You and us, we’re here together.
Im ersten Teil unseres Interviews haben uns Morzsa Records etwas über sich selbst erzählt und uns einen Einblick in ihre Vergangenheit geboten. Heute lest ihr, warum Freddie, Justin, Noémi und Endre zusammen Musik machen und wie wichtig ihnen ihr Publikum ist.
How would you describe your music in just a few words?
Noémi: „Fuck this, fuck that, everybody dance!“ [Ein Zitat einer ukrainischen Band.]
Justin: I would say it’s personal pop music that isn’t designed to please you but to help you enter some kind of community.
Endre: The only word I can describe most of our songs sounds terrible: „honesty“. It’s our own honest songs about our own honest feelings. There are no clichés or acting.
Freddie: Shame. A lot of shame.
Justin: Yes, they are right. The music is confrontational…
Freddie: … even when it’s pretty.
Justin: It’s meant to make you uncomfortable, even to provoke people.
Freddie: To me, this was a very good show for us tonight. The reason is, we had a good connection with the audience. This kind of show is between you and us and we’re here together. We’re building this concert together. Sometimes the audience would stand and dance, sometimes they would sit and listen. This is the perfect concert. The entire point of building this music is this constructive relationship between us and the listener. The listener is not simply a consumer anymore, but a participant, and what they are participating in is the development of a scene. And tonight, it was very good. It reminded me of home, actually.
You mentioned Baroque Pop and Punk influences. I heard some influences of bands like the Pogues tonight. You yourselves are describing your music as „Post-Apocapop“…
Freddie: … haha, yeah, that’s an older description. But let’s just say „apocapop“, man, let’s not go past the apocalypse.
Justin: I think the reason for this description comes from our lyrics. A lot of our lyrical content tends to be very suicidal and apocalyptic and is usually quite dark. Pop music is meant to make you feel good.
Freddie: Is it though? Because so much pop music is about break-ups and heartbreak, it’s more about making you feel… I don’t know…
Justin: … understood. But that’s why pop music appeals to so many people, because it attempts to. But we write music so that it will be understood.
Freddie: And so that you will feel understood, that you as an audience member, who came to a show that you don’t know much about, will sit there and be with us and feel understood.
An diesem Punkt steht Freddie auf, um die herumliegenden Blätter aufzusammeln und im Raum zu einer Figur zusammenzulegen. Die Figur erschließt sich mir erst hinterher, als ich zurück komme, um ein paar Fotos zu schießen: ein großer Smiley, den man nur aus Freddies Sitzposition erkennen kann. Diese Aktion zeigt, was Morzsa Records für eine Art Band sind: gute Laune verbreitend, aber dabei nicht aufdringlich.
Justin: But within this framework of pop music, which is there for people to relate to, we also have these quite challenging subject matters, which I think is a good thing. You can listen to music which is about going to the club, or you can listen to pop music about Russian anarchists and having dreams where you have your head ripped off.
Noémi: You have these kind of dreams on tour, when you sleep next to us. That should mean something!
The show here at the Zep was extremely comfy, the location being full of sofas and people sitting right in front of your feet. Is there any location you played that was totally weird or uncomfortable?
Freddie: How much time do you have? [laughs.]
Justin: One time we played on a huge stage, and the audience was, like, 27 children. We were on this high stage in front of the biggest basilica in Hungary. It’s the largest basilica in Hungary, maybe even larger than any basilica in Europe.
Freddie: It’s the catholic centre of Hungary. Which is probably why I peed on it twice.
Justin: Being up there on that stage – it doesn’t matter how many people come to a show, I never want to play on a huge stage like that with this event atmosphere where people could come and consume music as they buy fried food. We were just a part of an event list.
Freddie: But I don’t want to complain too much. We were there because there were people involved in that organization that believed in our music and thought our music would somehow contribute to this. Before that, we had played in their cave. Very literally, a cave.
Justin: So suddenly, we moved from a cave to this huge band stand surrounded by children dressed in white, flowing dresses and a bunch of people buying fried food from the stands and not understanding a fucking word you said. Festivals can eat it, in general.
Justin: There was also my family reunion. We went on tour in the States, two summers ago, and I come from a very southern, rural family – well, Freddie says „redneck“. I have a family reunion every summer with at least 200 people. We played a show at this family reunion in a big cattle option. We played there for 200 southern rural people, cowboys with one arm and old ladies. We even played two shows there, the other was in a Baptist church.
Freddie: One of Justin’s relatives, he’s an amazing man, Henry. He learned how to yodle by harmonizing with his tractor and he became a locally famous yodler. But he’s old and his vocal chord don’t work as well as they used to. After our show, in appreciation of it, he gave some, like, concert. All of us we’re brought to tears.
Endre: That was touching. The whole thing was amazing.
Your current tour doesn’t take you to Berlin, Cologne or Hamburg. Why did you choose to play such locations as Radolfzell or Heidelberg?
Freddie: This tour in particular, we’re not playing major cities. We’re playing a few, but a lot of what we’re doing is more rural and maybe suburban. The reason for that is we try to find people who listen and people who have stories and appreciate us, whom we want to build some kind of community with. The Viennese woods show was a perfect example for that, a bunch of dirty hippies, who I usually don’t want to work with, but in this case it was a great show.
Justin: More and more we’re starting to actively seek smaller towns to play in, rather than just going from big city to big city. Because when wo go to places like that, we usually have a good time, it’s fun, but city life – it sort of implies a distance from what you’re experiencing because there’s so much of it. You can go to a concert every night of the week!
Endre: None of us wanted to have a show in Berlin for this tour. It was in plan, we tried, but after a while it turned out that we were too late with organization. I personally was totally fine with it.
Freddie: We liked the idea of playing in Heidelberg because there’s the student culture here and people are doing things together and they have dreams and thoughts and they haven’t been disappointed by the crushing weight of capitalist society yet, so… a nice place to play some music.
Justin: And we can come here with no promotion of our own, but people who just want to see music and care, and the room was crowded! Nobody knew at all who we were and they thought „Oh, a concert? I’ll go! Because I like music.“
Am Montag erscheint der dritte und letzte Teil unseres Interviews mit der Band. Darin erzählen uns Morzsa Records von ihren Idolen und den Alben, die sie momentan in Dauerschleife hören. Außerdem haben wir die große Ehre, euch exklusiv die Weltpremiere ihres Videos zu „Ticket for Travelling“ vom aktuellen Album „Cosmonaut“ zu bieten!
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