Dutch jazz-grinding duo DEAD NEANDERTHALS have been mincing music for quite a while now. Their new album
POLARIS will be released via
Utech records on March 23rd.
Otto (sax) and René (drums) agreed to answer some questions for this blog. Thanks a lot!
Hey guys, congratulations on the new album Polaris. You really accomplish to surprise your audience with every new output you release!
Hi Chris, thanks so much man! Good to hear you like it and nice that we can keep people on their toes with our releases.
The
first thing that struck me is that you resigned from the multilayered
saxophone sounds and got back to basics: just one saxophone and drums.
That's right. We listen
to a bunch of different stuff and it all inspires us: Grindcore, Noise, Drone, Jazz. In this case, the latter probably got more dominant. But
hey, we're still Dead Neanderthals even in a more stripped-down version.
POLARIS is no easy listening, it's more like acoustic noise. A nice
little experiment we would say!
Instead of a baritone sax you used a tenor sax on Polaris. Any special reasons for that?
(Otto) Because I bought one! I was playing around with the idea of doing
something on tenor sax because it's really quite a different thing (to
us saxophone players at least) and that might be fun, not even
specifically for Dead Neanderthals or anything, just noodling around. And then when we thought about doing this more acoustic stuff it was
kind of an obvious choice for us. It really fits. I don't think it would
have been as nice if I'd done this on baritone sax.
How
do you guys write your songs? How important is the freedom of improvising when recording?
That
can be quite varied! The first album was almost completely improvised,
while The V-Shaped Position, The Saw EP and Jazzhammer/Stormannsgalskap were much more structured and composed. There was still
some room for improvisation, especially when we are playing shows. The
new album POLARIS is almost completely improvised.
What's
first? Songtitles you compose a song to or do you name the song when
you finished composing? And what the hell is "Neck-AIDS"?
(Rene) Yeah, Otto, what the fuck IS Neck-AIDS?? :)
(Otto) It's
a very serious affliction. Nothing to laugh about. For personal reasons
I don't want to talk about this any further.
On
your blog you offer two different technical riders.
We
can offer venues two really different sets now. The 'hard set' is our
Jazzhammer/Stormannsgalskap set involving a big-ass baritone sax, a
big-ass amp and many bright lights. The 'jazz set' is our improvisation
set which is more fitting to the
POLARIS album. We will use no amp and a
tenor sax. Also less lights are involved. It will be less harsh, but
not less intense! It's cool we can offer venues and festivals both sides
of the band, they can just pick whatever they like the most. We always
had one set, so we're also really curious how this will turn out. It
will probably keep things fresh for us.
You
have played with a lot of different bands and musicians, you played
with grind-bands as well as singer/songwriters. What are your
experiences concerning acceptance by your audience? Have you ever been
worried or even afraid of what might happen once you'd start playing?
Hehe,
only a couple of times when we started doing live shows. In the end
people seem to like us most of the time. Sometimes because they really
like our sound and sometimes because they never heard something like it
before. Whatever the reason, we never got boo-ed off the stage, which is
good. So we're not so worried anymore. It's cool to play with a lot of
different bands: You don't only play for different crowds, but also for
crowds of different sizes, which is great.
What are your plans for Dead Neanderthals?
For now we'll keep on writing and recording the
music we like to play. Actually, we already completed 2 (!!) new full
length albums, which we are hopefully releasing later this year. One was
a collaboration with British saxophone player Colin Webster and the
other a collaboration with Dutch drone/noise artist Machinefabriek. For
the rest: we're busy with a lot of shows at the moment. Hopefully we can
confirm all of them. A lot with cool artists or in great venues. We
definitely hope to play more shows abroad. If you want to book us, get
in touch!
Thanks again for answering my questions! I hope you can make your way over to Germany some time soon. It's not that far, anyway.
For more informations on Dead Neanderthals visit their blog: http://deadneanderthals.wordpress.com/
You have propably read about this. Released in January "Moksha" had huge impact on the underground, everybody is celebrating it as a ground-breaking masterpiece. It is hard if not impossible to find even one single word that is not heaping a praise on it. 
