It's a Trap! Scandinavian music journal

Interview: Ola Frick/Moonbabies

When I first heard the rough mixes of \"The Orange Billboard\" way back in March of 2003, I knew immediately that it was something special. I sang their praises far and wide, to anyone who would listen. Luckily, the people at Parasol/Hidden Agenda paid attention and heard the same greatness that I did. They ended up signing the band for the US version of the release and I felt triumphant that the band was getting their dues. It was even more exciting when I finally heard the finished product and was blown away even more! What was good before became positively exalted in its newly polished form. So it was with great pleasure that Ola Frick of the Moonbabies agreed to answer some questions for me via email. Here's what he had to say...

Avi: It's been awhile since the last album - what took so long and what happened these last two years? What would you tell your former self, if you could?

Ola: I'd tell my former self that you should have tried harder to work out complete songs, instead of just loose ideas, before you start the recordings. We worked on some songs for months that didn't made the cut for the album. When I look back at all the weeks we've spend on recording and mixing different songs, that ended up in the garbage can, it's a bit painful. But at the same time you learn a whole lot on those mistakes. Our first album, which was released in 2000, (later re-leased for USA in 2001) was so easy to complete.
We had about 200 songs that we'd written from 1996-2000 to choose from.
We also released 2 EP's the following years on which we put some of our best songs on. So when we started to record \"The Orange Billboard\" we didn't really have any songs prepared.
A lot of the songs are re-cycles though. \"Fieldtrip USA\" has the verses from a song called \"Dean & Ela\", while the chorus is taken from another song called \"Tubeblow\" which was one of our earliest songs ever written.
\"Slowmono\" was even included on our first EP from 1999, and it was put on the album after we did some old numbers at a show in Denmark last April. Everything just suddenly made perfect sense with that song, so we re-recorded it, and to me it got a totally new feeling to it. The other songs on the album (except \"Over My Head\") are complete new compositions.
We recorded an insane number of songs for the album, and I'd say at least 20 of them will somehow end up on the next or next-next album.
We really didn't have a clear concept for the album when we started. At the time in 2002 we were heavily into experimental music and most of those sessions where instrumental.
Around the time December 2003 we had decided to have 10 songs and just complete the damn thing. But somehow we got fed-up with how it sounded and I think just 4-5 of those songs really made the cut on the final album. There was originally a lot of darker, harder and experimental stuff on it.
\"Sun A.M.\" for instance has gone though at least 5 COMPLETE different versions. It's funny to hear them all now.
I know we wrote a bit more than 100 songs during \"The Orange Billboard\" sessions, and if I would add all the different versions it would make 3-4 times more.
I guess we need to put out a box-set with outtakes in a couple of years
:-) There's a lot of great stuff to be heard.

Wow! That's an insane amount of material.
So how exactly do you guys usually write songs? You mentioned doing a lot of instrumental session - is that how you usually begin?

We'll most write songs on piano or acoustic guitar. The instrumental stuff we do does usually start with a simple idea, and then just twist it in the studio, using loops or whatever. The band has gone though so many stages it's a great difference between now and then. At the time when we started with the album, we'd just jam with for instance Carina on the vibraphone and me on a distorted Rhodes Stage Piano.

Since you guys have home studio equipment, do you record pretty much everything as soon as you think of it?

About equipment, I'd say we have semi-pro stuff. We have everything we need to have to do what we need to do. During the album session, we were sleeping in the studio most of the time. And there was no such thing as a normal day-rhythm, we would sometimes sleep to 7 in the evening and record until 11 the evening after. Many of the best stuff was the result of me or Carina just waking up grabbing a microphone and just humming the melody line or lyric or whatever. The chorus of \"Sun A.M.\" started out with me having this melody line while dreaming, and I'm sure if I hadn't recorded a proper demo for it (with drums and everything) when I was in this half-dreaming state of mind, it wouldn't exist today.

It's really inspirational to hear about bands with such a cavalier DIY attitude and it's great to see people making such good music under modest means. Would you mind sharing some specifics? Are you going to digital or tape?

Both. Most songs are recorded digitally but sometimes with the drums and guitars recorded on tape first. But for instance \"Crime O'The Moon\" & \"Slowmono\" were recorded purely onto a 16-track Tascam analog player. Everything is mixed digitally, though. Nothing, when it comes to mixing can beat that!
It's like you need to think analog mixing (which a limited amount of tracks, etc) and use the technology that's good for you, but don't be tempted to use the billion of different plug-in effects or to ruin the song with to much crazy fade and pan.
I'd also like to say that during the recording of this album, we're really learned the way of \"Killing your Darlings\". Songs with 80 tracks, were stripped down to just a tiny bit of what they were.
That's also a thing about giving the song a bit of rest, and to pick it up with fresh ears.
I think we'll continue to record our albums this way, although I'm yearning to get new gear for the studio for the next album.
I've been drooling over a Manly Vox-box and a real good Neuman mic, for quite a while.
Anyhow, the thing with recording is to make yourself have fun with it. And if you're like us recording a whole album by yourself instead of paying a fee-an-hour at a studio, you CAN really let yourself have fun while recording.

When you track the more pre-written material, are you building it piece by piece with drum loops or do you sometimes get a live take?

Rarely as a live-take I'd say. For this album only two songs was based on an actual live-take.
Uhmm... Most song were originally recorded (with a click track and drumloop) as demos, and than later we re-used the best of those raw material, which often hold's a fresh/untouched feeling that is impossible to record on a later stage. Carina's vocals for the verses of \"Sun A.M.\" were taken from the very first demo, which is definitely a completely DIFFERENT song. The same goes for the choruses for \"Fieldtrip\", Carina's vocals were just perfect from those first demo takes, and we knew we wanted it that way. The take was poorly recorded, and we even needed to pitch-correct and polish it. But that was what we used.

What's the hardest part about recording? Any songs prove to be especially difficult?

The hardest part is when you know what you want (or hear inside your head) but JUST can't audiolize [sic] it, and that's the big challenge. Cause you know what you want, but the book has just opened and there are 1,000,000,000,001 ways of doing it.
You need to ask yourself, Do I want to do this the easy of the hard way? The easy way is of course to do exactly as you've done with all of your other recordings.
The other and most inspiring way is to just try out whatever you feel like it. It's just like painting.
I think we also have quite of an advantage, just being 2 people, and not being in a 4-5 piece democratically band, cuz we never have to compromise with how the rhythm section should be, we just make our own beats and groove on them, even if they're not perfect in a musical sense.
The hardest song was the title track. I was re-recording and re-mixing for so many weeks I even don't want to say it. Started out as a indie-pop tune, not very far from \"I'm Insane But So Are You\", and as you can hear on the album, it ended up as some thing completely different from that.

How do you go about translating the material for the stage?

Well, the recent line-up of the live-band has proven to be something of a blessing. We've ALWAYS had enormous trouble making our liveshows sound anything like how we sound on record. But when we found our guitarist, and also bassplayer Markus Weitner and our new (and Danish) drummer Anders Sejr Davidsen something just opened up inside us, and now it's the easiest thing to translate the whole album onto stage. Some songs that we'd never image to sound anything like the album, even sound better live right now.
Somehow the new live-members have brought back the energy to those songs, and now it's just fucking FUN to play live-concerts again.

So after all that work on all those songs, how did you decide what tracks make the cut? Do you do a lot of rough mixes first or what?

You just need to think and try out different orders and combinations and listen to the whole thing. That's the way we do it, and it's really time-demanding, but worth-while. Spacing between songs are also incredibly important to get right, as well as outros and midsections.
We have at least 10 songs recorded and almost finished that are as good as the ones that showed up on the album, but somehow they didn't fit in some way or other.
You always do rough mixes, and leave them for some days and start the real process when you're mind is fresh, and you just can't wait to finish the song.

And then when you actually put the record together in the final mix, do you work song by song or do you try to keep the whole album in perspective and go in order?

At first we recorded song by song, and when we had the album almost complete, we really cut every song and everything we didn't feel was necessary, and found ourselves left with about 7 songs. The last songs we put in there \"Crime O´The Moon\", \"Jets\", \"Wyomi\" and \"Slowmono\", were recorded to fit the album. And at that point we had a pretty good concept how we wanted these songs to be, and we also knew in what order we wanted them to appear. It wasn't up until 3 months before it was finished.
And a pretty big break came when we switched out \"The Orange Billboard\" to NOT be the opener.
We have had it as the first song since the very first sessions. Somehow it was a relief, and I'm really happy how that whole thing turned out.

When do you start thinking about the artwork? How important is the whole package in relation to the music?

I think it's really important that the artwork integrates the emotions of the music. And in our case we knew what we wanted during the whole recording period, and the front sleeve was done about when we were half through the recordings, which in some way I think helped us to shape the music in a similar way to how it looked. The rest of the actual package was done later, after the album was finished.

Now that the record is out, are you happy with the response it's getting? Do you think people are \"getting it\" in the way that they should?

Yeah, from the stuff I've read I get the impression that people are getting it.
The response has been quite overwhelming. \"June and Novas\" also got pretty raving reviews, but since it was a total underground release with any proper distribution (no distro in Sweden whatsoever) the new one has appeared in much bigger magazines and papers, over here at least.
Some reviewers seems to have a problem with the fact that we aren't bounded by a specific genre, and some think it's too experimental, while others think it's too commercial!?! :-) But we've noticed that many of the reviewers are totally \"getting it\", and they often put words into our own feeling towards the album.

In an ideal world, how would you want people to respond to it? Is there an ideal listening situation that you think suits it?

Ah, that's hard. I think the album is pretty much an all around listening experience.
It can be a great intensive listening experience with headphones, or in the background while cooling or reading, but the greatest kicks I get out of it is turning it up to a deafening volume, especially after a few drinks.

How do you feel about it now when you listen?

It took a long time for me to prepare myself to listen to the whole thing, after the mastering was done this summer.
I wanted to wait to hear it (apart from one occasion when I was forced to edit it for the Vinyl LP version, I had to edit out 3 minutes from the B-side), and the first time I listened to it was when the CD's from Parasol arrived.
And it sounded very, very good. Even if there's thousands of hours spent on these songs, there were actually some things I had forgotten how they were, so it's a great feeling listening to the album now. I was pretty amazed when we drove home from a gig in Stockholm recently and \"Sun A.M.\" was played at the radio P5 [Swedish Public Radio] and it sounded amazing in the car, a cool experience.

How about when you listen to your earlier material?

I still love everything we've released so far. I think \"June and Novas\" definitely is equal to the new album, love every song on it. The same goes for the EP's (except one or two songs that I regret, maybe).
A lot of work is behind, but it makes me really happy to hear that we've never released any fillers or songs with short life-length.

So what's next on your agenda? Are you already itching to work on the next record?

PR and touring to support the album. Hopefully a whole deal of touring.
So far Germany, Denmark and Sweden are on the agenda, but we'd love to do US, Japan and Spain as well. Touring is what you get the most money out of, and we love to play live, more than ever nowadays.
We're also wanting to start recording again, we haven't been in the studio since the album was finished (in August).

Do you find both experiences satisfying? How so?

Yeah, we find both very satisfying. It's of course two completely different forums.
We have to prove ourselves and really work HARD when it comes to the live thing, but whereas the studio thing is very relaxed and a place where we are 100% comfortable and \"safe\".

What can we expect from the next album and how would you approach it, knowing what you do now and looking back on the last one.

The next album will be (what I think sounds most logical) a less introspective and more outgoing album, mostly when it comes to the vocals. During the last months rehearsing for liveshows, both of us have started to express ourselves more openly with our voices.
I also get a feeling the next album will be recorded with a band in the studio live, for the basics at least. However, we do have a plan of releasing a limited live-tour 12\" EP with four songs from the \"Orange Billboard\" sessions that we love. It's based around a track called \"Ghost of Love\" which probably is our most challenging song ever, It wasn't fit for the album, and probably is too dark for the next one as well, but I'm sure it'll fit the EP format perfectly along with some other atmospheric and melancholic songs or instrumentals.
All we know is that it needs to be heard, and since people (like us) still buy the 12\" format, and the CDEP format is DEAD, It's a great chance it'll be released sometime during 2004 or 2005.
We even want to release it on our own and make just a simple thick black cardboard sleeve with just a few words.

Any last words of wisdom?

Can't think of anything right now... My mind is blank... 666 the one for you and me