FAULT: Does your music reflect your personality?

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There are of course songs which reflect our frame of mind or our thoughts. That’s a great trick for a musician of course: to send out hidden messages to the world. Our songs mainly just give us the chance to take on different roles and be something different than in real life or to just be.

FAULT: What do you think the future holds for the music industry?

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It was already being debated ten years ago whether there’d still be record companies in 2010 – and they’re still around and always will be. What will always work are the major labels, independent labels are going to lose ground. We believe that the image and methods of major record companies will change in the distant future and they will become more and more like pure promoters who earn their money by teaming up artists and advertising products. It is already the case to a certain extent now, if you take “Popstars” and co, more revenue is earned from telephone voting and advertising than from the sale of the eventual winner’s records.
The internet naturally offers lots of big opportunities for small bands, see MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites. If you do the maths though, it’s not possible for each and every artist or band to sell millions of records that way. It wouldn’t be fair either because then anyone could become a superstar and it wouldn’t mean anything anymore, so that’s why we think it’s ok the way it is.

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FAULT: Are you inspired by music? What are you currently listening to?

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You’d expect us to be influenced heavily by artists and bands who are known for their electronic style of music, but that’s not the full story. Melody is very important to us, we admire musicians and bands that are highly creative in terms of their song writing, who can constantly think up catchy tunes – and we love great voices. The best representatives in this category in our opinion are “ABBA”! That’s definitely the band that set the benchmark for catchy pop music. One particular thing about those four Swedes’ music is that it always has both a memorable vocal melody and melodies/harmonies/hook lines that support the vocals. ABBA was probably the first to take this approach to music. The band influences us in that we say to ourselves: “If a song hasn’t got a good vocal melody and no good musical hook lines besides, then you don’t need to bother recording the song because it will just be noise, regardless of whether its electronic music, rock or some other style”. We got into synthesized music because we found that it was a big advantage to be able to write music in a quiet little room. You don’t need a drummer or a bassist or anyone else to be able to do that. You’re completely independent and you can create sounds that are completely unique. That’s why electro bands/musicians influence us who have their own personal sound, like Erasure, Depeche Mode, Mirwais, Kraftwerk, Björk, Jean Michel Jarre and Enigma. In the 90s the whole treasure trove of trance, techno and dance sounds was opened up, which didn’t exactly just pass us by… “new concept.” may not sound like these styles of music, and we’re definitely not fans of “future pop”, but now and again we use sounds reminiscent of this era. We like rummaging in various musical styles so there are lots of artists that we like listening to: “Vangelis”, “Gazebo” (Italo disco), “Sven Väth”, “Paul van Dyke”, “The Cure”, “Moby”, “ZPYZ”, “Kruder & Dorfmeister”, “A-ha”, “Garland Jeffreys”, “Gloria Estefan”, “Blur”, “The ChemicalBrothers”, “Anne Clarke”, “Hans Zimmer”, “Hank Williams”, “Warner Mack”, “Kalkbrenner”, “Ernst Goldner”, “Mike Oldfield, “Pink Floyd”, “Caribou”, and many more.

FAULT: What does the next year hold for you?
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At the moment we’re working on a new single, “The 21th Century”, which we plan to release at the end of the year, spiced up with two of our remixes. Musically we can already say that it will be a nice mix of orchestral sounds, coupled with a lot of electro, groove and some guitars. The video to go with it will be available sometime next year.
After that we will get straight on with producing the LP. We’ve chosen 11 songs, 2 tracks are already finished. We can’t give you anything on the release date just yet but production is due to be completed by the end of 2011. Alongside that, there will be a few changes to our various web pages, we’re also currently busy discussing an alternative marketing channel and method of communicating with our fans that we want to set up so watch out for that!

FAULT: What is your FAULT?
Making music, we just can’t help it!

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Thanks a lot for the questions. Hi to all the readers and thanks for popping by! Uwe, Olli and Marcel, October 2010

new concept. Rhythm, Energy, Feeling, Electric!