David Sandström is a multi-talented musician most notable for his solo work with the David Sandström Overdrive and also for his drumming in the Swedish hardcore punk band Refused.

After Refused unexpectedly disbanded in the late 90s, Sandström worked on a project named TEXT with some of the members from Refused. Shortly after, he decided to turn to his own material and released his first album entitled Om det inte händer nåt innan imorgon så kommer jag..(If something doesn’t happen before tomorrow, I will..) In 2004, he released The Dominant Need of the Needy Soul Is to Be Needed and eventually released Go Down! in 2005 under the name David Sandström Overdrive. In 2008, the band’s last album, Pigs Lose, was released.

The connection with his friend and former bandmate Dennis Lyxzén was reignited in 2008 when they got together, along with Karl Backman and Jens Nordén and started the hardcore punk AC4.

We had the pleasure of asking David a few questions in order to get a sneak peek into his thinking and diverse musical career.

STATEMENT | We’d like to start with some of your recent work with the band AC4. We’d like to know what lead you to get together with Dennis and start AC4? How has the reaction been and where do you see it going in the near future?

DAVID SANDSTRÖM | Me and Karl had a drunken conference where we decided we wouldn’t do interviews full stop, not out of contempt for various media (at least not on my part) or any general detachment but just because it seemed there was not alot to say about what we do as AC4. What you see and hear is really all there is to it, and we all have other vehicles for being heard. Then, Karl told me how he made a fanzine when he was 13 or something, this would be around 1982, and he sent interviews to Anti-Cimex, GBH, Subhumans, Discharge, Crass and others and everyone answered the questions dutifully and sent them back to him except for Crass who sent him a flyer containing an offer to buy a book from them. He was 13 years old, and working class. So we decided we would at least do interviews with people under 18 because we didn’t wanna suck as fucking much as Crass. 

Clearly AC4’s style goes back to hardcore punk’s stripped down and simplistic roots. How does it feel to go back to the basics after doing more diverse and artistically “progressive” projects? 

A song always starts as a slow, seemingly unprovoked gut reaction. Then, the rest of the process is really about channelling that feeling. I will start over and over and over, until it feels right. It doesn’t have to be “good”. That never enters the equation. I think a better if not correct word would be “true” – true to what I initially went looking for. One spontaneous moment, a few seconds of a phrase, can then tilt the whole thing. It doesn’t matter if I’m working with 1, 6 or 12 minute songs, I always have to be attentive, perceptive and if possible, versatile. Every format has it’s specific demands and I try to persist until it’s as close to my initial sentiment as I can get. This is my ambition, though I very rarely get there. 

Your album Om det inte händer nåt innan imorgon så kommer jag.. was about your grandfather and you also sing about your grandmother in the song Rock in Motion on the Dominant Need. What was your relationship like with your grandparents? What kind of man was your grandfather? What influence did he have on your life and music? 

I’m very close to my paternal grandmother. She’s 93 and one of the funniest people I know. We got to know each other for real after my paternal grand-dad died in 1998. They got me my first drums from a toy store when I was 4 or 5. My maternal granny died a year ago. She had senile dementia, so for the last ten years she wasn’t really there, I felt bad for not visiting her and put it in a song for some reason. Sometimes I just throw some confession into a song, to sort of measure the level of sincerity in a song. That song (Rock in Motion) is made up of those kinds of statements and they ring true to me still. My maternal granddad hung himself in 1968. I was born in 1975 so the record I made was part retrieval, part redemption. I tried to put him in perspective, not trying to explain but just retrieve fragments of the context of his life. Something like that. I interviewed people who knew him and found out stuff that my mom and her sisters didn’t know. Although I don’t “like” the record (I don’t know if you’re supposed to. Does anyone listen to their own records?) I feel like I got close to the source of why I set out to make it. I feel good about that. 

You currently play guitar as well as sing in the David Sandström Overdrive, you play bass in AC4 and in the past have played drums in Refused. How did you initially get into playing music? Do you have any musical training (theory)? Does musical talent run in your family? What was the first instrument you learned to play and which do you consider to be your preference to play? 

Drums is the only instrument I feel like I understand, which is a different thing from just learning how to play them. I’ve played with people who can do anything on the guitar but have not a grain of musicality in them. It’s gymnastics, physics, to them, harmonic systems that they ape and regurgitate. Makes me sick. 

Some people understand instruments but haven’t been taught to play them. Those are my favorite types of musicians, like Neil Young’s leads, Kim Gordon on bass, Levon’s drumming, Thelonius’ right hand when he really goes looking for berries. Lots of strange rock-offspring like the Zambian band WITCH are not only self-taught but it sounds like they’ve taught themselves as an ensemble. Really just anyone who can play so you recognize who they are. 

I can play several instruments enough to use them in my music but I always know people who do more interesting things with them. That goes for drums too. I love musicians full stop, but the ones that stand out are the ones that keep searching, changing. They’re the hardest ones to work with but very rewarding when you make it work. 

I took drumming lessons from this weird commie Zappa-freak when I was a kid, but the lessons consisted of us just jamming, me on drumset and him on Rhodes-piano. He showed me drumnotes and how to play marimba, xylophone and various percussion but I still consider myself self-taught. He was really casual about giving me exercises, I don’t think he believed music could be taught. I think I was very lucky. I never had to study technique or do boring shit, just muppet-type drumsolos for years until I started my first band in 7th grade. There was always joy in it for me.

There are traces of musicality further back in my family but I’m the only musician. My perception is that everyone has an idea of music and could make music in their own way. Saying that someone is musical, that they have musical talent, can no longer be limited to someone being able to hit a drum on time or knowing a few chords on the piano. It can mean any type of inclination, being able to pick out a great song from an oeuvre, like a good dj, or compiling and piecing together abstract sound on a laptop, or just singing along to “Take My Breath Away” on the radio. We share the same musical genes. I mean, we really don’t know what or why music is, theories abound, and conflict, but it’s a mystery really. As a musician and composer, this is a very important fact. This is our reality. And no fancy playing on fretless five-string bass guitars can alter I don’t prefer any particular instrument over any other. Loud, insanely distorted things are always fun.

The graphic on the cover of your record The Dominant Need of the Needy Soul is to Be Needed is an unusual portrait of you in your underwear. What was the thinking behind this?

I had seen a photograph of Fela Kuti playing live in the same type of underwear and nothing else on. Of course, mine were swedish army-issue, and I’m wearing a turban. I was just being honest, and I wanted it to be clear that I meant business with that record. When I look at it now, this was 7 years ago, I just see a weird under-nourished dude in briefs but that’s just how I looked around that time. People shouted at me on the subway the weeks following 9/11. That was interesting. 

In songs such as Cocaine in Your Cola and Counting the Ties, the music has a unique vocally driven approach in which the vocals seem to carry the song and the subtlety of the instruments take a backseat. Do you come up with vocal melodies and lyrics before you write the instrumentation?

That’s just an accurate description of the type of hiphop I prefer. Cocaine… and Stop Talk off of Pigs Lose and Hook, Line and Sinker off of Refused’s Songs to Fan the Flames… and Wife and Kids and Television Grave off of Final Exit’s Umeå) start like rap, a flow of rhymes that I repeat obsessively in my head. It’s like hitting language like it was a drumset. Then I wrangle the phrases into song form. It would be great to do a song like The Last Poets. You know, just intense talking over a sparse rhythm. Method Man’s influence is heavy on Cocaine… 

“I came to bring the pain, hardcore from the brain, let’s go insde my astral plane”, “I wanna get in the ring just for the view, a few wild stabs and a kiss, and then scram like a king dismissed”. His first record still kicks my ass. I’ve seen him live three times – a lot considering I live in the far north of Europe. Big Pun is another one of those mc’s I love. The song consists of what goes on in his mouth.

The chorus in Cocaine in Your Cola really captivates me in the way that you list the disturbing realities of what society seems to want to sweep under the rug. (Cocaine in your Cola, Steroids in your cow, Dolphin in your Tuna…etc.) Can you elaborate on the meaning of the song and why you wrote it?

It was just me breaking free from dogma.. trashing idiotic self-important punks surrounding me at the time – that self-important idea in the west that if you make a change (stop eating meat, don’t drink Coca-Cola) it will somehow affect the rest of the world. In reality all that ever happens is that you annoy people which is different from inspiring them. I was trying to poke my stick in there somewhere.

In the same song Cocaine in Your Cola you go on to say that “all the punks in the world” can’t save you now. Do you consider this lyric to be tongue-in-cheek in regards to the usual know it all attitude of political punks or is this a confession of being fatigued and jaded towards punk rock?

Both. Not the idea of punk rock as in taking and doing and opening things up, but the stupid people that smother the fun of punk – the people who stifle curiosity, make barricades where I want adventure. In other words, 99% of punks in any scene I’ve experienced. It’s the peculiar odd deviants who are outside of the outside that are the point of it to me, always has been.

I’ve always been curious about the meaning behind the chorus in the song The Sixties. You sing: “The sixties never actually happened. I should know, because I wasn’t there.” Can you explain the meaning behind those lyrics and the song as a whole?

I don’t know, it was one of those gut things. Just being sick of nostalgia, especially when people who claim to long for change are using outdated vernacular instead of coming up with new forms of subversion. We can’t go back and know what the Panthers did, how it felt, what the yippies accomplished, the students in Paris – why people reacted the way they did to it, what Ornette was up to then, or what preceded all of it. I heard free jazz before I knew that it was different from The Rolling Stones. At some point it sounded like the same thing to me, and why shouldn’t it? To use what’s usable, what’s still relevant today and to keep on keeping on. Our culture is suffused with nostalgia. American movies want to be other american movies. Swedes want the oldschool welfare of the 60’s back. I don’t know. Maybe the English still mourn the glory of empire? Either way, I find all these indications hostile. To me, when you long for something lost, what you’re really saying is that you don’t believe in me, or you, or today. You don’t care about what’s happening to us. I don’t know what it was like to be 15 in 1965 but I know what it was like to be 15 in 1990 and that’s a lot more exciting because it actually happened to me. I just feel like alot of people from my generation don’t feel the same. They wish they were the Bad Brains or the Baader Meinhof or something. Long answer. 

It seems that a lot of your songs are about coming of age, and looking back at your life in retrospective. More specifically, in Lisa Lisa you talk about learning to write music and how to be sincere and make an impact. “Keep breaks in between songs at a minimum, and try your best to write something that lasts. You’re going to have to pay to play but let them know you have got something to sell. Always been the smartest kid in class but ten years down the line, you won’t be able to tell. ‘Cause too much trouble is going to wise you up in the end.” While listening to this song I’ve wondered about the meaning behind the “smartest kid in class” statement. My personal interpretation or how I relate to it has to do with the drug use and recklessness that often accompanies the stereotype rockstar lifestyle that some people feel the need to try and mold themselves into as they grow into being a musician. What was that song written about? 

There was a girl who reminded me of myself, 17, really self-confident, guitarist in a local band. I could tell she was one of us, in the sense that she was in it for life. She was gonna play for free or in some big band or be a producer or whatever and I was in a bad place and started thinking about all the shit I’d been through and what a long way she had to go, just out of school. So I wrote a song with advice, pointers, suggestions and the little bit of wisdom I could muster. What I’m saying, I suppose, is that if you’re able to do something else, if it’s possible for you to choose some other line of work, then you should do so. The money is shit. You will experience failure on some level within every project. It’s a tough lifestyle for partners to deal with. Your working hours are the same as drug addicts and criminals, and eventually you will feel entirely detached from mainstream society and you will, to the degree your meager means allow it, seek to distance yourself, penny for penny, further from it. You don’t ever get comfortable in that position either. Friends of mine have been hurt, worn out, burnt, by playing in a band – trying to make something beautiful, something great, and getting close to nothing in return. You raise your sights and then find you have to settle for less. Less looks better with pills and alcohol. When you’re a kid, they tell you that being creative is something healthy and positive but in the long run, it just seems to drive people fucking crazy, hollow them out, make them unfit for society. I laughed out loud finishing that sentence. I sound so morose. I think it’s true though. It’s a peculiar way of life. In the entertainment field, only comedians get a worse deal. 

In a video appearance on Stop Talk Live Sverige in 2008, you and Oskar Sandlund play a song that reflects your memory of distant interests and how you seem to feel out of touch with some of them now. You hint a call-out to those who continue to ask you questions about things that are dead.(One can only assume about Refused) “Stop talking, stop talking about it… nothing needs to be said about it”. Later in the song you go on to say that “Its only sometimes that when I read that I get that old Minor Threat shot straight through the heart”. There definitely seems to be a love-hate relationship there. Do you feel there is an inner struggle between the passion we consider to be punk rock and hating the shape that it takes as a collective scene?

Any song is always just a reflection of how I felt at a certain point in life – not to say that me changing my mind about something alters the validity of the lyrics in any way. If there’s something there that you pick up on, it is discernible to you on the merit of the writing. If it’s any good it’ll get you and if it got to you then I’m a happy camper. 

I’m singing from a position created by people like Jeff Morris, Ian MacKaye, H.R. and about things that are alot more confusing and inconvenient than songs in that declamatory tradition typically are. But I don’t want literal truth, I want emotional truth. Hardcore punk is littered with literal truth and that works well within the limited space a song like that provides, you need to make an intellectual point because I suppose man doesn’t adapt fast enough emotionally to information for there to be any nuance of sentiment in a one-minute hardcore-song. In DC when Rites of Spring and Embrace and those bands started, they had to play slower so that you could fit all the words in the song and react to it before the next song started. So, yes, I’m singing about those things that you mention, and I still get kicked in the ass by Minor Threat’s “I don’t want to hear it”, but I’m always focused on and more excited about stuff that me and my friends are doing now. I find it curious how much I have to say these days in order to get the feeling I got from just pointing my finger and screaming “It’s clobbering time!” when I was a teenager. 

Having been in many bands of different styles, does it ever become hard to write new material that doesn’t conflict with other projects you’re doing or have already done? Do you find the need to shift mentalities and draw a line between musical styles when writing for one project as opposed to another, or does it simply come natural? 

It’s utter chaos. There are no lines. I try to figure them out as I go – failing mostly. Sometimes it’s just comical. For example: the song that was gonna be the title song for the last Overdrive-record turned out to be a song for the then not-yet-formed AC4. Oskar (Sandlund, drummer/producer) just told me, “This is not an Overdrive-song, I can’t play that fast.” For some reason, a superfast hardcore song seemed to me to fit what’s essentially a songwriting rocknroll-band. I can sit with the guitar and something will pop up and it sounds like something abstract I did live once with TEXT or it’ll be distinct yet complex like something off of “The Shape of Punk…” but not as good and I’ll just drop it. I can’t form a band for every musical impulse I have. There’s already a John Zorn out there (and I love him). I always saw myself as more of a pop artisan, even before I knew what that was (Michael Chabon hits that mark bang on in an essay in “Maps and legends”, writing about Howard Chaykin, I think), just a restless one. Even spoilt.

You’ve been writing music and playing in bands for nearly twenty years, considering that Refused formed in the early ‘90s. What motivates you to go on and continue to write music year after year?

Just that gut thing. Nothing else makes any sense to me. Sometimes just an open Dm on a Gibson through a big Marshall amp… the feedback that ensues. Drums come smashing through. And it beats working for a living.

I have read that you feel that you have been mistakenly grouped as a politically based artist because of Dennis’ previous lyrics in Refused but I do hear a socio-political undertone in some of the David Sandström Overdrive songs. Am I right or wrong? Do you think politics are a vital part of punk rock music?

My problem wasn’t that I was pegged political (whatever that means), but what others assumed my politics to be. The literal vs the emotional again, and the absence of a line in between. If one absolutely has to be typecast, which it seems to me one does, I’d rather be the irreverent obscure trickster loner whatever thing I get sometimes (which isn’t close to me either) than most of the other positions sometimes on offer. 

No, I don’t think politics, as in ACTUAL politics, ever has had anything to do with punkrock music. People in punkrock talk to their friends about stuff they already agree on, on and off stage, and sometimes punkrockers do illegal things and carry banners, that’s true. Didn’t Jello run for governor once? I was talking to my girlfriend’s roommate who actually works in a political party – working for and against actual issues affecting peoples lives. He has no clue about punkrock but had heard that the band I was in in the 1990s was a “political” band and was asking me what we did. “We put out records and played shows” I said, he said “But what did you do politically?” I said “The vocalist would say things in between songs and once we put a photo of a French student throwing a molotov cocktail on the cover of one of our records.” He said “Oh, I see. No actual political work then?” I said “No.” 

I’ve recently seen a video online of you doing a live drumming collaboration with Igor Calavera (ex-Sepultura) in Umeå. How did this come about? 

Igor and Laima (his wife) have an electro-project called MIXHELL together where he sometimes plays live drums to the beats. A friend of mine brought them to Umeå and I was told Igor had asked if the Refused drummer was around. Apparently him and his brother are voracious music-listeners and had been listening to Refused from as early on as “This Just Might Be…” So I went there. They were the nicest people you could imagine, and we jammed. It’s funny, people who have made it in the business will complain and bitch about the stupidest shit. Igor and Laima were just deeply impressed with the quality of our tap water. 

How was it growing up in Umeå? In my experience, having grown up in a northern Canadian city of about the same size and population has influenced me in my younger days to travel great distances in order to see the things I enjoy (Hardcore shows being one of them). Located about 600 km north of Stockholm, Umeå reminds me of having to travel 4 hours south to Toronto or 9 hours to Montréal in order to see anything worthwhile. The staleness of local culture and overwhelming boredom pushed friends and I to do things for ourselves and bring what we enjoy to our city instead of having to travel so far. How has Umeå helped shape who you are and what you play? 

It’s the same. Annie Proulx writes “When you live a long way out you make your own fun.” We would travel to see Fugazi, Cro-Mags, Slayer, Sick of it All between 1990 and 1993 and by then we had built enough of a scene around the band back home to bring the bands to Umeå so the kids that came after didn’t have to travel. Umeå has deep grass-roots, so to speak, on every cultural arena, rock/pop, art, theater, since it’s too far from Stockholm which is where it counts to do things in Sweden. So, it didn’t start with punk. 50’s rock bands set up their own shows just like we did. We got that from there, not from SST or Dischord, but of course it all made total sense to us. The diy-ethic was in our mother’s milk. 

As a kid, what was the first show you attended that made you feel that “This place is for me.”? 

There are a thousand great musical experiences in any musician’s life – even in the periphery of northern Sweden. When you’re impressionable and starving for stimuli and 7 years old, the Blues Brothers movie will knock your socks off. I saw Europe in Umeå when I was 11 before they got big with “The Final Countdown”. But the one that stands out is when I saw Step Forward, Dennis Lyxzén and Jens Norden’s (AC4, Regulations) super-fast set-on-self-destruction oldschool hardcore-band at a youth centre in Umeå in 1989. I was 14 and didn’t know Minor from Threat, and they just turned my musical focus in a new direction. It took them around 15 minutes to do it. It was one of those nights when the world makes sense to you. It felt like they were doing something I had been doing in my head without being able to get it out of my system and they showed up out of nowhere and did it for me. I think every musician has had one or two of those moments. As if you were some early humans around a fire and one of you halfmonkeys started thumping the Honky Tonk Woman rhythm on a log and you just went: “Yes! That’s what we’ve been waiting for these last ten thousand years.”

What albums still give you goosebumps and which newer albums do you have in your recently played collection? 

I remember the riff from the song “The Grinder” off of Judas Priest’s “British Steel” driving me nuts as a little kid. I remember how surprised I was by how the guitars sound almost like Baroque music in the short instrumental interlude between the chorus and the second verse of “Autumn Child” off of Captain Beefheart’s “Safe As Milk”. It’s so neatly arranged. It kicked my ass just as much as Araya’s highpitched shriek when the drums kick in at the start of “Angel of Death”. “Epidemic” was always my favorite though – seriously frightening stuff to a 14-year old. I remember getting goosebumps from Fogerty’s entire vocal take of “Long As I Can See the Light”. Max Weinberg torturing the snare at the end of “Born In the USA” is one of those moments where I felt that drums were the shit. Watching the video as a kid, he looked so fucking cool. The stoned playfulness and comic-book violence of the first Cypress Hill record really opened the doors to rapmusic for me. I still have it and still put it on in the mornings. Of course anything Fugazi. Their ordered disorder and how they’re just so focused on playing the shit out of whatever they’re doing. Being in a band, you can’t help but wonder how much time they spent rehearsing that stuff. It is unbelievable what they did with just that regular rock setting. I grew up on a lot of classic 60’s music. My parents listened to the Beach Boys, Janis, Mamas and the Papas, Elvis of course, the American Graffiti soundtrack. My dad had a record called “BIG Sounds of the BIG Engines” with just V8 and V12 dragsters roaring and a speaker pedagogically explaining their separate measurements. I listen to that record still, goes a long way to explain my interest in Slayer I think. I’ve been listening to the their new record a lot too. Lombardo is in rare form these days, like an old blues-player or a fine wine. 

Contemporary stuff is impossible to list, there’s just too much. Right now, as I’m doing the interview, I’m listening to Thelonius Monk, “Monk’s dream”, “Epistrophy” and “Standards”. I’ve been listening to early Pet Shop Boys, Berlin, Eno/Byrne “My life in the bush of ghosts”, Stephan Micus, Ellen Allien, the Nigeria Rock Special comp, Charles Aznavour, Duke Ellington “Such Sweet Thunder”, lots of Arthur Russell, Lil Jon & the Eastside Boys, Nuclear Assault. There’s alot of crossover in the carstereo when we’re out with AC4 – Crumbsuckers, DRI, Suicidal Tendencies “Join the army”. Also Roky Erickson, Lambchop “Noyoucomon”, Kronos quartets africa-stuff, Pierre Boulez “Le marteu sans maître”, Murcof, Gorecki, Kaada, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. Yeah, one wouldn’t have to stop really. 

Have you done any bands or projects before Refused? 

I had a death metal band called Pain, in 1990. We did 12 minute mini-operas. I was 15. We weren’t bad. 

Refused’s early material was clearly influenced by North American hardcore music. How did you first get into the style and how were you able to follow American bands and get your hands on those releases back then? (before the internet and file sharing became popular etc.) 

People just traded records, got ahold of magazines and ordered, through Maximum Rocknroll for example – same as everywhere else. I had most of the extreme stuff just on tape. Dennis had a pretty sizable hardcore-collection when I met him. He got into hardcore when he traded Napalm Death’s “Scum” for Youth of Today’s “Break Down the Walls”. Bands like Anthrax wearing shirts of crossover and hardcore bands was a convenient link. You’d just try to find the bands on the thanks list of every record you liked and then at some point you figured out what was what. It was very much a social thing, you would visit friends to listen to records they had. That’s how most bands and scenes come together I think. 

There continues to be lots of talk in the online rumor mill lately about a potential Refused reunion, although it has been denied by Dennis Lyxzén in a recent interview. While many hardcore bands have started doing reunions in the last few years, (Bad Brains, Gorilla Biscuits, Earth Crisis, Floorpunch, Strife to name a few) do you think a reunion would give the band a feeling of closure on the disappointing and abrupt end to Refused? Do you feel an unsettled yearning deep down to return some day or do you feel it is better off as a memory of your past and nothing more? 

There’s no yearning. The only reason the thought is not entirely alien is because of other people frequently proposing the scenario. It would never have crossed any of our minds, at least not for many years, if there weren’t offers and people in our old management and of course kids on the internet who really want it to happen. So it’s an annoying topic on an awkward route. Not in your question now, but in how the script of our reunion is being written, in online quarreling and dollar signs. It’s not high-quality ink. 

According to Refused’s recollections in the DVD “Refused Are Fucking Dead”, you seemed to have had a horrible time during your last tour to the U.S. before the culminating break up of the band in Atlanta. What made this tour so horrific? Were the turn outs for the shows bad or were you all simply feeling disconnected with the touring lifestyle? Have you been over to the U.S. since? Would you ever choose to return with the David Sandström Overdrive or any other band?

We were just coming apart. We had all been putting the band before our personal lives for years, and we’d poured our hearts into a record that we thought was gonna blow everything else away, and instead, people didn’t seem to be that into it. Our expectations had grown out of proportion in our little bubble and we weren’t having fun and none of us had anything else going in life. We lived for the band and our life on the road and suddenly it all seemed petty and banal. This was mine, Kristofer and Jon’s perspective at least. Dennis was in some other place and the three of us couldn’t reate to his type of musicality anymore. It could get kind of hostile during the making of The Shape… Change isn’t always violent, different strokes I guess, but for us it was always all or nothing. There was no interest on anyone’s part for anything in between. I haven’t been back to the U.S. I haven’t had offers and haven’t been looking, but stranger things have been known to happen. It would be fun to go, AC4 is the more likely candidate I guess. 

It is obvious that during the writing of the Shape of Punk to Come, you had all been listening to different styles of music which you introduced into your own music by inserting different bits and influences into songs. (Mainly noting the jazz, electronic rhythms and violin sections) What artists were you listening to during the Shape of Punk to Come era that influenced your solo work soon after Refused? 

During the recording I was reading a book of interviews and lectures with/ by Karlheinz Stockhausen that had a huge influence on the stuff I later did with TEXT. Every one of his ideas seemed novel to me, crazy and fun. It felt like a new beginning, a new way to listen – a different perspective on sound that gave me a much needed kick in the head after years of being ensnared in the politics of guitars, bass and drums. TEXT was mainly a live entity. The record we put out was really the fizzling out of the creative flame behind “The Shape…”. Between 1999 and 2002 a bunch of friends and I all used the name TEXT for projects and experiments mainly in the musical field. The name was like a recipe that we passed around and made variations on. We hardly recorded anything though so only a few handheld video-recordings remain from those years – probably for the best. Sometimes loosely structured collective efforts can be exciting. When they’re not however, they’re likely to be the most painful listening experience one can imagine. It was the most creative and fun period of my life either way and the collaborations and research I made during that time is what inspired and informed my later solo work – especially “Om det inte händer nåt innan imorgon så kommer jag”. 

I was listening alot to Univers Zero, Alfred Scnittke, John Coltrane “The Avant-garde”, Charles Mingus, Kronos Quartet “Winter was hard”, The Rachels, John Zorn “Duras/Duchamp”, as well as early Springsteen, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, The Band etc. 

For all the kids in Canada and the U.S, are there any current European bands or artists that you suggest would be a good investment to get out and buy their disc? 

My short term memory for music is seriously flawed but: Frida Hyvönen, Les Corps Mince de Françoise, Masshysteri, Paper, Exploding Customer, The Field, Folkvang, Bear quartet, 1900, “Vital Signs” from TEXT – all swedish except Les Corps who are Finnish. 

Thank you David for participating in this interview. It means a lot. Good luck with all of your future endeavors. 

Thanks and the same to you. Stay hungry. Bye. 

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Hello everybody,

We announce the official release of STATEMENT MAGAZINE Issue 2 – Spring 2011. We have been hard at work in the Bureau office, getting ready for our second issue.

FEATURING:

FREDDY “MADBALL” CRICIEN 
STEVE LAMBKE (BABY EAGLE) 
BEN ANDREWS (MY DISCO)

In this issue we offer a wide variety of musical styles and personalities that keep pushing the envelope in their respective scenes. The diverse array of topics discussed in the following interviews allow you to see beneath surface and get to know the artists on a personal level.

We are very proud to bring you the true icon and pioneer of New York City Hardcore, Freddy “Madball” Cricien. Since the late 80’s, Madball has been representing the New York Hardcore scene and continues to release albums and tour with their heart on their sleeves. Madball remains to be one of, if not the only hardcore band that stays true to their message while consistently moving forward with their musical evolution. Behind the tough and rugged exterior of Cricien lies a humbled and respective individual who is modest about his successes and frank about his hard past.

Alongside Cricien is Steve Lambke — part-Constantine and 100% Baby Eagle, as well as Ben Andrews from Melbourne Australia’s powerhouse trio My Disco. 

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Frank Chartrand & Nico Taus

We’re giving away a SHARKS poster and t-shirt. Just post STATEMENT (our page) on your Facebook and write “shared” on our wall — winners will be announced at 3pm Wednesday!

Note: contest is now over.