“Music for house-wives on crack”
“It’s for the hordes of people who have built lives on false promises. Britney Spears fans who are revelling in the lies they were sold, but they’re shaved their head and now find themselves in a mosh pit.”
Power-cuts are so often the catalyst for intimate accidents - steamy experiments under the cover of darkness. Well when the internet went out on Human Waste and L i L i † H, from South African outfits DOOKOOM and The Frown, the spawn of this electrical fault was a rampant amalgam of chaotic-punk and performance-pop. Supergroup is a term so few can ever live up to, but NO INTERNET’s unmatched brand of gritty-instrumentalism and concept-heavy vocals are without a doubt the result of the best of two distinct musical worlds. Taking the weird and the wonderful and weaving them together, the offspring was NO INTERNET. It’s pop spelled “P Vomiting-Emoji P”. And it’s coming for Europe in 2019, like a freight train filled with synthesisers and beer.
GM Damian, you’re known as Human Waste - of Cape Town’s DOOKOOM. Was DOOKOOM a political band?”
D We had one track, ‘Larney Jou Pous’. It was engineered to push buttons by being highly political. It was an opportunity for us to introduce ourselves to South Africa. In retrospect if was a really dumb idea. It made the entire DOOKOOM dialogue about racial politics.” Damian explains, “Sure, it was cool, it was exciting. It was national news - for months! But you know, we are still labelled as a Black Racist band - which is interesting since two of us are white
GM But other tracks like ‘Do Not Exist’ also feel political...
D Well, to a certain extent everything in South Africa is political. We’re post-apartheid. But to be called a political band, we don’t feel comfortable with that label. We’re not pushing an agenda. At the time the main political parties wanted us to perform on their behalf, on their platform. We said no to all of them.
GM And Eve, you’ve made quite a splash with your work as L i L i † H of The Frown. What about NO INTERNET will be different?
ER The Frown was a fashion band, and I’m afraid of being that again. All the articles written were about what I was wearing, not what I was saying. We want to be part of the provoke movement. Play and be in places we wouldn’t naturally fit, to provoke a feeling in that space. That’s exciting for us.
GM Was that the plan when you started NO INTERNET?
DWell we started to do the music, without an idea. We had no internet, so we started to make music. To engineer a story onto that would be fake. But the idea of Human Waste & L i L i † H coming together to make pop music in our own perverted way, so we could be loved by the masses as opposed to fighting against the industry again, that is the core concept.
GM The sound is both aggressive and yet dreamy, how might the performance reflect that unexpected mix?
D We’ve had some idea. On the surface it’s melodic, almost sweet. But there’s an underlying and unhinged element to it. We’ve been playing with Horror Pop, Hardcore Pop, Punk Pop, as ways of defining, but we’re still not certain. With DOOKOOM it was punk before anything else, because our shows were pure chaos. It was grittier than the syrupy, radio-friendly vibe of NO INTERNET. But that just means there’s more to explore live.
ERDOOKOOM was messy, uncomfortable. The Frown was what people wanted. So in that sense there is only one way NO INTERNET can be.
GM What goes into the lyric writing process for you, Eve?
ER Shit… Black Label beer. Damian gives me that, switches the mic on, and there is no plan. That’s nice for me, because with The Frown every song had a concept and structure behind it. With NO INTERNET, whatever comes out of the song writing process is the music.
“When we say pop music we mean pop spelled “P Vomiting-Emoticon P”.”