So the guys have been together for just over 3 months; they've released a demo and have been gigging in Brisbane and interstate. Here's the next part of the interview:
A.P: Interests other than music?
C.C: Film. I obsess over cameras & optics, film cameras, photography cameras, movies and the aesthetics of films. Any aspect of film - I’m pretty fanatical about. Which is what I think gives the vocals that I do with this band [Schoenberg] a lot of differentiation from what I’ve previously done. Apex [Null] was always very sci-fi themed and a bit out there because we were a lot proggier, and it was just fun to write. With Cross The Lips I was singing someone else’s lyrics as well as the ones I wrote; because of the genre & the medium it was fitting into I tended to write a lot more very abrasive, straight up, harsh & offensive lyrics because that’s more the way I felt how it should be expressed and more what people within that genre would prefer to listen to. Well, I know I do when I listen to that particular niche...
With Schoenberg my biggest influences are probably people like Kurt Vonnegut (author of Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle), Brett Easton Ellis...and then add to that the images from a lot of Japanese filmmaking such as Takashi Mike, Akira Kurosawa and Shion Sono. People like that who pushing that extreme envelope in Japan but still keeping some taste to it. The lyrics have ended up being a lot more psychological and a lot more thought out. I often set out not to repeat lines in any of the songs, other than maybe a word that might be repeated because it’s the same rhythm build.
A.P: If someone chucked you a bunch of money and told you to make a video for one of your songs, how would it look?
C.C: It would be odd. I think bands when they’re starting out should focus on doing something so experimentally weird that they’re not even involved with the video; almost like a short film –I’d love to do that but having said that I’d kind of like our first one to be a performance type thing...
A.P: Well, people do like to get their faces out there...
C.C: Exactly, and people want to see the band on the first video because they don’t even have a clue what the band looks like when they’re playing.
A.P; You could always do a T.I.S.M and play with masks on...
C.C: Because we’re monstrous fans of games like Bioshock, a cool thing would be something like us falling into a massive lake, then coming up out of the water and then wandering out onto a beach with all the equipment set up, and then start playing. It would kind of fun and silly. It could combine the mystery of the opening scenes of Bioshock; and as people have seen with our artwork aesthetic; there’s a lot of bio-mechanical/steam punk influence. We’re really into the whole idea of robots that look really worn out and used up, like they’re incremental to the environment as opposed to being created for a purpose...
A.P: Sound like a good description of humans...the artwork I’ve seen so far almost reminds me of art nouveau and the movie Metropolis...
C.C: A lot of our aesthetic comes from Shane & my obsession with art-deco (laughs), which people find kind of weird because we’re people in their mid-twenties, living in Brisbane and playing death metal...we like it because it’s so quirky and it looks wrong. Cool but wrong.
A.P: There’s something inherently stylish about it too.
C.C: That’s the thing; they had so many ‘off’ angles and disgusting shapes but at the end of it, it looks so much more human and creative than something you’d see now. Everything now looks like a fucking ipod commercial; polished to buggery and what are you doing at the end of it? You’ve got the same product...now it’s pretty much just a case of what label do you want to buy; what label looks coolest to you – and that’s not for us. We really want an aesthetic that is ‘us’, which is something that I think a lot of bands have lost.
When I was 13, listening to bands like Pantera & Slayer, I thought it was awesome. Slayer had that aesthetic of (adopts comedy metal growl) ‘We’re all about warfare and Satan’, and they looked pissed off and it worked. Pantera – dudes claimed to be massive party rednecks; all their videos – party rednecks. They had this aesthetic and they went with it. We don’t want to portray ourselves as something we can’t be.
A.P: But you don’t want to get yourselves locked into a category?
C.C: No, no...which is why we keep that robotic side to it, with the bio-shock and the steam punk; having those semi-organic robots. We can progress the image if we want to.
A.P: Or retrogress?
C.C: Exactly. Whose to say with the album we don’t go forward 300 years and all of a sudden it’s Blade Runner style cyber-punk? The aesthetic will still be very similar but the key lines and definitions will change. But it won’t change the way the band looks as an aesthetic image; it will just be a different shape.
A.P: But what about how the band will sound?
C.C: Musically I don’t think it would change either, that’s what works so well for us; if we had that image in play as we do now, it would still work because you would still have those weird, old fashioned bits coming in with the mechanical and very modern parts. While we like to have progression in our music, we also like to have progression with the aesthetic of the band as well. There’s nothing worse than seeing a band constantly with the same aesthetic and mentality, writing the same music. Everything should be progressing somewhat.
A.P: ‘Should’ being the operative word; people feel safe with what they know...
C.C: That’s it. If you’re having the same aesthetic with every album but the music is only changing differentially then you’re going to start losing fans.
A.P: Well, if you don’t change then you stagnate. But then again look at Motorhead – they haven’t really changed their ‘formula’ for 30 years...and they’re still fucking awesome.
C.C: But they hold true to their aesthetic. Lemmy is rock and roll. There is no other way to describe the man. He is rock and roll in essence.
A.P: You talk very eloquently; I can imagine you being interviewed on the telly by some famous person.
C.C: It probably sounds obnoxious but I do feel more comfortable talking about myself.
A.P: It’s a subject that you know well.
C.C: (laughs) Yeah, I find it a lot easier talking about myself as opposed to trying to bullshit about something else.
