Die So Fluid have been together fourteen years now and recently released their fourth studio album The Opposites of Light to critical acclaim. Having just finished a short UK tour we thought it about time we had another chat with vocalist and bassist Grog to find out how everything is going:
R13: So are you pleased with the reaction to the new album?
G: Yeah I couldn't be more happy. It's a weird time right now though, I kinda feel intensely nervous about it as it's such an important album to me and the whole band. Because we've taken this independent route for it, what you find is that the response is amazingly positive, which is fantastic but we want more people to hear it as well! In a way all this work goes into making the album but at this point a whole load of new work begins for us because we've got to get it heard and make sure it reaches who it needs to reach so it feels more like a rollercoaster for me.
R13: I can appreciate that, I think most of the writing for this album was done in 2012 so it's a couple of years from writing to getting it out there so is it difficult to maintain the enthusiasm for the songs?
G: No not at all. We were still doing bits and pieces to it right the way through. Because I live in the US now it was a long process of sending things back and forth over the internet but also coming together as a band every now and again to play the tracks and work on arrangements and decide all the things that have to be decided together. We didn't lose enthusiasm because we set the bar so high for this album that we just loved every track and there are a lot of tracks on this album but hopefully every single track is the highest quality we could come up with.
R13: It's quite a different album to those you've done before in the sense that it was designed as a double album very much in two halves and that's evident when you listen to it. What was the thinking behind that?
G: Well we just came up with this framework within which to work, so that's the title The Opposites of Light and it just struck us as a really cool way to work, we could represent the heavier side of what we do and the more introspective, brooding side and that would also allow us to showcase everything that we can do; my vocal range and the range of dynamics that we have as a band. So that's how that came about but it also made a lot of sense to me on different levels because I was travelling a lot more since having relocated and there was a theme of going through different time zones and that was really interesting to me, the dark and the light if you like and the whole way that relates to life in general, you can't have the dark without the light and you can't have the female without the male and all these different dualities struck a chord with me so it made sense.
R13: In terms of the material a lot of it is familiar on the harder side of it but you've gone out on a limb a bit with stuff you've hinted at before but I think you've taken it to a different level with this one. Was the reaction to that something you worried about?
G: I never worried about that. What worries me is I find it scary how it disturbs some people laughs that's just bizarre, I mean we should have come a long way, look at a band like Led Zeppelin who did songs like That's the Way and Friends and Stairway to Heaven for fucks sake! And now everyone's worrying that we've written some songs that may have different influences such as folk or Egyptian influences or whatever. Why not just embrace it? I think everything still sounds like Die So Fluid because of the personalities involved and my voice just holds everything together as far as I'm concerned so I just stand by it. What's music for and what's art for if you can't just experiment and push the boat out a bit?
R13: Yeah sure and I guess taking the DIY approach gives you the freedom to do that without anyone looking over your shoulder
G: Totally.
R13: There were 18 tracks done for the album originally of which 16 made the cut so are there plans for the other two to see the light of day?
G: Possibly yeah. We haven't really discussed it, we've just come to this point with the new album. There were originally more songs than that but we chose 18 to take through to fruition and then the 16 songs that we chose were the ones that fitted together and made a complete journey for this record.
R13: You've just done a short 8 date UK tour and I'm quite interested to know how you managed to work some of the more introspective tracks into the set and did that change the feel or the whole experience of the set?
G: Yeah it totally did for me and I found it really encouraging. What we would do is throw in some of the new songs each night, there were some mainstay songs, which were Black Blizzard and Crime Scene but a new thing that we introduced was a backing track for strings, so we also started doing the track Violent Delights, which is more introspective although it does get really heavy towards the end but it's on that side of the record. We're known for being a live band but it just added a new dimension to the set and people seemed to really love it and so many people commented on it and really enjoyed it so that's a really exciting departure for us. In the future I can really see us building on the stage show and making it even more fantastical and adding to that extra dimension with lights and other stuff that you can do so for me that was really exciting.
R13: How important is playing live to you these days? You're working across two continents so there are all sorts of other factors to take into account but you've got a new record to promote and you've done a short tour but you've not done a twenty of thirty date tour so I wondered what influenced that?
G: Well it's really because there's a financial concern. We want to play as much as we can but we're held back by the restraints of money but we really want to hit the US. We've been delving into different ways of doing that and you can't do that unless you're really confident that it's the right tour to do because it's taking a risk. We certainly have plans for that later on in the year. There are a few things to be negotiated about the way forward for the band in several areas just because when you put out an important record it raises more questions than we bargained for. People contact you because they're interested, if you're selling a record people get intrigued and I can't really say more than that, I'll have to be mysterious! Everyone regards us as this fiercely independent band and we are, we always want to maintain as much artistic control as we can but it's not that we're against major labels, we just haven't found one that has the right thing to offer us yet. If we could find a label that we could work with and weren't going to rip us off, as some of the labels we've licensed to have, then we'd do that. We just want to play in front of as many people as we can and work with people that we trust so I feel like anything could happen between now and the end of the year. The response from all the sites that have supported us over the years has been great, it seems like this album has just blown their minds so I hope that's going to have an ongoing ripple effect and we can reach our true audience as a result. So we intend to tour in America and we are touring Finland in September and we're playing Alt Fest in August.
R13: Going back to the recent tour, how was that given that it's been a little while since you last played here? Was there a noticeable difference or was it the same old faces?
G: It was a mixture, it was really interesting actually. Quite a lot of new people have discovered us recently, we've got quite a strong thing going on Twitter, that really seems to have exploded and Facebook is very active so there were definitely some new faces there as well as the old familiar crew. It felt good, like a really good mixture of old and new.
R13: You've done a few videos for these songs with Black Blizzard in particular getting widely circulated so I wondered how important you felt that was and how much creative input you had into those videos?
G: Well I always have a fair amount of creative input into everything we do but Black Blizzard was made by a director called David Kenny so I was quite happy to leave most things in his hands because he's really good at what he does and he understood the song and it turned out really great. Comet is a very personal song for me and I actually directed that myself with the help of my husband and involving friends and stuff. A lot of it was filmed bombing around the streets of Hollywood on his motorbike using a GoPro camera and it was really fun to do. We were exploring areas of LA and you get the sense of that as it's actually happening as it's being filmed so that keeps it fresh. There's also one for Crime Scene, that was my first venture into video making and it was actually made on an i-Phone! Tom DiCillo from the Black and Blue Orkestre is such an encouraging force for me, he's so supportive and genuinely interested in everyone's artistic endeavours. He inspired me to start doing it in a away, I'm like a fan girl of Tom DiCillo because I love his films so it blows my mind that I'm in a band with him but he'll just sit and chat to you about everything and help you with ideas. So we actually did a video for the Black and Blue Orkestre using our iphones, so we all filmed independently where we live, so Will's in London, I'm in LA and Tom is in New York and then he pieced that together to make a video and I thought well if he can do that why can't I? So that's kind of what set me off and a fan gave me a gopro camera, which is amazing so when someone gives you a present like that you have to really run with it! We've actually made another one, which we're keeping up our sleeves, which I filmed out in the desert near where I live and is a very kind of shamanistic type of desert video and I made that for the song Landslides. While we were in London we made another one with a new film director for Violent Delights so we've got a couple more and Violent Delights will probably come out at the end of June.
R13: As you've already mentioned you've got Alt-Fest coming up in August which has a great looking line up and given that you've been around for a long time now and worked some fairly big names, do you ever get star struck when you play these festivals and run into some of these bands?
G: Oh totally yeah! It's weird, I'm kind of scared of meeting my heroes and heroines incase they turn out to be arseholes! It kind of ruins everything you know but most of the people I've met have been really cool. Deftones for example are one of my favourite bands and they're just so cool but there are some people that I'd just prefer to remain a fan, people that I look up to and that inspired me to do this in the first place. If I meet them then I meet them but I'm quite happy not to, I just want to watch them play, that's the point.
R13: So is there anyone there that you're really looking forward to seeing?
G: Well I'm quite worried that we won't get to see anyone as we're a band that's playing and they don't let you in to stay for the whole thing. We may just arrive on the day and do the job we're being paid to do so I'm going to have to get a plan and see who we can see!
R13: Is there ever a plan for Die So Fluid or is it just a case of this is what we do and you finish one album and automatically roll onto the next one?
G: Fundamentally that's how we are and we just keep creating but trying to stretch ourselves the whole time, just getting better and seeing how far we can take this. Realistically though I don't know how much longer we can keep going. We need more support, it's not like we can magically keep going, we need people to buy our records and we need people to invest in us. It's tough out there and it's tougher than it's ever been but creatively as long as we love doing what we do we'll find a way to keep doing it.
R13: Given that it's a two to three year process from writing to getting a record released and you've got to keep generating new product to keep your name out there and get new people interested, does that mean you're having to start thinking about the next record now?
G: Yeah shortly we will do. We're only human and we can only do so much and because we are doing pretty much everything ourselves I can't physically imagine starting to write the next record for at least a couple of months because there's so much to do with this record and I don't feel like it's been heard by enough people at all. It may even receive a more serious release, so this is a more soft release to coincide with the UK tour and then a much more in depth promotional release later in the year, a second wave if you like because it just deserves it. It's hard to get the mainstream press to even listen to something now unless you're on a major label, which I just find ridiculous, it's so old school. Everyone's going ooh yeah anyone can write a piece of music and have it out on the internet in ten minutes and yeah you can go a certain way with that and go so far but to reach everyone around the world on a global level that we'd like to do and should be doing, it takes a bit more backing because there are certain people that are still living in the old ways.laughs It's really odd, there's a total disconnect there and I don't care about talking about it, I think some people find it a bit taboo but I'm quite into the idea of reporting back to everyone what we discover on our journey. That's just how it is!