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First of all, could you give the readers a brief introduction of your band?
A brief introduction? Hey there! Are you tired of lame wanna-be bands that waste precious megawatts of electric energy on amps and increase gas emissions while touring? Do you wanna save the rain forest? Well then throw away your Rock Am Ring tickets and burn down your CDs and mp3s, and come on down to the island of Koh and experience industrial rock in a completely non-industrial environment of Croatia! The Mediterranean as it once was, industry-dead! Parental advisory: Watch out for The Censor, he’s still around.
Now a little more practical question that you probably heard many times before - what does the name Koh stands for?
That’s always an interesting one. We try never to answer it the same way. The last interpretation is that it stands for “chimney” in Slovakian, so I guess we basically met up after climbing down a big old dirty factory chimney somewhere in Slovakia and decided that the only fair thing to do is to form a rock band called Koh. I guess a fair answer would be that we kinda got tired of names with meanings that had no real meaning besides the fact that it’s a word everybody uses when they refer to your band, so we put on a name that looked and sounded different and unique to us… it definitely got its meaning along the way. We could have called ourselves Coffee ‘n’ Nun, and I’m sure it would stand for something in our minds today.
How would you describe the music you make, and what are your main influences?
In recent times we tend to describe it as a kind of a blend between rock and metal with elements of industrial and electronic music. Maybe industrial rock? A pretty broad definition, if at all, but you’ll get a more specific idea about it after cranking it up. Influences? There are many, from Tool to The Prodigy, from King Crimson to Aphex Twin, earlier Marilyn Manson, Filter and Nine Inch Nails, Laibach and Ministry, then some grunge bands also like Alice In Chains and Nirvana.. anything that tickles our ears really.
Your first release is called 'The Censor EP'. In my opinion it's a great and fresh release. What are your own opinions on the release?
To tell you the truth, the EP was out at the end of this year’s spring but the songs on it are 3-4 years old, it’s just that we head out to the studio a lot later then was initially planned, so it’s about as fresh as the Indonesian tsunami… But I must say we’ve been getting some awesome feedback from many different sources saying it sounds fresh and new and sometimes we’re not really sure weather that’s because it really is or perhaps because there are so many money/fame driven copy-cats out there in rock music at the moment that your mom’s blender sounds refreshing after a few hours of top 40 rock charts… Our opinions on the EP vary from day to day, but in the end we think it’s a pretty decent start for a first self-released recording. We think of it as a nice little introduction to what Koh has in store for the future.
What is, in your opinion, the best track on the EP - and why?
The best track? I don’t know, it was an opinion of our producer Boris Rakamaric that “Use You” should be put as the opening track, and we kinda agreed with him on that one. I think it has possibly the best blend of musical styles Koh was about at the time when we wrote those songs and started recording them. All four songs are quite different one from another, at least from our point of view and we like hearing different opinions on each of them… Just letting the audience be the real judges of that.
One major thing that caught my attention up front is the great artwork. Who created it, and what’s the message behind it?
The whole artwork was done by our dear friend Aleksandar Živanov who actually came to us first, inspired by the music he heard and offered us to work with him. He wanted to have a certain amount of artistic freedom in his visual interpretation of the songs and the EP, and after a few trials got really excited about the idea that later came to be the current artwork, which actually expended in a way our own interpretations of the story behind the songs and the art, and that’s about as much as you can get from someone in charge of the visual design. Its almost as influential as writing down some lines or creating a certain melody. And what we liked about him initially was that he always tends to go really deep when it comes to creating a visual interpretation of the music. He needs to know the story and the message behind it. And the message is that you have to keep your mind open, your consciousness awake and your senses sharp at all times cuz the all-seeing ear of the censor never sleeps. The (anti)utopian post-apocalyptic world of Prozac driven ameba minds is knocking at our door nervously, and its coming from within. I’ll take the red pill, thank you.
What is the message you want to spread lyrically?
Besides the obvious expressions of internal emotional states of the vocalist who writes the lyrics, reading between the lines and within the artwork itself we can come to find a meaning to it all, or a message if you like. What that message would be? I think that everyone with an open mind that has the potential to step out of the modern Ford’s Prozac-mind production line of ignorant chessboard pawns can relate to the story of unreasonable authority that determines in many ways how you’re going to live and be about, and you basically give him/them money for it. I’ll take the red pill, thank you.
My first meeting with Koh was the live performance at the Viva La Pola 2008 festival. Although you had to play right after a bunch of punk bands late at night, you still caught some people's attention. How do you look back at this particular performance?
Viva la Pola was excellent, it’s the 2nd time we’ve performed on this festival and the 4th time in Pula generally. We love coming here since Istria is something of a rock Mecca here in Croatia. We all used to listen to punk music and most of us still do from time to time, and if you step back a bit in your perspective on rock and styles of alternative music in general you’ll get to see there’s a bit of punk in every music out there that has sincere energy. Hopefully, that’s what the audience recognized at our show. Or maybe they were just too wasted and it was loud? {Laughs}
One thing I couldn't help noticing there is the rawer voice of your new vocalist compared with the one on the EP, which was an improvement in my opinion. How do you look on this yourself?
I’m really glad you brought that up since we in the band completely share your opinion, and a lot of people came to us with similar views. And its fair to say that that’s not the only improvement Karlo brought to us as a collective. I’m sure everyone knows that there’s a lot more to a band than just the music. And if you’ll stick around with us till we get the debut LP out in a few years time, you’ll get to hear that this characteristic of Karlo’s vocals is going to be even more apparent on our future material that will undoubtedly lean a step further to the industrial genre.
I read something about a VJ show on your MySpace, but I didn't saw one at the Viva La Pola fest. How will the VJ show look like?
We were gonna go with VJ in our show, we already played a few shows with it, got great feedback, but we dropped the idea this time due to some technical issues. We love the whole concept of it and we always kinda saw our live performance as a combination of the sounds and the visual combined in one experience and we will definitely keep on making an effort to bring that combined experiences to the audience, whenever that is technically possible of course. Hopefully in the future it’ll be something of a standard in our shows. It’s sort of an extension of the music’s atmosphere and gives you a better idea of what we’re about, as in how it all resonates in our own minds. The sound is just the basic cornerstone, everything else kinda dances around it, the lyrics, the visual, the performance, everything. Atmosphere is really something we put a lot of time and effort in creating, and the VJ helps a lot in bringing it about.
How is the industrial metal scene in Croatia?
There aren’t that many bands here that flirt with the industrial genre so it’s kinda hard to talk about a industrial scene here; we’ve only begun to experiment with this landscape of sounds and musical textures a few years ago ourselves. I think Laibach had a huge influence on all of us here in this region, like for example dreDDup, great industrial band from Serbia very much influenced by Laibach’s work. Also, you’ve heard of bands such as Omega Lithium and Asylum from Croatia, which lean toward the gothic/industrial genre. We think this style can blend in nicely with other styles of rock and metal music since it’s got that unique atmosphere to it, giving it all together a different feel to it. The thing is, we try never to get trapped within only one specific musical style, although that can sometimes be very hard to accomplish. Hopefully that’s what you’ll hear from us in a few years time.
What are, next to music, your other passions in life?
Anything that helps get away from the daily routine and anything that inspires really. Filmography, visual arts in general, literature, philosophy, even science. We deal with some of these areas in college professionally, and it takes away a lot of time from our involvement in music, but it never got to be the no1 passion. Music has been sitting in that throne for years, and continues to…
What can we expect of Koh in the (near) future?
As I have mentioned a few times already, we are in the process of writing new stuff that’s hopefully going to end up to be the debut Koh album. It’s still pretty far away, but we’re taking our time to get it right. Just started working on it. I won’t be giving out any names and information yet, but I’ll tell you that we’re really excited about it, it’s going to be quite different from what we’ve done so far, which is only logical since we just got started really, not to mention Karlo as the new vocalist. I can’t make any claims, but I’ll tell you that if you haven’t made a penny from your music and you’re still crazy about it all, then it has to be driven from within, and that’s where the best things come from in art. If we’ll ever be getting our hands on some significant cash, expect a shitty Koh record. Besides the album, the plan is to visit some European countries in near future, and see how our music bounces there.
The interview ends here, thanks for your time. If you have some final words to add, you can do it here.
We wanna thank you for doing this interview, we appreciate the interest and support, especially since we’re still a young band. Respect. The Rolling Stone called a few days ago about doing an interview with us, we said: Fuck off, we’re doing an interview for Industrialized Metal, go read it when it comes out, haha! Cheers to you and your readers and hope to come to Netherlands soon!
Interview by: Gerardo, answered by: Bojan (drums) - July 2008
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