Featuring Paul of Asmodeus X | Interview by Ruud Dreessen aka ebm-industrial.nl | 31 dec 2008
Thanks Paul | Asmodeus X that you have found time to give answers to these questions,
How and why did you come about starting Asmodeus X ?
Marshal and I used to be in a more Gothic band – Morphine Angel. That ended for us in 1999 or so. I’d wanted to work on a more electronic project, so we started playing around with sequencers and keyboards. It started to form into something coherent around 2001 or so. I wanted to take the dark daemonic elements and put them together in a more modern, even futuristic context.
What else inspires you to create?
The dark side of human nature – forbidden arts and sciences. It’s all very Faustian, but a Faust for the 21st Century.
Can you tell us a bit more about the musical projects and bands you were involved with prior to Asmodeus X ?
Morphine Angel was more of a gothic sort of thing. We lived and played a lot up in the Chicago area, did a couple of national tours and an Australian tour. The music was Drum machines with Keyboards, Bass, Guitar and vocal. Put out an independent album on our own Black Pepper Records, and then, one more album come out on Delinquent Records. I did the programming for the drum machine and played the bass. I started playing around more with sequencers and wanted to go more this direction, but not all the rest of the group was into this…they liked more of the rock thing. This began to create tension in the project which eventually exploded…everyone going their separate ways.
What are your views on the current state of the electro-industrial scene in Italië,in terms of creativity and audiences? And the scene in other countries?
I’m really inspired by a lot of the European stuff I hear these days. I went to Wave Gotik Treffen a couple of years ago and was blown away. Electronic music in America is not so strong, it really kind of peaked in the late nineties, whereas in Europe it has become an established genre. I hope to have Asmodeus X come play in Europe some day.
you have very nice numbers in your myspace and the lyrical compositions what you can tell about the done work? How does your music creation process work? How do you create a song/musical piece?
Usually we start with a groove – drum/bass/loop or whatever. Then I usually take this into Acid and start working with it there, expanding and structuring it. A theme usually emerges sometime around here, and I maybe add samples, sound effects, and start working out vocals. Then it gets recorded into Logic and we add live keys, vocals, and other bits.
How did you come up with the name of your band,Asmodeus X?
Asmodeus was a Babylonian Demon I was fascinated with. A lord of creativity and music. It all just sort of came to me at a time when I was reading a lot of books on Black Magic and the Goetia. The idea that there is a cosmic race of beings out there that we can exchange with has always fascinated me. It has always been of interest to a small faction of human culture as well. The excitement that people get out of the idea of UFO’s and extraterrestrials in modern times is in my opinion the same urge that was being pursued in medieval times in the Goetic literature.
What is the key to making music from Asmodeus X?
For me the key is in the doing and the being. When I’m making the music, for a moment it is all ‘real’. The places, people, beings; all are there and for a moment I am there with them. After the album is done and out there, it is no longer something that speaks to me. It is now speaking to other people on a different level. It’s kind of sad for me in a way at this point because once it’s out there, I’m kind of cut off from it. I tell myself I will never do music again; and then, cautiously, I begin working on a new song.
What ideas, movements and personalities would you say were crucial for the definition and development of Asmodeus X as a creative entity?
As mentioned, definitely the Goetia. Post-industrial culture, expressionist films. Especially the Fritz Lang film Metropolis. A great deal of my early musical efforts I can say came about as I tried to imagine a soundtrack to go along with Metropolis. This film combines the concepts of technology, modernism, and black magic in a most tangible manner.
While ebm / industrial is your main musical pallet,what other music do you listen to?
Neo-folk, Trance, 80’s New Wave and Synthpop, Classical, some Jazz – esp. Thelonious Monk.
How long have you been in the music industry and how has it changed over time?
Now I have to ask, what's the inspiration for the Asmodeus X story?
Of course the last big change in the music industry has been its digitizing. In one way this is good, because Record Stores used to hold dominion over genres, and genres were fairly rigid. If you didn’t fit in with a popular genre it was hard to get placed in the stores. Now everything is online and so a lot of genre barriers have been broken. This has also meant that music sales are based more on the song, rather than on the album. This has been challenging for me because I tend to put things together in terms of album themes. For me and album is kind of like a book and the songs are the chapters. So in a way downloading just one Asmo song is kind of like buying just one chapter from a book. It’s also painful for the album artwork – on a physical cd release there is so much graphic material that can go along with the music. In the digital world you just get a jpg.
It has been a pleasure to interview you on your musical activity,Well, any last words to your ebm-industrial fans?
I have much love for all the Asmo fans, and doing the shows is where it all comes home. Especially the fans in Europe who can appreciate this kind of music on a much deeper level. When people get into the music is when I know I have made some kind of connection. With music you can speak to people even who don’t know the language, it is a universal language.
Muzik, ich glaube ein allgemeine sprache ist.
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