Suffocate For Fuck Sake – Das Mysterium, das in Filmen aus Musik spricht

Ein Name, ein Kult aus Schweden, ein Mysterium!
Es ist noch keine verrenkte Comic-Handvoll Jahre her, als ich auf einen Song dieser Band gestoßen bin. Die erste Kontaktaufnahme verlief wie bisher ungekannt, obwohl mir ihr Klang bekannt vorzukommen schien. Kaum lief der erste Track durch, musste man Fragen verarbeiten, die von vielen weiter anstürmenden Fragen der nächsten Songs und Alben niedergetrampelt wurden.

Schnell aufzusaugen war auch der Rest der soliden, doch alternden Diskografie, welche Konzepte schrieb, die wie Hörspiele von verzerrten, gekonnt skandinavisch-kalten Tragödien klangen und vor Gefühlsgewalt strotzten.
Wer sich in letzter Zeit auf die Erkundungstour zwischen die abgemagerten Referenzen dieser Kapelle begeben hat, wird sicherlich mit mehr Erfolg auf das Bernsteinzimmer im Boden treffen, als dort auf satte Details und Infos zur Band.
Es ist weder etwas Neues, noch ein Vergehen, dass Bands gelegentlich ebenso ihren Anspruch auf Anonymität im Ausüben ihrer Talente in Angriff nehmen, noch besonders  auf eine nach außen getragene Präsenz in den Medien aus sind, was ich unter anderem sogar oft sehr gut nachvollziehen kann.
SUFFOCATE FOR FUCK SAKE sind eine Truppe, die, in meinen Augen, über viele Jahre hinweg schon eines am besten konnte, wenn es um Tension und einen Höreffekt vom Feinsten geht:

Die Atmosphäre in Bildern sprechen zu lassen, die es nicht erfordern, vorerst noch mehr zu erfahren, während ihre Veröffentlichungen mich sowieso an Schwellen reißen, die solche Fragen in meinem Triebwerk ausknipsen.

Lange hat sich nichts um ihre bisher immer vielversprechender werdenden Releases blicken lassen, bis sich ein neues Album mit dem Namen IT’S IN MY BLOOD auftat und wieder Persönlichkeiten zu zerbröckeln bereit war. Der unfassbar mitreißende Monolog dieser LP hat dieses Album sofort in meine Favoriten des Jahres katapultiert und enttäuschte sicherlich nur die wenigsten Leute, die mit SUFFOCATE FOR FUCK SAKE bereits vertraut oder ebenso erst im warm werden waren.

Wie aus dem Nichts standen wieder Fragen, Gefühle und rätselafte Schauspiele im Schädel an, die nur jeder für sich mit dieser Musik ausmachen kann. Den Fragen zu dieser Band und einem etwas genaueren Einblick hinter ihre vielschichtige Kulisse, wollen wir uns jetzt widmen, wo es unter den Fingern brennt und die vom Scrollen verdrehten Fingerwurzeln das fragende Hirn mit bisher kaum auf-findbaren Antworten enttäuschen.
Für alle, die noch nicht mit dem Handwerk der experimentellen Schweden vertraut sind, kann ich jedoch mit Sicherheit versprechen: Wer Tristesse und Melacnholie auf einem absoluten, emotional überwältigenden Atmo-Höhepunkt, eingehüllt in avantgardistische Black Metal Konstrukte, sucht, der hat mit SUFFOCATE FOR FUCK SAKE einen der besten Ansprech-partner für genau diese Stimmung gefunden. Wir hatten die Freude, dem Gitarristen der furiosen Kapelle ein paar Fragen zu stellen und wollen euch nun die Antworten nicht weiter vorenthalten. Viel Vergnügen!

__________________        INTERVIEW       ____________________

Hello, guys!

It’s nice to have you here for a short and gentle talk.
At first, I would like you to introduce yourself and maybe explain what your personal background of this project is.

Thanks for having me. I’m the guitarist, songwriter and one of the founders of the band.

How did you work out your musical and artificial concept and how would you like to take further influence on it in the future?

The concept was worked out from all the members not only listening to heavy music but also very calm and ambient type of music. And from there we had an idea before we even started writing material to start a band dealing with big contrasts. Not something in between but both worlds in one band. We then added the idea to use big amounts of samples to give the music a more deeper meaning. Many albums is just a bunch of songs on a record that actually don’t belong together. We wanted to do something different and create albums and not just separate songs.

For the future we will probably do something very different. We don’t wan’t to get stuck, we want to develop into new areas. But what’s important for us is that we still make music for ourselves and not for someone else, then i think the result is the best.

Before we’re talking about your newest record, there are a few things, that made your music attractive to me without even hearing a first note and I would like to adress the next few questions to their immensely expressive and remarkable character in connection to your music.

Most of your releases and songs are titled in an equally expressive way for me, as their lenght and message always seemed highly metaphoric and like they were supposed to underline your musical tone and atmosphere with a meaningful background.
How did you come up with these titles and how deep would you situate them inside SFFS‘ concept?

Almost all titles are translated quotes from the stories. Of course we selected the quotes that also described the feeling of the music aswell.

What made you change your mind on these conditions with you newest output?Is there a special reason, why the song titles and main title of your newest record are way shorter than in the past?

Would be boring to do the same thing again. We wanted “In my blood” to have it’s own style, in the song titles aswell.

Your artworks mostly impress me, because they always have such a deep meaning in the shape of pretty much minimalistic structures or motives.
IN MY BLOOD’s cover is, besides the geometrical shapes of your previous output, a photograph, but still continues to impress in the same way and brings the message of your album to a visual point.
Who is responsible for your artwork and how much influence and meaning do you have on the choice of your artwork?

100% influence because we do our artworks ourselves. The cover is always done after the music (like everyone does it) to try to capture the feeling from the music best way possible.

Speaking of previous albums, I noticed that there were eight years in between the release of your last record and IN MY BLOOD.
What did you do in that time and how did this period of time change your vision on change and a sort of new look, that your new record is at least giving to me?

A lot of things happened. Some of us got kids, moved to different cities and countries. I think in general or at least in my case we took a step away from music-making in general. To write a SFFS song is a long process for us and requires a lot of energy. And we knew that if we really wanted to do a new record it had to be done correctly otherwise we could just leave it.

The time in between resulted in some new influences, ideas and production ideas to create a slightly different sound. The idea was to be more direct and effective on “In my blood” then what we had done before.

In my opinion, your music always had its slight main focus on tristesse and melancholy, but IN MY BLOOD is also very powerful and well structured.
How would you explain this sort of change also regarding your way more experimental structure of this new material?

I’m a very self critic person and there are always things to improve so we wanted to make the whole concept a bit tighter and more direct. But still very experimental. We also tried to structure it a bit different. Move away from too much repetition in the songs.

The topic and content of your voice samples isn’t pretty understandable for people, who don’t speak Swedish, but they still bear a huge amount of your atmospheric and tension building moments.
They seem to evolve a sort of dramatical script and underline your music as well as your artworks.
How did you come up with that idea in the past?

The idea comes from audio books and film music. We had an idea about making an audio book with music to it. But we were also inspired by separate great songs like “Blaise Bailey Finnegan III” by Godspeed you! Black Emperor. Still we wanted to take this one step further.

Where do you take these scenes from and how do they fit into your lyrical theme?

The stories are already made radio interviews. And we use them as a base for the whole album and we build everything around the interviews.

Are you related to these people of all ages and genders in some way?

No. Not at all. We can of course relate to the topics. Everyone probably can.

Do you have any plans for the future that you may want to share with us and our readership?

We are hoping to start rehearsing soon as a “normal” band. The goal is to play a couple of concerts but we have to see how it works out.

How much space will you offer for these experimental ‚aspects‘, as for example the rising use of instruments and effects like a piano or clockwork ticking, in further releases?

No idea right now. We have to see when we plan for something new. But i think we will rather get more experimental then become just a normal band. That’s at least how i would like to do it.

As a band without any live shows and not much background visible in cyber space, how did get in touch with MOC Records and how is your relation to them?

We got a email from them asking if we were interested in releasing Blazing fires… and we said no but we have a new album. It really helps that one band member lives in the same city as the label aswell.

Do you have any side projects that you play in?

At the moment no. But you can check out Ioseb, The Universe and Iisole bands that features SFFS members.

What are your inspirations for new material, how do you look for your samples and create album concepts?

For the future the goal is to create something by ourselves instead of sample something. I’m hoping to work together with someone who can produce unique material just for us. Then we can steer it in a direction we want and have more control.

Do you have any other way to focus on the results of your creative work or things that are influencing your music?

Everything influences you when you write music. We are creative people in the band who do tons of other creative things. But they don’t have any impact on our music. In my case i like writing alone at night time and really focus really deep. I get so into it then that i have to force myself to bed when it slowly becomes morning. And during this deep focus the best material comes out.

Which kind of influences, events or discussable topics did have the biggest influence on IN MY BLOOD?

There is no single event, only the world we live in and the harder and more egoistic climate that grows day by day. One small influence was my Ex Girlfriend who had a mixtape containing only songs that only used the classic “Be my baby (Ronettes)” drum beats. The Boom-boom-boom-tjack one. This beat we then used in the first track Stina because of the interesting contrasts of using it on hard music.

                                           Foto und LP: Moment Of Collapse Records

How much of your daily questions, thoughts or situations are flowing into your songs?

Hard for me to answer. I guess it does involuntarily.

Regarding the increasing interest of people towards your music and a live show, would you declare it as possible to play some shows with SFFS in the future?

If not: Why would you like to leave this as a studio-project?

Definitely possible. But let’s see.

————————————————————————–

Tack så mycket! Wir sind auf jeden Fall gespannt, was uns noch von diesem Uhrwerk aus erwartet und freuen uns über die Möglichkeit, etwas über diese massive Langrille reden konnten. Hier unten findet ihr noch ein paar Links zur Band und einen Pfad zu Ninos Review der aktuellsten Platte.

_________  LINKS  __________

SFFS_Bandcamp
SFFS_Facebook
Review_It’s In My Blood