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Øresund Space Collective
Øresund Space Collective is a great new band with members both from
Copenhagen, Denmark, and Malmö, Sweden. They play totally improvised
psychedelic instrumental space rock. The name of the band comes from the
bridge that combines these two countries. They will release their debut CD
this week, so it was a good time to ask them a few questions. My questions
were answered by a long time space rock fanatic Scott "Dr. Space" Heller.
How did it all start with OSC? Whose idea was it to start a band playing instrumental, improvisational space rock?
Scott: It was my idea to get me and the guys from Mantric Muse and Bland
Bladen together to jam. I was good friends with the bands Mantric Muse (
Copenhagen) and Bland Blanden (Malmö, Sweden), who had played a few concerts
together, and I had stopped playing synthesizer with Gas Giant and really
wanted to continue to play music. In April 2004, I asked if maybe we could
all just get together for a jam and it turned out that we all had such a
great time and the music was super cool right from the start, that we
started setting up regular jam sessions, switching back and forth between
Sweden and Denmark. It has been very successful and is now a real collective
of like minded musicians.
How would you describe your music?
Scott: I think the music we play is very special. It is 100% improvised on
the spot. We try to fuse together the natural musical energies that come
forth from our minds and hands, when we are all in a similar musical and
mental environment. It has different flavours of the music, because of all
the different players. I bring in the space sounds, Magnus gives our music
the Ozric Tentacles feel, while Sebastian is very folky at times but also
brings a more 70's based guitar sound, Ola is our gatekeeper, he plays all
the cool rhythms under the music that both Michael and Søren hook into that
allows our spaceship to fly, while Mogens brings in the more jazzy feeling
to the sound. A great mixture that allows us to explore the musical
universe.
I can hear some Ozric Tentacles in your sound and possibly some Korai
Öröm on some tracks, what are the bands that you would compare your band
with if you must?
Scott: I think Ozric Tentacles is a favourite of many of the collective
members and a highly influential band for us, no doubt. I think that even
though we don't listen to a lot of Krautrock together, this has a big
influence on us, bands like CAN, Cosmic Jokers, Amon Duul. We all dig very
rhythmic stuff like Korai Öröm, Ole Lukkøye and Hidria Spacefolk as well. On
a personal level, Doug Walker's Alien Planetscapes has been a huge influence
on me to just want to make and explore music, whatever direction it may
take.
Tell me something about your average jam session. How does it all work?
Scott: We usually get together in the early evening on a Friday or Saturday
and greet, have a beer or two, set up the gear (which can be quite
complicated with 3 different keyboard set ups, 2 guitarists with lots of
pedals and gear and sometimes percussion as well as drums). Then we smoke
some joints and jam! Our first jam is usually short as we want to make a bit
of a sound check for the recording as getting a good sound on the recording
is very very important to us. We then have 3 or 4 jams lasting from like 30
to 80 mins each, where we take a break in between to have more beers and
joints and we play until it is getting too late or we are not feeling
creative anymore.
How did the recording of your first studio album differ from your
rehearsal jams? Did you use any overdubs? How much stuff did you have to
leave out?
Scott: It was pretty much like our rehearsal jams it just took a lot longer
to get set up (about 4 hours) before we could jam but we took the same
approach. Another main difference was that we did not hear each other via
the PA but with headphones. This was not ideal for some of the musicians,
particularly, Sebastian, who had a lot of troubles with his gear and hearing
everyone, while it was amazing for Ola, Mogens and myself. We had 4 jams
ranging from 30 minutes to 60 minutes for a total of about 2½ hrs. Out of
all that improvisation, we had about 90 minutes of cool stuff. There were
three pieces ("Oresund Space Boogie", "Exploding into Space" and "Space
Burst Cinema") that we did not use as the mix was not as good as it could
have been. As for overdubs, Magnus overdubbed a lead guitar on "Exploding
into Space" but this was the only overdub. Rather than overdub, we took a
lot of things out when we mixed. Mogens had a noisy cable and his
Hammondwas slightly out of tune towards the end of the session so
sadly some of his organ playing was removed. Sebastian had a lot of guitar problems at the
beginning of the session as well and most of his playing is not in the mix
as well, but the rest is all there...
How about the live gigs? Can you create the same jam feeling in studio
and live that you can at rehearsals?
Scott: Well, we have only performed two live gigs so far and they were both
pretty successful as we played 3 hours and 2 hours, respectively. People got
into the music and we have had some nice responses at the live archive.org (
www.archive.org), where both concerts can be downloaded. I think that in the
live forum, we play more upbeat and less spaced out than when we are just
jamming for ourselves. Some of the jams have tended to be a bit shorter as
well. I think our live concerts will be as good as or better than the
rehearsal jams, once we play live more often.
Why did you decide to release the debut album on Transubstans from Sweden? Were there any other possibilities?
Scott: The CD session was sent to several labels and 3 showed interest in
releasing the CD but we ultimately went with Transubstans as Johnny was
really supportive about the time frame of when we would like to have it
released and we worked out a fair deal as far as promotion and CD pressing,
and they are close by and easy to work with.
Is it hard or time consuming to have members living in two different
countries? What are the advantages of this?
Scott: This has actually been pretty easy to pull off due to the Øresund
Bridge and the train that connects Malmö and Copenhagen. It is very easy to
drive over with our gear when we jam in Malmö or for the Swedes to take the
train or drive over here. It is a pity the bridge is so fucking expensive
(about $80 round trip to drive!). I think the only advantage of this
situation is that we get to go visit each others countries and the Swedes
can come drink the cheap and much better Danish beer!
Your sessions often seem to have a bit different players, although some
remain the same almost all the time. Do you consider your band line-up to be
a steady one, or do you want to keep it more flexible?
Scott: I think we pretty much consider the stable line up of the OSC to be:
Scott, Mogens, and Ola on Synths, Søren on drums, Michael on Bass, and
Magnus and Sebastian on guitars. We have great friends in Sweden who have
come and jammed with us and these include Kaufmann (ex- Bland Bladen
Drummer), who played on many of our early sessions and will likely join us
as a percussionist in 2006. Dave (bass), also from Bland Bladen, has
contributed to a lot of our sessions and I suspect will play with us as
well. We have had cool jams with Eduardo from Sgt. Sunshine as well as
Tobias and Jocke from the Carpet Knights. Stefan (Gas Giant guitarist) has
promised he would jam with us in 2006! I suspect we will continue to be
flexible.
Do you have plans to play outside of Denmark and Sweden?
Scott: We really do want to play all over Europe. We hope that we can play
some festivals in Germany in the summer perhaps and make it up to
Finlandfor a gig at the Psychotropic Zone.
Holland would be great as well. We will see… I think it might take a few
years for us to get a fan base large enough to afford for us to go on the
road. We are 7 or 8 people with a lot of gear so this requires two vans or a
quite large van. We will see...
Your fans can download most of the stuff you've ever played from your
web site for free. What's the master plan behind this? Are you going to keep
this up as it is for ever? Do you have any idea how much stuff have been
downloaded from your site?
Scott: The way I see it is once we have played the music, we are done with
it and it now belongs to the fans. The MP3 files will always be free to the
fans on our site and our concerts will always be free to download from the
archive.org. There is no plan but for us, we would just like to gradually
build up a fan base and provide the best music we can to the world. We hope
that we will continue to produce cooler and cooler music and we also hope to
move into 24 track recording of all of our jams but this costs money. We are
looking for a music fan that might help us out financially with this. Lets
see… Even with 24 track mixes we will still give the MP3 files away for free
as far as I can see. We will reserve our studio material for CDs and these
won't be put up as MP3 files to encourage people to support us and buy our
CDs. We have started a series of the best of the live jams called Picks in
Space. These are selections from our first 11 jams that can be purchased on
CD-R or via FLAC download. As far as downloading, I am pretty blown away at
how much is downloaded from the web site. The past few months have averaged
over 10GB of downloads from the site with a peak of 13:2 in December 2005.
People from all over the world are hearing our music from Belarus, Mexico,
New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, Germany but most of the downloads are from
Sweden and United States.
Any other future plans you'd like to share with us?
Scott: Our immediate future is celebration of our CD release on Jan 21sthere in
Copenhagen. We hope to have a great crowd and we will jam for hours. Also,
we hit the Black Tornado Studios on March 10 and 11th to record our next CD,
which will be a double CD release. We also hope to record a 3rd studio
session later in 2006. We are also trying to set up some concerts in
Denmarkand maybe
Sweden with Damo Suzuki from CAN fame.
What is your goal as a band if you have one?
Scott: The goal of the band is for us to have fun making music. We hope that
it will be something that other people will like and can identify with. If
not it does not really matter to us. We would like to be successful and play
concerts all around the world but we will see. Making a living off playing
music is extremely difficult unless you play pop music, which is quite hard
to do when you make the music up off the top of your head each minute like
we do!
www.oresundspacecollective.com
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