Funker Vogt - "We love provocation !"

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03 Aug, 2007

The German aggrotech band Funker Vogt is back in battledress, this time to launch their newest sonic assault on your ears. "Aviator" comes 2 years after the last studio album "Navigator". Once again they deliver ultra harsh lyrics that cut through flesh and bone surrounded by dark ebm synths. Musician Gerrit Thomas and lyricist Kai Schmidt answered a few of our and your questions in what must have been the quickest interview conducted ever... (By Bernard Van Isacker)

SL. Good idea you had to include a voucher to get the promo MCD "Club Pilot" for free during the Aviator. How did it work out?

K. It worked really well. The only problem was that some fans have been disappointed as for example in Berlin, the CDs in the shops got sold out really fast. Thus not everybody in Berlin and even Hannover had the chance to get their own copy with the voucher in time.

G. But it was very nice to see how many people bought the limited edition of “Aviator” during the first days after the release. So, we can say that it was a very good idea.

SL. I believe this is your darkest album ever, the song lyrics have never been that harsh and confronting. Why?

K. When we started to set up a concept for this album, we all agreed to make this album much harsher and harder than the previous once. So I also worked on some lyrics which will fit this style. And looking out of the window, I get the impression that the entire world got been harsher anyway, so it fits (smiles).

SL. Kai, on "Paralyzed" you seem to enquire the reality we get serviced via media in general and you even seem to hint we live in parallel world where we see and hear things that are from being the truth. Are you that sceptical?

K. I am not really that sceptical, but I think everybody should question what he gets presented by the media. So why not go for the extreme and play with the idea that there is such a huge set-up going on. I guess the truth is somewhere in between. But just taking the extreme in consideration helps to wake up some people. This works much better then telling a lame story of something that might be there. Hit ‘em in the face to wake ‘em up. Then they will probably start to think again instead of swallowing everything the media presents.

SL. Especially the sentence "The last way out seems to be to take our suicide pill"... is there no way out according to you?

K. I like to formulate it a bit theatrical and cynical. I like to provoke by doing it this way. And it seems to work. If I would have put in a different way, we most likely wouldn’t have this conversation (laughs).

SL. Right... "City of darkness" is not exactly depicting a joyful picture either, we are like puppets on a string almost if I go through the song... And on "Child Soldier" you describe the tactic used in Sierra Leone, Liberia and other African countries to kill a family and keep the children as future soldiers. The sentence "But the past is now forgotten, he just went straight to hell" seems to indicate you think they are lost for good. Now, there are programs for re-inclusion of such orphans in society... something that will fail if I read well according to you.

K. No, that most likely won’t fail, but consider how many “child soldiers” will have the chance to enjoy such a program, one in a hundred or even in a thousand? Chances are slim so I have decided that my Child Soldier won’t be one of the few lucky ones and most likely is already in hell.

SL. Does "Blind rage" refer to the "Wir haben es nicht gewusst" mentality or what do we have to understand this?

K. Yes, it is also about that, but I don’t want to have it focused for example on German history! It is something which happened so often in the past, not only in Germany. It is about charismatic leaders, about how easily people get influenced, how almost everybody can be turned into a “true believer”. It does not even have to escalate into a war as for example McCarthy-Era has shown or the witch hunts in the middle age.

SL. You speak about 'Funker Vogt's updated Electro sound for 2007' on your website. In what way did you enhance the sound for this album? What did you pay extra attention to?

G. I think this means that “Aviator” sounds much more complex and compact than for example “Navigator” which has been the first album that was totally produced with computer software, completely without hardware synths and effect boards and so on. So, I had to learn many technical things about this way of producing during the time the Navigator songs were created. When we finished the recordings to Navigator, I felt, that we could do a lot of things more. That’s why we didn’t stop creating new songs for Funker Vogt and just continued after we finished the master of Navigator. During that time I cared more about creating different sounds and samples, both in a very different way than ever before. I also had the feeling that on Navigator some harder stuff was missing which we then did for Aviator.

SL. You are included in the PC Game "Grabenkrieg In Europa" for which you contributed some music, how did this come about?

K. That was easy (smiles). TGC, The Games Company, contacted us and ask if we are interested in a kind of cross-promotion. It was a good opportunity and we decided to include an exclusive Funker Vogt MCD. The song “Killing Ground” was kind of perfect for this. First of all we always considered it as a second possible single from “Navigator” and secondly the lyrics fit very well for this project. So the eager gamer gets also reminded about what war is all about besides winning it. Now they are confronted with the idea of being a prisoner of war in a desperate situation.

(...)

To read the complete interview, be sure to buy Side-Line issue 59 !

Side-Line issue 59
Funker Vogt CDs