Coilguns may be one of the most intense live bands you’ll ever experience. Ghost Cult caught up with Louis Jucker (vocals) and Jona Nido (guitars) to discuss their enthralling debut album, the band’s innovative approach to music and Louis’ rather disturbing stage antics.
What’s the story behind Coilguns? When did you guys form and what were your motivations behind starting the band?
Jona: Initially, Coilguns is 3 dudes playing in a german band called The Ocean and one drunken night in Berlin, we decided that starting a Punk/D-Beat band could be fun. After a first EP recorded in january 2011 with the help of loads of rum and weed, we got offered to play our first show : a support slot for The Dillinger Escape Plan. From then on, we realized we were a real band and things started to move forward pretty quickly. When we confirmed that first show, we only had 10 minutes of material to play. In 1 month we wrote 30 minutes of extra material, in 5 hours we recorded it and 3 days later it was mixed, mastered and we had manufactured ourselves 150 copies.
Shortly after that we did our first European tour, then a second one…We’ve had the chance to support high-profile bands such as Norma Jean, Baroness, Black Breath and Nasum. When we were touring Australia with The Ocean, We (Coilguns) had the chance to play our own shows a couple of times and the last week we decided to book a studio in Perth to record 2 tracks that have been released in september 2012 in the shape of a split record with German ear-rapists NVRVD.
That’s it. 2 years later, after a lot of booze and laughs, here we are : 3 EP’s destroying people’s teeth, a first full length to be released on Pelagic records in a couple of weeks and a 3rd European tour (which we’re on now) and a UK tour being booked at the moment to happen early april
This band started as a real joke. I was staying in NYC for a month back in december 2010 and bought a guitar there. That same day I wrote 3 songs just for fun. That’s what ended up being our first EP. Then stuff just kept happening without us pushing for it, we just accepted that we had turned into a real band with a solid sound and ideas that were making sense…We just went with the flow..
Your debut album hit the streets some time ago. What themes are you exploring on it and what was the recording process like?
Louis: This record addresses ourselves as commuters; active people constantly travelling from a point A to another one called B. Somehow we, touring musicians, do the same. Point A being here the club we leave in the morning and B the one we discover at the end of the day. It may be a different club, city, country, it’s still a club. Just like these commuters, we’re part of a tribe of nomads, a unformal population of rootless monkeys. And yes, we’re proud of our job.
What we usually forget is how static we actually are. We all end up spending most of our time in traffic jams, highways, petrol stations, motels, backstages. This is our C point, the one that’s not our destination but the whole way leading to it. C is the no man’s land.
Ever had the impression that your train is not really moving, but that it is the landscape itself that is moving instead? Well, touring is static. Our house is our bus and you are our visitors, not the contrary. Distances don’t get smaller, they just don’t exist for us. We make friends, they come to our show (they even bring a bottle or two) we entertain them, and they get back to their normal life. Nothing changes for us, we’re still on the road.
I made a few references to late 60’s architecture utopias. First of all because it is trendy and fun, but also because they crystallised the condition of the commuters. Plug-in Cities, No-stop Cities, Continuous Monument. This is how it feels touring the world nowadays, rock’nroll clubs are a continuum of standard equipment. Wherever we go, we’ll be sure to find what we need to survive and communicate. We’re the new nomads, and our life isn’t that far from what these architects predicted. Our tour van is our private life cell, e-mail english is our Esperanto, the world-wide web is our monument.
The artwork makes it obvious : circular shapes, standard subway map colours, ocean tides, didn’t we realize the earth was round staring at the sea horizon?
I wrote a first text named Minkowski Manhattan Distance and took it as a basis for these songs. I picked a sentence or two per track and paraphrased it into a new proper song. They all share the same theme: distance versus time, urban spaces, human relationships and so on. The usual blah. At the same time, these are just songs, you know, raw punk poetry to scream along heavy riffs and frantic drumbeats, there’s not so much space for clever thoughts. Don’t freak out too much if it seems absurd; it is probably meant this way.
Jona: The recording process took us 4 days. Luc and I always record live together and in one take which means it’s alway pretty chilled as there’s not much else to do than playing our songs a couple of times. The big part of this recording was the logistics of it. Gear and guests-wise. Booking flights, Hotels, organising food for up to 10 people every day, being on time with everything… For instance, we flew over from Finland to La Chaux-de-Fonds, Keijo Niinima from Rotten Sound / Nasum just to record one track and do backing vocals on certain songs. Louis couldn’t join us as planned in the studio, other people had to cancel last minute…and I mean, some songs are featuring up to 5 extra guitar players, so when one was canceling I had to find a subsitute and provide him with tabs and vids…It was a super exhausting period for me who was dealing with all of this and everyone. But because we are working with people who are dedicated enough and super flexible in every regard (thinking of Julien Fehlmann and Karim Pandolfo from Studio Mecanique) everything went really smooth and we’ve been able to make it to the deadlines we had. We stared to Record on november 22nd and 2 months later we were receiving pressed CD’s and vinyls ! Commuters was released last February, via Pelagic Records.
How did the recent split with NVRD come about? Are there any more splits planned?
Jona: While we were being in Australia, we received an e-mail from NVRVD asking if we were up to do a split record, nothing fancy, just 1 or 2 raw songs to put on a record together. We know these guys from shows we’ve played together and they’re a power trio, an excellent live band and we share the same interests in terms of sound, gears and music so we were like “FUCK YEAH!”. We had a whole week of holiday in Perth and when we played there, we met this awesome band which played with us called Förstöra. Their drummer, Adam Round owns an awesome studio in town and after a couple of spliffs and beers we asked him if he was down with recording us on a free day or something. And that’s how we did it! We did a massive setup with all the cool vintage gear we could find in his studio and did 4 takes of each song and we had our share of the split!
Since the last 6 months we’ve been really focused on writing, recording and preparing the release and tours for Commuters so there’s nothing planned yet. I mean, I love the concept of split records and I’m sure we’ll release something in that shape during the year….Or not…But there are many bands I’d love to share a record with.
The entirety of Commuters was recorded live in the studio, entirely in one take. Was this deliberate, and if so why?
Jona: The first time we went down that “live” path was to record our second EP, called Stadio Rods. As mentioned before we had to write all this material for our first show in such a short time period that we’ve spent 6 hours a day in the room for 3 weeks and after that, we thought we knew how to play these songs well enough to record them together. The result was completely satisfying and it was FUN to do. I don’t think that recording an album is usually fun. I mean, writing is fun, mixing is fun and listening to the final master is fun. But recording alone in front of your computer asking yourself 300 times if it was good enough and spending half of your time editing shits is not fun at all. Since then we decided that it was the only way we wanted to record our albums. I don’t think everybody can do that although it is not like we are the first ones to do it. A lot of bands coming from the Noise Rock scene only do it that way for decades. But maybe it is more surprising when we do that playing something more technical and less improvised. We don’t play to a click either but we still try to be as steady and solid as we can. I don’t think this is something for everyone and I am not only talking about the fact that you need to know how to play your instrument really well, but also that some people just freak out in the studio even if they’re awesome players and you can’t spend a whole day playing the same song over and over because you always mess up some spots. You also need to accept that your record will not be perfect. We are always looking for the take where there is more balls than the others regardless of if there are more fuckups than another one. You establish a standard of “quality” playing wise and then, everything matching this you take it and choose the mustach-balls-to-the-wall-I-wanna-kill-people version.
You are one of many bands now that don’t have a bassist. Why the rejection of the four strings and the low-end?
Jona: It wasn’t meant to be that way at first though. But in the end I’m really happy it is.
What happened is that when we got that first gig offer, Louis (vox) made clear that he did not want to learn my shit riffs and have to sing at the same time and that he’d like to focus on being the frontman and for once, enjoy such an intense sound being “instrument-free”…So I did not really have another choice since for me it was really important to stay as a trio. Less egos involved, much more practical in terms of logistics, no other dude playing and messing up everything…I still wanted to be able to sound like 3 musicians and be able to control my 2 guitar amps and my bass amp separately in order to compensate the fact that we were only two musicians. The solution came with a massive custom pedal board and this works really well. It has its downsides as well but it was really challenging to be able to create some atmospheres and write some epic instrumental 12 minutes tracks only being 2. It does change the way your write and think music though, it’s really interesting. I could not imagine a band like Converge or The Secret or Unsane without a bass player. It’s not about not wanting a bass player but how to do without one. It’s just a different approach and therefore, a different songwriting.
How much “crowd-fighting” does Louis actually get up to during a show? Have things ever got nasty?
Jona: Quite a lot. It always starts at the first song of the set. Most of the time he is not even on stage, like a cowboy with his cows he is going outside the venue and in the toilets looking for people to pull them to the front of the stage and then push the ones in the back against the ones in the front making them understand who’s the Boss. Then everything is unpredictable with him. It has happened a few times that the whole drum kit was down the stage not even before the end of the first song because…well, he decided it should be that way. Sometimes he can even convince / force people to undress and he would exchange his clothes with them during the show. He can also decide to literally choose you to be his ride, climbing on your back and never going off of it until you fall on the ground. He does not realize he’s doing that though. He’s just in another dimension and he is danger for others as well as for himself.
He got several injuries on his body that have left decent scars but he never notices before the end of the show. Nothing broken yet though. I think he has hurt a few people several times but not to the point where there was blood or anything. Actually he did broke a nose pretty seriously (the girl had needed a surgical intervention) but it was no glorious at all. There was a big roll of gaffer tape on stage and he threw it away and, poor girl, she was seated in the back of the room, not even watching the show and she got Gaffer-facialized.
What is the music scene like in your native Switzerland? Are there any bands that you personally recommend?
Jona: There is a high quality level of bands in Switzerland and considering the population of this country I think there are quiet a lot of bands. I think there is a certain “swiss made” going on in underground music and this for decades. Coroner, Celtic Frost, The Young Gods, Samael, Knut…and this is just to name the few ones that have either started a whole scene or creating something that has been an influence or new breath to other scenes…
There is a certain Swiss attitude when it comes to being in band that certainly has some downsides like, a lot of band do not see the point or don’t want to sacrifice their social position or their comfort to tour although they could easily be a full-time touring band just because their music is so good, tasty and original. The goodside of it is that nobody feels the need to really prove anything to anyone or that they need to do this or that to become bigger. They just do what they want and feel and are really detached from any external elements that could disturb or influence your song writing and way of doing things. I also think that by tradition, Switzerland is a hard-working country, we like when the work is done and when it’s done as close as possible to perfection and most bands have a certain taste in what they do be it musically or in the aesthetic of the artworks and all other communication elements.
Here are some Swiss bands I strongly recommend: Abraham, Krüger, Rorcal, Cortez, Zatokrev, Euclidean, Wardhill, Elizabeth, Vuyvr, Kehlvin, Yog, The Fawn, Breakfast On A Battlefield, Unfold, Wellington Irish Black Warrior, Widderschins, Monoski, Disco Doom, Unhold, Ventura, Honey For Petzi and Shelving.
Due to your volatile nature, do you ever worry about pissing the wrong person off or worry that you may burn out too quickly?
Jona: Not at all, we, and especially our singer Louis don’t care. We do our thing the way we wanna do it and we made it pretty clear from the beginning. I mean, if someone decides to book us, he must know how our live shows are. Beside the music, the live performance is a big part of the reason we are being booked. We are never trying to be disrespectful or we never mean to break stuff but hey, that can happen. On the other hand, we’re always really thankful and appreciate that people are giving us some credits and give us the ability to make this band alive. We never mean to piss off anyone, but if we do, then we don’t care. We’re really smooth and easy to deal with. If there’s a problem, we talk about it and if we’re wrong we’ll admit it and solve it but if we feel like there’s no need to argue then we’ll tell whoever it is to fuck off.
You recently played a few dates with Nasum on their farewell tour? What was that like, and do you have any current tour plans?
Jona: First of all, it was an honor. The best thing is that the offer came out straight from some of the band members. We knew Jesper (the original bass player) because we’ve toured with his other band Burst back in 2009 and singer Keijo (Niinima from Rotten Sound) who we toured with in 2008. Everything happened because I wrote them an e-mail asking if they were interested in being our guests in Switzerland to record Commuters with us. We are currently on our 3rd headlining European tour. It’s only 15 shows in a row but we have to respect a certain schedule since Louis went back to his studies and also deal with The Oceans’s schedule. We will do another tour early april with 6 shows in the UK, more info soon!
Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions! Why should the readers of Ghost Cult check out Commuters?
Jona: Hard to answer without being cliché…I think Commuters is a daring and different album, something you haven’t heard really often. I am mainly talking about the atmosphere and the sound. It does sound very different from all the bands we are affiliated to and the song writing, as odd as the result is, is worth one listen at least. Then I’ll tell you that it’s a grower. Apparently, the more you listen to it the better it gets. That’s what people say and for me it’s a positive thing.
James Conway