $6,000 from us in Amsterdam right when we were leaving. It put us in an atrocious position. We recovered, but when we got to New York, we learned our tour bus was in Montreal. We also learned our first show, in Washington, D.C., had been moved up a night. So we had to drive up to Montreal, back to New York and then down to Washington without stopping. But we made it. And we played well when we got there.”

Ka-Spel’s expecting a much smoother ride the rest of the tour. And he says he’s especially looking forward to the Phoenix date.

“We’ve been there a couple of times,” he says of the Valley. “In 1987, we opened for Skinny Puppy at a wonderful place called Crash. It was a brilliant space to play, great atmosphere. I still consider that show as one of my all-time favorites.