Interview

GNOD

Dimanche 26 août 2012

Can you introduce the band, define your music for people who wouldn't have heard about you ?

Paddy: All right. What kind of music do we play ?
Chris: Psychedelic...
Paddy: No it's not that. I don't know. It's music from the heart but not sounding too cheesy. The music is always different, nearly always different, because it's always different people playing it.

Is Gnod

Gnod

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still working as a collective ?

Chris: There's no fixed line-up. People still come and go a lot.
Paddy: It's still like if somebody comes and wants to jam or whatever and we play and if something good happens and they're available for gigs... That's what we do. If people come to rehearsals or jams... That's how it works. Does that make sense ?

© John Gallardo

You have a lot of releases, splits, albums, tapes... Where does that inspiration come from ?

Paddy: By buying and listening to records.
Neil: Because people want to have something, like vinyl or cassette. It's better than having a MP3.
Paddy: We're just putting out music as much as possible.
Chris: It doesn't really matter what format it's on. There's a lot of stuff that we do that we sell on CD-R which couldn't come out on vinyl because some tracks are like forty minutes long. We can't put tracks that are over twenty-five minutes long on vinyl so we have to find another way.

So the length of the songs is what makes you choose the format on which the music will be released ?

Chris: Sometimes. Some songs are suited to CD.
Paddy: Whatever the label wants to put it on. If they don't want to put it out, we put it out ourselves on CD.

© John Gallardo

I read you're going to record an album during the next tour in September...

Paddy: We're thinking about it, yes. Because we have some dates to we need to fill in. The alternative to sending a lot of emails, trying to get gigs last minute is, if somebody has got space that we can use for three days, to record an album. But it's looking like we're getting gigs now so I don't know. We might have two or three days down and there's a possibility that someone has a space available for us if we want.

And so do you know what you're going to record ?

Paddy: No no, I don't. But if we've got two or three days, there will probably be a lot of different stuff recorded.
Chris: We've always got ideas because we play live a lot so we always have to come up with new ideas and new tracks to play live. Sometimes we have a drummer, sometimes we're only three or four... I did have a point.
Marlene: We just pick up and record whatever.
Paddy: It's really hot here by the way ! People at home gotta know. It's thirty-five degrees !
Neil: There's a lot of line-up changes in the last years so just for the Roadburn set, most of those tracks have been done about a year before because that tour didn't really happen last year and there has been a lot of line-up changes. We're just getting the right people.
Chris: The way we go about recording stuff is that we have a few ideas combined with what we have been playing live. But once we're in the recording situation, we might come up with something that's better than our previous ideas and end up doing that. It has just to do with the feel of what you record. And record in interesting places like the Chaudelande albums that were recorded in France. The good atmosphere really came through the album.
Paddy: It's good to do it on tour as well, when you've done ten shows in a row. You're like a fucking zombie but you're on fire, you can play music because you've been doing it for ten nights.

© John Gallardo

You've also played some DJ sets lately...

Paddy: Yes we did a DJ set in Portugal. I don't know if it went on too well really. We're always up for DJing. Ideally it would be great to play every gig and be in charge of the music at every fucking gig. We've always done that. We've always offered to people who book us to play some tunes after or before our gig.
Chris: It can be punk, techno. It could be pop music, drone, metal. We've got a lot of different tastes. Our DJ sets are a mix of different styles.

Is there anything else you'd like to add ?

Paddy: Erm yeah...
Neil: Sorry !