Passion is the stuff that makes us go on even though, from a rational point of view, there is no reason to.
Shortly Danish electro rock heroes VETO released their new album Sinus Point Break – a special release of the two previous EPs Sinus and Point Break. Time to talk to the guys about their career, their new album, the cultural and political importance of rock music and of course hope and passion.
Over the last years VETO constantly grew and grew. Can you give us a short recap of what happened from your point of view and tell us how it feels like?
Well, we have focused a lot of our attention on Germany, and we’ve been very well received down here, so it’s natural for us to come back more often than other places. Our audience is growing in Germany, and it’s always a nice feeling to play for larger and larger crowds, though we kind of enjoy the place we’re at now. Between 300-500 people is a good size audience. It’s large but still intimate.
We saw your show at Reeperbahn Festival 2012. Would you say that the festival brought you a buzz? As how important do you see Reeperbahn Festival for a band?
It’s always nice to play festivals where the press and the business is gathered, as it spawns some attention and it allows us to show what we’ve got. It’s hard for us though, as a danish band, living in Denmark, to tell what impact it has, when we don’t follow the german media or generally have a sense of what’s going on there. With that said, we can definitely feel that something is happening, and that some things have happened as an immediate consequence of the Reperbahn show.
VETO released their new album, Sinus Point Break, in January. It is a collection of their latest EPs Sinus and Point Break.
Your new album “Sinus Point Break” is a collection of two EPs – the previously released “Sinus” and the new “Break Point”. Would you say that the time of releaseing full-length albums is over?
Well, for us it’s not so much about the full-length album, as it is about the format dictating the work, and not the other way around. We’ve reached a point where streaming and digital media is taking over, and it just doesn’t make any sense to talk about an album as a 40-60 minute thing. There is no reason to let a physically limited format like the CD, decide how many minutes of music will be on a release. Physcial music will die out, vinyls will survive, but the CD is just not that “compact” anymore, and the quality is not near what you can get from a full resolution sound-file. It’s a nothing but a die-hard mini-disc, really.
We want to release material when we feel it’s ready, and in the batches we feel makes sense. Right now they are smaller releases, but in theory it could be a thousand songs as well as just one.
By combining electronic music with rock sounds and a certain touch of melancholy, your music is always somewhat “floating”. What’s the secret behind? How do you make your songs special and give them the special VETO touch?
We get a lot questions like this, and it’s really hard for us to answer, as we don’t differentiate between sounds as being “rock” or “electronic”. They are just sounds, and we try to put them together as we see fit. There’s no formula and no plan for the sound, there’s just the output of five guys and an enormous amount of equipment.
Who influenced you most as musicians, as band and as persons?
We are five persons in the band, all from very different backgrounds. That means that our personal heroes seldom overlap, but of course there have been musical influences that we’ve shared. The soundscapes of APPARAT have been a very big influence these last couple of years, and the german techno scene has also influenced us a lot. Groups like EXTRAWELT, MODESELKTOR have been huge in the band, but we’re also looking to movie-scores for inspiration.
Is rock music only music to you or does it have a deeper cultural or political importance to you?
Music and art in general have always been a snapshot of the time it’s born into. We try to write about the things that concern us, both personally and politically, and so our music is also a picture of our particular situation in our particular part of society. We have no agenda or political bias, but we live in a world where politics influence everything. It would be weird if we tried to fight that, for sake of not being political.
Music has the potential
to change the course of history,
but it’s most often
not in it’s own time.
I don’t know if “rock music” is even a valid term anymore, but one could say that music in general has the potential to change the course of history, but it’s most often not in it’s own time. The historical and cultural value, of any work of art, lies in how it captures and puts into perspective, the zeitgeist of it’s own time.
Back to music: what can people expect from VETO in 2013?
More releases, more concerts. Just more :)
Last one: What do “hope” and “passion” mean to you?
Passion is what fuels something like our band. There is absolutely no cost-beneift calculations behind it – if there were we would’ve changed business long ago. Passion is the stuff that makes us go on even though, from a rational point of view, there is no reason to. From there we can only hope.
