Looking to hear 80’s inspired synthpop similar to the likes of Depeche Mode. Imagine eerie vocals, dirty synth loops and fat baselines. You will find all this and more with the amazing Swedish group, Praise to the Machine and their recent release ‘Everything is Noise’. Here are a few questions we asked they guys from this awesome group:
1) Hi Guys, thanks for agreeing to another Sonic Music Review feature. How was your day?
It’s just another rainy day... a good day to make music.
2) Lets start off with the Name, Praise the Machine? How would you describe the role of machines in your music?
The computer or synthesizer is just an instrument as any other. A piano is also a sophisticated (analogue) machine so the difference is not that big. But obviously machines play an extremely large part in our music; they allow us to create landscapes of sound that would be more or less impossible with traditional instruments.
The name itself comes from an old quote by the German philosopher and mathematician Leibniz who foresaw the advent of the modern computer and the revolution it would bring: "For it is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculations, which could safely be left to anyone else if the machine was used... And now that we may give final praise to the machine, we may say that it will be desirable to all who are engaged in computations which, as is well known, are the managers of financial affairs, the administrators of other’s estates, merchants, surveyors, navigators, astronomers, and those connected with any of the crafts that use mathematics."
3) How did you guys meet?
Anders: Well... first I married Björn's younger sister. Only later did Björn and I discover that we both shared a deep passion for electronic music. We started to create music together and it quickly became painfully obvious that we needed help with the vocals. We put up an ad on various websites for musicians and Torsten found us. He was a perfect match both musically and personally, and his voice works perfectly with the music.
4) What is the most interesting place you have performed at?
Torsten: The most interesting place? Well, I guess it has to be a tiny concert where only death metal bands were playing and me and the guys from a former heavy metal band felt quite out of place. So, it wasn’t as much the place but rather the setting itself. As you can imagine we weren’t very successful in winning over the crowd - hmm... let me rephrase that - the 20 or 30 people who actually weren’t so drunk that they could no longer follow what was happening on stage.
Björn: If we can include the most interesting places we never played at, we were invited to perform on a virtual stage in Second Life. For various reasons it didn’t work out at that point in time, but it was definitely an interesting request.
5) What is the weirdest thing you have eaten?
Torsten: To be honest I fathom that you do not really want to hear about this, but here goes... Me and a friend were on vacation on Sardinia, where we stayed at a small farm out on the country side. It was a really lovely place with nice neighbours. The downside to this, however, was that we one day got invited over to a small celebration. I can’t recall what it was about and maybe I didn’t even understand it - my language skills in Italian were and are not exactly practical when it comes to making conversation. ;) Anyways, what happened was that we grasped - my friend was far better in Italian than me - that we would be served “pecora” (sheep), which apparently is a delicacy down there. What came along was a kind of soup with literally the eyeballs swimming around in it. I don’t want to get into any nasty details here - suffice it to say that the eating process was very slow and when asked how we liked it, I replied that it must have been a lucky sheep.
6) Your Music has an almost eerie quality, what production tips can you give to get a similar sound?
Björn: Our songs often revolve around subjects like regret, shame, loss, existential questions, technology, politics and so on. Perhaps it's easier to lean on the sometimes eerie side of production when writing about those subjects. It might also have something to do with that we often write and produce our music during those quiet hours in the middle of the night.
Anders: It's all about the mood... and it comes natural to us. It might be the Swedish climate and the childhood we spent listening to electronic music. With the tools available today, there are so many options avaliable. We sift through a large number of sounds when we produce our songs and for some reason, we're drawn towards the dark and eerie. So my recommendation would be to get into that special mood.
Björn: Yes, that and a healthy selection of excellent plug-ins from Native Instruments, Steinberg, Rob Papen, etc.
7) What is your song making process? Does it start with ideas that are perfected later or do you prefer to make your music more organic and spontaneous?
Anders: That sums it up pretty well, ideas that we perfect later. Even if Björn and I share the writing credits on some of the songs, like Covergirl for which Björn wrote the lyrics and I wrote the music, we usually write (and produce) our songs separately. For my part, I do quite a bit of the writing in my car. I have a long drive to work and have plenty of time to write music. When I get back home and bring up Cubase, I have a pretty good idea what I want to do. Throughout the process we keep a close contact and comment on each other's songs, right from the start. Both of us have been writing songs for quite some time, but the tools are new and we're still learning. Especially mixing and mastering is a challenge, so we learn as we go along.
8) Do you foresee synthpop being the next wave of music in the near future?
It already is! Take for example Sweden's biggest pop star Robyn. It's synthpop all the way and damn good too, but no one seems to realize it's synthpop.
9) What are your goals as artists?
To make music. It's a passion. If someone wants to listen, that's a bonus.
10) What do you think of modern music and productions? Do you see the digital ‘basement producer’ as beneficial or harmful to modern music?
Anders: We are those digital basement producers and I think us pretty harmless. :-)
Björn: On a more serious note I think that the emergence of affordable tools and all the distribution possibilities of the Internet make a very interesting combination. True media democracy might be happening in the shadows of the mainstream market. Even if the vast majority of the bands out there, ourselves included of course, will probably never find a large audience, we all have a more or less equal opportunity to make our voices heard.
11) What are your musical backgrounds?
Anders: Both Björn and I were brought up on a heavy dose of synth music. When I think back on my childhood, it's almost scary how many hours I spent listening to contemporary electronic music at the time, particularly Depeche Mode. It made us who we are in many ways. Our lead singer Torsten is a different story. He's never been much into synthpop, but he seems to like our songs.
Torsten: Actually, I come from a heavy metal background. I’ve always adored bands like Iron Maiden, Sonata Arctica, Kamelot and Virgin Steele. Their style of singing is unique and the power in most songs is raw and “ballsy”. So, I started singing with some local metal combos and even had a brief stay with an Elvis cover band, but that was a loooong time ago. ;) But I also like a lot of Depeche Mode songs, which probably is one of the reasons why I am the singer in PttM. But PttM does have its unique style and feel and now that I am getting more accustomed to the style, I sense that, from a singing perspective, there is still room for improvement. Needless to say I am not singing power metal style in the songs but I feel we could do some experimenting and there is definitely more to come in ways of creatively fusing together different styles.
Björn: As Anders stated I listened a lot to the electronic music of the 80s, but I also played in a local electronic band during the late 80s and in the very beginning of the 90s. When we started out we used a Yamaha CX5M as a sequencer, and we only used low-budget hardware like DX21, RX21, DX27, a Korg Poly 800 and so on, but it was great fun. Later we moved on to Atari ST, Steinberg Pro24, and I particularly remember the day I bought my E-Max to bring sampling into our music. A few years earlier we had been using an Akai S-612, but never really managed to incorporate it very well in the music. It worked a lot better with the E-Max. We also used a lineup of synths from Roland, Korg and Kawai, etc. The song Fools to Believe, featured on our Facebook-page, is actually a heritage from those days. We performed mostly at local venues on and off over the years, then studies, work and life in general split the band in different directions.
Once again, we would like to thank both Eyethought for conducting the interview and Praise To The Machine for their detailed and interesting responses. We would like to wish both artists the greatest success in the future and, as ever, invite any further submissions.
If you represent electronic music talent and would like your music featured on The Sonic Music Review, please get in touch.
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