NER\OGRIS interview: ‘I use control to protect the accident rather than to correct it’

There is a useful contradiction at the centre of “Fame Fatale”: NER\OGRIS have become more precise about their identity at exactly the moment they seem most interested in introducing instability into it. KaiN talks about preserving sounds that drift, distort or sit slightly outside the grid; TinoC writes about people attempting to maintain individuality inside systems that make behaviour increasingly predictable. In both cases, the problem is similar: what happens when something becomes so optimised, visible or controllable that it begins to lose the qualities that made it individual in the first place? That makes “Fame Fatale” a considerably more interesting second album than a simple refinement of “I Am the Shadow, I Am the Light”. Its production can be meticulous without aspiring to cleanliness; analogue instability is deliberately left inside digital construction, and influences from industrial electronics and highly polished pop production are allowed to coexist without being reconciled into one obvious aesthetic. KaiN’s distinction between nostalgia and influence is particularly revealing: rather than reproducing an earlier decade, he wants to extract physical qualities from it, warmth, hiss, instability, and place them against sounds that belong unmistakably to the present.

TinoC approaches the present from another direction. He still rejects the role of commentator with a programme or mission, describing the lyrics as observations of what happens around him. Yet those observations now repeatedly encounter social-media visibility, manipulated information and the increasingly strange relationship between individuality and mass behaviour. Even the sarcastic mutation of femme fatale into “Fame Fatale” turns attention itself into part of the problem.

I spoke with TinoC and KaiN about why technical mistakes can become the most valuable part of a recording, the difference between influence and reconstruction, digital perfection and analogue resistance, social-media fame, the uncomfortable politics of attention, and why NER\OGRIS may eventually move in a much quieter direction than “Fame Fatale” suggests.

Karo: When we spoke in 2023, Kai described NER\OGRIS as perhaps the more “grown-up” continuation of ideas that had existed elsewhere, while “I Am the Shadow, I Am the Light” still felt like a project discovering its own internal logic. Three years later, “Fame Fatale” sounds much more certain about what belongs inside NER\OGRIS and what does not. Do you now feel that the project has acquired a language of its own, or is recognising that language precisely the point at which you become suspicious of it and start trying to break it?

TinoC: For me, N\OG has its own, maybe unique style. And I think this matters, because otherwise all my other bands and projects wouldn’t make sense. But we are talking about N\OG, so when we compare the beginning of 2022, when the band started, with now, or rather with the point when the album developed, we were in a completely different situation. When we assembled IATS-IATL, we had several tracks and had to find a selection for the album. For some of those tracks, I wrote lyrics. That is, in short, the story of the first album.

For “Fame Fatale”, we had to start from scratch. It means the cat was out of the bag: the band was there, the music was there, and some people had and have expectations. I honestly hope that we managed to create music which people will recognise as N\OG, but also recognise that there is progress, change or new facets.

Karo: The phrase “Fame Fatale” is immediately suggestive because fame traditionally implies being seen, while the album seems preoccupied with a world in which visibility no longer guarantees understanding; everything is exposed, circulated and measured, yet what matters becomes harder to locate. What does “fame” mean in the title? Are you talking literally about celebrity, or about a broader condition in which ordinary people are increasingly required to perform themselves for attention?

TinoC: The name of the album is a little ironic, or has a decent dose of sarcasm in it. Most of the tracks, lyrically, are about people and their issues trying to “survive” their daily lives. And yes, the so-called “fame” they gain from social media is in fact fatal. I don’t remember exactly why we decided to edit the French phrase femme fatale into the album name, but I am sure there was a reason. 😉

Karo: In our previous conversation, Tino, you said something I found quite important: “I am not on a mission. I am just a guy who writes about some topics at one point of his life.” “Fame Fatale”, however, moves through manipulation, social tension, distorted truth, isolation and attention becoming a currency. Has the scale of what provokes you changed? Are these still fundamentally personal observations, or has it become impossible to write about private anxiety without also writing about the systems producing it?

TinoC: I am still this guy who writes about things I see and hear, and topics that move me in some way. I haven’t written an autobiographical or biographical song for a very long time, so to answer the question: they are still observations, because there is A LOT of shit going on at the moment.

Karo: The album’s central idea seems to involve a strange paradox: we have unprecedented access to information and unprecedented difficulty deciding what deserves our trust or attention. Music itself now exists inside exactly that economy, competing with infinite content, algorithms and increasingly abbreviated forms of listening. Did making an album about fractured attention affect the way you thought about the album format itself? Is asking somebody to stay inside a complete NER\OGRIS record now almost a countercultural demand?

TinoC: Fun fact: you nailed it in some way. As you said, all the information is there, the knowledge is there, but people decide to believe in a damn AI clip in their timeline. In the end, the album is about the fact that almost the entire mankind is fucked. A lot of people are telling this to the people who are obviously more fucked than others, and the result is that the more fucked people decide to declare that they are the elite now. In this case, I am guilty too: I make music because I want to be heard. 😉

Karo: The musical coordinates around “Fame Fatale” are unusually broad. Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly represent abrasion, experimentation and industrial pressure, while Trevor Horn and Frankie Goes To Hollywood represent almost obsessive studio construction, scale and pop precision. Those are not obvious neighbours. Is the interesting territory for NER\OGRIS now found exactly between those approaches: allowing something to remain ugly, unstable or threatening while producing it with enormous attention to beauty and detail?

TinoC: Let’s suppose we knew what we were doing and could control the direction we were heading… I think we’d try exactly what you’re describing. 😉

KaiN: Yes, exactly there, and I think the analogue/digital tension is part of why that space works. Everything today is made inside a computer. Everything can be perfectly in time, perfectly in tune, and that’s precisely what makes it sound so replaceable. So while we build things with a lot of digital precision, I try to smuggle in something that resists it: a hardware synth that drifts slightly, a distorted signal, a take that isn’t fixed to the grid. That friction between ugly or unstable and beautiful or precise is basically the friction between analogue and digital. In this very digital time, I want that friction, that dirt, to stay audible. It’s good for the ears, even when it hurts a little.

Karo: “Fame Fatale” clearly draws on electronic music with a long history behind it, yet it never feels interested in reconstructing a particular decade. How do you distinguish between influence and nostalgia when you work? Is there a point where knowing the history of a sound becomes useful precisely because it allows you to detach it from its original context and make it mean something different now?

TinoC: I mean, if I were a musician, maybe I could monitor or manage my work. Because I am not, I follow my instincts, or the music just happens. And this happens in a way I like, which I feel, and turns into music I personally like. And yes, I love two decades in music history. That’s why almost everything I do is an homage to that sound, or maybe I simply can’t do it differently.

KaiN: For me the difference is this: nostalgia wants to recreate a decade; influence wants to steal one physical quality from it and drag it into now. I don’t want to make a record that sounds like it was made in the ’80s or ’90s. I want the warmth, the hiss, the slight instability that analogue gear from those eras had, and then put that texture next to something that is completely of today. That’s less about a specific decade and more about not wanting music to sound too clean.

Karo: Kai, when we spoke before, you described moments when a single sound could trigger an entire composition, sometimes producing things you later could not quite reconstruct yourself. With “Fame Fatale”, has increased control made those accidental moments harder to preserve? How do you stop a highly developed production process from correcting the very accidents that gave a track its personality?

KaiN: Control and accident aren’t really opposites for me; they’re two different phases of the same process. That moment where one sound triggers a whole track almost never happens once the setup is “finished”. It happens early, when I don’t quite know what I’m doing yet: a filter set wrong, a random modulation routing, a preset I only meant to check for two seconds. The further a track moves into production, the bigger the temptation to smooth exactly those “mistakes” out, because technically they’re not clean. With “Fame Fatale”, I tried to slow that down on purpose, bouncing the raw early version quickly and then building around it instead of endlessly “fixing” the original sound. Sometimes that means something in the final track is technically wrong. But that’s usually its personality. So I use control to protect the accident rather than to correct it.

Karo: Musically, “Fame Fatale” seems interested in two apparently contradictory ideas: abrasion and scale on one side, meticulous construction and memorable melody on the other. How do you decide when a sound should remain harsh, unstable or even ugly, and when it needs to become beautiful? Can excessive refinement actually weaken the emotional truth of a track?

KaiN: For me, it’s less a rule and more a question I ask about every sound: what is it doing emotionally in that moment? If a harsh, unstable element is carrying the tension or the threat in a track, smoothing it out doesn’t make the song better; it just makes it quieter emotionally. A bit of analogue dirt, something slightly off, slightly warm, slightly wrong, does something to your ear that perfection can’t. So my test isn’t “does this sound good?” It’s “does this still feel true?” If the answer is no, I go back.

Karo: The debut used contrast almost as an organising principle: shadow and light, ambient passages against harder electronics, even the distinction between Spanish instrumental titles and English vocal pieces. “Fame Fatale” still works through opposition, but the contrasts seem less clean now; vulnerability can exist inside aggression, seduction inside something deeply uncomfortable, and highly controlled electronic structures can carry a sense of instability. Has your understanding of contrast changed from placing opposites beside one another to allowing them to occupy the same moment?

TinoC: Obviously we have fewer instrumental tracks on the album, and you are right, the tracks are a bit faster or straighter. The exception is “Graves”, which for me is a genius weirdo. 😉

Karo: “A View” is the first piece from “Fame Fatale” that we encounter together with a visual narrative, and I found the message of the video strikingly pessimistic. There seems to be very little faith in our ability to distinguish observation from manipulation, or simply to step outside the systems shaping what we see. What was the original concept behind the video, and how closely does your own interpretation correspond to that rather bleak reading?

TinoC: The video itself is a medium to transport the lyrics. The lyrics are maybe the second optimistic words I have ever written, but the protagonist struggles. He, she or it struggles a lot and mourns about it in a very sad way. It’s not the point that he, she or it feels betrayed or manipulated, just fucked by everything.

Karo: You are taking “Fame Fatale” on the road in autumn, moving through Prague, Germany, Sweden, France and Belgium. You previously told me that NER\OGRIS live is deliberately not a reproduction of the record; the backing tracks are rebuilt for performance, synths and effects are manipulated live, and there is room for controlled chaos. Has that philosophy changed as the music has become more detailed and cinematic? At what point does preserving the architecture of a production begin to compete with the danger that makes a live electronic show exciting?

TinoC: Kai adds some sounds and noises to the tracks and T uses his voice, so “controlled chaos” is maybe a big word for what we will do on the tour, but there will be some differences from the album versions.

KaiN: It’s true that we’re not trying to reproduce the record one-to-one, and for me that’s partly a control question again. A purely digital backing track never changes, never breaks, never surprises anyone, including us. So live, some of what I add is deliberately analogue or hardware-based, things that can drift a little from night to night. It’s a small risk, but it keeps the show honest, and it’s very much in line with how I feel about the whole album: in a time where everything can sound perfect, a bit of unpredictability, a bit of dirt, is what actually makes it feel alive.

Karo: “Fame Fatale” arrives only three years after your debut and one year after “Silenci”, so NER\OGRIS still feels like a project moving unusually quickly rather than settling into a comfortable cycle. Looking beyond this album and the upcoming tour, what part of NER\OGRIS still feels unexplored to each of you? Is there something you have already discovered about the project that you deliberately have not used yet because the right record, collaboration or context for it has not arrived?

TinoC: As always, I personally think that “my” best song has not been written yet. Let’s see if I am wrong or right.

KaiN: There are ideas we’ve already found and deliberately not used, sounds or directions that felt too far away from what “Fame Fatale” needed to be. I think there’s still a much quieter, more minimal side of NER\OGRIS that we haven’t shown yet, almost the opposite of the scale and abrasion on this record. Whether that becomes its own release or just one track on the next album, I don’t know yet. But it’s sitting there, waiting for the right context, not the right idea.

About NER\OGRIS

NER\OGRIS is the German electronic duo of Kai Neugebauer and Tino Claus. Neugebauer is the founder of Les Berrtas and works on the musical and production side of NER\OGRIS, while Claus is known as the vocalist of Amnistia and through projects including TC75 and MRDTC. The two first met in 2014; the project itself formed in February 2022. Its name combines nero, Italian for black, with gris, French and Spanish for grey.

The collaboration began when Neugebauer had been preparing instrumental material and Claus heard one of the pieces and immediately imagined vocals for it. What began as an experiment developed into NER\OGRIS and their debut album, “I Am the Shadow – I Am the Light”, released in February 2023 through Dependent Records; Side-Line reported the first single in Ner\Ogris release first video single ‘Deepest Fear’ taken from forthcoming debut album ‘I Am The Shadow – I Am The Light’ and spoke to the duo in the Click Interview with Ner\Ogris: ‘A Strong Name That Reflects Our Philosophy’. The album established many of the contrasts that remained central to the project: analogue and digital sound, ambient space and rhythmic pressure, melody and dissonance.

The six-track mini-album “Silenci” followed on 1 November 2025. Its production credits already established the division of labour behind the duo: music and production by KaiN, words and vocals by TinoC, with mastering by Arnte of Pyrroline.

“Fame Fatale” is the duo’s second full-length album and is scheduled for 2 October 2026, with the pre-sale and the autumn dates reported here in NER\OGRIS launch ‘Fame Fatale’ pre-sale, confirm tour with Fïx8:Sëd8. Its nine tracks are “Calls”, “Antithese”, “Lack of Proof”, “A View”, “Graves”, “La Hora El Ganador”, “Glowing in the Dark”, “Unter Menschen” and “Dulcimer”.

NER\OGRIS will take the album on the road in autumn, beginning at Prague’s Futurum Music Bar on 17 October. Their current official listings continue through Münster, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Lille, Liège, Hannover, Freiberg, Berlin and Schmalkalden, with the final currently announced date on 28 November 2026.