Interview

MY SLEEPING KARMA

Mardi 20 novembre 2012

How are you doing ?

Seppi : Hello ! Doing good, very good.

Tonight was the first gig of your tour with Monster Magnet

Monster Magnet

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. How was it ? And how come you were part of this tour ?

Matte : It was great to be in Norway, the first time ever for us. It took us three days to travel up here to Bergen so the waiting for the concert was pretty long and we were happy that it started today. Monster Magnet

Monster Magnet

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are super cool guys. We have a lot of fun.
Seppi : That's the reason why we are here, we want to have a good time.

© John Gallardo

You released your fourth album, Soma, a couple of months ago. How has been the response for it ?

Matte : We got a few reviews so far. We bought the magazines that reviewed the album. Luckily so far it's a pretty good feedback for the Soma album. We hope these positive reactions will continue. We like the album ourselves.
Seppi : Evidently, yeah.
Matte : We like to play the songs live. That's a good sign when you want to play it live. Hopefully people dig it as well.

It's the first record you released via Napalm Records . How's your experience with this label ?

Seppi : So far it's very good. It's a label which works worldwide and it's very good for us. So far we are very happy with them. Einar is a huge fan of us and that guy brought us to that label.
Matte : We had some good promotion, some sampler tracks in magazines, some advertisement and all things things together, hopefully, help getting more and more people interested in our music. So far, Napalm did a very good job. As a band, you get feedback from social networks and homepages and they pretty much get the good feedback about where people bought your music or where they have seen or heard you the first time. It really comes from different things, not only from the psychedelic or stoner rock scene. Many people read about us in alternative magazines or heavy metal magazines. That's pretty interesting.
Seppi : They give us a good feeling.

What inspires you to create music ? What's the role of buddhism and hinduism which seem very present ?

Seppi : It's not a religious thing that inspires us. We create music in our rehearsal room. It's the music we want to play. We just jam. The buddhism and hinduism stuff come later.
Matte : It came naturally, it wasn't planned. It came to us, we were not searching for a kind of trademark or whatever. The music, the name and the spiritual or hypnotic touch our music has, pretty much fit the buddhism and hinduism world. So we just accepted it. We like to work with that kind of genre but we are not religious people.

© John Gallardo

Your artworks are quite typical. Who's in charge of them ?

Seppi : The first one is made by myself. It was just an idea that came to me. I just drew it down. For me it fits the music. The other guys liked it as well.
For the second album, the cover was made by a friend of mine who is a graphic designer. We gave him some instructions and he did a good job.
Matte : The third one is also made by a friend of ours who works pretty well with computers. For this one, we had two ideas for the cover. That's why the CD and the vinyl have two different covers. It's the same record, Tri, but the CD has a different artwork than the vinyl because we didn't know to which guy we should say no. (laughter) So we gave them both the chance to show their artwork.
For Soma, we had it a bit more planned. It was more and longer planned than the other records. During the songwriting process, we were also checking on cover ideas. We found the Soma topic super interesting. We tried to work around this topic also for the artwork. We found a super professional artwork guy, a graphic designer who really made it exactly like we wanted to have it. We're very happy with the artwork. It's super detailed, especially the vinyl version. It's a kind of surrealistic image that we wanted to have, because Soma is a kind of ritual drink of gods which brings you to a higher, surreal world as well. All of this fits pretty well together. That's the small story about Soma.

Is there anything else you'd like to say ?

Matte : Thanks for this interview ! We are having a good time in Norway. We hope this European tour will keep on going well and we are looking forward to playing the next shows. That's why we are here. I hope to see you all again somewhere.