Photo by Betina Garcia
Interview by Arletta Przynoga / Good Because Danish
They won the hearts of Danish audience with energetic live shows and powerful sound, thnn – this spring – they went to show their music to people in Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Austria. After almost a month on tour TURBOWEEKEND came back to Denmark to play an intimate show at this year’s SPOT Festival. Before that the band released a special EP Shadow Sounds with semi-acoustic versions of five of their songs. They are very hard working musicians with their own view of how their work should look like and how they want to deliver it to the listeners. NOTHING BUT HOPE AND PASSION had a little chat with Anders and Martin before TURBOWEEKEND‘s show in Berlin (April 12th). A talk about the tour, near-death experiences, annoying interviews and a lot more stuff.
We usually ask this one at the end but this time we start right with the big question – what do hope and passion mean to you?
Martin: Our passion is music and we’re just happy to be able to live from our passion and we HOPE that it will continue.
Anders: These are two words that go hand in hand. Passion can drive something and hope can be the goal, if you get a little poetic about it. These are some good things to have when you create music and do some stuff. These aren’t words that we use that often, but they are there somewhere.
Martin: It’s a big part of what we do. It doesn’t have to be necessary said out loud, it’s just there.
Currently you’re on tour outside Denmark, how is it going?
Martin: It’s going along pretty nice. We were in the Netherlands, there was… not that many people.
Anders: It felt kind of like starting over, like the time when the band was starting. You know, playing for 40 people maybe at the venue.
Martin: This week we came to Germany and yesterday we played in Hamburg and that was really really nice. I think there was a 100 people
Anders: Good response. It’s nice to come to foreign country and see people singing along to your song. It’s weird and nice.
Did something funny or scary happen during the German tour to you? Something that you’ll be telling in 10 years?
Martin: The scary thing was that we were in water park and we tried this water slide where you’re droped eght meters, you’re going very fast on it.
Anders: They should call it “near-death-experience”
Martin: Yeah… and we did it three times.
Anders: I did a daily speed record – seven second and fifteen mili-seconds. Because I’m small, I guess.
When you are on tour you spend a lot of time with each other on the bus. It’s a pretty small space. What’s the key to not go mad and to not kill each other?
Anders: Maybe that will come later, in fourteen days on our way back to Denmark we’ll have a knife fight on the bus. But I don’t think it’s a problem now.
So please, do not take any sharp stuff to TURBOWEEKEND during this tour!
Martin: We bought a PlayStation to take with us, so that’s a good way to not to kill each other.
Anders: And if you really want to have some space for yourself, you can just go to your bungalow, close the curtains, take some headphones and disappear.
TURBOWEEKEND: “Things start to slow down if we do it the same way everytime”
You’re on tour, but you’re also in the middle of preparing material for a new record. How is it going?
Martin: Well, it’s just the beginning, it’s going slow.
Anders: We’re building a kind of skeleton for it, for how it should sound and where we’re heading. It’s difficult.
Martin: We got a new studio.
Anders: It’s a great environment, light going through the windows, nice cosy kitchen, maybe too cosy. It’s nice to work there.
Your previous records, each of them sounds a bit different. I was wondering if it comes from the fact you work different each time or?
Martin: I think it comes from the fact we turn to shift the way of working a lot, because things start to slow down if we do it the same way everytime and we get tired of it.
Anders: Now we’re looking on Fault Lines and saying “ok, this is good, but what do we want to do now?”, we want to have a different approach. For example Martin is saying that now drums should sound like this and this… it’s always easier to look at things retrospectively and to say “this is good, but let’s do something in this direction”. I think it’s also a compliment that you think all the three albums sound different.
In my opinion all of them sound different, but you have this kind of characteristic line on each of them.
Martin: Thank you.
Anders: That’s the thin red line on each of them, we take it as a compliment.
It is an honest one! Talking about doing things differently – recently you were on tour around Denmark, an intimate tour, playing songs more acoustically. Where the idea came from and how did it went?
Martin: I think it came from the same fact, that we wanted to do things differently that we used to. We’ve done these small scale shows, like playing for the Danish radio. Than we thought “why not play the whole tour like that?”.
Anders: And than, as we talked about before – the massive sound of Fault Lines can be really like a wall of sound. So at some point we thought “wouldn’t it be cool to just play it on one maybe two keyboards and we play a set without all the hight head and all kind of things going on all the time?”.
Martin: We tried to make songs at the same atmosphere as I Forgot in a way.
You’re going to perform these more acoustic, intimate versions of your songs at this year’s SPOT Festival, right?
Anders: Yes! It will be great!
Do you have any specific recommendations for this year’s SPOT Festival?
Anders: It’s a good line-up, but we haven’t checked it yet.
Martin: I think MØ will be good for sure, we saw her on P3 Guld, she’s pretty cool.
Anders: We’re sure there will be a lot of new fresh uprising starts.
SPOT Festival is a good example that each year there’s more and more new interesting bands in Denmark, which is pretty small market. So how do you see your band on it? TURBOWEEKEND is well known in Denmark, but now you went “outside” kind of, touring Neatherlands, Germany, Poland and Austria. Is it because the music market in your country is getting too small?
Martin: I just think it’s because we need to see different people. It’s like if you toured Denmark for five times, you’ve seen it all. So you want to see different venues, different people, new cities.
Anders: … and try out your stuff in front of new people of different origins, different cultures. That’s exciting.
Maybe the Danish people need to kind of rest a bit from you?
Martin: Yes, I think is good to be away from them and then they’re gonna miss us and then we come back.
Anders: Miss us or forget us.
TURBOWEEKEND: “We want to have free boundaries to do whatever we want”
You’re currently on tour promoting your latest album “Fault Lines”. One of the singles from this LP was “Neverending”. Do you remember when did you create it? It’s kind of a special song in a way that your fathers appeared in the video clip.
Martin: I think we wrote the music around New Year’s Eve 2010/2011.
Anders: The idea for the riff came around that time.
Maritn: I even think that Silas had the vocal pretty much from the beginning. It was one of these songs that almost wrote itself, from what I remember. The song is about eternal love and so on.
I asked about this one, because it’s different from the others. Usually your lyrics aren’t so outspoken and not that “big words” and sounds.
Anders: Yeah, but as we talked before a bit, “Ghost Of A Chance” was very dark and cold and then at this point TURBOWEEKEND wanted to do something lighter.
Martin: Yes, a bit melodramatic stuff.
Anders: So it’s was our major key and it has a lot of upbeat sounds to it.
You’re on tour now in new countries, I think you give a lot of interviews during that tour. You’re new for the people around, so they might ask you the same questions. I’d like to ask you: what is the most annoying question that you really hate to hear and hate to answer?
Anders: Ok, look at Martin’s face when I ask him this question: Martin, so how did TURBOWEEKEND start?
Martin: Well, I think this question is allright, I think you need to tell the story. In my opinion the most annoying question is “can you describe your music?” or “what does your music sounds like?”. I think these are the most annoying questions, because it’s very hard for us to describe it, we’d rather have people describe it. I think a lot of journalists, they try to make us to put genre on our music. It’s very hard to us to put our music into a box and say “this is how our music sounds like”. Because we don’t want to be put into a box.
Anders: It’s up to others to devaluate us.
Martin: We want to have free boundaries to do whatever we want and sometimes it can be limiting to be in a box.
Is there any question that you’ve never been asked about but you’d really like to answer?
Anders: That’s a good question, actually… So, a question that we never been asked, but we would like to…?
Martin: That’s a tought one.
Anders: … No, I don’t know. That’s unanswerable. I’ll let you know, when I hear a question like that.
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