The Lost Rivers were recently interviewed by Italian music zine Retrophobic. For the full interview complete with pictures please go to www.retrophobic.com
Baden-Württemberg is an industrialized region of Southern Germany, and its capital is the city of Stuttgart, the birthplace of Mercedes-Benz. A brand that is synonymous of comfortable and safe journeys on beautiful luxury cars. The journey isn't that safe with The Lost Rivers, another leading product of the German region of Baden-Württemberg. The band offers a "beatific vision" through an ecstasy of noise, where analogue signals are passed through serial electronic effects and volume amplifications, until that place is reached. Their debut, the "My Beatific Vision" EP is going to be licensed through Northern Star Records on July 4th, and we've got the noisesters here for a chat.
Hello Phil, Retrophobic welcomes The Lost Rivers...it's a great pleasure to have you here and celebrate the release of "My Beatific Vision" on Northern Star Records. First of all I'd like you to introduce the band and tell us something about the story of The Lost Rivers...
Hi, thanks for having us man! The Lost Rivers is Izzy on drums, Hell Pilot plays bass and I'm the guitarist and singer. We've been playing together in different projects since 2000. Actually, Izzy and I have already had a band before Hell Pilot joined in later. I've been writing songs for the Lost Rivers since 2006 but we played our first show not till 2008, I guess.
I enjoyed the EP, and I found some kind of "cinematic" edge running through the tracks... I'd like to know which are your non musical influences... inspirations you get from cinema, literature and so on...
Happy that you like it! To be honest my main influence is being bored. I can think of no better inspiration for writing songs than being bored by where you live, by the people you have to deal with, by the bands you see on TV or who play the local clubs. Of course there are really exciting people and bands here, too, but this tension between being bored to death and sometimes having those great moments of excitement is what influences me a lot.
Germany has always meant to me the legacy of Krautrock, from Krafwerk to NEU!, Can, Amon Duul, LA Dusseldorf... how do you relate with such a great tradition of music in your country as a band?
Yeah, those bands have definitely been very important, but I mean for decades there has come nothing out of Germany musically wise that was worth switching on your stereo. Germany is a musical wasteland with a few beautiful flowers growing in there trying to survive. The bands you named have been important as they paved the way for what we're doing, but since then there has never been a German band I can think of that took this legacy and evolved further from there.
Baden-Württemberg is the region where you come from. How's that place like musically? Are there any aspects you get from there and put in The Lost Rivers?
If you're a cover band playing party hits Ba-Wü is the place to be. If you think music is more than playing bad covers of even worse bands, then you'll have a hard time here. There are a couple of good bands but you can count them on the fingers of one hand. Still Ba-Wü is important for my writing - see the paragraph about being bored in another answer...
The sound of the band is layered and multi-textured and it can really cover every space, as we can see in parts of tracks like "Death Of Eve"... how did you come up with this unique, "evil" sound palette?
I really like experimenting with sounds, effects and guitars. I come up with lot's of different sound ideas which I not only get from music, but also from traffic, construction sites and industrial machinery e.g. and I try to recreate those sounds with my guitar. I also love when at a certain volume all the effects start to gain a life of their own and go crazy and you just try to remember the settings to reproduce this sound - it never really works. But that's how you get another layer of sound which transforms into another layer again when you try to reproduce the aforementioned and so on. So it's this play between the sounds the electronics offer you and you always trying to get the control back which ends in a chaotic and crazy struggle between the sound and you. If you then keep all this stuff which other producers would want you to throw away you get the best and craziest results - that's why we're doing everything ourselves.
Now that the physical release of the EP is next to come, I'd like to know what you're planning for the future, have you got an album scheduled? I definitely need more!
We've just finished the recording of our debut album which will be released via Northern Star Records later this year. We're really excited about that because we think it's turned out amazing. Then we want to play as many shows as we can. And I need to buy a pirate ship for me and a good friend of mine.