Front 242

Torsten Schmidt

Today, we have the pleasure of welcoming members of the band, which, if I am not totally mistaken, was the first band I ever owned all the records that were officially on the market from when I was 12 or whatever. So, yes, we do have a bit of an interest here as well, so bear with us with a little childhood trauma and psychoanalysis and welcome to the stage Front 242. (Applause) Well, I hope if it’s okay if we do the interview in English, because my French totally sucks.

Daniel Bressanutti

Mine does too.

Torsten Schmidt

The reason I didn’t dare to introduce you guys with your names was, I’m pretty sure that up until booking the flights, we wouldn’t really know them, and then if you look at the record covers or credits, mostly you were credited with some sort of codenames. These days, people try to expose absolutely everything there is to know about them and a lot of things that are not to know about them in the public arena, on the internet, or whatever. Whereas, you went totally the opposite way. Can you give us a little bit of the idea behind what the concept behind that was?

Patrick Codenys

I’ll start. Hello, everybody.

Torsten Schmidt

How would you introduce yourself in the first place?

Patrick Codenys

We are just members of Front 242… my name is Patrick Codenys.

Daniel Bressanutti

I am Daniel.

Patrick Codenys

And to answer your question, Front 242 started not really like any other band, because some people in the band come from other artistic disciplines, like crafts and design. Also the technology in the ’80s was just blooming, especially the synthesizer at a cheap price, affordable, and that was also the trigger of electronic music entering a more popular era. At the time, I remember it was more important for us to develop a logo, to develop a strong image, like an advertisement company or something of that kind. Because of the way we had to handle music with the type of machines we had, it was very rigorous and we needed a lot of discipline, so there was no time for the rock & roll bullshit stereotypes, like tattoos, piercings and girls.

So, it was just very manual and complicated machines for us at the time, very stiff mathematic type of machines, so the whole attitude was based on a discipline because that was the only way to make it. So, very little reference to rock, blues, or any Anglo-Saxon genres. The band was more inspired by architecture, because architecture has also similar structural ways of handling artistic elements, or elements that would fit better for us into our type of approach of the music. Influenced by cinema, also, because those machines had a dreaming way of bringing sounds to life although it was difficult.

So, we were very away from the classical, like I said, American or English way of approaching music. And it was also important, coming from Brussels, Belgium, which is the kind of country with a very small background… it was very open to assimilate other cultures and bring everything together.

Basically, when we started it was more like an incorporated or a logo, no need to bring the people a hat. In that matter it was closer to certain DJs, a live DJ set, or people who are more working through an image, rather than really their own personal star feelings. I’m not going to keep on talking about this, but this is basically to answer your question about the logo – it’s really linked with the fact that it’s a concept.

Daniel Bressanutti

When you see products, because when we began our music was a product that we had to bring to the public, and when you go and buy Red Bull, you don’t care who is the boss that makes it or anything, you are interested in the product. Not putting in phrases on who we are, the name of the guys... draw the people in by your image, you let them dream… Out of the product, they can take whatever they want. If you tell them, “It’s that guy that makes it, he is that old, he likes this that kind of stuff,” you remove a lot of possibilities for them to imagine what your music is saying. If you say, “I like guitar music,” then maybe there won’t be interested in your music at all any more.

The mystery of not knowing who is behind the products is an interesting concept and it is not used too much even today. You know everything about Amy Winehouse and things like that, and it would be maybe better not to know that because you will find all the things that you want in the music more then, and it maybe won’t degrade. When you listen to the music, it will not color the music or the packaging around music. That was another reason why we didn’t want people to know who we are.

Torsten Schmidt

So, in the first place, you have this enigmatic characteristic to lure people into getting into it a little more, but at the same time you do offer that projection to people to put in there everything that they could possibly imagine. But at the same time, how did that tie in with the advent of new technologies that probably called for a different approach? You said earlier that synthesizers were becoming more affordable, but at the same time, I remember I was far away from being able to afford an Emulator or something that you guys were using. Far, far away. Now we are so used to getting the emulation of whatever, can you from a synth-lover’s point of view describe the picture of that sense?

Patrick Codenys

An Emulator is about the price of a car, and I decided not to have a car but to have a machine. There are a lot of people who have cars here and would probably be able to buy an Emulator in the same sense. This was very particular. Anyway, to come back to the technology of the time, when you are in the early ’80s and have these new machines coming in front of you, and you are living in Brussels, you don’t have the same feeling as a guy living in New York or a guy living in Kingston.

You don’t want necessarily to do reggae music or to do underground, urban music, rock music or whatever. You have a specific sensitivity and your chance is that in front of you, you have a machine that is also a sort of bastard, in the meaning that it doesn’t have a father, it doesn’t have a mother, there is no reference. In ’81 a synthesizer is a black box with knobs. You don’t have to play guitar with it, you don’t have to try to be Jefferson Airplane or any other band. You have a new machine, a new concept, you can start from scratch.

This is an opportunity for us. We felt maybe here we have a machine that is going to be able to express something of our culture because this machine is as naked as our musical culture. And when I speak about Brussels, it doesn’t tell you anything, because there are no bands coming from Brussels. Maybe more now, but there wasn’t. And so you think, “Here I have a chance to create a new aesthetic, to create a new concept, a new vision of music because I have an instrument that doesn’t offer any reference.”

You know as well as I do that in blues, rock, jazz, there are recipes – bass, guitar, whatever. There are recipes. And even electronic music today still has a lot of Anglo-Saxon bands have that reflex to bring electronic music into a rock feeling, and we have some stereotypes like that, too, you cannot deny the importance of the Anglo-Saxon background. But nevertheless, at the time, and I say this because there is a lot of Spanish people in the room – those instruments have the ability to maybe bring your expression that is linked to your roots or your feelings or your culture, more than any other musical instrument, and I believe there is no rules. So this is basically the way we approached it.

Through time, every period of time had its technology because at that time there were not too many softwares on the market, there were just mostly hardwares, and the machines were very specific. So, basically, we did almost one album per technology. You could say the first album was analog, second one was analog but another development, third album was DX7, algorithm, first digital, and each time we were starting an album it was basically partly the instruments who were trying to tell us what expression, what aesthetic we could try to find in that machine.

Today, a lot of software is developed just to give you what the audience wants. At the time, you had to create your own aesthetic and that was something very interesting because, even today, those are good reflexes, to not take for granted what you have in front of you, even if it sounds good. And we’re not going to go through all the campaigns that we did but every one was a different concept visually because there is a parallel with the graphic arts because we come from Amiga up to the Macintosh now or whatever you use, PCs, so there is also a colorful graphic art and the whole imagery that went with the technology. What is very important is the creative process, I think, and you shouldn’t be blinded by what is in music, actually.

At the time, like I said, cinema was an inspiration, architecture, craft, interior design. Very often in arts when you try to do something from scratch, it is a matter of being able to translate things. Translating emotions, translating an aesthetic. I see here there are some guys that exploit contemporary art objects. An object can be a source of inspiration. For us at the moment, at a certain time, it is the technology of the TV and sampling, you leave the world of notes and you enter the world of sounds, which is wider, so there was a lot of potential at the time.

Torsten Schmidt

This absence of history, to a certain degree, was a big chance for you as well because it was mostly uncharted territory that you were entering. I am kind of grateful for understanding, through you guys probably, when early in this century or millennium when people like the Black Strobe guys started sampling you, I finally understood how heavily people from the soul and funk background were opposing hip-hop in the early ’80s because it was drawing back from that reference. Now, with always heading towards a futuristic approach and trying to take things further, how did that feel for you when you first realized like, “Oh gosh, we are part of the historical context now?”

Patrick Codenys

It makes you feel old.

Daniel Bressanutti

You don’t feel like that, even sometimes when you read it, it is hard to believe. You know your history, you know why you used some machines, because it was the best way to translate what you are. If I had a guitar, I would have done rock music. And also, you don’t have to forget that we are still not musicians. I never wanted to learn to play keyboard, because I think it is good to be able to play keyboard, but when you want to translate things in another way, not being able to play an instrument is a good thing, because you don’t fall into stereotypes. The translation of what we wanted to do as Europeans – because as Europeans in the ’80s who wanted to start music – there is nothing that enabled you to create something new, except the machines or synthesizers. If you want to take a dulcimer or pick up a guitar, then automatically you would be drawn to that. That’s why, even today, when people say, “You did that,” there was no other way so we don’t see that.

Torsten Schmidt

Before we go deeper into this contrast, because you mentioned before the Anglo-Saxon influence, which I guess, is pretty strong for everyone in this room – probably to make it a little less abstract, could we go back in time and play something from the starting points and take it from there?

Patrick Codenys

To make a short introduction, you’re going to hear that most of the beats and the way we do music is quite metronomic because it is linked with the instruments of the time and we always wanted to work with limits. It’s very important. At the time, there were limits. To work within a limit and take a few instruments to decide what you going to do has always been a way of working for us.

Daniel Bressanutti

Do you want to start with the really early stuff or not?

Torsten Schmidt

How early do you mean?

Daniel Bressanutti

I can go back on the experimental things I did in my room or things like that, and I can go to the live stuff that we do now today.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess, people would be pretty interested in hearing those experiments as well, and when I say early, I mean the first commercial releases, talking somewhere between ’81 and ’83.

Daniel Bressanutti

That’s when we started. Front 242 as my first band and my only band.

Torsten Schmidt

First love and never split.

Daniel Bressanutti

I can play something from the first album then. I don’t know what it is.

(music: Front 242 – “Art & Strategy”)

It is 30-years old, of course, and going back in that time, you see that what we always wanted was to not just to be making noise. We were influenced, of course, by all the musique concrète and all that stuff, but we wanted to bring a popular aspect to the music, because something we missed in abstract music was rhythm. At the time there was research in that domain, but they didn’t go into what we called dance. You had abstract music with a rhythm, but it was never “dance,” and that is what we wanted to introduce to music. It was research, but also a research that would speak to the people and we thought the way to speak to the people with noise was through rhythm. Which is still something that is done a lot today. If you listen to Pan Sonic, for instance, they have all bases of incredible noise and they simplify it – which is not a nice way to say it – but they put in that rhythm so it still speaks to the people. If you remove the rhythm, it could be noise… like anyone else would be able to do it. That’s what at that time we tried to do, take all the research, the collage that we did, and always put something in there that makes it simple.

(music: Front 242 “Controversy Between” (Aerial Version))

Torsten Schmidt

Well, speaking about the times of Geography, which interestingly enough you pronounce in the French way...

Daniel Bressanutti

Any language can do it. For us, there is not one way to pronounce it and especially Geography, the first album, we wanted to say that if someone wants to say “geography,” no problem.

Torsten Schmidt

There are shitloads of samples on there, pronouncing it in loads of different languages, so it is hard to imagine, but there was this time when all you knew about a project was the physical thing that you had in your hand, and obviously, you were not part of teenage magazines or most music magazines or whatever. It was just people having the actual records and other people telling you about records and passing that on. You couldn’t picture where these guys were actually come from in the first place.

Patrick Codenys

At the same time, you don’t know where you go either because you are really worked like a cell in your own basement, let’s say, and you are limited also with your instrument. Most of those tracks are two or four-track recorders, your machines have no memory presets to save your sounds. So, you are doing your sounds on a modular and there was no way to store it. Basically, you go ahead and you stay in a very closed world. We haven’t spoken about the live presentation, but in live, the problem remained the same, there was no formula like a rock band or something. I remember going to the States and a guy saying, “Here is your riser for your drummer,” and we said, “We have no drummer.” He said, “Where do you want to put the amps and the guitars?” And we said, “We have no guitars.” The guy said, “You’re not a band.” In the ’80s it was very hard to force your way, but like I said, it is discipline, but that is mostly what happened.

Torsten Schmidt

Before we touch on discipline, can we have something off Geography that is a little bit more more beat-driven?

Patrick Codenys

What you are going to hear here is mostly live sets, so it is eight tracks, plus pictures linked to what we do on stage.

(music: Front 242 – unknown)
(music: Front 242 – “Take One”)
(music: Front 242 – “Headhunter”)
(music: Front 242 – “Take One (Rebuilt)”)

Torsten Schmidt

OK, we were jumping about a bit in time there for a second. That last piece came out in 1983, if I’m not mistaken, and you said that is the track that took you to America, so we’re definitely talking pre-Chicago house, pre-Detroit techno and all of that. Nevertheless, obviously, you can totally hear the direct connection between the two. Can you paint us a picture of you getting over there? You’re there in Brussels and that is one thing, and at the time we are all bombarded with these images of America. Getting there and also getting there as an artist.

Daniel Bressanutti

So it is only our second record. We did one album, we do the second EP, and straight away, the guys from Brussels are invited to do the United States, which was at the time fantastic because not a lot of European bands, except Anglo-Saxon bands from England, had that chance. For us, it was great that somebody in the United States heard that track and wanted us to go there. That was fabulous, but the rest of the time when we were there, it was surprising, in fact, that there was a connection between what we try to do as Belgians – I’m Italian but it’s Europe, I suppose – but doing in Belgium, and we that found a connection straight away in the United States. From there, we met a lot of the people we talk about that came to the gigs. It was incredible, in fact.

Patrick Codenys

I think we should also speak about the Detroit thing and what was probably interesting for those people when they saw Front 242 is that we had the formula live with electronic drums, but a guy standing, and two singers and a keyboard. It was very energetic because, on stage, we had army uniforms and it was really full of energy. It was not like a lot of people were saying, electronic bands are cold, because you only had guys behind computers, here it was very danceable. That’s also something in electronic music. You could hear some dance tracks with Kraftwerk, more or less, but our tracks were very danceable. And also, we had to force the technology, because most of the PAs were for rock bands, like I said – some even in mono. So, you really force something, and even for those people who have a tradition of having rock bands every day in their clubs, to suddenly have totally different configurations and electronic guys, dancing, whatever, and these kind of sounds must have been something that brought them other ideas or impressed them or something like that. The possibility to come and play electronic music live is a huge step ahead, because it made people understand that electronic music was not only computer-freak or a machine-freak type of music.

Daniel Bressanutti

Also, the way we misused synthesizers or rhythm to do the music there, we also misused the PA systems. Usually, because the PAs were whatever, we thought it was better not to try and make good music on the mono speakers. We tried to surprise the people, so what we did was misuse the technology of the PA, to our advantage, of course. We had a reputation to play very loud, but when the PA sucks, make that also a part of your music. Make it good. There is no accident that is bad in music, there is never anything that for us is bad. Even today, if there is a problem with the PA, I try to see what good can it do to the show we bring. If I see that by pushing the drums it sounds better, then that’s what we do. And that’s what we did all the time in the United States, and that’s also maybe why we left an imprint, because we always went up to the limits of what people would not expect you to do.

Torsten Schmidt

Now, when you are using a drummer on stage that uses triggered drums, it is slightly opposite to that machine ethos of using a sequenced drummer. How do you get the two together, how do you dehumanize the human on a stage again?

Daniel Bressanutti

It was always an addition. It was a percussion player, that’s why we never wanted anyone to sit down and play a bass drum, because that is the machine’s thing. The bass is a machine, so with the limit of the tracks that we had at that point, we always used machines to do the basic thing and – even if the people didn’t play, the music still stood there. That was one of the basics of Front 242. One of the first ideas was, “If it’s playback, we don’t care. We are here to put a show down. We are here to surprise people by using smoke, whatever.” In the beginning for us it was a complete package, it was not always the music, there was a lack of light or too much light, but we also used army smoke or police tear gas in the concert room, so that the people who came to a Front 242 gig had a complete experience. They were like, “What just happened to me?” Today, you can’t do that, because you would just get sued.

Patrick Codenys

An element that is also important is the education of the ear of the people. In the ’80s, when you are playing with a rhythm box, people are so used to hearing real drummers that they would say, “This is not human, it is too mathematical, we don’t like it.” Today, it is almost the opposite. When you hear a drummer, you think the guy’s not on time, because your ear has been educated through the evolution of electronic music to become more mathematic. We listen to music in a more rational way. Before you had a human touch, which was great, and a lot of electronic acts now are trying to go back to that sort of human touch, but it was more conflicting at the time. At the time, when you had stiff electronic music like that, a lot of people rejected it systematically. They even called us “disco whatever.” You have to keep in context. People educate their ears very differently. When you listen to electronic music, even today, it is very sophisticated samples, totally assimilated, so your audience is changing also.

Daniel Bressanutti

And what we also used at that time, we did playback and were not afraid to show the people, so the tape recorder was on stage, but center stage, where the singer would be. And we had a lot of fights, even, with promoters about that because they expected a live band to play live and we were really one of the bands that pushed the limits. Now, today it is ordinary, but I think if you create music, the things you don’t want people to know are sometimes an advantage. Using tape machine, showing the people that if you don’t press play, nothing is happening, is a good thing.

Torsten Schmidt

To which degree was there a connection or an interaction with the poppier side of things? Because when you talk about banging, percussive electronic drums, there is this famous scene on the Live in Hamburg video of Depeche Mode, hitting on these huge metal sounds and that has an incredibly powerful moment of futurism and very archaic at the same time.

Patrick Codenys

I would make a reference to industrial music, which existed before the ’80s, like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, those are industrial bands using noise, organizing noise, and using metal. I think Depeche Mode, and I think Front 242 have vulgarized it in their music.

Torsten Schmidt

Which is not necessarily a bad thing for you?

Patrick Codenys

No, because at the time in the ’80s, it was important to try to touch people with electronic music because otherwise it never can bloom… You have to make concessions. I remember on our albums on ten, 12 tracks, there were maybe seven, eight tracks of research – clumsy, bizarre things – but also you needed to have three or four good songs to drive the album that people would at least catch your concept and enter into what you are doing. And then, after listening to the catchy songs or gimmick songs, maybe go more into research. And even today, I think electronic music is still in a sort of area where there is a lot of research that can be done on all levels. I would like it to experiment more. The problem is that, today, there is a culture of results. All the software is made for that. It is a culture of quick results. You guys are artists, and artists need their whole lives to develop their vision or emotion. I often say that at 50 years old, if you’re a painter, you’re considered a young painter. Let time go and experiment. I think it is very important to be able to go and do research.

Torsten Schmidt

Research is one thing, but as you mention the live element, a lot of that show was about agileness, strength, aggressiveness and youth, almost tying in with a cult of youth, which especially in Europe, also has a weird connotation.

Patrick Codenys

Yes, I know what you mean. We need to be extreme, otherwise you don’t go through the ‘80s in electronic music. If you’re not extreme, if you are not military… I mean, at the time you don’t have to forget a lot of films like Alien, Blade Runner, even Rambo… In Hollywood, you can have aggression and energy, it was allowed. But when you bring it to music, because music somehow is quite conservative and we were coming from progressive music, if you want to shake the establishment, you have to be extreme. And we have been called fascists, Nazis, whatever, just because of that energy, that smoke on stage, there was very strong imagery. We based a lot of things on propaganda, commandos, raids – these were all ways to enter very drastically and very aggressively into that world of music, which was made of, “Who is the best drummer, who is the best guitarist?”

Daniel Bressanutti

And also what made Front 242 more than the music, was the live thing. If we had not played live, we would not be what we are today because playing live gives you the possibilities of going further. A record is a record, it records something you do. Live, you can test a lot of stuff musically, also the way you present yourself. I would say that live is a more important part of what Front 242 music has become or was after that. What we tried to do was translate the energy that we felt when playing live to records, which was always the main critique, I think that at the time the record is great, but it does not sound like Front 242 live. And that is where we have made all of our advances. Good bands today still push the boundaries live more than when you sit in your room doing music with a computer. I think playing live could be the main influence on how you make music after that.

Torsten Schmidt

And just for the record, that doesn’t mean you have to know all the blues scales by heart that there ever were?

Daniel Bressanutti

No, just like I said, if you play me a note, I still can’t say what it is, and I don’t care.

Torsten Schmidt

People have been seeing the slide shows there, which are mostly covers of records, stickers and T-shirt motifs, this sort of thing. One interesting thing is that you have been called many things, actually the eclecticism from what you draw from, it ranges from futurist movements to communist propaganda to Nazi-type issues. Now, could you probably paint us a bit of the historical context in which it happens because there was a little bit of paranoia going on in the ’80s period?

Daniel Bressanutti

There was a feeling that it was the end of the world, almost, and we played on that because it also touched us. We also had the impression that this is the last record because maybe tomorrow we will all be dead. There was the Cold War… everything. For us, I don’t know why… because we are graphic artists, there was no camp for us, we could play with all imagery. There is, of course, something that you don’t cross, you don’t put Adolf [Hitler] there, because that may be going too far, but for me, there was no limits going into communist, fascist, because, with graphics, we don’t care. The image is more important than the message of the image.

Patrick Codenys

The Cold War, also, when you look at it, it is binary, and, like we were talking before, it forces you to make decisions. There is also a state of emergency, which can be sometimes a good way to work because you are challenged constantly, you always have to find. There is a challenge with instruments, and if you are an artist, you are kind of a sponge to the world, or a mirror to the world, so you take the whole political situation, you take the whole hope and distress of the world. Like I said before, very often when you have ideas you try to translate things through your body. At the time, like Daniel said, there was that tension and that tension was working also with the challenge we had with instruments. With the limits we had, it was very edgy, very sharp. Today, you still can do it if you limit yourself, but if you just go for a weapon of neat applications or a way to the music, you basically have everything in front of your eyes.

Daniel Bressanutti

And it was also at that time, the imagery influences the music, and the music influenced the imagery. I suppose, if we made music in the ’60s, the flower thing, imagery and that music was linked. There was “Peace and Love” and “Stop War” and everything, and all the music created from ’66 to ’70 was very influenced by that. We are just the hippies of the ’80s, I suppose, because what influenced us was the political climate and the images from the groups.

Torsten Schmidt

And as every budding hip-hop MC knows, controversy does help just a little bit in helping to get yourselves known.

Daniel Bressanutti

Yes, we did stuff that was daring. We played gigs and had 30 guys behind us with flags. It can be a fascist image, it can be as you want it, and that’s what people did. But we did festivals and during the complete gig, they would stand on stage behind us, like in Nuremberg. We wanted to be the soundtrack and the film of the music business and there is only one way to achieve it, it is to make mistakes or to do everything you think is right to get there.

Torsten Schmidt

And, apart from all that at the end you might have, separating the playfulness and controversy, it is a little bit of fun also, too. Like how people are Pavlov’s dogs and you feed that kind of thing and they will go off.

Daniel Bressanutti

What we never wanted people to know was who we are because when you do something like that there is cynicism, there is humor. We are quite funny, but I don’t have a limit in what I can laugh about, what I can play with. There is no limit. But that is never translated in the music or imagery, so when we did something we knew very well, for us, it was humor or it was serious. That’s what we wanted with the music and the image, people can take it and make what they want with it. Of course, if your tendency is more extreme right, you think Front 242 is. If you are tendency is more ecological, you will think, “Wow, this is a great ecological statement.” We have seen with the Charter of Human Rights thing… we play that now as a video on one of our pieces. And it was not our choice; the video guy we work with has total freedom – and we have seen the reactions of the people who think that we make a statement and it is just a case of you can believe it or not. I won’t say what I do. But using that wisdom for Front 242 music, drew people in and we got big applause just because we did that.

Patrick Codenys

I think it is a matter of just taking a stance, even as an artist today. What is difficult, and this is why I spoke about research, is that it gives you time to analyze things and consider things. We are in a culture where there is a lot of recycling… When people think, “I’m going to take dub and blues and mix it with hip-hop, recycle three different genres and it brings something new.” But somehow it has to be deeper than that. You have to go to the essence. Technology is blinding you more easily, because you are quick to a result. It is important to try to find the essence of things whatever your direction, to maybe come back to something more substantial. Because what people are looking for is sometimes leaders, substance, more than form. There are a lot of things now on the market to allow you to do almost anything, but that substance is really something that we have to go and try to find in our daily life.

Daniel Bressanutti

Another thing that I think is important is that when I do music I always, in the back of my head, want to know, “Will this go out live or will this be received in a living room?” And the music that I make must translate, already in the back of my head, very well for that, otherwise it is a no-go to me. And I think if you do music today, if you do not think about how it will be presented or received, already something is missing. You see that with bands like Daft Punk – their live show, there wasn’t one. Everything has been taken to a direction where that thing becomes even more important than the creation of the music at first. The end result should always be a multimedia spectacle. When you do the music you have to think, “If ever I have to play live, how do I do it?” If you do not know already when you do the music, there is maybe a little problem. For me, that is my philosophy. Doing a bassline, I always want to know if I play it on a big PA, how will it sound? If I can’t translate it, I drop it.

Torsten Schmidt

To which degree do you think that you changed your live show? Because in the first years, it would be something very close to a scene from Cruising, it would appeal to a totally different crowd, but your crowd also grows with you, there are new people coming with you and you can’t pretend to be this young commando unit climbing down whatever kind of building. How did you have to change that?

Patrick Codenys

You have the help of some technology, like projection for instance, more accurate light shows – you bring the edgy part on other levels. Live, the guys on stage, the two singers are still dancing, they come back in the dressing-room, as if they played three football matches, so there is still that physical part that’s very important, because we do not disassociate electronic and physical acts.

Daniel Bressanutti

And we also don’t try to hide. We are a band that is 30-years old, almost. So I don’t see myself trying to do music that is just 2008, because then you erase the history. We are a little bit prisoner of what we were and you cannot fight that, so we play with it. But we know the limitations of what we are, and any band that is that old and that does not want tomorrow to do a classical record just to prove to people they can do something else, will know you have to stay what you are. The biggest frustration is not being Front 242, it’s not to be someone else sometimes.

Torsten Schmidt

Do you think it is harder now not to make that stance? We called it earlier a binary world, with the blocks and everything was very black and white, and you have appealed to a lot of people and groups that were more on the sidelines of society, as in the gay community, for example. Now, 20 years on, we tend to think that it is slightly more liberal, and it is probably not that easy to provoke any more.

Patrick Codenys

Yes and no. I think that humankind stays humankind, a person stays a person, and as a person you make your choices every day. Do not forget that music is also still an artistic discipline that is very primitive, it is not like visuals. In visuals, you have lots of models and codifications that everybody knows. In music, you have very little symbols – it is still a very instinctive and intuitive and primitive. So that ability you can have, you can make your choices, you don’t have to be blinded by a software, you can oppose yourself to the software. We always come back with our old reflexes to use collage or do things differently, or to drop a software because it is telling us too much what to do. You can rebel against any system, today maybe more than ever, so I think if you come back to the human qualities of each other, inside of us, if we are not facing a screen but we are facing the world, I think if you have that attitude and you only have the tools in front of you, then you can basically do whatever you want to do.

Torsten Schmidt

As a member of the team said a couple of years ago: “I really hate Logic because it forces me to think as a musician, whereas everything I ever wanted to do was be anything but, but still create music.”

Daniel Bressanutti

This is an attitude, and it can be tough because you don’t have access to the Roland library type sounds or this type of sound and you don’t have as quickly a result because it’s tougher to do something different. But also, you develop your personality and music, like I said, being so primitive is really a good background to develop your personality more than any visual art, to me.

Daniel Bressanutti

And today, for me, the biggest problem I have is that everything is possible. And it’s the lack of being able to do something that was the push behind the creativity... Today, there are too many choices, in fact. As a musician, you have to put yourself into a challenge position and say, “I will create only with this or with that,” because if you don’t, you are overwhelmed by possibilities. You never finish your projects.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you fight that feeling of being overwhelmed because, as you said, you stand there and go, “Gosh, I’ve got tons and tons of terabytes of sound files to manage?”

Daniel Bressanutti

And even every day a new plug-in comes out, a new compressor, whatever, synthesizer. Sometimes I do that and you get pushed back. You say, “This is out, I’ll wait, I’ll buy it and do this on the drums,” and you never stop. I think when we did pieces with two and four tracks and put everything in those two tracks. Also today, you can create in phases, you can do a bassline and then one month later do the drums. That was not a possibility before, you had to do your complete song with what you had around you and record to the finish.

Patrick Codenys

One of the keys, I think, is to spend more time about your creation process. I always take the same examples, and Daniel was mentioning that also, in the ’80s when you had the synthesizer I compared it to a black box. And it really was a black box at the time, and the people who were building those machines really didn’t know where those machines were going to lead them, so they needed the feedback from the musicians and to hear certain releases of records to say, “A Moog can do this, while a Korg MS-20 can do that,” because people use it a certain way. With time, the music was more and more formatted and it is more like software designers who started to decide what would be the sound of tomorrow, rather than the hardware designer or the musician.

One of the things that has changed also is what I call the interface. To give you an example, when you’re watching TV in the ’60s it was black and white, but people had to make an emotional and intellectual effort to see the color in the image. Same with photography – you had 24 or 36 exposures and could not be wrong, you had to do a choice at the base, because the frame in your 36 pictures, if you had one or two good, it was a miracle. Today people take 3,000 pictures and some just put them on their hard drive without even having the time to watch them. This is what technology tells you: the interface, which means the effort between the human and the machine, before forced the people to have ideas and to try to extract something from the machine, but also be influenced by the machine. It was a tougher but more interesting relationship. Today, the screen is so perfect, your sound is so perfect, that you can be lazy.

Torsten Schmidt

We are definitely leading the topic towards sound design and the actual process, how would you go about it? Do you start with a simple waveform?

Patrick Codenys

Very often, it comes back to the basics. For me, it is hard to say, it is cultural. You know sounds because you are very attentive with your ears and pay attention to all the sounds that exist in nature, and sometimes in sound design the criteria is that it has to sound different to everything that I’ve heard before. That could be one way of doing it. Or trying to be purist, or trying to isolate a sound from an environment and trying to work with that to see if this sound is living alone. Or, like I say, making parallels with other artistic disciplines, or why couldn’t you start a song with saying, “I’m thinking about, I don’t know, jealousy, and I am going to try and translate jealousy into the music.” Then you are forced to put codes into your sound design, like it is in visuals, actually, and there are different techniques. Some people would just like to have a PA in their room and play it full blast if you have a temper to be somebody crazy, maybe you can record your whole record like Iggy Pop, have a huge PA in front of you and a microphone and record it that way. There is no rule. I come back to that human feeling – if you let yourself go into your true and real impressions and emotions, you cannot be wrong.

Daniel Bressanutti

And one rule that never dominated the way that we created music is a rule of notation, the 12 notes. A lot of the time, we do pure noise and in pure noise, if you let three, four, five oscillators turn, at one point there will be a melody created because of the sweeps and everything, and if your ear is there at the moment, that can be the start of something new. It is never about the keyboards or the strings or anything. When I want to start a song, it never starts with notes, it starts with me programming something on the synthesizer that sometimes is not even correct, there is no scale, and after that adding the notes makes that also become what it is. Not being a musician, in fact, for me is my big advantage.

Torsten Schmidt

In that sense, I guess, especially in western culture we do, also how to fight these inhibitions of being a real musician and at the same time deeming something worthy. As you say, if you use especially something modular, you come across so many of what you could call it “lucky accidents,” but so many new movements…

Patrick Codenys

This is the magic of synthesis. It can bring you into fields that you cannot imagine. Like you said, you don’t have to be a musician… if you train your ear to everything, to the world of sound, then you will localize that in what you are doing with the sounds. This is what we think, there are tons of ways of doing music.

Torsten Schmidt

What I was trying to say is that I think it is really hard for us to take some ownership, or pride even, in connection with this machine, I kind of created this, because the very notion of being a creator is something really high. How do you overcome that?

Daniel Bressanutti

You don’t because at some point you will discover that it is an asset. I work a lot with classically trained musicians who play violin, classical instruments, and for them, my lack of musicality and the way I work machines, they think this is incredible and they have as much respect for me as if I could play violin really well. It’s the same when I see a guy play violin, it’s the association with the two things… I see what I cannot do as an asset. It depends on a lot of people, on who you meet. If, of course, somebody wants to jam and thinks you will come and play a bassline, it’s wrong, but a lot of people don’t. They expect you to stay who you are and they know who you are and how you work.

Also what I realized working with “real” musicians is that they do not care what you used to do your music, there is no bad machine for me or them. I can use whatever machine I get to make something interesting. And that is the other thing about today, is that everybody is looking for the best synthesizer that does this that does that, the biggest bass, how many different sounds it can make, and you can take an old piano and put it through some re-modulate effects and that’s something incredible.

For me, there is no basic instrument. I can take a Weevil – I don’t know if people know what it is, it is those little circuit band boxes that make noise – and go and do an improvisation concert with a percussion player and a violin. I have just had that box and that is all I use with a delay, and you can create really great stuff with any machine.

Torsten Schmidt

And probably on the notion of machine, people tend to forget that especially in, let’s say, the 1600s and even today, a really well-built violin is an amazing piece of technology, and you can use it in all sorts of different ways.

Daniel Bressanutti

It is just wood and four strings. Some synthesizers today are just four knobs – if you know how to use the four knobs you can make anything. It depends, if you want to make a bassline, you’re fucked, but if you know this machine can make this kind of noise, and you use the abilities of the machine, anything is possible. People take a synthesizer and look for the Moog bass and when you take a synthesizer you have to look… When I don’t know a synthesizer and want to buy it, I download the manual, read the manual, see the technical stuff and know if it is something I want to have. I don’t have to hear it, I don’t care about the sound, I just want to know what it can do.

Torsten Schmidt

That’s kind of an interesting approach, especially since today a lot of electronic noises are already connotated in some kind of way, because this one reminds you of that, this one reminds you of that, that’s a sound that so and so used, and so on. And also, at the same time you can get away in the most boring TV advertisements with a lot more drastic sounds than anything you would have played on stage 15 years ago. So, how important do you deem the fact to find your very own sounds or where do you stand on presets?

Daniel Bressanutti

The problem is you never do, the older you get the more references you have. I can hear a band today, after each song I can say… and it’s a bad thing, it’s really bad, because I cannot create music because I have too much… I have a big library in my head, I do a bassline and I am like, “That sounds like that band, Can, or whatever,” my library is so big that it is annoying. Everybody here will have that at one point in their life where they don’t know where to go, because it sounds like something he has done or something somebody else has done. So, today I listen to music every day and a lot of people are beyond that limitation, but when you have the repertoire and the things we have done, it is very difficult to go and do, like I said, Pan Sonic’s music because they did it, Amon Tobin or whatever and that is a difficulty, I think, for everybody today, is to find a niche, that thing where I can live in the world of music.

Torsten Schmidt

Do you need a certain naivete in that creation process?

Patrick Codenys

I think that is a good word. In any form of art, I think, to see things like a child can help because it goes back to the roots, certain primal feelings. I think that helps but that is how you develop your personality. You ask maybe three or four times the same question, and you have to know what you are good at. You know what you’re good at when you have sex. You may as well have the same selection when you do music and decide this and that. Some people are very particular in certain domains, and the music can be like that, too… not being totally surrounded by software or whatever and you have around you, but really precise. What is your personality, what do you think you are good at?

Daniel Bressanutti

And how you analyze also, because whatever you do you recycle art and it is how good you recycle your influences that will draw people to say, “Wow, this is great!” Even not just music, images, everything has an influence on you, and a good creative guy today is a guy who recycles the best.

Torsten Schmidt

That is an awful lot of information in a very short time. Probably, we could take a second to let that simmer in and how about No Comment?

Daniel Bressanutti

Again, what I did is I took the original tracks, it was eight tracks and it is not mixed... It’s just the original tracks that come from the recorder, so I don’t know how it will sound.

Torsten Schmidt

And you still have the tapes stored?

Daniel Bressanutti

Yes, very badly, but you put them in the oven for some time, you cook them and they are all right again for one go. The way we recorded also, only the first two albums were done on eight-track, and all the rest we lost because the error we did was to believe in technology, and we did everything with computers. So we did it with Atari, and then Commodore 64, and we have all the disks but there is no way to get them back. On tape, we just recorded what we couldn’t put into the machine, which was the vocals.

Torsten Schmidt

You don’t have a little museum at home where you keep C64’s just for the purpose of digging these things out?

Daniel Bressanutti

No, and I wouldn’t be able to use them. I tried to, we bought an Atari 1040 and I couldn’t even use it.

(music: Front 242 – “No Comment” (Commando Mix))

Daniel Bressanutti

I just realized, in fact, it is what is on a recorder and that the DX7 which did the bassline is not there. But what you also see is that there were rhythm boxes and we played with the pitch on the rhythm boxes, which is something people could not believe. Now, you can do that every day, but at that time people were like, “What is this?” So, maybe I should look for a mix in another format. This is off a live thing, but there is no vocals if that is not a problem?

Torsten Schmidt

It is not a problem, but it is probably not a good lead into talking about your use of vocals. is there anything else you have with vocals to demonstrate?

Patrick Codenys

This is a song that started with sampling of, like. religious preachers. It is called “Welcome to Paradise” and the sampling actually is conducting the whole track.

(music: Front 242 – “Welcome to Paradise”)

Torsten Schmidt

Now, as with most of the more sample-based things, this obviously again is playing around with political notions. Now, when you are entering the arena of politics, obviously, you do put yourself into a lot of trouble easily, because either you get totally misunderstood or you get a lot of attention from the wrong people. How do you deal with that?

Patrick Codenys

You can express yourself, it is no problem. We always took the example at the time of Martin Scorsese and Taxi Driver. Because of this movie a guy became crazy about Jodie Foster and he tried to shoot Ronald Reagan. When you do a piece of art or a piece of music or whatever, you are not in control of the way the people interpret it, so basically it is the same situation. You do what you think you have to do and the way people have to take it is uncontrollable.

Daniel Bressanutti

We are also mostly really lucky because we were understood in a balanced way. In things like this, the Mormons, the young guys liked it because of that phrase “No sex until marriage” that is in there – and they really thought the message was what it said, and for us, it was the reverse. The same when we used Gadaffi or Farrakhan...

Torsten Schmidt

The Farrakhan one stirred a bit of controversy, especially in America.

Daniel Bressanutti

Yeah, of course, but again, the American people loved it – the young people of course, not the politicians.

Torsten Schmidt

On so many levels, there are a lot of parallels with what you were doing, not only because of sampling, but with people like the Bomb Squad and PublicEnemy did essentially the same thing.

Patrick Codenys

There was a notion of musical terrorists at the time, which you probably wouldn’t use today.

Torsten Schmidt

That is an interesting point, why do we do not use it today. We don’t we have to claim back the terrorist term from right-wing propaganda in America.

Patrick Codenys

I would, but you might very quickly be in a lot of trouble. A lot of people have been to the States, you can try to say for a joke that you have a bomb in your luggage, but they are going to nail you.

Daniel Bressanutti

There is less intelligence in terrorism and anti-terrorism today. We played with Islam in the same song, and we never had a problem, but if we do that today there are so many less intelligent people, we would get in trouble. And we are not the only one who says that, writers and everybody says it, you have less liberty to play with stereotypes today than you had ten years ago.

Torsten Schmidt

How does the paranoia today… compare to the paranoia and general climate of the Cold War?

Patrick Codenys

Again, in the ’80s, I think people were much more naive. Now, we have more information about anything that comes to you. You go on the web and you go on Wikipedia to try and figure out what is really the conflict or what people are trying to tell you, there is even too much information because you cannot make the difference between what is real and not real. So, again, I think selection is important, to be able to select and go to old values. It is a good thing that a lot of DJs go back to analog, for instance, it forces them to go back to another architecture and to rethink how would the base of that electronic music develop. Today, I think, there are lots of very interesting artists, and I am absolutely optimistic about the way things are going, there are so many creators, and I wouldn’t say it was better before, it was different.

Daniel Bressanutti

I think the barriers today are the same barriers we had, but we had also barriers of fighting the guitar and rock & roll culture. Today, you have the message and there are things you maybe cannot say, simply, but you still can because you are an artist – weave that in our music, arts or whatever, and you can bring it out. For an artist there is still no limit. If you do the stuff intelligently, you can bring out whatever you want.

Torsten Schmidt

Another interesting notion in the definition of artist is all this kind of music included or was a certain cult of the machinery – which also plays around with ideological things as well – but where do you deem the importance of your actual tool and where do you prevent yourself from fetishizing it?

Patrick Codenys

The tool is there to serve your ideas, not the other way around.

Daniel Bressanutti

And the way you use it as a fetish is to make people think it is more important than it really is. You use it and you know, but that is the whole mystery of the entire thing. We make the machines more important and mysterious than they really are, everybody here will know a machine when you know how to use it, it is nothing.

Patrick Codenys

Nothing has to be forever, it can be an open project. At some point, surely, you have to decide, here I will make a decision, but I like the fact of constructing and deconstructing the song. Don’t be afraid to break the magic, because rock music in general and popular music, is when people start to feel comfortable and there is something magic and something appealing. Strange enough, when that was happening we decided to break it down, but people function differently.

Daniel Bressanutti

And what we did when we created songs, we used modular synthesizers, and the songs were created in the same way. We did modules and sometimes one song on an album is in fact three different songs that we spliced together. One of the big things when you’re not a musician is that the chorus can be anything, you don’t care, you have a good verse and a good chorus somewhere else, you take it and just splice it and that’s how we build the songs, too. It was like Lego. A lot of the songs were built like that in the early stages. Still, today, I never work a composition out, I just record ideas, and sometimes when I want a result, I just go and put the ideas together and I have a song.

Patrick Codenys

What is nice sometimes also is when you work with collage, for instance – because at that time we had to cut tapes and bring it back and there weren’t programs like Ableton or whatever plug-ins to alter the pitch or fine tune your sound – so basically, when you have a collage and you sample, you have to live with it the way it is, not always trying to adapt everything to your song. I think that is sometimes an opportunity to send the song somewhere else, if you leave it the way it is.

Audience member

Do you guys focus on tension and release as well, as much as just going wherever the music takes you and wherever the sounds reveal where you want to go? Because in electronic music, I notice a lot of the time it is like a build- up and then a release, back down again. In terms of the direction of your music, is it based on tension and release?

Patrick Codenys

This links to the whole period of time, and how that after a period of time, music has stereotypes also. A lot of those tracks start off as a sample and then the bassline starts, then builds up and up, that is why we are still more attracted to the early works, like Geography. It is important to go to the core of what you want to do. I prefer to try and find the right sound, one after the other, rather than to build. Because if you build, you come into that new trash, crap darkwave electronica and with those guys screaming. I am not too much into that kind of approach, I prefer to have a purist approach, if we can. Again, in our careers, people took some of those songs to label a band like EBM or whatever. It is not the only direction, but it became a recipe, it became a way to do music and it is not my favorite one.

Torsten Schmidt

And stepping finally to sonics, I am sure that what you give to people is something that sounds always very good, you don’t want to give low-quality MP3s and stuff.

Daniel Bressanutti

That is another big thing you fight against. Finally, after ten years to see that your side is winning, because everybody is fed up with that “I want to be louder than the other one.” And MP3 is another thing, it is so bad to the music business and the music in general, because people’s ears work differently. I don’t know how to explain it, but the dynamics of music are so influenced by what the MP3 and all that compression culture has done, I hope we go back to something that is better quality, but I don’t see it happening. The iPod generation has so much influence over artists, they’re thinking, “How will this sound as an MP3?” It is something I never wanted to do.

Patrick Codenys

It is also because music became something that people expect to have for free, so you have to make concessions everywhere from the standards to the distribution. Before, in the ’70s, ’80s, people had a vinyl and were looking at that cover forever, listening several times to that album. Here, music becomes something disposable.

Daniel Bressanutti

And musicians have to go back there to initiate something. Storage is not a problem any more, MP3 came because of storage and internet speed and that kind of thing, but that’s not a problem any more. So musicians need to really stand and say they do music and they want to release like this and not… doing mp3 with your product is the same as packaging your products to make it more efficient, to be sold to a lot of people.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess that has changed in a really interesting way because I vividly remember having to literally steal money to go and buy Geography, while now they steal the music directly and, yes, you might save yourself some moral trouble on the foreground. But still, music being taken as a commodity is a really interesting notion that somehow prevents a lot of people in here from having a career in it.

Patrick Codenys

When I see the studios here I see all the people working a long time for a result, trying to really do something on those nice speakers and whatever, and working in details and then that music will be thrown for free on any iTunes or whatever web distribution in MP3, it is really a shame. It’s a shame. I believe music has a value, we should find a way to bring back the value, money-wise or different.

Daniel Bressanutti

When you are a starting musician, you don’t do music to have success. I hope nobody does that in the room, you make music for yourself as best as you can, and I prefer people stealing Geography in a WAV format than stealing it in MP3 because at least they would have the quality of the work that I wanted to do and MP3 is just another barrier. Today, everybody steals your stuff, but I am pretty sure that stealing music on the internet is not a barrier to success. We see that every day and I think everybody here they should do the music for themselves and then see what happens with it. For me, the stealing is not a problem.

Audience member

Can I just add to that? If you spend all the time working out how to do the music, then nobody can take it away from you. A piece of music is like a painting, it doesn’t matter… if you are good at reproducing sound or whatever you do, making music, you are the person to do it… It would be nice to see some money coming to musicians, so they can have a better living environment and all those things, but we were listening to that guy Melvin, and he bought all this gear while living on a park bench, lining himself with newspapers to get himself the shit to do what he wanted to do.

Daniel Bressanutti

When I make music today, I have the same problems as everybody in this room, I know it will be stolen more than I would even sell it. So it is just one more element in the equation of being a musician. It is just like I said, 30 years ago, we had to fight against the mono PAs and the guitars, then today we have the fight against, “If I make music, it will be stolen,” and what do you do about it? You can say we don’t like it and a lot of people do, but that is it, it is one of the things of today. If you do something with music, it will be stolen. How do you deal with it? It could also push you to make your music another way, bring your music live, they can’t steal what you do live, so if the fact that music is stolen so much makes everybody here do live things more, then a success will come maybe with a live thing and then you will sell records – I prefer to call it merchandise them – and maybe we have to come back to something more artistic, because the CD is only a product. A CD is like a box of cookies in a supermarket for me. When you do your music, you should also package it and make the product an object and something special – the mystery and all that stuff – people will not want to steal that or they will steal the music and want the package. That is usually how I see a lot of people discover new things. They steal music and then, because the music spoke to them, they want the package, they want everything that goes behind it. It is just one more negative thing that can only be positive in the future for musicians.

Torsten Schmidt

I like the way you turned that around: just obstacles and if you want to survive them, start to fight.

Daniel Bressanutti

Everybody is back at that thing and everybody has to fight against it and my way to fight against it is not to bitch about Napster, it is to think, “How can I now do a product that people will want to buy?”

Patrick Codenys

It is also more a global problem because it is about how not to be enslaved by the internet. Everybody is on the internet. One day I asked myself, “Can I disappear from the internet, not to have my name on it?” It is impossible. People do not go to the cinema any more, they download torrents. This becomes the central god, this becomes the Big Brother – it is a lot of freedom and somehow it is a lot of evil because it is probably, if you come back to the ’80s, if I had to be a musical terrorist, I would probably want to fight the internet. This is my enemy today, although there is a lot of positive things and great things about it. How do you manage to find your way in there, not to be totally absorbed and enslaved by it?

Daniel Bressanutti

And even the disappearance of the labels is a good thing, because it will bring musicians back together. The big thing is that labels had musicians fighting and saying to each other, “I know you got this for your record.” And at every label we have been there was that fight, and maybe the disappearance of labels will push all musicians together and maybe ten people in this room will create a label for their music. That is what is going to happen. There is a lot of things you can do in the future and it is like, if we have a big crash of the financial markets, what can you do about it? You can build a new future or you can drop your arms. I am more like, “Let’s try something else then.”

Audience member

It is interesting, you said earlier when you were talking about collaborations and you said you two don’t work together in the studio, and I was wondering – we are in this together, and there has been a lot of talk about collaborations – so have you collaborated with other musicians and what was your approach?

Daniel Bressanutti

I have the same approach in the band and outside the band, I never work with somebody, I can’t. Basically, it came from my inability to work with somebody, and for a lot of people that is a good thing. They work with me, but they know we will never be in the same room. They send me stuff and I send back other stuff. Sometimes, at the end stage we are together, but again, it has never been a barrier to do something with anybody, and I work with a lot of people like that.

Patrick Codenys

It is very linked also on being complementary. If you collaborate, it has to be something complementary. And it is also important to have an idea of the person you have in front of you, the personality of the person, because very often, if you match somebody, then there are chances it is going to work, and it is also important that every person knows his own limits. If you find a person who is good in his field, and will not interfere with what you’re doing, then you have the perfect mate – it is very important like that. Like I said, the human feeling is sometimes more important really than the real talent of the person because you need to find complementary people who will add something. At the end of the day, everybody works for a certain result and who is taking over the other one in how the final music piece is going to end? With Front 242, the luck we had is... it is like a closet with drawers, and each person has a drawer and knows exactly what their work is within the little factory, and we all work for the same [thing] and when that is understood, we can progress.

Daniel Bressanutti

Music, and I think every artist, is a bit of a dictator somewhere, and when you work with someone in the same room, there is that other thing that is called respect. And there is a lot of things you will not do out of respect for the other person, because you are together in a room and maybe that is a big problem in the creation. So, I would rather be good friends with the guy on another base but not have barriers, because I have respect, and you also have the thing of, “Oh, maybe he wants this from me,” and you don’t have that when you work at a distance. The only way I work with people together is when they say, “Improvise!” I do improvisation with a lot of different people, and nothing is expected from you, you don’t try to build a song, and that is the only way I can work with people. It is like a band. If you are four people together, there is always – maybe even if they do not know it – there is a leader, there is somebody that pulls the stuff. And when you work together, not as a band but still together, each in his corner is pulling the stuff and that is the magic formula for Front 242.

Patrick Codenys

And also, for a lot of people who work alone here, it is important to have feedback. If you work alone very often you go in the same direction and you stick with it, and somehow, if you’re obsessed by something and know exactly what you want to do, then fine. But the feedback is very important, and it is not always people from the musical world that are the most important feedback, sometimes. Artists is nice, but maybe choose someone from another discipline to have a view on what you do, that is always a good way to have feedback.

Daniel Bressanutti

Same thing in music, you have music and there will be no drums in it, ask a drummer what he thinks of it. You don’t want drums but you will be really amazed at what he will tell you and you will discover for yourself, “Yes, this is something I’ve been working on for a month and he has a solution, because he is a drummer and he thinks differently,” like a painter will think differently. For us, working together is not a solution, you need to be able to give your work and have somebody tell you the big nasty truth about what you’re doing, but it opens your ears and your eyes to the problems. And sooner or later you realize, “I had been blocked by listening for so long,” and he tells me why.

Torsten Schmidt

I think this is the time now we say thanks to Patrick and Daniel... [Applause]